How Biden could use the powers of the presidency to protect vulnerable communities and hold fossil fuel companies accountable.
Election Day is closing in, and former Vice President Joe Biden has made climate change one of his signature issues. His “clean energy revolution and environmental justice” plan would be the most ambitious and aggressive environmental agenda in US history if it were enacted. Voters, especially young voters, also crave action on climate change. Polling shows that a majority of Americans of all ages want all levels of government to address global warming, but it’s one of the highest priorities for young Democrats. Last year, Vox asked every Democratic presidential campaign at the time to answer six questions about climate change. Our questions stemmed from two key themes. The first is that we wanted to know what candidates would do specifically with the powers of the presidency rather than their beliefs. The second theme is that political power, not science, is the main limiting factor to action on climate change. We wanted candidates to go beyond professing their belief in the science and talk about how they will shift the balance of power in government toward their positions. (You can see their responses here). A lot has changed since then. Biden is now the nominee, with California Sen. Kamala Harris as his running mate, and he has put out a more aggressive climate plan than what he had in 2019. The Covid-19 pandemic, meanwhile, continues to rage. Millions are out of work. More than 215,000 Americans are dead. And Trump and Biden are slated to discuss climate change at the third presidential debate Thursday night. With that in mind, we asked the Biden campaign to revisit their responses to see if any priorities had shifted. We posed a similar set of questions to the Trump campaign as well. Courtney Parella, a spokesperson for the Trump campaign, didn’t answer the questions we sent but offered the following statement: The responses provided by Biden campaign’s press secretary, Jamal Brown, follow: 1. A president has only 100 days or so in which to pass a few key priorities. Where does climate change fall on your list of priorities when you step into office? Because of President Trump’s failure to get control of the virus, we are in the midst of a serious economic recession. Trump has no plan to combat the virus, and no plan to pull our economy out of a recession. Biden has a plan for both, and his economic recovery agenda he will pursue immediately upon taking office is a plan to not only build back to the way things were before the virus or before President Trump — but back better. “Better” means an economy designed to tackle the climate crisis. When Trump thinks “climate” he thinks “hoax.” Biden thinks “jobs.” Biden’s climate plan is a jobs plan, at its core. Last year, at the beginning of his campaign, he rolled out an ambitious plan to take immediate action on day one of his Administration to rejoin the Paris Climate Agreement, lead the world in upping the ante of our climate ambitions, and put the U.S. an irreversible path to achieve net-zero emissions, economy-wide, by no later than 2050. This past summer, he released a second installment of his climate plan, scaled up to meet the moment — an economic crisis. His plan will invest $2 trillion in clean energy and infrastructure over four years, creating millions of high-paying jobs with a choice to join a union. He’ll put Americans back to work to accomplish important tasks such as manufacturing electric vehicles, plugging abandoned oil and gas wells, and retrofitting our offices and homes to be more energy efficient.
