Biden unveils $1.7 trillion climate plan, paid for by reversing Trump corporate tax cuts
Jacob Pramuk, CNBC, June 4, 2019
Former Vice President Joe Biden unveiled a plan Tuesday to put $1.7 trillion into clean energy research and infrastructure overhauls, funded by rolling back Republican corporate tax cuts. The 2020 Democratic presidential candidate aims to use that federal investment to spur more than $5 trillion in state, local and private money for measures to address climate change, his campaign said. Biden would push for net-zero emissions by 2050, reenter the Paris climate accords and ban new oil and gas permits on public lands and waters.
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REPUBLICANS RESIST PUSH FOR CLEAN ELECTRICITY MANDATE: Biden’s call for Congress to pass a clean energy mandate will confront a political reality check on Capitol Hill, as Republicans are resisting entreaties from Democrats to support a federal clean electricity standard.
Supporters view so-called clean electricity standards as more likely to attract bipartisan support than carbon taxes, which the GOP also resists, because the resulting higher energy costs would not be as obvious to people.
But Republicans aren’t biting, expressing little desire to expand the federal government’s role beyond their preferred formula of funding clean energy research and development.
“If we have the greatest [emissions] reductions in the world and are doing it under our current strategy that is working, why do the feds need to come in and have Big Brother telling the states what they can and can’t do?” Rep. Garret Graves of Louisiana, the top Republican of the House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis, told Josh.
Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, chair of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, offered a similar argument. “I would rather not be in the place where it’s a forcing mechanism and a mandate,” she told Josh. “We have made considerable headway without a mandate.”
