You may have noticed that in recent weeks, the Biden administration has been rolling out a hell of a lot of new regulations. Earlier this month it wasĀ big student loan reformsĀ and aĀ massive improvement in how public lands are managed, then this week we hadĀ better pay and working conditionsĀ for working Americans,Ā minimum staffing ratiosĀ for nursing homes, and evenĀ improved service on airlines.
Thatās not only because itās an election year, though Joe & Kamala certainly do like to point out that where the Other Guy rages (andĀ wants to raise inflation!) theyāve been busy making Americansā lives better. But the bigger reason is that the administration wants to get new rules finalized prior to May, toĀ keep them from being tossed out in the next CongressĀ via the Congressional Review Act, which Donald Trump and his cronies used to reverse a bunch of Barack Obamaās environmental regulations.
. . . The requirement that coal plants find a way to eliminate 90 percent of their emissions by 2032 effectively accelerates the end of coal for power generation, which was inevitable anyway. Roughly 70 percent of US coal plants have already closed, and last year,Ā coal generated only 16 percentĀ of electric power, a new record low. In addition to the emissions rule,Ā three other final rulesĀ alsoĀ impose strict new limits on mercury, coal ash, and pollution of wastewater,Ā to put an end to the environmental degradation caused by coal.
. . . The other option, obviously, would be for utilities to meet coming demand with renewables, as administration officials pointed out when previewing the new rule. Thanks to the IRAās hundreds of billions of dollars in incentives, carbon-free power generation, including battery storage,Ā already beats the cost of building new gas plants.Ā Going forward, the administration is confident renewables will be the far more cost-effective and reliable way to meet increasing demand by 2032, when the emissions limits fully kick in.
Clinton was very invested in creating Israelis-Palestinian peace, I donāt think he would have been as passive on the Palestinian death toll as Biden was at the beginning of the conflict. Obama was willing to go up against Netanyahu when he wanted something (like the Iran Nuclear Deal), so I think itās likely he would have also had a stronger response to the Israeli genocide, as long as it was politically expedient for him. On most issues, I think Biden has actually been better than the (admittedly very low) expectations I have for the Democratic party, but I think heās actually worse than his partyās predecessors on Israel.