A key part of Joe Biden’s climate agenda will likely be cut from the budget bill because of Democrat Senator Joe Manchin’s opposition.
The West Virginia Senator threw cold water on Joe Biden’s plan to get rid of coal and gas-fired plants – and replace them with wind and solar energy.
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Recall, Joe Biden vowed to make the US’s power sector “free of carbon” by 2025 during a virtual bilateral meeting of the Major Economies Forum (MEF) on Energy and Climate last month.
Biden returned the US to the Paris Agreement and committed to reducing US emissions 50% – 52% lower than 2005 levels by 2030.
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Last month Biden traveled to Golden, Colorado to tour the National Renewable Energy Laboratory to promote his “Build Back Better” agenda.
Biden said junk wind turbines are the answer to combating climate change.
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Biden has very ambitious goals to take us back to the dark ages by 2025, but Joe Manchin, a senator from coal-rich West Virginia, is pushing back on Biden.
New York Times reported:
The most powerful part of President Biden’s climate agenda — a program to rapidly replace the nation’s coal- and gas-fired power plants with wind, solar and nuclear energy — will likely be dropped from the massive budget bill pending in Congress, according to congressional staffers and lobbyists familiar with the matter.
Senator Joe Manchin III, the Democrat from coal-rich West Virginia whose vote is crucial to passage of the bill, has told the White House that he strongly opposes the clean electricity program, according to three of those people. As a result, White House staffers are now rewriting the legislation without that climate provision, and are trying to cobble together a mix of other policies that could also cut emissions.
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The $150 billion clean electricity program was the muscle behind Mr. Biden’s ambitious climate agenda. It would reward utilities that switched from burning fossil fuels to renewable energy sources, and penalize those that do not.
The setback also means that President Biden will have a weakened hand when he travels to Glasgow in two weeks for a major United Nations climate change summit. He had hoped to point to the clean electricity program as evidence that the United States, the world’s largest emitter of planet-warming pollution, was serious about changing course and leading a global effort to fight climate change. Mr. Biden has vowed that the United States will cut its emissions 50 percent from 2005 levels by 2030.
