Biden unveils climate change plan using Green New Deal as framework, after AOC criticism

Warning that “we must take drastic action now to address the climate disaster facing the nation and our world,” former Vice President Joe Biden on Tuesday unveiled a wide-ranging plan to combat climate change and transform America’s economy.

Using the Green New Deal as a framework, the clear front-runner right now in the race for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination announced he’s “calling for a Clean Energy Revolution to confront this crisis and do what America does best – solve big problems with big ideas.”

The price tag for the proposal -- named ‘The Biden Plan for a Clean Energy Revolution & Environmental Justice’ --  is $1.7 trillion over the next 10 years. Biden’s campaign said this would be supplemented by leveraging more than $5 trillion in additional private sector and state and local investments. This is considerably less expensive than the Green New Deal itself, for which cost estimates range as high as $93 trillion.

But it follows criticism from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and others on the party's left flank about his stance on environmental issues. The former vice president vowed he’d pay for the new plan by rolling back the tax incentives in President Trump’s tax cuts that he argued “enrich corporations at the expense of American jobs and the environment.”

Biden, in a statement announcing the plan, emphasized that “more severe storms and droughts, rising sea levels, warming temperatures, shrinking snow cover and ice sheets -- it's already happening. We must take drastic action now to address the climate disaster facing the nation and our world.”