CLIMATE CLASH
Dueling plans on clean energy define Trump-Biden battle.
President Donald Trump traveled to the new political battleground of Georgia last week 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, energy-efficient appliances are “worthless” and zero-emissions buildings “basically have no windows.” At every turn and on every regulatory decision the administration embraces business over environmental interests.
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.
“They are polar opposites on almost everything to do with the environment but particularly climate change,” said Christine Todd Whitman, the former Republican governor of New Jersey and administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency under George W. Bush.
Biden’s plan would spend $2 trillion over four years to put the United States on an “irreversible path” to net-zero emissions of planet-warming gases before 2050, meaning that carbon dioxide and other pollutants would be completely eliminated or offset by removal technology.
To do that, he called for clean energy standards that would achieve a carbon-free power sector by 2035; the energy efficiency upgrade of 4 million buildings in four years; and the construction of 500,000 electric-vehicle charging stations. He also vowed to bring the United States back into the Paris Agreement, reinstate climate regulations that Trump has repealed and put more restrictions on things like emissions from vehicle tailpipes.
Trump has already moved to roll back virtually every effort the federal government made under President Barack Obama to combat climate change, from restricting emissions from power plants and vehicles to curbing methane from the oil and gas sector. He even rescinded an Obama-era executive order that urged federal agencies to take into account climate change and sea-level rise when rebuilding infrastructure.
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.
Biden’s campaign criticized the president’s gutting of the environmental policy act as a way ”to distract” from Trump’s failure to deliver an infrastructure plan.
Scientists said the next four years could be critical to whether greenhouse gas emissions from the United States rise or fall.
“We are on a trajectory to a hotter planet,” said Waleed Abdalati, director of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Trump and Biden, he said, “represent two very divergent paths.”