WASHINGTON (CN) — One day after President Joe Biden announced America's goal to cleave carbon emissions in half by 2030, a bevy of his administration’s envoys joined him Friday in the final day of the White House climate summit to lay out their ambitious plan for achieving that mission.
“When the winds of change blow, some build walls. Others build windmills,” Department of Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said, updating the old proverb. "Climate disasters worldwide tell us the scariest thing we can do is nothing at all.”
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the United Nations have both warned that Earth’s average temperature can rise no more than the 1.5 degrees Celsius before the globe shifts to an irreversibly hotter, wetter climate that cannot sustain the fragile ecosystems teetering in the natural world.
Biden officials say the fundamental shift in the way America conducts itself, from industry to trade to foreign policy and technology, can be kickstarted by altering how the United States looks at the $2.3 trillion — and growing — market for clean energy.
In the weeks ahead, the Department of Energy will announce new goals for next-generation energy projects starting with hydrogen and carbon capture as well as industrial fuel and energy storage. The department will tap all 17 of its national labs to get the initiative underway.
Granholm said the department has set a goal of reducing the price of solar by 50% by 2030, and the U.S. will lower the cost of clean hydrogen technology by 80% by 2030 to make it competitive with natural gas. The department too will evaluate its role in making electric vehicles more affordable and one day, cheaper than gasoline-run cars.
“This is our generation’s moonshot. Less than a decade ago President Kennedy declared our nation’s choice to go to the moon. We planted an American flag on that cratered surface and today we choose to solve the climate crisis. Imagine what we can do and imagine if the entire world participated,” Granholm said. “For too long the climate conversation is viewed as a zero-sum game. No longer. Going big on our ambitions means we’re going to create jobs for millions, construction workers, project managers, engineers, technicians. That means we can all do right by our people as we do right by the planet. We can lift up communities that have been knocked down and make good on moral debts owed to those bearing the burden of fossil fuel pollution.”
Before the two-day summit opened on Thursday, the White House released a report from its Interagency Working Group on Coal and Power Plant Communities, which flagged up to $38 billion in existing federal funding that could go toward revitalizing 25 regions where coal-related industries have been hardest hit.
Coal miners and other labors in related fields would get a boost under the program and be put to work remediating abandoned mines, orphaned oil and gas wells, and restoring brown fields — lands that are not developed but may be contaminated from industrial use. Small-business and grant funding for labor training is also possible with the investment of available funds, the report underlines.
To get there, the working group recommends that the White House and federal agencies agree to launch a series of town halls with administration officials in coal communities within three months. A year from now, with collaboration between federal and state forces, an office specifically for coal communities seeking access to federal resources and agencies would be stood up by the federal government.
“We all are tired of the old view that we have to make a tradeoff between jobs and the environment,” Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said during Friday's summit. “Raising innovation ambition will be what makes it possible to raise the world’s climate ambition.”
