"Biden Outlines $2 Trillion Climate Plan." NPR

"Biden's climate initiative calls to chart the United States on "an irreversible path" to net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.

"To do that, the plan would aim to achieve a carbon pollution-free power sector by 2035. It would also upgrade 4 million buildings and weatherize 2 million homes over four years to increase energy efficiency. And the proposal, Biden's campaign said, would seek to shift major cities toward public transportation and "create millions of good, union jobs rebuilding America's crumbling infrastructure."

The former vice president's plan comes with a $2 trillion price tag, with plans to deploy those resources at an accelerated pace during his first term.

The proposal also includes environmental justice components, such as creating an Environmental and Climate Justice Division within the Department of Justice.

"When Donald Trump thinks about climate change, the only word he can muster is 'hoax,' " Biden said in prepared remarks Tuesday in Wilmington, Del. "When I think of climate change, the word I think about is 'jobs' — good-paying union jobs that'll put Americans to work.""  NPR

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"Good paying union jobs"  Ah, yes, he is a "union man."  He never held a non-government job and someone tell me if he ever belonged to a union, but, he is a union man.  My maternal grandfather was a union man.  He was a weaver in a woolen mill in New England.  I don't recognize Joe as anything like my grandfather.  No, he is a lot like the union bosses who manipulated and exploited people like my grandfather by lying to them about reality.

How will this program, part of the Biden Death Spiral Economic Program be paid for?  His controllers cause him to read statements to the effect that taxing the rich will be the solution  But, that is a lie.  There cannot be enough money from that source to come close to paying for this madness.  Only borrowed money can pay for it.

An "Environmental and Climate Division" in DoJ?   What they are talking about is a cow fart gestapo.  Pilgrims, you have seen how well DoJ has functioned during the Trump Administration in continuing the Obama/Biden mandate to use their careerist sinecures against the chief of state and government.  What do you think they, and their police friends in the FBI, will be like when they are unleashed upon the citizenry and cheered on by the nomenklatura of the new dispensation?

But, it is your choice, your choice.  Trump is "a being darkly wise and rudely great" but he is the alternative to the cow fart gestapo.  pl 

https://www.npr.org/2020/07/14/890814007/biden-outlines-2-trillion-climate-plan

Comments

[walrus]

Such programs translate into requiring permission to cut down a tree on your own land and similar impositions.... and don’t forget the fees each time you apply. Then, if you want to build anything, there are the hydrology studies, the noise studies, the air quality, wildlife impact, heritage, climate change and diversity studies, ....and don’t forget the fees.

[fakebot]

The president gave a very good speech in the Rose garden dismissing Biden's entire platform. He hit it out of the park.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uyexhRRyi2E&t=1298s

[rho]

"To do that, the plan would aim to achieve a carbon pollution-free power sector by 2035."

$2 trillion is not nearly enough to achieve that, if it is possible at all.

One German study estimates the cot to achieve an 85% CO2 reduction in the German energy sector to be around 6 trillion Euros by 2050. And the costs jump up to around 8 trillion Euros if you want a 90% reduction in the same timeframe.
https://energiesysteme-zukunft.de/fileadmin/user_upload/Publikationen/PDFs/ESYS_Analyse_Sektorkopplung.pdf (see discussion around page 116)

Therefore, attempting to do the same thing in the USA with roughly 4 times the German population (and many times more its size, which influences the cost of expanding the grid) will easily cost at least $35 trillion, and then you are still left with 10% of the former CO2 emissions, which will be prohibitively expensive to eliminate totally.

Who is going to pay for that? I have no idea. But we will crash our economies if we try.

[Jack]

"We know that markets can be complacent until a certain point and then they turn on a time. We are at this point in a benign phase supported by an enormous amount of central bank liquidity emanating from the primary reserve currencies, the euro area, the US Fed and to some extent the Bank of Japan and the Bank of England."

"But we must also recognize is that there are no free lunches. If there’s one statement you want to keep to pound into the head of every policy maker, it’s that there are no free lunches. If you borrow today, there is a presumption that it will be repaired at some point, so you are in a sense taking away resources from somebody else in the future."

"Now it may be a generation or two down the line will be on the hook for this...whether they can pass it on to their children is an open question...but you’re definitely taking away their ability to borrow by borrowing today."

former Central Bank of India Governor and University of Chicago Professor Raghuram Rajan.

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/there-are-no-free-lunches-former-reserve-bank-india-chief-explains-why-mmt-will-never-work

I have a lot of respect for Raghuram Rajan. At the Jackson Hole Fed confab prior to the 2008 mortgage credit crisis, he was one of the few Ph.Ds calling out the financial speculation backstopped by central bank policy. He was proven prescient in his speech then.

These trillion dollar spending plans, the trillion dollar annual federal government debt increases and the trillions of dollars in bailouts of financial speculation are not benign.

