With Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s Election Win Comes a Sigh of Relief—and a Call to Action

The voters have spoken—but the work doesn’t stop here.

The voters have spoken, and it’s official: Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have been elected the next president and vice president of the United States, ousting Donald Trump from the White House and putting an end to his dangerous assaults on our health, our communities, our climate, and our democracy.

This is a tremendous, game-changing, and life-altering moment for the United States. The Biden presidency is our last, best chance to course-correct in our fight for climate action—and we won. With Joe Biden, the country will have a president who understands that the climate crisis must be an urgent priority for humankind. His climate plan is the most ambitious ever proposed by any president in U.S. history. Not only that, but Kamala Harris—the first female vice president of color in the nation’s history—shares a deep understanding of the climate crisis and its disproportionate impact on low-income communities and communities of color.

But let’s not forget: Trump is not gone yet. With the full support of his now lame-duck allies in Congress, he is certain to use his final weeks in office to inflict even more devastating harm.

So there is no time to waste in getting to work to build that better future we’ve all been waiting for. NRDC will be ready on Inauguration Day to work with the Biden administration to begin undoing the damage caused by Trump’s presidency, including re-entering the Paris Agreement and halting climate-busting oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. And we’ll push to rebuild the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, U.S. Department of the Interior, and other key federal agencies that were decimated by four years of chaos and cuts. Starting on day one, we’ll work to help turn the promise of the groundbreaking Biden/Harris Climate Plan into reality, restoring and expanding investments in clean energy, putting people back to work, and rebuilding an economy that has been ravaged by the COVID-19 pandemic.

We’ll fight for the deep, systemic change our country needs to lessen the impacts of the climate crisis that fall disproportionately on Black, Indigenous, and other communities of color.

We’ll push to restore bedrock environmental laws—like the Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act—and NRDC’s litigation team will continue to use the courts to make sure our environmental laws are enforced. Our lawyers have filed more than 127 lawsuits against the Trump administration, and we’ve prevailed in 90 percent of the cases decided. We know how to use the courts to uphold the law, and we will do it when necessary—no matter who is president.

We’ll double down on our bottom-up strategy to help local leaders—governors, mayors, and community leaders—tackle the climate crisis and protect our environment and health. And we’ll continue mobilizing the grassroots power of NRDC’s nearly three million supporters to stay engaged and call on our leaders to protect our health, environment, and clean energy future.

Make no mistake: While we have every reason to be hopeful that change is coming, we will not let up in our push to move full speed ahead toward an equitable and just clean energy future in the coming months, and we won’t hesitate to hold anyone’s feet to the fire. We are going to hold the incoming administration to their promises of protecting people, the environment, and our climate. And we will push back hard if we need to, just as we have with every single White House going back to NRDC’s founding in 1970.