Climate Change Takes Center Stage as Biden and Warren
Release Plans
Former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. discussed his plan
to reinstate the climate policies of the Obama administration and strengthen
them to “higher and higher standards.”CreditCreditElizabeth Frantz for The New
York Times
By Coral Davenport and Katie Glueck
June 4, 2019
WASHINGTON — When Joseph R. Biden Jr. was Barack Obama’s
vice president, their administration brokered the landmark Paris climate accord
and imposed the nation’s first federal regulations for cutting carbon dioxide
emissions.
Now, as Mr. Biden runs for president, he has laid out an
ambitious climate plan of his own that goes well beyond what Mr. Obama
achieved, proposing $1.7 trillion in spending and a tax or fee on
planet-warming pollution with the aim of eliminating the nation’s net carbon
emissions by 2050.
The sweeping proposal from the typically moderate Mr. Biden
demonstrates just how far the Democratic field has moved on climate change. His
environmental targets are similar to the goals of the Green New Deal put
forward by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, which even the
House Democratic speaker has been unwilling to embrace.
Mr. Biden’s proposals came just hours before a rival
candidate, Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, released her own climate
proposal as part of a $2 trillion green manufacturing plan. Her plan would
create a National Institutes of Clean Energy and push federal spending toward
American-made renewable energy technology.
As the Democratic base increasingly demands action on
climate change, other candidates have unfurled major environmental policies.
Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington is focusing his entire campaign on climate
change, and former Representative Beto O’Rourke of Texas has also released a
proposal.
“Climate change is an incredibly important issue for the
Democratic base right now,” said Nick Gourevitch, a Democratic pollster who
said he is neutral in the race. “It’s about the future, and it’s something that
this president has made worse in the minds of the Democratic base,” he added,
referring to President Trump.
Mr. Biden faces deep skepticism from the liberal wing of his
party, even as he leads most early polls. How far he would go on climate change
seemed to be a daily question in his first month as a candidate. Senator Bernie
Sanders of Vermont, who is also running for president, and Ms. Ocasio-Cortez
took swipes at him over that issue.
On Tuesday, however, environmental activists largely lauded
Mr. Biden’s plan and credited the influence of the Green New Deal.
“He put out a comprehensive climate plan that cites the
Green New Deal and names climate change as the greatest challenge facing
America and the world,” said Varshini Prakash, executive director of the
Sunrise Movement, an environmental activist group that has championed Ms.
Ocasio-Cortez’s proposal. “The pressure worked.”
Mr. Biden’s base tilts toward older and more centrist
voters, rather than the younger progressives who are traditionally more closely
associated with environmental concerns. But Mr. Biden has said that he has
“never been middle of the road on the environment,” stressing on the campaign
trail that he was an early advocate for combating climate change, and
frequently referring to work he did on that issue dating to the 1980s, when he
was a Delaware senator.
Democratic pollsters say that in surveys and focus groups,
climate change often emerges as the second most important issue to the party’s
primary voters, following health care — a departure from previous presidential
campaign cycles when the environment was sometimes an afterthought.
Joseph R. Biden Jr. was a two-term vice president and spent
36 years as a senator. But his front-runner status in the Democratic primary
will be tested by the party’s desire for generational change.CreditCreditMaddie
McGarvey for The New York Times
“We’ve seen the ground shift, certainly in the Democratic
Party and with Democratic voters, around the importance of climate change,”
said Anna Greenberg, a Democratic pollster who is working for former Gov. John
Hickenlooper of Colorado, another presidential candidate.
In some ways, Mr. Biden’s plan goes even further than the
Green New Deal, which offers aspirational targets but few concrete policy steps
to achieve them.
Mr. Biden proposes that Congress pass a law by 2025 to
establish some form of price or tax on carbon dioxide pollution, a policy
championed by most economists as the most effective way to fight climate
change. Mr. Obama tried but failed to pass such a bill in 2010 after
Republicans successfully attacked the idea of a carbon price as a national
energy tax — and that was when Democrats controlled both the House and Senate.
Mr. Obama later drew criticism from Republicans for
bypassing Congress and using his executive authority to instate the nation’s
first major federal climate change policies, including regulations to curb
planet-warming pollution from tailpipes and smokestacks.
But he never came close to a plan like Mr. Biden’s intended
to zero out the nation’s carbon emissions by midcentury, pledging instead that
the United States would lower its emissions 26 to 28 percent below 2005 levels
by 2025.
Mr. Biden’s plan calls for a federal investment of $1.7
trillion over 10 years into clean energy and other initiatives, which the
campaign said would be paid for by rolling back Mr. Trump’s tax breaks for
corporations. It also proposes leveraging state, private and local funds, for a
total expenditure of $5 trillion over a decade.
