US President Biden is planning the accelerated expansion of wind turbines along almost the entire American east and west coast.
(Photo: Boston Globe / Getty Images)
When it comes to successfully fighting climate change, the whole world is a laboratory for the future. The dispute over a quick coal phase-out illustrates how experiments are being carried out on both sides of the Atlantic at the moment.
“In order to meet the climate protection goals, an accelerated phase-out of coal-fired power generation is necessary. Ideally, this will be successful by 2030, ”says the exploratory paper of the traffic light coalition. This is what realpolitik sounds like. It will be interesting to see how the Greens will explain to their voters why CO2 emissions continue to rise even under a climate protection minister, Robert Habeck.
In the US there is the same debate with similar omens. There, President Joe Biden had to withdraw his ambitious climate targets because his party friend, the Democratic Senator Joe Manchin from the coal-rich state of West Virginia, does not want to go along with it.
But Biden is dependent on Manchin’s vote in the Senate if he wants to get a majority for his budget package of $ 3.5 trillion. In order to achieve this, Biden apparently has to reduce the speed with which he actually wanted to replace the coal and gas power plants for generating electricity in the country with wind, solar and nuclear energy.
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The economic historian Adam Tooze illustrated why Manchin went berserk in a tweet with reference to the local coal lobby:
The economic importance of the coal industry for “coal country” West Virginia is, however, controversial. Nobel laureate in economics and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman points out that today less than seven percent of the state’s labor income is generated by coal mining and that less than three percent of the workforce is employed there.
For Biden, Manchin’s climate blockade is not only a problem domestically. The US President will travel to the climate conference in Glasgow (COP26) in early November to pace up the fight against global warming. In addition to his credibility, his promise is now at stake to cut US climate-damaging emissions by half by 2030 compared to 2005 levels.
In order to save the reputation and the climate, Biden is now planning the accelerated expansion of wind turbines almost along the entire American east and west coast. It would be the greatest political tailwind for this type of renewable energy ever blown from Washington.
More: Johnson pushes climate protection – but a flop threatens at the world climate summit in Glasgow