Joe Biden’s climate plan is the green New Deal, minus the crazy.

Joe Biden has embraced the green New Deal. You may not have uttered those magic words on Tuesday as you unveiled your campaign’s new far-reaching plan to combat climate change and revitalize the U.S. economy, but you didn’t have to. In substance and spirit, the Democratic candidate has signed the most important pieces of the concept, while removing some of its more controversial and less essential embellishments.

It is understandable why Biden could avoid the brand. For many moderates and conservatives, including our president, the phrase “new green deal” has become an abbreviation for left-wing overreach. In part, that’s because no group can really claim full ownership of the idea, and some maximalist versions favored by young activists have included things like Medicare for All and a federal job guarantee, along with zeroing emissions. carbon, making their proposals look like resembling Socialist-Democratic wish lists disguised as plans to stop global warming.

When Democrats in Congress really tried to draft an official New Deal Green framework in 2019, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s staff explained that they had lowered their 10-year emissions targets a little bit “because we’re not here.” I’m sure we’ll be able to get rid of cow and plane farts so quickly. “The result has been an endless stream of jokes about the hamburger ban, the kind of insanity that Biden, whose bid is basically comfort food for moderates. from the United States, you would like to avoid.

But when it comes to real climate policy, the green New Deal has always represented a very specific and serious philosophical shift. In the past, Democrats wanted to cut emissions through market-oriented mechanisms, such as a carbon tax or cap and trade. Significant tensions of that thinking are still seen today, as when a bipartisan group of 45 renowned economists, including former Federal Reserve presidents and rookie laureates, signed an open letter in the Wall street journal calling for a carbon tax and dividend scheme. Green New Dealers has taken a different, less market-focused approach, combining clean energy mandates that would force carbon, mass public spending and industrial policy designed to create jobs, and a strong emphasis on environmental justice for businesses. communities most affected by pollution. Rather than put a price on CO2 and let capitalism do its magic, the new generation of climate hawks wants to force power companies and other emitters to abandon fossil fuels while using the federal purse to put people to work and reinvent themselves the American economy.

Biden’s primary season climate plan included some of those pillars, and he even referred to the Green New Deal as a “crucial framework,” but the new version adopts it much more. The candidate’s original platform required $ 1.7 trillion in spending over 10 years, and set a goal of zero net emissions by 2050. The new edition raises the price to $ 2 trillion in four years (there is its massive spending), and has as Aim to remove carbon from the electricity sector by 2035 using a clean energy standard for utilities (there is its mandate). Biden has also launched a “made in America” ​​economic plan that would use large amounts of funding for government purchases and R&D to develop national sectors such as renewable batteries and electric vehicles (this is its industrial policy). And the campaign has outlined an extensive proposal to “secure environmental justice” by targeting 40 percent of its climate spending to disadvantaged communities.

Biden is borrowing some of his new ideas directly from Washington Governor Jay Inslee, whose short presidential career made him a popular hero to climate hawks. The proposal to achieve clean electricity by 2035 comes from Inslee. So does Biden’s call to create a Civilian Civilian Corps that works on restoration and resilience projects, a direct nod to Franklin Roosevelt’s original New Deal-era Civilian Conservation Corps. As writers like Vox’s Dave Roberts have pointed out, the Inslee campaign essentially wrote an “instruction manual” to achieve the Green New Deal’s climate goals, even if it didn’t use the name. Now the old veep seems to be reading from him.

“Basically Joe Biden backed a green New Deal from our point of view, substantially,” Julian Brave NoiseCat, vice president of strategy and policy for the Progressive Survey and Policy Store Data for Progress, told me. (His team was one of the first to describe what a green New Deal could look like, launching a plan in September 2018.) Other left-wing groups haven’t gotten that far, in part because Biden’s plan doesn’t take some of his more absolutist stances on energy. Unlike his former opponent, Senator Bernie Sanders, for example, Biden would not ban oil and natural gas fracturing or phase out nuclear power, leaving the door open for carbon capture technology, which some environmentalists see as a technological distraction. and many others think that it will be absolutely essential if we want to prevent the planet from frying. Also, on the list of differences: AOC and Senator Ed Markey wanted to move the country to clean energy in 10 years, while Biden’s timeline is longer and more realistic. And, of course, you are not registering with Medicare for All.

But activists are still clearly happy with Biden’s shift to the left. The Sunrise Movement, the youth activist organization closely associated with the New Green Deal, issued an approval statement that took credit for teaching Joe Bide to “speak on the subject” about the weather, and promised to do so “by walking the way”. The group had previously awarded Biden’s climate plan an “F” rating during the Democratic primary.

The bottom line of all of this, in the end, is that the Democratic Party’s activist wing and its moderately temperamental presidential candidate now appear to be closely aligned when it comes to their core focus on economic and climate policy. As Biden prepared to deliver his climate speech on Tuesday, he was speaking to one of his longtime economic advisers, Jared Bernstein. I asked him what part of his schedule he was most excited about Biden. “I think what he is particularly excited about is doing something in the clean energy space that also helps domestic manufacturers, so you’re doing well by doing good,” Bernstein told me.

What’s more, talking the talk is extremely natural for Biden. The green New Deal, in the end, aims to connect job creation and climate policy to voters’ minds. Adopting him as a cornerstone of his campaign gives Biden an excuse that can help him get back well-paying jobs. “Look, these are not cake dreams in heaven,” he said in his speech Tuesday. “These are actionable policies that we can work on immediately.”

“When Donald Trump thinks of renewable energy, he sees that windmills somehow cause cancer,” Biden told the crowd. “When I think of these windmills, I see American manufacturing, American workers rising up to dominate world markets. I see the steel that will be needed for those windmill platforms, towers and ladders that could be made in small manufacturers. I see union certified men and women who will build and install everything. I see the ports that will come back to life: the stevedores and shipbuilders and the communities they support. ”

That’s the green New Deal, minus a little craziness.