US Presidential Hopeful Bernie Sanders Comes up With a $16.3 Trillion Climate Plan

Keeping pace with global warming, the presidential race in the US has just started to heat up. US presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders yesterday unveiled a $ 16.3 trillion plan to tackle climate change. The Green New Deal plans to transition US towards 100% renewable energy in electricity generation and transportation by 2030.

Upping his ante against the famous climate denier and the current US president Donald Trump, Bernie in his website announced a very long ‘Green New Deal’ that covered renewable energy, transportation, job creation, grants to authorities and infrastructure development while protecting rights of communities and tribal.

Major highlights have been:

Reaching 100 percent renewable energy for electricity and transportation by no later than 2030 and complete decarbonization by 2050 at the latest

Ending unemployment by creating 20 million job

Directly invest a historic $16.3 trillion public investment

Declaring climate change a national emergency

Supporting small family farms by investing in ecologically regenerative and sustainable agriculture

Commit to reducing emissions throughout the world, including providing $200 billion to the Green Climate Fund, rejoining the Paris Agreement, and reasserting the United States’ leadership in the global fight against climate change.

On his platform, Bernie took the responsibility of the historical emissions and added “we have an outsized obligation to help less industrialised nations meet their targets while improving quality of life. We will reduce domestic emissions by at least 71 percent by 2030 and reduce emissions among less industrialised nations by 36 percent by 2030 — the total equivalent of reducing our domestic emissions by 161 percent.”

The Bernie Sanders plan is claimed to ‘pay for itself over 15 years’ by following polluter pat principle in which, he wants to make ‘fossil fuel industry pay for their pollution, through litigation, fees, and taxes, and eliminating federal fossil fuel subsidies’ and ‘making the wealthy and large corporations pay their fair share’. Targeting the oil conglomerates, he added a contentious point of scaling back military spending on maintaining global oil dependence.

The Green New Deal platform said,”we cannot accomplish any of these goals without taking on the fossil fuel billionaires whose greed lies at the very heart of the climate crisis. These executives have spent hundreds of millions of dollars protecting their profits at the expense of our future, and they will do whatever it takes to squeeze every last penny out of the earth.”

The announcement was made hours after prominent climate activist among Democratic presidential hopefuls, Jay Inslee, quit the Democratic primary race. With Trump at the helm, Obama era environmental strides have been wiped or reversed in his latest policy. Now it remains to be seen whether Bernie can put the cat in the bag if he becomes president of the US.