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“The United States and other countries hiked their targets for slashing greenhouse gas emissions… Biden unveiled the goal to cut emissions by 50%-52% from 2005 levels at the start of a two-day climate summit kicked off on Earth Day and attended virtually by leaders of 40 countries including big emitters China, India and Russia.” Reuters
Read our recent coverage of Biden’s climate executive orders. The Flip Side
The right is critical of Biden’s pledge, arguing that it is not feasible without exorbitant costs and economic disruption, and that China is not making a similar effort.
“Amid last year’s Covid-19 lockdowns, greenhouse gas emissions fell to about 21% below 2005 levels. In other words, even with the economy shut down and a large share of the population stuck at home, the U.S. was less than halfway to Mr. Biden’s goal…
“The Biden goal will require the electric grid to be totally rebuilt in 10 years. According to the Natural Resources Defense Council, the U.S. will also have to double its share of carbon-free power to 80% from 40% today—half of which is now provided by nuclear—to have any hope of achieving Mr. Biden’s pledge. All coal plants would have to shut down, and natural gas plants would be phased into obsolescence. Wind and solar energy would have to increase six to seven fold… [Biden is] committing the U.S. to a far-fetched CO2 emissions goal without a vote of Congress.”
Editorial Board, Wall Street Journal
“Biden’s promise to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 50 percent from 2005 levels by 2030 is going to mean life changes for everyone… Take transportation. Reducing emissions in this sector is theoretically simple: Stop burning fossil fuels to power our vehicles. In practice, this means moving as quickly as possible to all-electric vehicles, which requires the retooling of automotive factories so they replace gas-powered internal combustion engine vehicles with battery-powered ones…
“The changes that will come from altering our electricity production will be as dramatic or [more so]. Do you use natural gas to heat your home or cook your food? That’s going to have to change if we’re going green, which means massive retrofitting of homes to move to electric heat and cooking… Communities that live off of local power plants will likely wither away, and many of the nearly 1.4 million people who work in the utility industry will have to change careers…
“There’s a reason Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (D-N.Y.) Green New Deal says saving the planet will require ‘a new national, social, industrial, and economic mobilization on a scale not seen since World War II.’ It will. Meeting Biden’s goals will ultimately require Americans to endure wartime-level economic planning and intervention for years — perhaps decades. It’s doubtful Americans are willing to pay that price, especially when they learn that China, which emits more greenhouse gasses than the United States and the European Union combined, still plans to increase its emissions in the coming years.”
Henry Olsen, Washington Post
“In the (non-binding) Paris accord, Xi vowed only that China, the world’s worst emitter of carbon dioxide, would reach its greenhouse-gas-emissions peak by 2030 and become carbon-neutral by safely-far-off 2060. Last year, China not only generated more than half the world’s coal-fired power (the dirtiest fossil fuel), it also opened three times more coal plants in 2020 than the rest of the world combined. It’s the only G20 country whose emissions rose last year…
“Yet Xi told Biden’s summit, with a straight face and without challenge, ‘To protect the environment is to protect productivity, and to boost the environment is to boost productivity. It’s as simple as that.’ Except, again, he’s not even trying ‘to boost the environment’ for another decade.”
Editorial Board, New York Post
“If the Chinese fall short of their pledge in 2030, by which time we may have fought and lost a hot war with China over Taiwan, what are we going to do to punish or correct them? If we can’t get them to stop committing genocide in Xinjiang province today, are we really going to bring them to heel over excess emissions nearly a decade from now?”
Rich Lowry, Politico
“We need to get smarter on climate. It is not about the rich world spending trillions it doesn’t have on ineffective and premature renewables. Leaders should instead spend billions smarter on green innovation: if we can innovate future green energy to be cheaper than fossil fuels, everyone will switch. To Biden’s credit, this is one of his many climate promises, but it needs to be front and center of a successful climate agenda.”
Bjorn Lomborg, New York Post
The left urges Biden to release more details; some argue that even more ambitious commitments are necessary to avert climate change.
The left urges Biden to release more details; some argue that even more ambitious commitments are necessary to avert climate change.
“This will not be easy. And although a unified federal government leading the charge is vital, much of the onus will fall on consumers who have been slow to buy electric vehicles instead of the gas-powered pickup trucks and SUVs with which they’ve been so enamored…
“Further, nearly half of U.S. homes are heated with gas furnaces; converting those to electric fuel pumps or other sources will be expensive. Americans love their beef and other meats, but raising the animals — particularly cattle — is a significant contributor to the problem. Not only do the animals emit copious amounts of methane, but ranchers around the globe also are clearing critical carbon-sucking forest for pastureland. And on and on… [Biden provides] lots of vision, not a lot of details.”
Editorial Board, Los Angeles Times
“Public polling from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication shows that while a slimmer majority of voters believe the US should tackle global warming, transitioning to clean energy sources like wind and solar is broadly popular across parties. That could be a boon for Biden as he aggressively sells his $2.25 trillion American Jobs Plan to Congress — a jobs and infrastructure package that doubles as a climate bill…
“[A December 2020 survey] found that 66 percent of registered voters said developing sources of clean energy should be a ‘high’ or ‘very high’ priority for the president and Congress. That number was 13 percentage points higher than the number of registered voters who said global warming should be a high or very high priority for the president and Congress, the poll found. And 72 percent of registered voters supported transitioning the US economy from fossil fuels to 100 percent clean energy by 2050. (Of course, it’s worth repeating that Biden wants to speed up this timeline.)”
Ella Nilsen, Vox
“Climate change is a cumulative problem; if one were to add up all the greenhouse gases the US has emitted, the US would top every other country. The largest share of human-produced carbon dioxide in the atmosphere right now came from the US. The energy that created those emissions helped the US become one of the wealthiest countries in the world…
“The US also continues to have some of the highest per capita emissions of any country. Now the impacts of climate change are here, raising sea levels, fueling extreme weather, and wreaking havoc across economies, and the countries that contributed least to the problem stand to suffer the most…
“That’s why some activists are arguing that the new [target] doesn’t go far enough. ‘As the world’s biggest historical emitter, the US has a responsibility to the most vulnerable nations on the frontlines of the climate crisis,’ Brandon Wu, director of policy and campaigns at ActionAid USA, in a statement. He added that a fairer US target would be closer to a 70 percent cut in emissions, coupled with financial support to developing countries suffering under climate change.”
Umair Irfan, Vox
“Emissions reductions in the U.S. don’t need to be decisive to be mitigating. And American policy may well determine whether leaders in the developing world find a politically tenable way to decarbonize their economies. If rich countries do not treat warming as a serious issue, they cannot expect poor ones to do so either; it’s not like entrenched fossil-fuel interests or anti-science demagogues are phenomena peculiar to the United States…
“More concretely, no nation-state on planet Earth is better positioned to spur green innovation than the U.S. We have the world’s top research universities, more per capita wealth than any large country, and the world’s reserve currency, which allows us to finance public investment at near-zero interest rates…
“Breakthrough technologies that allow low-income nations to have their rapid economic development — and CO2 reductions, too — are humanity’s last best hope. The U.S. should spend as much as we can afford on facilitating such breakthroughs.”
Eric Levitz, New York Magazine
