Former Vice President Joe Biden introduced a $2 billion clean energy plan today as his presidential campaign picked up steam on the policy front.
The plan calls for net-zero emissions, economy-wide, by no later than 2050. The Biden plan marks a middle ground between Trump Administration fossil-fuel focused energy policies the Green New Deal sought by the progressive wing of the Democratic Party.
The plan would include investments in roads and bridges, railroads, wind power, and the automobile industry. The emphasis was on union jobs.
Biden rolled out the plan at the Chase Center on the Riverfront in Wilmington.
- Infrastructure: Roads and bridges to green spaces and water systems to electricity grids and universal broadband.
- Auto Industry: Create 1 million new jobs in the American auto industry, domestic auto supply chains, and auto infrastructure, from parts to materials to electric vehicle charging stations.
- Transit: Provide every American city with 100,000 or more residents with high-quality, zero-emissions public transportation options.
- Power Sector: Move ambitiously to generate clean, American-made electricity to achieve a carbon pollution-free power sector by 2035 with wind and solar.
- Buildings: Upgrade four million buildings and weatherize 2 million homes over four years.
- Housing: Spur the construction of 1.5 million sustainable homes and housing units.
- Innovation: Drive dramatic cost reductions in critical clean energy technologies, including battery storage, negative emissions technologies, the next generation of building materials, renewable hydrogen, and advanced nuclear..
- Agriculture and Conservation: Create jobs in climate-smart agriculture, resilience, and conservation, including 250,000 jobs plugging abandoned oil and natural gas wells and reclaiming abandoned coal, hardrock, and uranium mines .
- Environmental Justice: Ensure that environmental justice is a key consideration in where, how, and with whom we build – creating good, union, middle-class jobs in communities left behind, righting wrongs in communities that bear the brunt of pollution, and lifting up the best ideas.
The Trump campaign was quick to criticize Biden’s proposal as a “killer” of energy jobs.
