The oil industry has been left reeling. Share prices plunged, and Goldman Sachs warned of a drop in US crude supplies.
“The industry is aghast at these changes,” one oil services company CEO told Bloomberg. “They are more direct, more fierce and quicker than what folks expected.”
Biden and his team have been meticulous in casting the agenda as an exercise in job creation and economic stimulus in the wake of the Covid-19 crisis.
Mr Kerry repeats the now familiar “build back better” mantra to me.
“If we’re going to invest new money,” he says, “let’s invest it in clean energy, invest it in clean jobs, invest it in those technologies and other things that will build the future, rather than simply being the prisoners of the past.”
Meanwhile, there have been a few modest sops to the fossil fuel industry.
Fracking won’t stop, for example, although there will be tighter regulations, and Biden promised to put displaced fossil fuel workers to work sealing off the estimated one million leaking oil and gas wells.
The plan to build 1.5 million new energy-efficient homes, and manufacture and install half a million new electric-vehicle charging stations, would also create millions of “prevailing wage” jobs.
And the car industry will be delighted by the commitment to electrify the government’s 650,000-strong fleet of vehicles.
But, at the same time, President Biden has reiterated his desire to end all fossil fuel subsidies, ordered a ban on new oil and gas leases on federal land, and said a third of all federal lands must be reserved for conservation.
He also ordered agencies to accelerate the authorising of renewables projects, as part of his effort to double wind capacity by 2030, and make the electricity sector zero-carbon by 2035.