Tuesday, August 26, 2008

One of the reasons I like Biden as a VP

from Grist:
Joe Biden, Barack Obama's running mate, has earned an 83 percent lifetime score from the League of Conservation Voters during his 35 years representing Delaware in the U.S. Senate, voting fairly consistently with environmentalists and the mainstream of his party. In 2007, while running for president, he said "energy security" was his top priority, and argued that he was well-suited to deal with the challenge thanks to years of experience on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which he now chairs. Biden is also a big booster of biofuels. 

Key Points

Primary cosponsor of a "Sense of the Senate" resolution calling on the U.S. to participate in U.N. climate negotiations. He introduced it with Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) in the current Congress and the previous one.

Cosponsor of the Boxer-Sanders Global Warming Pollution Reduction Act, the most stringent climate bill in the Senate. It would establish a cap-and-trade system for greenhouse-gas emissions and require the U.S. to reduce its emissions to 1990 levels by 2020, and to 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050. (Biden became a cosponsor of it more than three months after it was introduced and just days after both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama signed on.)

In 2007, during his most recent run for president, called for raising fuel-economy standards for automobiles to an average of 40 miles per gallon by 2017 by increasing fuel-economy targets within vehicle classes by about one mile per gallon per year.

Called for increasing ethanol and biodiesel production by upping the national renewable-fuel standard to require that the fuel supply include 10 billion gallons of renewable fuel a year by 2010 and 60 billion gallons a year by 2030.

Called for 20 percent of the U.S. electricity supply to come from renewable sources.

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