Environmental plans define race
Trump, Biden outline markedly different agendas
President Donald Trump traveled Wednesday to the new political battleground of Georgia to blast away at one of the nation’s cornerstone conservation laws, vowing to speed construction projects by limiting legally mandated environmental reviews of highways, pipelines and power plants.
One day earlier, his Democratic presidential rival, Joe Biden, took a different tack, releasing a $2 trillion plan to confront climate change and overhaul the nation’s infrastructure, claiming he will create millions of jobs by building a clean energy economy.
In that period, the major party candidates for the White House displayed in sharp relief just how far apart they are ideologically on infrastructure and environmental matters of vital importance to many American voters, particularly in critical battleground states, including Pennsylvania and Florida.
Biden is trying to win over young voters and supporters of his vanquished rival, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, by showing an aggressive awareness of climate change and promising to move urgently to combat it. At the same time he has sought to maintain his promised connection to white, working-class voters, especially in the Upper Midwest, who swung to Trump four years ago and are leery of what they see as threats to their livelihood, especially jobs in the oil and gas industry.
The president, in contrast, is pretty much where he has been for more than a decade: intermittently acknowledging global warming and calling it a hoax; making spurious accusations that windmills cause cancer, energyefficient appliances are “worthless” and zeroemissions buildings “basically have no windows.” At every turn and on every regulatory decision the administration embraces business over environmental interests.
“Biden wants to massively regulate the energy economy, rejoin the Paris climate accord, which would kill our energy totally; you would have to close 25 percent of your businesses and kill oil and gas development,” Trump said Wednesday as he announced a “top to bottom overhaul” of the National Environmental Policy Act, a bedrock environmental law since its passage in 1969. He offered no evidence to back up his statistics.
“When I think about climate change, the word I think of is ‘jobs,’ goodpaying union jobs that will put Americans to work, making the air cleaner for our kids to breathe, restoring our crumbling roads and bridges and ports,” Biden said Tuesday as he outlined his plan.
The events captured the two candidates’ radically different beliefs about the global threat of the planet’s warming and offered a glimpse of how they would lead a nation confronting a climate crisis over the next four years. For Trump, tackling global warming is a threat to the economy. For Biden, it’s an opportunity.
The Trump administration’s latest overhaul to the National Environmental Policy Act highlighted their differences still more.
The changes finalized Wednesday include a limit of two years to conduct exhaustive environmental reviews of infrastructure projects. They also revoked a requirement that agencies consider the cumulative environmental effects of projects, like their contribution to climate change.