Democratic presidential candidate and former Vice President Joe Biden today unveiled a $2 trillion policy platform that seeks to address both the climate crisis and the worsening pandemic-driven economic crisis by drastically expanding investments in infrastructure improvements and clean energy.

The proposals in the Biden plan are in line with a policy package released earlier this month by the House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis. The House Democrats’ plan (a 550-page PDF), at a very high level, calls first for bringing the United States to net-zero emissions by 2050, then for using the back half of the century to get to negative emissions. That ambitious goal would be reached by adopting new regulations and incentives in energy, transportation, housing, construction, manufacturing, agriculture, telecommunications, and infrastructure, among other sectors.

Biden’s plans, as outlined on his campaign website, go much less in-depth than the Congressional proposal package but are perhaps even more aggressive.

Invest in everything

Biden calls for a $2 trillion investment across four years—one presidential term—to be spread immediately across the infrastructure, energy, transportation, construction, and agriculture sectors for some fairly large projects.

The infrastructure investment the plan calls for is exactly what you think: repairs and upgrades to roads, bridges, water systems, and electric systems as well as the deployment of universal broadband nationwide. Similarly, the transportation investment covers about what you’d expect from the campaign: electric vehicle charging stations and more US auto manufacturing jobs.

Notably, however, Biden’s plan also calls for a drastic increase in funding for public transportation, both in cities that already have it and in cities that do not. “Every American city with 100,000 or more residents,” of which there are roughly 300 give or take, should have access to “high-quality, zero-emissions public transportation options,” which not only includes rail and buses but also safer, expanded infrastructure for bicyclists and pedestrians.

Biden’s plan also calls for a radical expansion of clean energy, and fast (relatively speaking). US electricity should be “carbon pollution free” by 2035, he writes, which would be achieved by investments that spur rapid development in and widespread commercial adoption of “critical clean energy technologies, including battery storage, negative emissions technologies, the next generation of building materials, renewable hydrogen, and advanced nuclear” technologies.

In addition to expanding clean energy, the plan adds, we should clean up better after existing messes we’ve already made, by creating “250,000 jobs plugging abandoned oil and natural gas wells and reclaiming abandoned coal, hardrock, and uranium mines.” Those clean-up efforts would reduce leakage of toxic products into local air and water supplies and prevent local environmental damage.

Get everyone on board

The Biden plan, like the Congressional plan, also calls for keeping a careful eye on who benefits and who is harmed by US policy, and it does so by focusing on environmental justice. Biden would do that by “creating good, union, middle-class jobs in communities left behind, righting wrongs in communities that bear the brunt of pollution, and lifting up the best ideas from across our great nation—rural, urban, and tribal,” he writes.

The communities that tend to be hardest-hit by environmental pollutants are low-income communities of color. One 2019 study, for example, found Black Americans being exposed to 66 percent more air pollution from vehicles than their white counterparts. Even the Trump administration concluded in 2018 that people of color are more likely to breathe polluted air in the United States than white Americans. Black, Latinx, and low-income communities are also more likely to face cancer-causing pollutants or to live with tainted water supplies.

Biden’s plan would leverage basically the entire federal apparatus to generate change that actually benefits everyone, he explains—or, in his terms, an “inclusive and empowering, all-of-government approach.” That would include the establishment of a new division inside the Department of Justice expressly devoted to pursuing criminal environmental prosecutions for polluters, “to the fullest extent permitted by law and, when needed, seek additional legislation to hold corporate executives personally accountable.” That includes jail time, “where merited.”

Civilian Climate Corps

Additionally, Biden would restructure and expand White House environmental advisory groups and overhaul the EPA’s office of civil rights compliance. The plan also creates a Civilian Climate Corps to work under scientists and land-management experts in areas such as forestry management and wetland restoration. That work would bolster resilience and mitigate damage from future natural disasters, such as hurricanes and wildfires, that can be exacerbated by climate change.

Biden explicitly tied his climate plan to the COVID-19 pandemic still sweeping the United States in remarks (video) he delivered in his home state of Delaware. The US needs to “deal with the climate crisis that could cast us into an even darker and more permanent shadow” than the current pandemic, Biden said, adding that plans to reopen should “build an economy of the future, not an economy of the past.”

That “economy of the future” looks like “millions of high-paying union jobs creating a modern infrastructure and a clean energy future,” Biden added. “These are the most critical investments we can make for the long-term health and vitality both of the American economy and the long-term physical health and safety of the American people.”

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1691692