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“The Chinese are building something like one new coal-fired plant a week–a week...spewing pollution,...and they’ve been doing that for the last six or seven years….The pollution generated in China is choking us, not just the Chinese.…After the Japanese tsunami, we had huge chunks of cement, chunks of piers, washing up on the beach in Oregon. If the current can carry that stuff across the ocean, imagine what’s coming across in the atmosphere."
May 9, 2013, “Joe Biden: The Rolling Stone Interview,” Rolling Stone, Douglas Brinkley (May 23rd issue)
“The vice president on guns, global warming and why he’s “the last guy in the room” on every decision Obama makes.”…
“Unlike President Obama, who speaks in interviews with Hemingway-esque sparseness, Biden rambles like Thomas Wolfe, painting a robust picture of an ever-changing America where coal miners will soon be working in clean-tech jobs, gun-safety laws will be tougher and China will be reined in by the White House from poisoning the planet with megatons of choking pollutants….
As Biden tells it, these days he and the president see eye to eye on all policy issues. Only their nuances are slightly different….
My takeaway from my one-hour White House interview with Joe Biden is that he must be considering a presidential run….With Air Force Two at his disposal and his two superbright sons, Hunter and Beau, probably working as his chief advisers, Biden can give Hillary Clinton a run for her money….And it’s hard to imagine that this highly ambitious man will choose not to pursue the office he’s wanted all his life….
[RS} Why doesn’t the Obama administration use the bully pulpit to talk about [so-called catastrophic human caused excess CO2 which even if it exists only does so in Communist China] climate change like it does for gun control?
We have. The president used the biggest settings he had, in the inaugural address and the State of the Union. In his inaugural address, he said, “We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations.”
In the very beginning, we decided that we had to move on this. And we thought, cap-and-trade. But it got shut down, even when we had a Democratic Congress. So from that point on, the president has been trying to figure out how he can use his executive authority to make some real changes….We were in the midst of the deepest recession we’ve had since the Great Depression….
[RS] Despite the congressional opposition, do you feel the Obama administration has made inroads in the [so-called] climate fight?
The thing I’m proudest of that we were able to get done in the first term was the Recovery Act. It had $90 billion in clean-energy programs. We had a lot of money going into research and development, and also tax credits for wind and solar energy….
In terms of conservation, we’ve doubled the fuel-economy standards, which is going to save hundreds of millions of barrels of oil….In the meantime, also, there has been at least a near-term boom in terms of natural gas. Theoretically, it would be nice not to have any carbon fuels. But natural gas is a hell of a lot less polluting. So in this budget, we’re continuing to push for the transition from coal-fired plants to natural-gas electric plants. If you moved the trucking fleet in this nation to natural-gas-run vehicles, you’d save hundreds of millions of dollars and cut greenhouse-gas emissions. And you’d reduce our dependence on foreign oil….
You should be attacking the carbon emissions, period, and whether it’s cap-and-trade or carbon tax or whatever, that’s the realm in which we should be playing. In the meantime, the president is going to use his executive authority to, essentially, clean up the bad stuff, encourage the good stuff and promote private industry moving in that direction….
[RS] You mentioned a carbon tax. Is the Obama administration going to follow the lead of [Communist] China and propose such a policy?
The truth is, right now, no, because we know it will go nowhere. Look, one of the things we are doing, and the president is asking me to kind of get ahead of here, is that we have a real chance, both in this hemisphere and with China, to enter into joint ventures on renewable energy and on cleaner-burning natural gas. Let me give you an example: The Chinese are building something like one new coal-fired plant a week–a week. So pick the biggest coal-fired plant you know around here that’s spewing pollution, and they’re building them every week, and they’ve been doing that for the last six or seven years….
The pollution generated in China is choking us, not just the Chinese. One of the examples I used on the campaign trail last year was that after the Japanese tsunami, we had huge chunks of cement, chunks of piers, washing up on the beach in Oregon. If the current can carry that stuff across the ocean, imagine what’s coming across in the atmosphere. So we have a great opportunity here to figure out how we can not only begin to wean ourselves off of carbon-based fuels but wean the world off of them too. It’s just a gigantic opportunity, and it produces a boatload of jobs. There are going to be 600,000 new jobs out there in the gas industry over the next 10 to 12 years….
The one lesson we learned from Iraq and the last administration is…how can I say it? In managing the affairs in Iraq, they destroyed every institution. There was no structure left. There wasn’t even a Department of Public Works. And we know we can fix that, if we’re willing to spend a trillion dollars and 160,000 troops and 6,000 dead, but that we cannot do….
When you leave the Senate, they let you buy your Senate chair. I have two sons, and I didn’t know what to do. He said, “Look, give Beau your chair; I’ll give Hunter my chair.” So Hunter has President Obama’s chair from when he was a senator. That’s major league.”…
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