Joe Biden, touted as the US’s first climate president, is presiding over the quiet weakening of his two most significant plans to slash planet-heating emissions, suggesting that tackling the climate crisis will take a back seat in a febrile election year.
During his state of the union speech on Thursday, Biden insisted that his administration is “making history by confronting the climate crisis, not denying it,”, before reeling off a list of climate-friendly policies and accomplishments. “I’m taking the most significant action on climate ever in the history of the world,” the US president added.
However, last week the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) said it would delay a regulation that would reduce emissions from existing gas power plants, most likely until after November’s presidential election. The delay comes as the administration waters down requirements that limit pollution from cars, slowing the country’s adoption of electric vehicles.
Joe Biden just did the rarest thing in US politics: he stood up to the oil industry Bill McKibben
The backtracking could jeopardize Biden’s goal of cutting US emissions in half this decade, which scientists say is imperative to averting disastrous effects from global heating, and shows the competing pressures upon a president looking to hold together a wobbly coalition including climate activists, labor unions and centrist swing state voters before a likely showdown with Donald Trump later this year.
That’s all right. I didn’t want my kids to have a habitable planet anyway.
I do truly wonder how they are going to sell this lie to the American people when temperatures could exceed 2 - 5 degrees this year.
“God is punishing us cause of the gays!”
Some of them literally believe that
What exactly counts as “moderate” in the present day US political landscape?
“Destroy only half of the planet, take away only half of women’s rights and genocide only half of palestinians. But we can compromise if the right doesn’t want that”
If the right won’t meet us halfway maybe they’d go for something more like three fifths as a compromise
It’s pretty much a Republican in any other country
sure?
There are many countries way to the right of the US
Real moderates are mostly just low information voters who don’t spend much time thinking about politics to develop an ideology or world view.
The generally accepted political narrative is that these sorts of voters mostly just care about the economy.
Lots of people call themselves moderates but consistently vote Democrat or Republican and just differ from their party on a couple issues.
*Edited my language to be a little fairer about that second group
I was a bit shocked hearing his plan to halve US’es emissions by 2030. Sounded unrealistic to me.
I think it’s shocking because declaring an ambition that is in line with our needs is uncommonly sensible electorally for Biden.
I fully recognize that his targets during 2020 were not realistic, but that’s appropriate. No goal of this magnitude ever arrives on time, as planned. But if you know that, it means you MUST aim for at least what is appropriate (if not more) because if you scale your ambition to what is sensible, you’ll get even less than that.
I didn’t bother reading the article. I think Biden and his campaign are stupid. Right now, it’s very, very, VERY clear to me that his vulnerability isn’t “the middle”. The very concept of “The Middle” is a fiction at this point. There are moderate, Democratic leaning independents who may or may not show up, and there exist some persuadable voters who are not insignificant, but they are not the deciders in Georgia and Michigan and Pennsylvania. The real, real, real obvious threat to Biden’s reelection is that his base has completely eroded. You can’t build a campaign on courting the tiny slice of swing voters if you’ve got no base for them to add to. The base needs enormous reconstruction. I don’t know if it’s possible, but Biden is running a campaign which looks currently like a case study in how to ignore expert wisdom and lose massively.
I am not a Democrat. I am a progressive, former Democrat. I am squarely the type of Obama-to-Bernie voters that the party really needs to recapture if they’re going to have a future. I want to help Biden, and that means marching in the streets yelling ‘Stop committing genocide!’ ‘We need a Green New Deal!’ ‘Pass the PRO Act!’ ‘Raise the minimum wage!’ ‘Child credits now!’
I’m trying to lead a horse to water, but this old horse really seems determined to die of dehydration out of some misguided sense of spite. C’est la vie, n’est pas? I’ll try not to give up hope, though boy, he and his handlers aren’t making it easy.
The IRA is a fantastic overall piece of legislation that gives us a fighting chance. Most policy experts agree that it has a lot of very achievable goals – thanks to its structure that offers uncapped subsidies for certain beneficial productions that are estimated to represent well over a trillion dollars in real investment, on top of the fact that renewable energy already out-competes fossil on NEARLY all financial metrics.
And if Biden loses, huge amounts of this progress can be undone by executive action, inaction, and feebleness by a Trump administration. Which he, I remind everyone has pledged to do.
If the bill lasts more than a couple of years, it will build its own constituency a la medicare and become VERY sticky and hard to remove. But it’s very vulnerable right now.
So yeah, as someone who thinks climate is the top issue everyone should be caring about since it represents an existential threat to our entire human race, I think it’s fine for Biden to focus for the next year on winning that election. If he wins that election, most of the very significant progress will get 4 more years to cure – it will be pretty well locked in and indeed many growing industries will be craving more. Rural states seeing major investment for the first time in decades in the form of renewable energy industry will want more. It has the potential to be really transformational.
Plenty of solid reasons to criticize Biden. Climate is not one of them. He’s made progress that is difficult to fathom for people who only have cursory knowledge of the US energy economy.
It would be his last term. No reason not to lie about it.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
During his state of the union speech on Thursday, Biden insisted that his administration is “making history by confronting the climate crisis, not denying it,”, before reeling off a list of climate-friendly policies and accomplishments.
The backtracking could jeopardize Biden’s goal of cutting US emissions in half this decade, which scientists say is imperative to averting disastrous effects from global heating, and shows the competing pressures upon a president looking to hold together a wobbly coalition including climate activists, labor unions and centrist swing state voters before a likely showdown with Donald Trump later this year.
Power plants are responsible for around a quarter of the US’s total carbon emissions, and a previous attempt by Barack Obama’s administration to curb their planet-heating pollution was effectively killed off by the supreme court.
Nearly one in 10 cars sold in the US last year was electric, going some way to fulfilling a Biden administration goal to transform the types of vehicles Americans drive so emissions from transportation, the largest source of carbon pollution in the US, can come down quickly.
In Louisiana’s Cancer Alley, the 85-mile heavily polluted stretch between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, communities were “devastated” in January when the EPA dropped its civil rights probe into permitting practices, before backing down from environmental justice cases across the country.
“Far more resources have opened up through the IRA [Inflation Reduction Act] but communities have to jump through so many hoops that it’s not making an impact,” said Eloise Reid, the manager of the Louisiana Against False Solutions Coalition.
The original article contains 1,458 words, the summary contains 258 words. Saved 82%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
votes for Trump
too bad this article will be downvoted with the following comments
“But he is not named Trump!”
“The writer of this article supports fascism because he wrote bad about Biden and not Trump!”
“Rather have someone doing nothing to defend against fascism than to have a fascist dictator!”
People criticize Biden plenty, in fact I think those on lemmy are some of his most outspoken critics.
I just think we’re kind of backed into a corner because the US electoral system.
Edited my comment to be nicer to the person above me.
Yup, it’s the article getting downvoted rn
