Over the last year, Joe Biden has been throwing pieces of his domestic agenda overboard in an effort to keep his presidency afloat. Free community college, child care funding, expanded preschool — all left behind.
But there was one critical piece that emerged largely intact, albeit not unscathed. The legislation approved by the Senate over the weekend includes nearly $400 billion for clean energy initiatives, the country’s largest-ever investment in fighting global warming.
The measure, which includes other provisions on taxes and prescription drugs, is expected to be passed by the House on Friday before going to Biden’s desk for his signature. In a statement to The Associated Press, Biden said the legislation will help fulfill his campaign promise to “build a clean energy future and create jobs for American workers building that future.”
“Our children and grandchildren will remember this for many years to come: this bill changes their lives and secures their future more than almost anything Washington has done for decades,” he said.
For the White House, the final result is proof of an approach — more focused on incentives than regulations or penalties — that was born from the failure to advance climate policy more than a decade ago, when Biden served as vice president.
After President Barack Obama took office in 2009, Democrats began pushing legislation that would create a cap-and-trade program to limit greenhouse gas emissions.
The proposal would have limited emissions and forced industries to buy permits to release emissions, creating a financial incentive to operate more cleanly.
But with the economy still struggling to recover from the recession and Republicans in opposition, the legislation stalled in 2010. Joe Manchin, the West Virginia Democrat who was running for Senate at the time, released a campaign advertisement in which he fired a rifle at a copy of the bill.
Christy Goldfuss, the senior vice president for energy and environment policy at the Center for American Progress, was working on Capitol Hill at the time. She said the failure was “absolutely devastating to the climate community, and really led to deep reflection and introspection.”
Another setback came in 2018, when voters in Washington state rejected a carbon tax. If the idea couldn’t even get traction in such a liberal corner of the country, Goldfuss said, what chance did it have nationally?
Feldman said Biden’s experience as vice president informed his thinking about climate policy when he started running for the White House in 2019.
“He had seen President Obama work very hard to get cap and trade over the finish line,” she said. “He knew that we had to try something different.”
Ali Zaidi, the White House deputy national climate adviser, said Biden was helped by the fact that clean energy had become more affordable and recognizable in recent years.
“This is a set of technologies and a set of solutions for which time has come,” he said. “He was able to speak to an American people who knew tangibly what this meant, and the economics lined up to propel action.”
