(C) Common Dreams
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Many Young Voters Bitter Over Biden’s Support of Willow Oil Drilling [1]
['Lisa Friedman']
Date: 2023-04-24
About a dozen young climate activists interviewed said they were not assuaged by the other actions by the Biden administration, even if they significantly draw down greenhouse gas emissions that are dangerously heating the planet, Mr. Haraus said. What they want, he said, is for the president to rein in oil and gas companies, which enjoyed record profits last year.
“I don’t think any of those things encourage people to forgive the Biden administration for projects like Willow,” said Mr. Haraus, who lives outside Chicago. “Young voters see our future getting thrown out the window. We need Biden to take on the industry, otherwise there’s not much for us to hope for.”
Young voters overwhelmingly — about 62 percent — support phasing out fossil fuels entirely, said Alec Tyson, an associate director of research at Pew Research Center. There is broad support among registered voters of both parties for a transition to a future in which the United States is no longer pumping carbon emissions into the atmosphere, Mr. Tyson said. But most are not willing to break with fossil fuels altogether, he said.
From his earliest days in office, Mr. Biden has highlighted climate action as a top priority. Soon after moving into the White House, he re-entered the United States in the Paris Agreement and set an ambitious goal of cutting the country’s emissions roughly 50 percent below 2005 levels by the end of this decade.
He signed into law the Inflation Reduction Act, which provides $370 billion in incentives to expand wind, solar and other clean energy and electric vehicles. He has proposed rules to ensure that two-thirds of new cars and a quarter of new heavy trucks sold in the United States by 2032 are all-electric. Within weeks, he is expected to require that coal and gas plants, responsible for 25 percent of the country’s greenhouse gases, significantly cut their emissions.
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[1] Url:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/24/climate/willow-biden-climate-voters.html
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