U.S. President Joe Biden will urge Democrats in Congress to back a new $1.75 trillion framework for economic and climate change spending, senior administration officials said on Thursday.
The officials said Biden was confident of winning their backing regardless of the deep divisions between moderate and progressive Democrats.
They said the framework would be fully paid for by repealing certain tax rebates passed under former President Donald Trump, imposing a surcharge on corporate stock buybacks, and adding a surcharge on the earnings of the wealthiest Americans.
The framework will include $555 billion for clean energy investments.
If taken up, it would represent the country’s largest climate investment on record.
The spending targets emissions-reducing technologies across buildings, transportation, industry, electricity, and agriculture.
The new spending package is an apparent deal with Senate Democratic holdouts and follows months of negotiations between progressive and moderate lawmakers.
The dollars earmarked for climate spending focus on incentives rather than punishments.
The initiatives will start cutting pollution now, with more than one gigaton of greenhouse gas emissions reduced in 2030, according to the plan’s framework.
This will set the U.S. on a path to reduce emissions by 50 per cent to 52 per cent below 2005′s levels by 2030, the framework said.
The plan includes a 10-year expansion of tax credits for utility-scale and residential clean energy, transmission, storage, electric vehicles, and clean energy manufacturing.
More than 100 billion dollars is set aside for resilience investments as extreme weather events, including wildfires fueled by climate change, batter the U.S.
The plan also looks to spur domestic manufacturing around clean energy.
President Biden has emphasized that this will create hundreds of thousands of new jobs. (Reuters/NAN)
