Declaring the climate emergency an "existential crisis" that requires bold and urgent action, Sen. Elizabeth Warren Tuesday night unveiled a proposal that calls for repealing President Donald Trump's tax cuts for the rich and corporations to help fund a transition to 100 percent renewable energy by 2035.
Warren's plan adopts and builds upon the clean energy blueprint introduced by Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, who dropped out of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary race last month after running a campaign that centered the climate crisis as the most dire issue facing the U.S. and the world.
"Jay didn't merely sound the alarm or make vague promises. He provided bold, thoughtful, and detailed ideas for how to get us where we need to go," Warren wrote in a Medium post. "One of the most important of these ideas is the urgent need to decarbonize key sectors of our economy. Today, I'm embracing that goal."
Warren said she will "commit an additional $1 trillion over 10 years—fully paid for by reversing Trump's tax cuts for the wealthiest individuals and giant corporations—to match Governor Inslee's commitment, and to subsidize the economic transition to clean and renewable electricity, zero emission vehicles, and green products for commercial and residential buildings."
The senator outlined the broad goals of her clean energy plan, which calls for $3 trillion in federal investment:
By 2028, 100 percent zero-carbon pollution for all new commercial and residential buildings;
By 2030, 100 percent zero emissions for all new light-duty passenger vehicles, medium-duty trucks, and all buses;
By 2035, 100 percent renewable and zero-emission energy in electricity generation, with an interim target of 100 percent carbon-neutral power by 2030.
"Nothing less than a national mobilization will be required to defeat climate change," said Warren. "It will require every single one of us, and it's time to roll up our sleeves and get to work—there is no time to waste."
Warren's clean energy plan was unveiled Tuesday as part of the Massachusetts senator's overall climate platform, which is detailed on her website.
Warren, an original co-sponsor of the Senate Green New Deal resolution, said her platform would aim to ensure a just transition for fossil fuel industry workers, bolster protections for frontline communities, and create millions of well-paying union jobs while confronting the climate crisis.
"If we work together to make smart investments in our clean energy future, we will grow our economy, improve our health, and reduce structural inequalities embedded in our existing fossil fuel system," Warren wrote. "The task before us is monumental, and it is urgent."
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The youth-led Sunrise Movement praised Warren's platform, which was compiled ahead of a CNN climate crisis town hall on Wednesday that will be attended by 10 Democratic presidential candidates, including Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), entrepreneur Andrew Yang, former Vice President Joe Biden, and South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg.
Ahead of tomorrow’s @cnn #ClimateTownHall, @ewarren has compiled all her plans so far for a #GreenNewDeal. They are as detailed as they are bold. Thank you for your continued leadership. We hope this list keeps growing! Happy reading https://t.co/qu7GHwu7Of — Sunrise Movement (@sunrisemvmt) September 4, 2019
In a statement on Tuesday, Mitch Jones, climate and energy program director at Food & Water Watch, applauded Warren's clean energy plan as a "welcome" addition to her slate of climate proposals.
But Jones criticized Warren for neglecting to mention fracking, which is largely responsible for the planet-threatening boom in U.S. natural gas production.
"While Senator Warren came out early in support of previous plans to stop fossil fuel production on public lands, this latest proposal is silent on banning fracking everywhere," said Jones. "Our new fossil fuel exporting economy is based on fracking, without banning it or exports of fossil fuels, we are condemning our children to decades of fossil fuel use."
"We must move immediately to ban fracking, ban the export and import of fossil fuels, ban new fossil fuel infrastructure including pipelines, as well as banning production on public lands," Jones added. "We don't have time to wait. Acting now is both a political and moral imperative."
t3hd0n on September 4th, 2019 at 13:02 UTC »
possibly dumb question,
what was that money paying for before? i know our deficit went up, did they literally just take out loans to cover the missing tax revenue?
ZombieDemocracy on September 4th, 2019 at 12:00 UTC »
It's an ok start, but even the Trump administration is predicting a 7 degree Fahrenheit rise by 2100.
if you sit down and you consider how high of an increase that is and how short of a time and how far above most of our previous estimates we are, it stands to reason that it's going to take a bit more than 3 trillion dollars.in some ways you could argue that we're in the situation that you may as well spend the money because it's not going to be worth as much in a few more decades. If the world's warming 7 degrees by 2100 I don't think you're going to really need to worry about outstanding debts all that much.
You should probably be spending like 3 trillion dollars every year or even a third of your GDP to combat climate change. It's not just that important, but now it's also that fast-moving and likely to get even faster!
I think the visual CO2 maps over the course of decades like NASA put out help visually illustrate how the heat builds up slowly at first and then grows faster and faster, but it takes quite a while for the heat to build up to a level where people actually notice it and once it does it starts to kind of take on a life of its own. We're pretty much the zooming through that phase right now to the part where the mass of heat we've collected is like a runaway freight train. The stuff we're seeing now is just the tip of the iceberg. Now that climate change has the invested heat energy it needs, the actual Change part is going to start to happen at what seems like a more and more exponential rate. hopefully the next 10 years of increased and more noticeable climate change starts to really convince people to make these big investments.
Bernie's right that we need bigger investments, but Warren might be right that it's better to ease into it than overwhelm people. it's easier to promise more down the road than it is to promise less, so there is some strategic value, but of course Bernie's larger investment and embrace of the seriousness of climate change that does make him see more compelling if that's one of your major focuses.
I would say one general approach to climate change is to try to make it a bit more of a challenge to overcome than painting it as reduction, reduction, reduction.
In a generalized way we should call reduction efficiency increases and we should reference climate change as the greatest job creation opportunity the world has ever seen as well as move for humans to collectively have the capacity to regulate the climate. This way it's like getting to the Moon, you set a goal and you kind of dere people to get there.when it comes to reduction, well you just going to have to do that through regulation and taxes just like you always thought because just kind of asking people to do things is actually not all that effective.
so in some ways we start saying what we need is climate regulation and you can also adopt the argument that the world was always going to need climate regulation because if you look at climate even over a hundred thousand years it's not really stable at all. the worst case scenario over a hundred thousand years isn't as bad as the worst case scenarios for global warming, but the planet was still looking to kill off several billion humans in a couple thousand years as a natural cold trend would have probably been in the earth's long-term forecast. we're currently in interglacial. And by every natural cycle piece of evidence we have we would say that the interglacial is a relatively short. Between two pretty severe cooling trends where are glaciers takeover massive parts of the planet.
We got global warming now instead and that's worse, but it does highlight how we always needed to challenge ourselves to learn to control the climate above and beyond that of just the natural cycle, though if you could do it in any cost-effective way you will work alongside the natural cycle and not entirely in spite of it.
beeperone on September 4th, 2019 at 10:59 UTC »
Renewable energy pays for itself quite quickly.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/03/shift-to-renewables-would-save-australians-20bn-a-year-reportp