Clip And Send To Your Great Grandchildren: Joe Biden Is Kicking Ass On Climate Change!
Part One of as many parts as we need: Biden's climate agenda.
You’d think that being the president who finally reversed decades of government inaction on climate change would be doing a lot more for Joe Biden in the polls, especially among younger voters, who in general are more engaged than old farts when it comes to climate.
So far, however, Biden’s climate change policies, his biggest achievement if you ask me, have for various reasons gone largely unnoticed by many voters. In a CBS News/YouGov poll in April, nearly half (49 percent) of voters who identified climate as a top issue said they had heard or read either “not much” or “nothing at all” about what Biden has done on climate, and just 10 percent said they had heard or read “a lot” about it.
Among voters under 30, a worrying 59 percent said they had heard or read either “not much” or “nothing at all” about Biden’s climate actions. You can find similar polls all over, including in Yr Editrix’s recent survey of her visiting twin college age nieces, one of whom is an environmental studies major who “has heard literally nothing about what the US under Joe Biden has been doing about climate change.”
Well then, let’s change that! Not just for the college-age nieces, but for everybody, because we think it’s pretty important to let everyone know the many things Joe Biden and his administration have done to tackle the climate crisis. Over the next few weeks, I’ll be doing a number of brief explainers on what the Biden administration has done on climate, for Wonkette readers to print out and send to the youngs in their lives — and heck, for friends of any age who don’t know how good Biden has been on climate.
For once, we have a president who isn’t simply talking about climate, but is actually taking action to move the US to a clean energy economy. The energy transition is already happening, and everyone needs to know that!
What Has Biden Done For Climate? (In A Musical, We’d Sing About It)
Today’s post is going to start at the very beginning (that’s a very good place to start), with a look at Biden’s overall climate goals. In coming posts, we’ll dive into the real meat of Biden’s more than 300 climate actions, particularly as they show up in legislation and in regulations put in place by executive agencies, including:
The American Rescue Plan, Biden’s first big stimulus bill. It had climate stuff too!
The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which was about roads and bridges but also about clean water, EV charging stations, electric buses for schools and mass transit, and much more.
The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), Biden’s signature climate bill, which the head of the International Energy Agency hailed as the world’s “most important climate action” since 2015’s Paris climate agreement. Climate modelers predict that the IRA all on its own should get the US as much as 42 percent of the way to our target of cutting carbon emissions in half by 2030. And yes, it’s already created hundreds of thousands of jobs and billions of dollars in clean energy investments, with more on the way because it’s a 10-year bill.
The CHIPS and Science Act, aimed at bringing the computer chip industry back to the US
A huge pile of regulations that will cut carbon emissions across the economy, from vehicle emissions standards, to coal and gas powerplants (goodbye, coal, goodbye!), to a fundamental rethinking of public land use, to regulations that will upgrade the electric grid to handle all the clean energy coming online in the next decade. Oh, and more. It’s a LOT.
Dang, I’m gonna be busy. With that, let’s start with the basics!
The Day One Agenda
In fact, let’s start right at the start, when on his first day in office, Biden signed an executive order formally rejoining the Paris climate agreement, which Donald Trump had withdrawn from. He also cancelled the KeystoneXL oil pipeline and ordered a review of all of the Trump administration’s executive actions affecting climate.
In his first week, Biden set several goals for US climate policy, targets for action that his administration would pursue.
Reduce total greenhouse emissions to 50 percent of 2005 emissions by 2030
Build up clean energy production so the electric power sector will be free of carbon pollution by 2035
Reach net zero greenhouse emissions by 2050
Spoiler alert: Put together, all of the administration’s actions put us on the road to achieving those goals — but Donald Trump has promised to undo most of that progress if he gets back in office.
Just a week after taking office, Biden outlined the ways his administration would act on climate — and looking back, we can say that Biden’s Cabinet agencies and policies really have held to these guidelines. One big exception that Biden has taken a lot of heat for: His executive order that would have frozen new oil and gas leases on public lands was almost immediately overturned by a federal court, and later reaffirmed after the administration appealed it.
As we’ll discuss in a future post, the administration has taken quite a few actions aimed at limiting the damage from that court order, but that’s a given in our system: For every good executive action, there’s an equal and opposite conservative federal judge (or renegade senator from West Virginia, ahem). For today’s post, we’ll look at some of the first-week agenda items that Biden has followed up on right through the present:
A “whole of government” approach to climate, building climate considerations into all government policies instead of putting all the burden on the EPA, the Interior Department, or the Energy Department.
Use the federal government’s buying power to promote clean, made-in-America climate products and services. For a prime example, the US Postal Service committed to electrify its delivery vehicle fleet by 2028, a $9.6 billion investment made possible with funding from Congress. The USPS had initially only planned for 5,000 of its next generation postal trucks to be electric; the revised plan will mean 75 percent of the 66,000 new trucks will be electric. (EV technology being where it is, some rural routes will continue using gasoline, at least for a time.)
Building environmental justice into all climate policy. This one has been huge, going back to when Biden was campaigning in 2020. Pollution and climate change have had an outsized impact on low-income communities and communities of color, largely because too damn many of America’s dirtiest industries were built, by design, where people lacked the money and political power to fight them. Here’s the surprise good news: Biden has followed through, with policies that make sure the communities affected most by environmental injustice are prioritized in new climate programs. This is worth a post all on its own! But a quick example: The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law includes funding to mitigate the damage to minority communities done decades ago when new interstate highways were routed right through minority neighborhoods.
Helping energy communities make the transition from depending on fossil fuel employment to becoming clean energy hubs. So many towns have built nearly every part of their economies around a single, polluting business — a coal-burning power plant, oil production, and the like. Again, this goal is already seeing action: All the Biden administration’s climate legislation, especially the infrastructure law and the IRA, includes extra incentives for new clean energy jobs in these communities. In fact, places where coal and gas powerplants are decommissioned have a huge resource to attract new clean energy: Those old plants’ existing connections to the power grid allow a new solar or wind farm to get on the grid much faster than a competing project that has to go through the regulatory process to come online.
Making climate policy part of foreign policy, another part of that "whole of government” thing. Biden didn’t just rejoin the Paris agreement, he created the job of “special envoy for climate” for John Kerry, who took it seriously and, with his Chinese counterpart Xie Zhenhua, restored the US-China climate cooperation framework that had lapsed. It certainly helps that China is doing more renewable energy than the rest of the world combined. Biden has also held climate meetings with other world leaders, and the passage of the IRA, his signature climate bill, has made other countries sit up and say hey, we should do one of those too!
Again, those first-day/first-week goals weren’t just empty words; Biden and the people he’s put in place at key government agencies have actually turned them into policy that’s already creating green jobs and cutting greenhouse gas emissions. Our next installments in this little series will get into the details of how that’s getting done!
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[CBS News / Climate Power / White House / Center for American Progress]
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You know that Joe Pera video where he goes around telling EVERYONE about how amazing "Baba O'Riley" is? That's how I feel about Biden's climate record.
(link may require cable system login, sorry)
https://www.adultswim.com/videos/joe-pera-talks-with-you/joe-pera-reads-you-the-church-announcements
I like Joe Biden. I like him a lot. And I like u.
If you want America to continue to be a place with lots of jobs and a better environment, vote for Biden - Harris.