Either way around, we have a clime change denier on one side and someone trying to stop it on the other... I side with Biden.
Biden's policy operates under the framework that the United States is not doing enough.
The truth is the opposite: the US has long subjected itself to large amounts of domestic action regarding climate change.
“carbon emissions from energy use from the US are the lowest since 1992” and “in 2017, the US had the largest decline in CO2 emissions in the world for the 9th time this century.”
“Over the past decade, the U.S. has decreased annual carbon dioxide emissions by nearly 800 million tons. This is by far the most of any country in the world, and is primarily a result of shifting coal-fired power to natural gas and renewables.”
On the flip side, AEI furthers that “China and India accounted for nearly half (212.2 million tons) of the increase in global carbon emissions (426.4 million tons).” In fact, China alone accounts for more emissions than the EU and the US combined.
In other words, while the US is making efforts to lower emissions domestically through regulation, emissions in other nations such as China have been increasing dramatically. The reason for this underscores the key problem with domestic action regarding climate change: outsourcing of pollution.
The result is fairly obvious: when these jobs and production lines are outsourced to China the gas emissions that come with them are also outsourced. In this way, companies simply bypass domestic regulation and produce even more emissions out of their home country since they no longer have to worry about regulation.
Extensive research has been done on this.
“around 25% of global CO2 emissions are embodied in imported goods, thus escaping attribution in the consuming country (the end user) and instead being debited at the producer side. And we clearly see that the proportion of embodied emissions has been growing. Since carbon intensity varies between countries, as new climate policies emerge, the loophole could be widened further. The shifting of air pollution provides a worrying example: despite strong, successful air quality legislation in the U.S. and EU starting in the 1970s, global air pollution in total has continued to grow.”
Thus, it is fairly easy to see why these domestic policies are all-around harmful: they hurt the economy by killing US jobs, while also providing the environment with even more emissions than they would have with simply staying within the US.
So let me ask, what is better? For you to elect the guy that will choke business and cause them to simply outsource their pollution, or to elect the guy that incentivizes innovation, especially in the Green sector. If we don't choke businesses, they will develop Green technology more quickly because, lo and behold, there is more demand for it in the US than in China or India. Consider that Tesla moved from California to Texas to continue developing their GREEN vehicle technology because of California's crippling policy. That is a mini-model of what will happen under a Biden presidency.
