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The former vice president is accused of wanting to appeal to the oil and gas lobby in the U.S. with his alleged "middle-ground" approach to Climate Change.
United States presidential candidate Bernie Sanders and other progressives criticized Democratic establishment candidate Joe Biden over his still-unreleased climate plan.
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The critiques came after a Reuters report which said that Biden will seek a “middle ground” crafting a climate change policy he hopes will appeal to both environmentalists and the blue-collar voters who elected Donald Trump.
“There is no ‘middle ground’ when it comes to climate policy,” Sanders wrote on Twitter Friday. “If we don't commit to fully transforming our energy system away from fossil fuels, we will doom future generations.”
Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the champion of Green New Deal also slammed Biden.
She wrote, “This is a deal-breaker. There is no ‘middle ground’ w/ climate denial & delay. Blaming ‘blue collar’ Americans as the main opponents to bold climate policy is gas lobbyist 101.”
According to the report, the U.S. would probably rejoin the Paris Climate Agreement and preserve the country’s regulations on emissions and vehicle fuel efficiency that Trump has sought to undo. His policy could also be supportive of nuclear energy and fossil fuel options like natural gas and carbon capture technology.
The candidate had not taken a public position yet on the Green New Deal. Biden said he would make his climate policy public soon.
Referring to the outlines of Biden’s policy, Varshini Prakash, the director of the Sunrise Movement, which has been asking candidates to endorse the Green New Deal, said, “We are ready and willing to call out the insufficiency of policies like that.”
“All this approach will do is lose young voters and throw communities of color and working people into chaos and violence, leaving my generation to deal with a broken economy and global society.”
Washington governor Jay Inslee said, “If our house were on fire, we wouldn’t seek a middle-ground approach to putting it out. We can pursue realistic and aggressive climate policy, based on successes in states and cities across America [U.S.].”
Biden’s camp disputed the report that he would have an Obama-like approach to the issue that most Democrats running for office for 2020 consider central.
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