President-elect Joe Biden has made addressing climate change one of his top priorities but climate experts Thursday said his proposed policies would lead to higher costs and no significant reduction in global temperatures.
“It is very important to understand just how expensive Biden’s climate plan is and just how much harm it would do to the American economy as well as American household budgets,” Heartland Institute president James Taylor told reporters in a press conference Thursday.
“This puts the average American household on the hook for $17,000 per household as a result of this climate plan.”
Biden called climate change an “existential threat” in a speech earlier this year and unveiled a $2 trillion climate plan to create jobs while increasing clean energy use in the transportation, electricity, and building industries.
Although Biden said he does not support the Green New Deal, his plan calls for a “clean energy revolution” to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050.
When I hear the words climate change, I hear the word “jobs.” Good paying, union jobs that will solve our jobs crisis while addressing our climate crisis. pic.twitter.com/7NRGNXsMI6
— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) July 14, 2020
But polling data shows that climate change was not an important issue for voters in 2020 when compared to other issues like the economy and the coronavirus pandemic.
The poll found 42% of voters said climate change was “very important” to their vote according to the Pew Research Center, lower than almost all other issues.
“Biden does not have a mandate for such an aggressive climate plan,” Taylor told reporters. Experts also said proposals floated by Biden and his transition team would lead to higher energy prices for consumers and households.
Treasury Secretary nominee-designate Janet Yellen, for example, has said she supports a carbon tax and could implement such a policy if confirmed to head the Treasury, according to The Washington Post.
But a 2015 study by Brookings Institution researchers found that such a plan would raise the price of gasoline by 36 cents per gallon and add an additional 20% cost to consumer utility bills.
Biden’s climate plan also aims for an unprecedented reduction in greenhouse gas emissions to mitigate rising temperatures. But some climate scientists say that may not work — a 2018 study concluded that global temperatures would still rise for centuries even if greenhouse gas emissions reduced to zero.
Incoming CO2 Coalition executive director Greg Wrightstone said he agreed with the assessment.
“If the United States reduced 100% of all of its emissions today,” he told reporters Thursday, “it would only avert four-hundredths of a degree centigrade by the year 2050 and only one-tenth of a degree by the year 2100.”
Biden vowed to rejoin the Paris Climate Accord during the 2020 campaign, according to MarketWatch. The United States officially backed out of the agreement on Nov. 4 under President Donald Trump.
Biden’s transition website states that he “will not only recommit the United States to the Paris Agreement on climate change — he will go much further than that.”
“It’s not going to be as easy as people have assumed,” Competitive Enterprise Institute climate director Myron Ebell told reporters Thursday.
Read more at Daily Caller
The most important question now is whether the climate propaganda machine can be effective enough to brainwash a strong majority of Americans into believing the crisis narrative. I worry that its efforts are well-advanced in Canada and that our prime minister isn’t understood as a dangerous threat (and not only on climate) by enough of us.
I think Spurwing gives Biden too much credit for being knowledgeable and aware of the aims of those pushing the “green” agenda.
Nov 11, 2020 Biden’s Nature Trick
Joe Biden has appointed one of the most dishonest academics in history to be his climate advisor.
https://youtu.be/G6Fzx9Rinug
Biden like just about all Globalists is all about returning us to a backward way of living with Human Sacrifice just like the Aztecs Mayans and Incan’s did and the Indians before Columbus did Biden bases everything on the Globalists Plans
A complete waste of money. Will have no significant effect on the climate. But will bring the EU’s energy poverty to the United States. Their energy costs are three times those of the US. And all they’ve accomplished is energy so high that one-fifth of Europeans must choose between heating – and eating. And the Paris Accord calls for one hundred trillion dollars to the year 2100 – also to do nothing. CO2 is NEVER a significant driver to the climate. Only those assuming that the coincidental rise of CO2 and temperatures starting in the mid twentieth century were anything but coincidental. The ONLY CAUSAL RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN TEMPERATURE AND CO2 IS SOLUBILITY. Climate cannot be understood in the timeframe of decades. Climate moves in timeframes of millennia at its fastest. For example we have been warming since the Little Ice Age in the 1600s. And we will continue warming for another 2 degrees C before the one thousand year Eddy cycle turns back down into cooling to complete the one thousand year cycle. All this massive political stupidity politicians call climate change accomplishes is many times more death by energy poverty than the weather causes! Oh for a media that could count and understand science. CO2 is the basic ingredient of life on earth. And it’s been declining from levels ten to twenty times those at the beginning of multicellular life for nearly 600 million years to near lethal lows. MORE CO2 IS ALWAYS BETTER.
But Biden did not win fair and square. He is not president elect, and he will never be my president.