Joe Biden in 2019 Town Hall

On Energy & Oil: Undo what Trump has done, from CAFE to other standards

BIDEN: First of all, we have to turn back all of the changes that the president has made, from CAFE standards to moving in a direction that we deal with providing people who get displaced opportunities to have jobs. Whole range of things. I would see to a standard that we provide efficiency for appliances, that saves billions of gallons of gasoline--$500 billion in savings and two billion metric tons of CO2 going into the air. We should do it across the board. I propose we have 500,000 charging stations in the new green economy. We should own the electric vehicle market. I think we should raise the CAFE standards, bring them back to where they were. It goes on from there. But the bottom line is, to set in place standards that cannot be walked away from when the next president does what Trump tries to do.

On Energy & Oil: Limit fracking at state level, but disallow new drilling

BIDEN: I think the way we deal with state lands is we have less latitude, what we say we can and cannot do. I've argued against any more oil drilling or gas drilling on federal lands. I think we should be looking at what exists now [on state lands] and making a judgement whether or not those wells are dangerous, and what we can do from there by trying to change the attitude of the governors and the state legislatures. I don't think we could pass national legislation, to say all fracking that's going on now ends, unless you can show there's some physical security need or worried about explosions, or physical safety from earthquakes. But I would not allow any more.

Q: So to be clear, you would not call for a ban statewide on fracking or nationwide? You said stop new oil and gas drilling on federal lands? BIDEN: Yes.

On Technology: High-speed rail & mass transit would remove millions of cars

BIDEN: I think we should, depending on what it is they're exporting for what they're replacing. Everything is incremental. For example, about transportation. I've been pushing really hard for mass transit and for rail. We can take millions of vehicles off the road if we had high-speed rail. I've been a champion of that for the last 25 years. We know the corridors where we could do that. It would literally take millions of vehicles off the road. But you have to have a rail system that makes people say, "if I get on that rail, I will get there as fast as I would have gotten had I driven and I can afford to do it relative to the cost of my driving." There's a direct correlation. This is something I spent the bulk of my career on, trying to save Amtrak and other things like transportation. But my point is, we can begin to change the arc in a significant way, [by] investing in the science and the technology and the changes that are available.