WASHINGTON— The Center for Biological Diversity launched an online ad and petition campaign today urging President Joe Biden to set strong clean-car standards and reject automaker pleas for weak ones.

“We are living through a climate catastrophe,” the new video ad notes atop scenes of fire and hurricane damage. “Big automakers helped drive us here and they’re fighting progress.”

“To tackle the climate crisis, we need President Biden to lead a dramatic drawdown of the largest-polluting sector of our economy,” said Dan Becker, director of the Center’s Safe Climate Transport Campaign. “Automakers are blowing smoke when they lobby for a deal that would achieve roughly half of what the industry agreed to a decade ago.”

Carmakers were successful in getting President Trump to roll back the 2012 standards they negotiated with President Obama. That would have been the biggest step any nation took to cut global warming pollution. Now some companies are pushing to make a separate, weaker deal with California the national standard.

To get in line with science-based reductions to greenhouse gases, new standards need to drastically cut gas-powered vehicles’ emissions and accelerate the arrival of an all-electric fleet.

The Center is calling on President Biden to end sales of fossil-fuel vehicles by 2030 and reduce their emissions by 7% per year until 2030. That’s up from the 5% reductions carmakers agreed to with President Obama.

“There’s no room for hesitation if President Biden wants to fulfill his pledge for strong climate action,” said Becker. “He must act as if the world depends on it, because it does.”