https://vimeo.com/442763550 While Biden's latest climate plan is much improved, it's far short of what scientists say is needed. Biden's aggressive rhetoric will not help build a joint climate plan with China, a crucial step for any global plan to succeed. Dayton Martindale joins Paul Jay on theAnalysis.news podcast. Transcript Paul Jay Hi, I'm Paul Jay, welcome to theAnalysis.news podcast. The Democratic Party has released a series of documents on its plans for dealing with the climate crisis, that is if Biden wins the presidential election in November. Biden has been applauded as the coming climate change president with a Rooseveltian vision for the future, and he's been slammed for refusing to confront the fossil fuel industry and an over-reliance on unproven carbon capture technology. As things stand now and assuming there are elections in November, which I think is still somewhat of a question mark, Biden will be the next president. Will his climate policies live up to the urgency of the threat? Now joining us from Chicago is Dayton Martindale. He's a freelance writer on science and politics, was previously associate editor at, In These Times. Thanks for joining us Dayton. Dayton Martindale Hi, thanks for having me. Paul Jay So, Dayton, two or three different documents have surfaced over the last few weeks. What are they and what is the Biden administration assuming, there's going to be one, what's it promising to do about climate? Dayton Martindale Yes, it's kind of difficult to keep track of all of it. About a month ago, there were two that came out, one from a DNC kind of internal council on climate change and a much longer one from the House Democrats who had a select committee on climate change suggesting a congressional approach to the issue. But we get a better sense of Biden's specific priorities in three that have all come out in the last week or two, which which have a lot of overlap. So the first one is what came out of the Unity Task Force on Climate Change. So that's some of the people in the Bernie Wing and some people in the Biden wing got together to release platform recommendations on pretty much every major issue. Paul Jay And that's co chaired by John Kerry and AOC. Dayton Martindale That's correct, yeah. So that came out, and they came out with their recommendations, like I said, maybe two weeks ago. And then last week, simultaneously Biden released a new climate plan for clean energy on his website, as well as a draft of the Democratic platform that was obtained and published by Politico. So kind of in those two most recent documents, which are both heavily shaped by that Unity Task Force, you see kind of where Biden in the Democratic Party are right now. And like all climate change things it could be a lot worse, it could be a lot better. I definitely marked some improvements from where Biden was about a year ago. So on his website, he's now calling for, I believe, two trillion in investment over his first term, which is up from-- a year ago when he was saying not even that much over 10 years. And it has a lot more specific timelines and goals than his previous plans did. For example, it wants the electricity sector to be carbon pollution free by 2035. Every city with 100,000 or more people has a robust zero emissions transit system within a decade. There are specific numbers of homes to be weatherized and made efficient and build new homes.
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