Skip to main content

What’s in Joe Biden’s $2 trillion climate plan?

Biden Plan for a Clean Energy Revolution & Environmental Justice | Joe Biden for President

Joe Biden’s campaign is proposing a plan to spend $2 trillion on clean-energy initiatives over a four-year span.

“I want to make sure we put down such a marker that it’s impossible for the next president to turn it around,” the presumptive Democratic nominee for president said at a fundraiser on Monday, according to The Washington Post. The trillions would be spent in a variety of ways, from electrifying public transit to weatherizing buildings to giving rebates for the purchase of more energy-efficient appliances and cars. Many of Biden’s plans come from the recommendations of a task force created by Biden and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who also made a bid for the Democratic nomination this year.

The plan is still light on details, but we’ll update this article as the Biden campaign releases more information.

Homes and buildings

Part of Biden’s plan will focus on retrofitting existing buildings and homes to be more energy-efficient. This includes upgrading and weatherizing the structures, and providing rebates for homeowners who buy more efficient appliances and windows.

Energy-saving appliances are not only environmentally friendly, they save renters and homeowners money. The Environmental Protection Agency’s Energy Star program has helped push appliance makers to make ever-more-efficient products. In 2017, the Trump administration planned to eliminate the program due to budget cuts. Part of Biden’s earlier climate plan included more aggressive appliance- and building-efficiency standards.

Clean energy

Biden’s original climate plan was to spend $1.7 trillion over 10 years to reach net-zero emissions from electricity plants before 2050. The new proposal sets the target date for 100% clean energy sector at 2035. Meeting that goal would require installing more solar panels and wind turbines, as well as reliance on existing nuclear power, according to Biden’s campaign.

Biden will also support research into carbon-capture technology.  While some see this type of technology as promising — it often involves extracting carbon dioxide from the air and storing it underground — some say it’s not yet at a stage to make a discernible impact on the changing climate.

Transportation

Vehicles contribute significantly to U.S. air pollution. Under Biden’s plan, buses built in the U.S. would emit zero greenhouse gases by 2030, and older diesel-powered versions would be converted as well. To support more electric vehicles, he plans to build 500,000 EV charging stations. Biden is also endorsing a bill from Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-New York) that provides funding for people who want to trade older models for electric or low-emissions cars.

To see Biden’s proposed climate plan in full, you can head to his campaign website’s dedicated clean energy page

Editors' Recommendations

Jenny McGrath
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Jenny McGrath is a senior writer at Digital Trends covering the intersection of tech and the arts and the environment. Before…
We finally know the price of Asus’ most powerful gaming NUC
The Asus ROG NUC on a desk surrounded by three monitors.

The first Asus ROG NUC (Next Unit of Computing) model is just around the corner. The small form factor PC is now up for pre-order at a German retailer, and although it's powerful enough to rival some of the best laptops, it costs more than many comparable models -- and you'll still have to pay extra for a monitor.

Asus' first take on Intel's portable PC contains a lot of compute power in a small chassis. Although there are a few configurations of the PC, the one that was spotted up for sale ahead of time comes with Intel's latest Meteor Lake-H CPU, the Core Ultra 9 185H, which sports 16 cores and 22 threads and can be boosted to run at up to 5.1GHz, all with a thermal design power (TDP) of 45 watts. However, Asus allows overclocking, meaning that the CPU can run at up to 65 watts instead.

Read more
YouTube tells creators to start labeling ‘realistic’ AI content
YouTube on Roku.

YouTube is taking steps to try to help viewers better understand if what they’re watching has been created, whether completely or in part, by generative AI.

“Generative AI is transforming the ways creators express themselves -- from storyboarding ideas to experimenting with tools that enhance the creative process,” YouTube said in a message shared on Monday. “But viewers increasingly want more transparency about whether the content they’re seeing is altered or synthetic.”

Read more
AMD is making the CPU more and more obsolete in gaming
A demo of AMD GPU work graphs featuring in-game scenery including a castle and a town.

At GDC 2024, AMD just expanded on Microsoft's recently announced Work Graphs API, and a quick demo shows just how powerful the new tech can be for gaming performance. AMD's iteration moves draw calls and mesh nodes from the CPU to the GPU, cutting back on the time it takes to execute these tasks. As a result, AMD found that there was a massive performance improvement -- rendering time saw a 64% boost -- when using Work Graphs with mesh shaders.

Microsoft introduced Work Graphs as a way to streamline processes both in gaming and in productivity, all by giving the GPU the power to schedule and execute tasks without first communicating with the CPU. It's built into the Direct3D 12 API and it can reduce bottlenecks and improve gaming performance in 3D games.

Read more