If President Joe Biden is to slash the country’s greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030, he will need a lot of help from residential and commercial buildings owners.
The president announced the goal, which is based on 2005 emission rates, Thursday during a global climate summit. The new target greatly accelerates the Obama administration’s reduction target of 25 percent by 2025.
Biden billed his goal as a way to both address an “existential crisis” and “create millions of good-paying, middle-class, union jobs.”
“I see the engineers and the construction workers building new carbon-capture and green-hydrogen plants to forge cleaner steel and cement and produce clean power,” he said. “That’s where we’re headed as a nation, and that’s what we can do if we take action to build an economy that’s not only more prosperous, but healthier, fairer, and cleaner for the entire planet.”
Residential and commercial buildings respectively accounted for 19 percent and 17 percent of carbon emissions from fossil fuel combustion (including allocated electricity emissions) in 2019, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
