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Joe Biden on Energy & Oil

Vice President; previously Democratic Senator (DE)


I have supported clean coal for 25 years

Q: Let me clear something up: Sen. Obama has said he supports clean coal technology, which I don’t believe you’ve always supported. Do you?

BIDEN: Absolutely. Absolutely we do. We call for setting hard targets.

Q: On clean coal?

BIDEN: My record for 25 years has supported clean coal technology. A comment made in a rope line was taken out of context. I was talking about exporting that technology to China so when they burn their dirty coal, it won’t be as dirty, it will be clean.

Source: 2008 Vice Presidential debate against Gov. Sarah Palin , Oct 2, 2008

Cause of global warming is clearly Man-made

Q: What is true and what is false about what we have heard about the causes of climate change?

PALIN: As governor of the nation’s only Arctic state, Alaska feels & sees impacts of climate change more so than any other state. And we know that it’s real. I’m not one to attribute every activity of man to the changes in the climate. There is something to be said also for man’s activities, but also for the cyclical temperature changes on our planet. But there are real changes going on in our climate. And I don’t want to argue about the causes. What I want to argue about is, how are we going to get there to positively affect the impacts?

BIDEN: Well, I think it is manmade. I think it’s clearly manmade. If you don’t understand what the cause is, it’s virtually impossible to come up with a solution. We know what the cause is. The cause is manmade. That’s the cause. That’s why the polar icecap is melting.

Source: 2008 Vice Presidential debate against Gov. Sarah Palin , Oct 2, 2008

Obama believes in investing in alternative energy

BIDEN: We have 3 percent of the world’s oil reserves. We consume 25% of the oil. John has voted 20 times in the last decade-and-a-half against funding alternative energy sources, clean energy sources, wind, solar, biofuels. Obama believes by investing in clean coal and safe nuclear, we can not only create jobs in wind and solar here, we can export it.

PALIN: I was the first governor to form a climate change sub-cabinet to start dealing with the impacts. We’ve got to reduce emissions. John McCain is right there with an “all of the above” approach to deal with climate change impacts. As we rely more on other countries that don’t care as much about the climate as we do, we’re allowing them to produce and to emit and even pollute more than America would ever stand for. It’s all the more reason that we have an “all of the above” approach, tapping into alternative sources of energy and conserving fuel, conserving our petroleum products and our hydrocarbons so that we can clean up this planet

Source: 2008 Vice Presidential debate against Sarah Palin , Oct 2, 2008

Nuclear OK after dealing with security, safety, and waste

Q: What role do you see for nuclear power?

A: I see a role for nuclear, but first you've got to deal with the security as well as the safety concerns. I'd be spending a whole hell of a lot of money trying to figure out how to reconfigure the spent fuel into reusable fuel. I would not invest in [growing our nuclear power capacity in its current form], but I would invest in sorting out the storage and waste problems.

Source: NEI Nuclear Notes (Nuclear Energy Industry blogspot) , Aug 25, 2008

The energy challenge take sacrifice and is a moral crusade

We should increase the mileage for automobiles required, make sure every new car in the US is a flex-fuel automobile, and invest in cellulosic research because corn ethanol’s not going to take us the whole way. You’ve got to say we are going to make a major change, and that requires a significant investment on renewable energy, moving from 22% to 20% by the end of this next decade in 2020, and making this a moral crusade for the American people. We’re going to have to sacrifice to be able to get by.
Source: 2007 Des Moines Register Democratic Debate , Dec 13, 2007

FactCheck: Oil did not jump $18/bbl due to Iran Resolution

A question about the Senate’s September adoption of a resolution declaring Iran’s Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization sparked lively debate, and a whopper by Biden. Sen. Biden said, “The moment that declaration was made, oil prices jumped over $18 a barrel.”

There are two things wrong with this statement. One, it took two months, not a “moment,” for the price of a barrel of oil to increase by $18. The price per barrel was $80.31 on Sept. 26, the date of the Senate resolution. It wasn’t until Nov. 19 that it went up as much as Biden says, to $99.16.

The second problem is that connecting the increase in the price of oil to the declaration on the Revolutionary Guard is a rather stunning post-hoc fallacy. There’s no evidence that something like the Senate resolution would have anything approaching such a dramatic effect on the price of oil. Some would expect [SOME] impact from Bush’s sabre-rattling [but] risky financial maneuvers by high-stakes speculators may be having a bigger effect.

Source: FactCheck.org on 2007 Democratic radio debate on NPR , Dec 4, 2007

Supports cap-and-trade for greenhouse gases

On climate change Biden occupies what has become the conventional liberal middle-ground, supporting “a ‘cap-and-trade’ approach to regulating emissions and investment in technologies” to reduce greenhouse gasses.
Source: The Contenders, by Laura Flanders, p.180 , Nov 11, 2007

Provide for emergency fuel assistance immediately

A big piece of that cost of high oil prices is risk. People are betting on things getting worse. That old joke, you know: When you’re in a hole, you should stop digging. Why do we continue to cause the price of oil to rise by continuing to rattle the saber with Iran? Why do we continue to cause the price of oil to rise by a foreign policy that is absolutely moribund of any center? What we have to do immediately is to provide for emergency fuel assistance.
Source: 2007 Democratic debate at Drexel University , Oct 30, 2007

Make every automobile sold be a flex-fuel automobile

We have to make an equivalent of a Manhattan Project [on energy & climate change]. We have to fundamentally shift the way we do it. Barack and I have a bill to make sure that every automobile sold in the US is a flex-fuel automobile; every gas station in America, by the year 2009, has to have 10% of it’s pumps pumping E85 ethanol.

We also have legislation in requiring we invest $100 million a year for the next couple of years in order to be able to find lithium battery technology to be able to power our cars.

We also have legislation talking about capping emissions. Cap them now; not wait. Cap them where they are now. Time’s running out.

But you have to be willing to make multi-billion dollar investments over the next 10 years and set hard goals in order to be able to get to the point where we are no longer dependent.

Source: 2007 South Carolina Democratic primary debate, on MSNBC , Apr 26, 2007


Joe Biden on Voting Record

1970s: Voted against the Trans-Alaska Pipeline

I respected Biden's decades of experience, but I also knew him as one of just a handful of members of the US Senate who way back in the 1970s had actually voted AGAINST the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, an economic lifeline that would ultimately result in thousands of American jobs, 15 billion barrels of oil pumped into the economy to date, and a huge chunk of domestic energy production.

Over the years, I had occasionally listened to Biden's discussions of energy and realized he had not changed. He still seemed opposed to sensible innovations, from clean coal to nuclear energy to responsible new directional drilling techniques in places like ANWR. On one issue after another, Obama's VP choice was loaded with government experience but still seemed to have no understanding of logical steps we could take to capitalize on American energy resources.

Source: Going Rogue, by Sarah Palin, p.288-289 , Nov 17, 2009

Voted YES on tax incentives for energy production and conservation.

OnTheIssues.org Explanation:A "Cloture Motion" would end debate on the bill, and then allow a vote on passage. This motion failed (3/5ths of the Senators must vote YEA), based on objections of how the new incentives would be paid for.Congressional Summary:A bill to amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to provide Tax incentives for energy production and conservation, to extend certain expiring provisions, and to provide individual income tax relief.