[Fred]

Don't leave out the green ($$$) fleet initiatives. Biden is quoted elsewhere as requiring a complete replacement of all school buses and government vehicles with battery powered platforms. That's about 4,000,000 vehicles that wouldn't get bought otherwise. That's a huge buy to automakers such as GM, which needed an EO to get them to produce ventilators; Ford, which is in a j.v. with Volkswagon for electric vehcicle cars. That gives China automotive industry a huge gain since they are the main source for the raw materials for the batteries (and batteries as well) for those companies, it will also help stabilize China's economy as GM and VW are big players in the Chinese market.

Does anyone think those tariffs will remain in place or that any of those companies will reshore any of that manufacturing back to the US if Joe is elected? How long before the lefties decide your fossil fuel car needs to be carbon taxed out of afordability?

[Terence Gore]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=805&v=oihV9yrZRHg&feature=emb_logo

Biden's Full corn pop speech. Actually Joe went up a notch for me after watching this. However if a conservative had mentioned some of the things he speaks freely about, he would have been arrested, dragged off the stage drawn and quartered

[Bill H]

How will such a program be paid for? It will be paid for by simply printing more money, because "Modern Monetary Theory" says that unlimited and unrestrained printing of money does not cause inflation.

MMT says that government, in fact, does not need to collect taxes for any of its operations, including running the military, because it can just print money for that purpose. So why collect taxes? Because taxes reduce the amount of money people have available to spend, thereby preventing runaway consumer spending and preventing inflation.

We live in interesting times.

[Barbara Ann]

Given that Biden's increasingly meaningless utterances now include getting "..our kids to market swiftly", it is clear that assigning Biden's name to a policy in the possessive sense is largely meaningless. The endorsement by Biden's controllers does, however, make it clear that official Dem policy is now to fast track a command economy. For any readers who missed the excellent post here on the GND a year ago, here is the relevant quote from the Washington Examiner article:

Chakrabarti [AOC's chief of staff] had an unexpected disclosure. “The interesting thing about the Green New Deal,” he said, “is it wasn’t originally a climate thing at all.” Ricketts greeted this startling notion with an attentive poker face. “Do you guys think of it as a climate thing?” Chakrabarti continued. “Because we really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing.”

As for paying for it, if the present trend continues I expect the Fed will merely conjure up another couple of trillion dollars of 'money' from thin air. Fed monetary policy is so firmly in the realm of Cloud Cuckoo Land already, maybe it is time one of the MMT true believers took over as chair. Someone like Stephanie Kelton who believes that money grows on trees would seem ideally suited to an incoming Democrat administration. Consequence-free debt to pay for the Socialist utopia.

As for the current list of environmental regs walrus provides, I must confess to being conflicted. My spouse makes a good living as consultant to property developers needing to negotiate this wall of red tape. The costs for all this are of course passed on to the consumer by way of increasingly expensive housing & commercial rental. Are these costs factored into the climate initiative price tag? I would think not.

https://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2019/07/httpswwwwashingtonexaminercomopinionaocs-chief-of-staff-just-killed-the-green-new-deal.html

[Balint Somkuti, PhD]

Never in my whole life could have had imagined Karl Marx's vision coming true. Especially in my lifetime.

Starting with his maxim that it will all start in the most developed country.

[blum]

cow fart gestapo

I am wondering a bit, Sir, if you don't mind.

If "cow fart stasi" wouldn't be better? You feel it wouldn't be as easily recognizable?

[Polo]

This from a guy who never got his hands dirty on a blue collar job in his life let alone be a union member.

As for improving the infrastructure of our great country, he was tasked by President BO in 2009 to oversee that effort. By the time he left office as VP in Jan 2017, nothing had happened. This is what career politicians do...

And now he claims he will fix infrastructure if elected president. What great new ideas can one surmise he has now that he didn't have in those eight years?

Biden's whole campaign reminds me of that great Burt Bacharach song, "Promises, Promises."

In 47 years of political life, he has not delivered anything meaningful and has been on the wrong side of myriad foreign policy decisions that turned out to be blunders.

With two strikes in previous failed presidential attempts, may this one be "A swing and a miss" which leads this long-time taker of public funds into retirement... the sooner the better.

[Peter VE]

"cow fart Gestapo"!!!
When even Michael Moore can see that the carbon free techno future is a chimera, it's time for Joe Biden to join the movement.
For the past two centuries, we've been living off stored sunlight from the past 100,000,000 years. That time is coming to an end, and our grandchildren will see a world where most of the energy they use will be locally generated in their own time, and only the wealthy will have access to electricity and transport fuels.

[turcopolier]

blum

It WOULD be more apt. The Nazi thing is overwhelmingly tempting here because the German police fell in so easily with the Nazi takeover. The Berlin political police actually became the Gestapo.

[BABAK MAKKINEJAD]

Fred:

Ford & GM are in a mass-market business and must cater to the often fickle tastes and preferences of their customers.

They do not have a viable choice other than proclaim their adherence of the new Eco-Religion of Electric Mobility. Just look at the stock price of Tesla - the Capital Markets have a religious faith in future viability and profitability of electric vehicles.

You can see the plebs' sentiment expressed so well in Germany: No to Nuclear, No to Coal, No to Petroleum, No to Natural Gas; and a resounding Yes to the hare-brained Renewable Energy sources.

