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(Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Democratic Senate seat wins in the state of Georgia have given U.S. President-elect Joe Biden a “green light to move forward” on some key shifts in national climate policy, such as much greener pandemic stimulus spending, U.S. policy analysts said.
With Democrats now in control of the Senate, “it’s a huge, huge difference”, Nigel Purvis, CEO of the Washington-based Climate Advisers policy group, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
“This almost doubles what he can do - he has a whole additional range of tools and levers at his disposal,” said Purvis, who has worked with three former U.S. administrations on climate policy.
January 6, 2021
Democrats will control the entire executive branch for the first time since 2011 as Georgia sends two Democratic senators to Congress. The last time this happened, Barack Obama was entering the White House in 2009, backed by commanding Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress.
What followed was a stimulus bill that transformed the US economy in ways that accelerated the clean-energy transition faster than anyone imagined.
The $831 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act earmarked $90 billion for clean energy and climate-related programs. Its massive size, more than 10 times larger than previous clean energy bills, placed thousands of bets on energy efficiency, grid modernization, transportation, and renewable energy technologies across the country. “And it worked, unbelievably,” said Michael Grunwald, a journalist who wrote a book on the 2009 stimulus plan.
Five years ago, representatives from nations around the world gathered in Paris and agreed to take drastic measures to curb climate change. For many, it was a moment of unity and hope.
But underlying the Paris Agreement was the understanding that those ambitious plans would not actually achieve the agreed-upon international goal of limiting global warming to an increase of 1.5 degrees Celsius. That goal seemed even less attainable when the U.S., the world’s second largest greenhouse gas emitter after China, dropped out under President Donald Trump.
Why We Wrote This
Scientists agree that the emissions targets set by the Paris Agreement five years ago won’t rescue humanity from catastrophe. A virtual gathering on Saturday aimed to close the “ambition gap.”
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The United States has led the world in reductions of greenhouse gas emissions since 2005, mostly through private-sector innovation and market forces.
“The trend is decarbonization,” said George David Banks, chief strategist for Republicans on the House Select Climate Committee and a former international energy adviser to President Trump. “That’s likely to continue even in a business-as-usual scenario just because of innovation.
Nevertheless, the U.S. before this year was not on pace to meet a target set by the Obama administration as part of the Paris Agreement in 2015 to reduce emissions 26% to 28% from 2005 levels by 2025.
Former President Barack Obama said the target would put the U.S. on a path to achieve economywide emissions reductions of 80% or more by 2050.
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