The New York Times analyzes Biden’s energy and climate plan
How and how much will Biden push on renewables? Facts, comments and scenarios in the New York Times insight
On April 22, Earth Day, leaders from more than three dozen countries, including 17 nations responsible for four-fifths of the world's greenhouse gas emissions, will gather in a virtual summit. The purpose is to discuss where the world goes on climate change and what each country needs to do to limit the Earth's warming to no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels – a threshold beyond which scientists predict irreversible environmental damage.
All eyes will be on the person who organized the summit, President Biden. It's a bit melodramatic to call this a moment of truth for Biden, but it's a critically important moment for a new president who has vowed to claim a leadership role for America on a pressing global issue his predecessor foolishly abandoned. Likewise for a president who has pledged to make the US economy carbon neutral by mid-century and who has said he will work tirelessly to get other big economies to do the same. The ideas he presents must therefore be not only ambitious but also credible – reads the New York Times editorial .
Anyone with the energy to navigate acres of verbiage will find elements of a plausible strategy embedded in its $ 2 trillion recovery plan. The plan is not exactly what its energy secretary, Jennifer Granholm, has enthusiastically described as a "once in a century" opportunity to reinvent America's energy distribution system. But it offers much more than what could be deduced from the reactions of leftist groups. The Center for Biological Diversity, for example, complained about the plan's subsidies, its loyalty to the free market, and its failure to end oil and gas drilling much more quickly.
The piano has many moving parts, two of which are transformative. One aims to reduce emissions from cars and trucks, the largest source of carbon dioxide emissions in America. Biden is focusing heavily on electric vehicles, which today make up only 2% of vehicles on the road. To "win the electric vehicle market," as he said (China is 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 a series of tax credits aimed at convincing manufacturers to produce electric vehicles and equip them with batteries that can be recharged as quickly as filling a tank of gasoline. Plus, point-of-sale credits to get people to buy finished products.
The second potential game-changer is a national clean energy standard – a federal mandate that requires a certain (and ever-increasing) percentage of electricity to be generated from zero- or ultra-low-carbon sources such as wind, solar, energy, and energy. hydroelectric and nuclear power. All those electric vehicles and residential heat pumps in Biden's electrified America are going to need huge amounts of power, and it better be clean. One effect of this rule would be to accelerate the transition from fossil fuels. Coal is already on the verge of extinction, and the days of natural gas are numbered unless a way is found to capture emissions from the power plants that use it.
This proposal could have a hard slip in Congress not just because Congress has many devoted friends of oil and gas. Clean energy standards have traditionally been left to states, 30 of which plus the District of Columbia have already adopted them. But there are encouraging signs of buying by the big utility companies, in the same way that some of the big auto companies, most recently General Motors, have embraced a future of mostly electric vehicles.
Here, too, tax credits and subsidies loom. For example, credits for renewables such as wind and solar energy, subject to the whims of Congress for years, receive a 10-year extension in the plan and therefore a degree of certainty they never had.
Overall, Biden's climate plans, like the broader employment plan they are a part of, rely on private and public investment, and little mention is made of regulation, which has taken center stage in the plans. of President Barack Obama's emissions reduction. But Biden hasn't foreclosed on regulation. The difference is that the regulations will henceforth play a complementary, albeit important, role.
The Obama-era rules revoked by Trump will most likely be reinstated and possibly strengthened – among them, rules aimed at reducing planet-warming methane emissions from new and existing oil and gas plants and rules to reduce carbon emissions. carbon from vehicles. Vehicle rules would be particularly important, as they would require manufacturers to produce increasingly fuel-efficient cars before the transition to electric vehicles begins, which could be in a decade or two.
An overlooked fact in the discussion of Biden's plans is that the clean energy economy is moving in his direction – due to no small part of the $ 800 billion economic recovery plan enacted in 2009 under Obama. That plan, which has been dwarfed as too small, included $ 90 billion or so in tax credits, loans, and other incentives for clean energy projects, including home air conditioning and electric vehicle starting ( there wouldn't have been a Tesla if it wasn't for a timely loan under the program). The effect on renewables such as wind and solar has been particularly striking, and prices for both have come down to the point that they both compete favorably with fossil fuels.
A predominantly renewable energy landscape is no longer a pipe dream. Nor is a less threatening climate.
Extract from the foreign press review by Epr Comunicazione
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/energia/il-new-york-times-analizza-il-piano-biden-su-energia-e-clima/ on Sat, 17 Apr 2021 06:14:59 +0000.