Nobody’s saying that the climate denier is better for the environment. We’re saying that Kamala, who “believes in science” would be a smokescreen, just like Biden was.
If your climate agenda is to give tax credits to install heat pumps and a ton of money to EV manufacturers, and to not actually tackle the biggest polluters in the country, you don’t have a serious climate plan. Also deeply unserious is slapping tariffs on China’s affordable and reliable solar panels and EVs.
The military is a huge polluter and greenhouse gas emitter. So are suburban neighborhoods and aviation. If you can’t tackle those by realigning foreign policy, infrastructure, and urban development, then you’re not going far enough.
This won’t be solved by giving a ton of money to private companies and hoping they find a profit motive. We’d need a vast expansion of state capacity at this point.
The Inflation Reduction Act included $65 million in research grants for low emission aviation and $245 million in development of biofuel based Sustainable Aviation Fuel (aka SAF). And the $3 billion in loan guarantees for manufacturing advanced vehicle technologies included certain aircraft.
There were also $5 billion in loan guarantees for shutting down our heaviest polluting power plants or retooling them to greener generation methods.
There was $3 billion in buying zero emissions vehicles and charging infrastructure for the postal service.
The Inflation Reduction Act, which inherited a lot of the stuff from the Green New Deal, was a lot of things, and I don’t think I’ve ever heard it called deeply unserious before today.
The point about aviation is that we need to reduce the need for flights. Short flights, especially those that are under 600 miles over land, are prime to be replaced by high speed rail.
No amount of SAF is going to make the short flights less polluting than a robust high speed rail system between those city pairs.
Also, you called the IRA deeply unserious, not me. I called Biden’s tariffs against Chinese renewables and EVs deeply unserious because they are.
Yeah, the IRA and Infrastructure Bill steer about $67 billion to railways, $80 billion to transit systems. And even though a lot of the other spending goes towards the status quo of car-based passenger transportation, electrifying that will go a long way towards reducing carbon emissions.
And there are some more ambitious ideas baked in, too: redesigning cities to require less car infrastructure and overall energy use, etc.
I thought it was a big deal when passed and honestly can’t understand why people who care about climate don’t acknowledge just how big of a deal it was (and how devastating that so much of the money authorized will now be in control of a Trump administration).
Fixing the environment means pushing back against the profit motive of corporations. You can’t fix the climate and stay friendly with big polluters. What the dems are doing are half-measures that will still see our future ruined because they refuse to go against their corporate donors