It pledges support for environmental justice programs,
designed to help minorities and poor people disproportionately harmed by
pollution, and urges an end to new permits for oil and gas exploration on
public lands.
Mr. Biden, who is seeking to appeal to blue-collar workers
who helped deliver states in the industrial Midwest to Mr. Trump in 2016,
promised retraining programs and new economic opportunities for coal workers
and others displaced by the decline of the fossil fuel economy.
“We’re not going to forget the workers, either,” Mr. Biden
said in a video promoting the plan.
Mr. Biden’s proposal “would be an effective climate change
policy,” said Richard Newell, president of Resources for the Future, a
nonpartisan Washington research organization focused on energy and environment
issues. “But for the kinds of shifts envisioned in this plan and the other
Democratic plans, there needs to be a sea change in Congress.”
A spokeswoman for Mr. Trump’s re-election campaign
reiterated on Tuesday the president’s frequent criticism of climate plans like
the Green New Deal.
“If they want to win the nomination, all of the Democrats
will ultimately have no choice but embrace the Green New Deal, which is just a
wish list of unrealistic, socialist policy ideals,” the spokeswoman, Erin
Perrine, said in a statement.
Hours after the Biden campaign rolled out the proposal, an
official with a progressive group and an article in the conservative Daily
Caller flagged a handful of sentences in the document that appeared to borrow
language from other organizations.
Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts also released a
climate proposal on Tuesday, part of a $2 trillion green manufacturing plan.
Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts also released a
climate proposal on Tuesday, part of a $2 trillion green manufacturing
plan.CreditBrittany Greeson for The New York Times
It resurrected a sensitive issue for the Biden campaign:
Accusations of plagiarism forced Mr. Biden out of the presidential race in
1988.
“Several citations, some from sources cited in other parts
of the plan, were inadvertently left out of the final version of the 22-page
document,” the campaign said in a statement on Tuesday. “As soon as we were
made aware of it, we updated to include the proper citations.”
Other candidates have set out their own far-reaching goals.
Ms. Warren said Tuesday she would spend $2 trillion over 10
years for environmentally sustainable research, manufacturing and exports,
intended to help “achieve the ambitious targets of the Green New Deal.” She
also favors a moratorium on new federal fossil fuel leases on public lands.
Ms. Warren pitched her plan as part of a broad program of
economic intervention to support American manufacturing and promote job
creation. She, too, said she would prioritize investments in historically
marginalized communities and provide benefits for fossil fuel workers.
Mr. Inslee has called for the nation to eliminate its net
carbon emissions by 2045 and has proposed $3 trillion in federal spending to
create eight million green energy jobs. And Mr. O’Rourke would spend $1.5
trillion over a decade on climate and clean energy programs, with plans to
leverage an additional $3.5 trillion in state, local and other funding.
Several other candidates, including Mr. Sanders and Senators
Kamala Harris of California, Kirsten Gillibrand of New York and Cory Booker of
New Jersey, have formally backed the Green New Deal legislation but have not
put forth their own major climate change policies.
Mr. Biden’s most aggressive initiatives call for flexing the
United States’ trade and foreign policy muscles to compel other countries,
particularly China, the world’s largest carbon dioxide polluter, to reduce
emissions.
Combining climate change policy with trade policy, the plan
calls for the imposition of “carbon tariffs” on goods imported from heavily
polluting economies, a move that would directly affect Chinese imports. It also
gives Mr. Biden, a former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, a
chance to highlight his credentials in the international arena.
“We can no longer separate trade policy from our climate
objectives,” the Biden campaign wrote. “Biden will not allow other nations,
including China, to game the system by becoming destination economies for
polluters, undermining our climate efforts and exploiting American workers and
businesses.”
While the idea of placing tariffs or quotas based on
pollution associated with specific imported goods has long been discussed in
Washington, it has never been enacted, in part out of fear of sparking a trade
war. But Mr. Trump has already started the process to tax nearly everything
China sends to the United States.
The president also has pledged to withdraw the country from
the Paris climate agreement. Mr. Biden’s plan calls for the United States to
rejoin the agreement and to take the lead in pushing members of the pact to
regularly strengthen their pledges to reduce planet-warming pollution, although
such a mechanism is already built into the original text of the accord.
A Biden administration would convene a world summit of the
most heavily polluting economies, the campaign said, and Mr. Biden would urge
those nations to commit to even more ambitious pollution reduction plans.
Coral Davenport reported from Washington, and Katie Glueck
from New York. Astead W. Herndon contributed reporting from Detroit.
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