“Besides fixing up 20,000 miles of roads, [Biden] wants to do everything from electrifying the yellow school bus fleets to getting rid of lead pipes that taint the water supply to a $400 billion commitment to helping the elderly and disabled… Expect resistance from the Republicans on [the] tax hikes. But there’s a whole lot of other stuff that they’re going to find very attractive. It’s hard to imagine politicians throwing their bodies in front of a plan that’s going to fix their downtown bridge and get broadband service out to the folks in remote areas.”
Gail Collins, New York Times

“Republicans are already making the case that last time millions in taxpayer dollars were squandered on green energy jobs that never materialized. They are road-testing a new slogan about what’s coming: ‘Solyndra Syndrome.’… Solyndra was indeed a failure: As part of a federal program to support promising companies, the Obama administration gave a $535 million loan to the firm. But their solar panel technology struggled to compete against low-cost panels from China, and the company eventually went bankrupt…

“But the whole point of the loan program was to take risks, in the knowledge that some of them wouldn’t work out. And other loans paid off spectacularly well. You may have heard of another up-and-coming green tech company that got a $465 million loan at around the same time, enabling it to start making passenger cars. It’s called Tesla. It paid back its loan with interest, and today has more than 70,000 employees. Republicans spent years trying to turn the Solyndra failure into a scandal. What they didn’t mention is that despite the loss the government took on it, the program that funded that loan quickly turned a profit, eventually earning billions.”
Paul Waldman and Greg Sargent, Washington Post

Critics note that “The bill would be improved by directing a higher percentage of its climate funding toward research and development…

“Ultimately, the fight against climate change will be won or lost in the developing world. The U.S. accounts for 15 percent of global CO2 emissions, and barring a world-historic catastrophe in China and/or India, our share of that pie is going to decline in the coming decades. Either these countries are going to gain access to the technology necessary for achieving sustainable prosperity or they are going to pursue the unsustainable kind. No Chinese or Indian leader is going to endorse degrowth or radically higher energy prices unless they want their government toppled. Breakthroughs in green technology are our best hope. We should spend as much as we can on trying to discover them.”
Eric Levitz, New York Magazine

“There’s no slowing climate change or protecting us from its worst insults without reforming the way we farm. Agriculture generates 10 percent of US greenhouse gas emissions; and our most important growing regions, from the fruit and vegetable fields of California to the Midwestern corn belt to the citrus groves of South Texas and Florida, are increasingly vulnerable to climate-related shocks like polar vortex-driven freezes, droughts, storms, and wildfires… Yet the 27-page fact sheet on Biden’s American Jobs Plan says very little about agriculture, mentioning it just twice in passing.”
Tom Philpott, Mother Jones