Reason #21 to be excited about Joe Biden: Biden sponsored the very first climate change bill ever.
In 1986, Biden introduced the Global Climate Protection Act, the first climate change bill in the Senate. The act directed the government to research and develop a strategy to deal with global warming.
Biden’s climate change bill died in the Senate. But the following year a version of it survived as an amendment to a State Department funding bill. Reagan signed it into law.
Biden spoke about the bill on the Senate floor in January 1987 in terms that are pretty similar to what we talk about today. He talked about the threat to human habitat resulting from melting polar ice caps and rising sea levels.
"Life on this planet exists only under highly specialized circumstances," Biden said. "Indeed, so special are these circumstances that even a small rise in temperature could disrupt the entire complicated environment that has nurtured life as we know it."
Paul Bledsoe, a former Clinton White House climate staff member who is now a strategic advisor at the Progressive Policy Institute, told Politifact that Biden deserves his due.
"Without question, Biden was among the earliest supporters of climate change action in Congress," Bledsoe said. "His 1987 bill was focused on forcing the Reagan Administration to establish a wide-ranging White House Task Force on Climate Change, a critical action that in fact was not taken until the Clinton Administration, so it was both prescient and influential on long-term policy."
With so much else going on, it is easy to forget that we are ALSO in a climate crisis. But Joe Biden hasn’t forgotten. Biden has intertwined plans to save the earth with his plans to save the economy and our health.
Not only does he care about the climate now, but Joe Biden was among the first to sound the alarm.
