"The president-elect will have to tap a variety of appropriations, from infrastructure to farmland."
"Until now, any lawmaker who asked for $2 trillion in federal funding without offsetting savings would have been laughed out of politics.
But then came the Green New Deal. And then the coronavirus pandemic. And then another bout of rock-bottom interest rates.
Suddenly, a couple of trillion dollars doesn’t sound like as much money as it used to. And that’s good news for President-elect Joe Biden, who is planning to pursue a costly package of climate change policies aimed at transforming the country’s economy, including the way farmers plant crops and the way automakers design engines.
For Biden, who helped oversee the $900 billion economic stimulus bill President Barack Obama signed in 2009, this seems doable, and he will seek to merge the need for stimulus spending with the need for climate action — without taxing crude oil, carbon or gasoline, as previous presidents tried to do in vain."
Steven Mufson reports for the Washington Post December 22, 2020.
