President-elect Joe Biden has assembled what environmentalists are calling an all-star team to lead his governments efforts to curb climate change and reverse the Trump administration s astoundingly pro-polluter legacy.

Rep. Deb Haaland (D-N.M.), one of the first two Native American women elected to Congress and a strong supporter of the Green New Deal movement, would replace a former oil lobbyist if the Senate confirms her as head of the Interior Department. In place of the ex-coal lobbyist running the Environmental Protection Agency would be Michael Regan, who brokered the biggest coal-ash cleanup settlement in U.S. history as North Carolinas top environmental regulator. The Energy Department would swap a fossil fuel die-hard for Jennifer Granholm, Michigans former governor and attorney general and now a clean energy advocate.

With the Senate likely to remain in Republican hands this year, Biden seems to be preparing to resurrect the Obama administrations approach after Democrats lost the House in the 2010 midterms: a combination of aggressive regulation, executive orders and close collaboration with states.

To oversee the effort, Biden picked Gina McCarthy, Barack Obama s former EPA chief and architect of the administrations regulatory suite, as his domestic climate czar, a position Obama initially created in his first term to coordinate the federal governments energy and environmental strategy and work to get climate legislation passed in Congress.

Beyond their stark ideological contrasts to President Donald Trump s agency heads, Bidens top-level nominees also appear to signal the new administrations plans to embed climate policies at the state level, cementing the clean-energy transition and making it harder for the next GOP president to undo whatever progress his administration makes.

Theres this very calculated, hard-nosed recognition among the choices that executive action is going to be the key to progress, and action at the state level is going to be the key to progress, said Cara Horowitz, a climate policy expert at UCLA School of Law.

As the Obama and Trump presidencies prove, it could likely be a rocky road. Absent new legislation, the White House must creatively interpret its legal mandate to enact rules under existing statutes, leaving them open to challenge. Republican state attorneys general sued the Obama administration so routinely that the top cop in Texas joked : I go into the office in the morning. I sue Barack Obama, and then I go home. GOP-led states persuaded the Supreme Court to block Obamas signature power plant regulation in 2016, and that was before Trump added three right-wing justices to the bench and stacked lower federal courts with conservatives. Red states are already vowing to pursue that same strategy.

But Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris have options. And theyve made it clear theyre all on the table.

The Biden-Harris Administration intends to pull every lever available, not only through executive and legislative action, but partnering together with cities, states, and businesses to reverse course on the climate threat, advance environmental justice and a clean energy future, and create millions of good-paying union jobs, Jamal Brown, a Biden transition spokesman, told HuffPost in an email.