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Opinion | Trump Abandoned the Climate. This Is Biden’s Moment. (Published 2021)
The new president has promised to take the lead on climate. His plan does not disappoint.
www.nytimes.com
4/12/21
On April 22, Earth Day, the leaders of more than three dozen countries, among them 17 nations responsible for four-fifths of the world’s emissions of greenhouse gases, will convene at a virtual summit. The purpose is to discuss where the world goes from here on climate change and what each country must do to limit Earth’s warming to no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius compared with preindustrial levels — a threshold beyond which scientists predict irreversible environmental damage. All eyes will be on the person who organized the summit, President Biden. Anyone with the energy to slog through acres of verbiage will find the elements of a plausible strategy embedded in his $2 trillion recovery plan. The plan has many moving parts, two of which are transformative. One is aimed at reducing emissions from cars and trucks, America’s biggest source of carbon dioxide emissions. Mr. Biden is betting heavily on electric vehicles, which today make up only 2 percent of the vehicles on the road. To “win the E.V. market,” as he put it (China being the main competitor), he proposes $174 billion to build half a million charging stations along the highways — a small fraction of what will be needed, but a good start — plus an array of tax credits aimed at persuading manufacturers to make E.V.s and equip them with batteries that can be recharged as quickly as one can fill up a tank of gas.
The second potential game changer is a national clean power standard — a federal mandate requiring that a certain (and steadily increasing) percentage of electricity be generated by zero-carbon or very-low-carbon sources like wind, solar, hydroelectric and nuclear power. All those E.V.s and residential heat pumps in Mr. Biden’s electrified America will need huge amounts of power, and it best be clean. One effect of this rule would be to hasten the transition from fossil fuels. Coal is already on its way out, and natural gas’s days are numbered unless some way can be found to capture the emissions from power plants that use it. This proposal could have tough sledding in Congress not only because Congress has many devoted friends of oil and gas. But there are encouraging signs of buy-in from big utilities, in much the same way as some of the big car companies, most recently General Motors, have embraced a future consisting mainly of E.V.s. A mostly renewable energy landscape is no longer a pipe dream. Nor is a less menacing climate.
There may not have been a Tesla Inc. without the $800 billion economic recovery plan enacted in 2009 under Mr. Obama.
That plan included $90 billion or so in tax credits, loans and other incentives for clean energy projects including EV's.