Biden's Policies; addressing a Hotter Planet

The most important change to our planet as we head into the autumn of 2024: the Earth is continuing to heat dramatically.

Scientists have said that there’s a better than 90% chance that this year will top 2023 as the warmest ever recorded.

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PROBLEM

Paleoclimatologists were pretty sure last year was the hottest in the last 125,000 years. The result this summer has been a non-stop set of super-weather events driven by an ever hotter planet. A Social and economic run of disasters plastered media outlets with pictures of floods, floating cars through streets underwater and people fleeing for their lives. Global Heating (aka Climate Change and Global Warming) is increasingly making life on this most habitable of planet very difficult, and in some places increasingly impossible. And it’s on target to get far, far worse.

Possible the biggest thing change in the months ahead will be the outcome from the American presidential election, which presently looks as if it is going down to the wire.

Thes 2024 election is fundamental on several points as to the future direction of United States, as it will decide America’s power future and transition into a clean energy economy. The consequences of rolling back science and progress in our global transition to a clean energy economy is no less impactful to all Americans, than how quickly we honestly and effectively address the unabated temperature rise now underway. The possibility of political delays and/or failure into an essential transition to clean power can be summed up in word: catastrophic.

Donald Trump gave an interview last week, in which he laid out his understanding of global heating. He summed up his climate-change denial theories in just two words…”It’s weather.”

SOLUTION

The second-biggest thing happening on our planet right now: clean and renewable energy has arrived at commercial scale previously only dreamed about, and from the most logical and straight-forward global clean energy options; the Sun and wind. By some calculations, we’re now putting up a nuclear plant’s worth of solar panels every day around the world, and this has put the old and dirty energy fueled global economy on the edge of complete replacement.

In California, there are now enough solar farms and wind turbines that day after day this spring and summer these pollution-free energy sources supplied more than 100% of the state’s electric needs, and for long stretches. There were also now enough batteries connected to the state’s grid that they become the biggest source of power for California’s after-dark economy and forty million residents.

In China, it looks as if carbon emissions from its historic coal-driven economy may have peaked – they’re six years ahead of schedule on the effort to build out clean energy renewables.

In Hawaii, solar power plants with battery storage are slowly, but surely, turning the state’s dirty energy combustion power plants into obsolete relics of an energy past dependent on the state’s imported energy suppliers.

POLITICS

(If) Trump wins the 2024 presidential election, he promised, beginning on day one, he would become a “dictator” and order “drill, baby, drill”. Reported earlier, Trump has meet with key power players within the fossil fuel sector for a “one billion dollars” ask in campaign contributions, telling his oily audience … “I’ll fix it”. Big oil is also doing its best to raise money on behalf of Trump. Never has an industry sector so powerful politically and economically imagined in their wildest dreams they’d find a former president and 2024 candidate for sale to the highest bidder. The Washington Post reported a couple of weeks ago, Harold Hamm (who is also reported to be worth US$18.5 billion making him the 63rd wealthiest person in the world, and in his own words told the Post …”we’re working incredibly hard to raise as much money as he can from the (dirty) energy sector”. “We’ve gotten max-out checks from people we’ve never gotten a dollar from before.”

Biden’s green policies. and IRA bill (passed 2023), will save 200,000 lives and have boosted clean energy economy, data shows

Two separate reports find policies will save Americans from pollution in coming decades and so far have added nearly 150,000 clean energy jobs.

The environmental and clean energy climate policies of Joe Biden’s administration will save approximately 200,000 Americans’ lives from dangerous pollution in the coming decades and have spurred a surge in clean energy jobs, two independent reports outlining the stakes of the upcoming US presidential election have found.

The first full year of the Inflation Reduction Act (perhaps Biden greatest accomplishment as President), was a sprawling clean energy-climate bill passed by Democratic votes in Congress in 2022, with VP Kamala Harris enabling the deciding vote which made possible nearly 150,000 transformative clean energy jobs, according to a new report by nonpartisan business group E2.

Nearly 3.5 million people now work in growing clean energy sector in the US, more than the total number of nurses nationwide, with 1m of these jobs centered in the US south, a region politically dominated by Republicans.

Clean energy jobs grew by 4.5% last year, nearly twice as fast as overall US employment growth, and account for one in 16 new jobs nationally, the report found.

New roles in energy efficiency led the way, followed by an increase in jobs in renewable energy, such as wind and solar, electric car manufacturing and battery and electric grid upgrades.

But the future of the IRA, which provides tax credits and grants for new clean energy activity, is a flashpoint in the election campaign, with Donald Trump vowing to “terminate Kamala Harris’s green new scam and rescind all of the unspent funds”.

The former president and Republican nominee has accused Harris, his Democratic opponent, of waging a “war on American energy” and called for an end to incentives encouraging Americans to drive electric cars.

Harris, who has promised in unspecified ways to build upon the IRA, has attacked Trump for “surrendering” on the climate crisis as well as in the US’s attempts to compete with China, the world’s clean energy manufacturing powerhouse.

Bob O’Keefe, executive director of E2, said the IRA has helped lead “an American economic revolution the likes of which we haven’t seen in generations”.

“But we’re just getting started,” Keefe added. “The biggest threats to this unprecedented progress are misguided efforts to repeal or roll back parts of the IRA, despite the law’s clear benefits both to American workers and the communities where they live.”

UNDER THE THUMB OF A NEW TRUMP ADMINISTRATION

Should Trump return to the White House, he will need congressional approval to completely repeal the IRA, although his administration could slow down and even claw back funding allocated but not yet released for clean energy projects, such as the $500m pledged for a green overhaul of a steel mill in JD Vance’s home town of Middletown, Ohio.

If a new Trump administration came to pass in 2025, he would have more power over the future of air pollution regulations set by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) than during the Biden presidency. Any major environmental and climate policy rollbacks will have a heavy toll upon public health. A new analysis of 16 regulations passed by the EPA under the Biden administration (started in 2021) findings reveal Biden’s regulatory reforms are on track to save 200,000 lives, save tax dollars, and prevent more than 100 million asthma attacks by 2050 by cleaning up historic toxic air pollution sources.

Trump has directly promised oil and gas industry executives a fresh wave of de-regulation (the regulatory dismantling of President Biden’s reforms, should he return to the White House. This will likely occur (if elected), with or without the $1bn in campaign contributions demand Trump placed on oil and gas stakeholders.
Project 2025, a conservative blueprint dismantling public benefits and regulatory protections was authored by many former Trump officials. Although disavowed by the Trump campaign, the Project 2025 sets forth a roadmap for dismantling regulatory protections in various key Federal agencies, including the EPA. A rollback of environmental rules and protections in the politicization of decision agency making and priorities are the essence of the Project 2025 roadmap. “These changes are designed to put polluters in charge of air and water regulations, and put millions of Americans at needless risk of cancer, heart disease and asthma,” said Symons.