GM, Ford, Toyota, Fiat, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Yamaha, Honda and many others have a lot of IP in the internal combustion engine. Chinese automakers do not have that.

Need one say more?

The astonishing thing for me is to watch the real future of transportation, diesel-electric hybrids, being thrown away in favor of toy vehicles - all the while enfeebling the United States.

[Deap]

Reminder: unions are private, independent due paying membership organizations.

Why is any government official mandating workers must join these private third party operations. Their sole job is to funnel their union member dues into Democrat campaigns.

Why is no one calling Biden, or any other pro-union Democrat on this egregious public mandate to favor these private membership clubs?

WARNING:
1. Private industry unions -bargain at arms length - labor and management

2. Public employee unions - same people chose who sits on BOTH sides of the bargaining table. They elect the government agents who sit on one side; and chose the union leader who sit on the other side. And the sole goal is carve up every available tax dollar for themselves

Joe waxes nostalgic about his daddy's private industry union. Yet we are now being choked to death by the massive 44 million member strong public sector unions. Huge, huge, huge difference.

Joe pretends he does not know the difference. Call him on this.
Meanwhile 44 million government employee union members are out for blood this November. Just look at the demands the government employee teachers unions just made on LA schools - that is your "union" future.

[Fred]

A friend of mine is an architect in OK. The school board in Norman is debating revamping all the ventilation systems in all the buildings to make them block viruses. They'll spend more money doing that than has been spent constructing all the schools in the city's history. All over Covid19 fear mongering. It would be cheaper to defund all the schools and rebate all the taxes associated with them. Vouchers for everybody and may the best teacher's get rich running their on-line businesses.

[JohnH]

Not to worry. This is all campaign blather. Biden will forget everything hie said the day he gets elected, just like Obama before him.

Biden is an empty suit, who has no record of achievement except an uncanny ability to survive and float to the top. I seem to remember John Kerry saying, “What will we do if we win?” Biden is cut from the same cloth—he must be terrified that he might actually be expected to lead and to accomplish something.

[Fred]

Babak,

"adherence of the new Eco-Religion of Electric Mobility. "

Yes, obey the politiciains who will regulate the populace out of their legacy vehicles the same way they declare some people, and the businesses they own, "non-essential", and thus ensure a captive market for a product the majority of consumers would not buy otherwise. (As an asside I wonder how much Debbie Dingell made at GM while helping ship all those factories to China, all while married to that member of congress whose place she took when he died?) Tesla's stock price is unrelated to its unit sales or profitability.

China has essentially zero petroleum and is using the lure of high sales and profits to entice corporate investment, thus creating its industrial base while stealing the Western world's IP from past and current R&D. The masks connecting the corruption in government, academia and commerce to entanglements with China are being stripped away. The want Trump gone more than Hilary ever did as he is the only effective resistance to their foreign policy in decades.

[turcopolier]

JohnH

Biden would be a sock puppet for the career Dem pols and the marxists.

[BABAK MAKKINEJAD]

Fred

China did not steal IP, it was given to her freely.

US Government was helping Chinese government agencies to reform and be more efficient.

This happened under both Republican and Democratic governance.

As I stated before, every one has got something during the last 30 years:

the Druggies their Drug Legalization,
the Alternative-Life-Style Crowd their Gay Marriage,
the Protestant Fundis their war against Islam,
the Cold Warriors their Russian-Containment and
the Financiers the Global Labor Arbitrage anchored in New York City.

Trump is only adding one more item to this list with his China policy.

[turcopolier]

Babak

Yes. The globalist governments and business communities of the US have helped China forward has part of a desired world globalist polity and economy. Trump is not doing that.

[Barbara Ann]

The subject of the Nazis' (Himmler's) takeover of the German police was mentioned above. On this subject and their wider ascent to power, I'd highly recommend the 2019 BBC series Rise of the Nazis. The three 1 hour programs cover the period from the September 1930 general election to the July 1934 enactment of the "Law Concerning the Highest State Office of the Reich" and the death of Hindenburg - immediately after which Hitler was able to grab absolute power.

The focus of this series is the backroom machinations of the power players; Kurt von Schleicher, Franz von Papen, Hitler himself and others. What comes across is the number of off ramps to avoid totalitarianism missed by miscalculation, ineptitude, or simply historical accident. As someone who was previously aware the the basics (Knight of the Long Knives etc) it is IMO an excellent exposition of two of history's most important lessons; democracy is fragile, and underestimating ruthless men can be catastrophic. The accompanying musical score is great too.

BBC content is supposed to be available inside the UK only, so you may need to call in a favor from a British friend to download it from the BBC's website for you.

[turcopolier]

Barbara Ann

Actually Goering as head of Berlin government converted the political police into the Gestapo.

[Barbara Ann]

Colonel you are of course correct, Himmler didn't get control over the Gestapo until April 1934.

[turcopolier]

Barbara Ann

You know a great deal about Nazi Germany and the war. How is that? For me it was a study I made for many years to enrich my knowledge of war and its context.