Former Vice President Joe Biden speaking in Wilmington, Del., on Tuesday about modernizing U.S. infrastructure and his plans for tackling climate change.
Photo: leah millis/ReutersFormer Vice President Joe Biden unveiled a $2 trillion proposal Tuesday to combat climate change, calling for a bigger investment and faster action than he backed during the Democratic primaries earlier this year.
“If I have the honor of being elected president, we’re not just going to tinker around the edges. We’re going to make historic investments that will seize the opportunity and meet this moment in history,” Mr. Biden said during a speech in Wilmington, Del., Tuesday afternoon.
Mr. Biden’s program would use climate policy as an economic-development tool over a framework of four years. Last summer, he proposed spending $1.7 trillion over a decade. The souped-up investment Mr. Biden proposed Tuesday is part of an economic plan the presumptive Democratic nominee began releasing last week, when he announced a $700 billion economic revival program.
The climate plan would attempt to eliminate carbon emissions from the power grid by 2035, put Americans into electric vehicles and zero-emissions mass transit, and rebuild roads, bridges and other infrastructure. The plan would devote spending to minority communities and bolster rules to support unions, which the Biden campaign frames as a way to ensure benefits go first to poor and working-class people and to communities hurt the most by pollution.
“Here we are with an economy in crisis, but with an incredible opportunity, not to go back to where we were before, but better, stronger, more resilient and more prepared for the challenges that lie ahead,” Mr. Biden said.
Mr. Biden is seeking to draw parallels between climate change and the coronavirus pandemic as he makes the case for his sweeping initiative. He blames President Trump for a slow response to the pandemic and for fueling an economic decline by failing to heed scientific advisers.
Climate change is another impending crisis, the Biden campaign says in its plan, promising to take guidance from scientists. The plan’s emphasis on urgent progress mirrors recommendations from the United Nations-led scientific panel that says the world must drastically reduce and even reverse greenhouse-gas emissions in the coming decades to avoid climate change’s most catastrophic outcomes.
The Trump administration has ignored that report, and Mr. Trump personally has said he doesn’t believe the U.S. government’s own dire scientific assessments of climate change. His administration has been undoing much of the country’s climate policy as part of a deregulatory agenda, calling Obama administration initiatives legal overreach that hamper U.S. manufacturing and energy businesses.
“When Donald Trump thinks about climate change, the only word he can muster is hoax,” Mr. Biden said. “When I think about climate change, the word I think of is jobs, good-paying union jobs that put Americans to work.”
Mr. Biden’s climate plan adds to the more than $7 trillion in new federal spending Mr. Biden has proposed over the next 10 years, according to campaign and think-tank estimates.
Biden officials said the program would be paid for with a mix of tax increases on corporations and the wealthy, as well as stimulus spending, likely related to the coronavirus pandemic. A campaign aide said if Mr. Biden is elected president, he would work with Congress to expand stimulus spending that wouldn’t need to be offset by spending cuts.
Mr. Biden has previously released a tax plan that would return the top individual income-tax rate for individuals with incomes above $400,000 to 39.6% from 37% under current law. He would also raise the corporate tax rate to 28% from 21%.
A Biden campaign official said the plan involves a mix of executive action and congressional legislation. The House is currently led by Democrats, but Republicans hold the Senate, posing a likely obstacle to some of Mr. Biden’s biggest promises if the GOP remains in control. In particular, there are longstanding political fights about the effectiveness of federal subsidies in steering environmental policy, some of which are likely to re-emerge in any effort to implement Mr. Biden’s initiatives.
Natural gas, wind and solar are now the most common fuels for power, but it took decades of government spending on research, tax breaks and other subsidies to help make them plentiful and cheap. Tax credits for electric and other low-emissions vehicles were a part of tailpipe-emissions rules that the Obama administration issued nearly a decade ago, but success drawing consumers to electric vehicles has been limited.
“The reality is we’ll be facing a country that will be in dire need of the types of investment that will be made here,” said a campaign official. “He is of course making sure he is campaigning in every state needed to make sure we win every Senate seat we possibly can to further that goal.”
Mr. Biden has been criticized by some progressives who were looking for a more aggressive approach to climate change. During the primary, activists from climate groups such as the Sunrise Movement showed up at his events to protest.
However, since Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who had proposed investing $16 trillion over a decade in an overhaul of the economy aimed at fighting climate change, dropped out of the race in April, Mr. Biden and his aides have been in discussion with members of these groups and other activists.
Last week, a task force made up of allies of both Messrs. Biden and Sanders released a set of recommendations focused on how to tackle climate change, including eliminating carbon emissions from power plants by 2035 and creating a climate corps and climate-justice initiatives. Mr. Biden has adopted variations of those plans on his own.
Mr. Biden’s promise Tuesday not to “tinker around the edges” of climate policy was similar to a line used by Mr. Sanders to describe his own vision for the country when he campaigned for the Democratic nomination.
“I think for me this plan represents a considerable leap forward from where Joe Biden’s climate plans were a few weeks ago. It’s like a 200% increase in investment,” said Varshini Prakash, a co-founder and executive director of the Sunrise Movement and a member of the task force chosen by Mr. Sanders.
Ms. Prakash called the new plan a victory for climate activists, but said activists needed to continue to push for even more than was being proposed because the “science is ruthless.”
Despite the progressive proposal, a campaign official said Mr. Biden’s stance on fracking hasn’t changed. He intends to ban it, but only for oil and gas production from federal lands, not more broadly, as his public comments have sometimes suggested
The Trump campaign has seized on Mr. Biden’s plan to ban some fracking and shift to clean energy, accusing him of cutting American jobs.
“Joe Biden pretends to be an advocate for union jobs, but his so-called ‘Build Back Better’ plan and radical proposal to spend $2 trillion in four years on Green New Deal policies make it clear that union jobs related to oil, natural gas, fracking and energy infrastructure will be on the chopping block in Joe Biden’s America,” the Trump campaign said.
The Biden plan promises support for carbon-capture technology and advanced nuclear power under an effort to reinvigorate government-funded research and development. Those efforts have broad support from the U.S. business lobby but have faced opposition from some parts of the environmental movement.
It also leaves out any mention of a carbon tax—another initiative with business support—and continued use of oil and natural gas. The American Petroleum Institute, the industry’s largest trade group, noted that natural gas was responsible for a steep drop in U.S. greenhouse gas emissions as it replaced coal over the past decade.
“The choices policy makers make in 2020 and beyond will determine whether we build on America’s energy progress or shift to foreign energy sources with lower environmental standards,” the group’s leader, Mike Sommers, said in a statement. “You can’t address the risks of climate change without America’s natural gas and oil industry.”
Write to Timothy Puko at tim.puko@wsj.com and Eliza Collins at eliza.collins@wsj.com.
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