Joe Biden has been accused of plagiarizing his climate change plan.
The Democrat presidential candidate and former vice president was forced to update his platform Tuesday after allegedly copy-pasting text from five different environmental groups without giving credit. The Biden campaign said the oversight was a mistake and updated the plan with citations. President Trump blasted Biden Tuesday over the alleged plagiarism, but said the media would probably “save him.”
“Plagiarism charge against Sleepy Joe Biden on his ridiculous Climate Change Plan is a big problem, but the Corrupt Media will save him,” Trump tweeted.
Plagiarism claimed
The alleged plagiarism was first noticed Tuesday by a progressive activist, Josh Nelson, vice president of progressive and environmentalist cell phone company CREDO Mobile. Nelson pointed out two examples in which Biden appeared to lift language whole-sale from the Blue Green Alliance and the Carbon Capture Coalition, two environmental groups, the Washington Free Beacon reported.
“The paragraph in Joe Biden’s climate plan about carbon capture and sequestration includes language that is remarkably similar to items published previously by the Blue Green Alliance and the Carbon Capture Coalition,” Nelson tweeted Tuesday morning.
In one example, Biden’s site wrote that “Biden’s goal is to make CCUS a widely available, cost-effective, and rapidly scalable solution to reduce carbon emissions to meet mid-century climate goals.” The language is almost exactly parallel to text that appears on Carbon Capture Coalition’s site, which states “[our] goal is to make carbon capture, use and storage (CCUS) a widely available, cost-effective, and rapidly scalable solution to reduce carbon emissions to meet mid-century climate goals.”
In the second example, Biden wrote that “carbon capture, use, and storage (CCUS) is a rapidly growing technology that has the potential to create economic benefits for multiple industries while significantly reducing carbon dioxide emissions.” Nelson noted that language appeared to be lifted from a 2017 letter from the Blue Green Alliance to the Senate, which stated, “Carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) is a rapidly growing technology that has potential to create economic benefits for multiple industries while significantly reducing carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.”
Not the first time
By Tuesday afternoon, Biden’s campaign updated the site to give attribution, but not before president Trump and the Republican party took notice. Republicans hit Biden over the plagiarism charges, which they tied to similar incidents in 1988 that rocked Biden’s first, doomed presidential campaign. That run was beseiged by allegations that his campaign speeches were partly cribbed from British Labour Party Leader Neil Kinnock. Biden admitted at the time that he plagiarized an article in law school.
“Joe Biden has been plagiarizing for longer than I’ve been alive,” Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel told Fox.
The Biden campaign excused the new plagiarism charges as a mistake and said that they promptly updated Biden’s site to give credit. “Several citations, some from sources cited in other parts of the plan, were inadvertently left out of the final version of the 22 page document,” the campaign told news outlets. “As soon as we were made aware of it, we updated to include the proper citations.”
The Daily Caller reported at least three more examples of apparent plagiarism, from Vox, American Rivers and Climate.gov. The Biden campaign updated the site to include attribution for the latter two.
Trying too hard
Biden rolled out his climate change plan Tuesday, declaring that the world must take “drastic action” to address rising global temperatures. The debut came weeks after the 76-year old Democrat was criticized by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) for taking a “middle of the road” approach to climate change. The Democrat then told Democrats to wait for his proposal before rushing to judgment.
But Biden, in his efforts to catch up with the radical left, appears to have relied a little too much on their advice, to the point where he actually copied their homework. Biden’s plan, called the “The Biden Plan for a Clean Energy Revolution & Environmental Justice”, is not as ambitious or costly as the Green New Deal championed by Ocasio-Cortez, but Biden appears to have used it as a model.
Biden said that the Green New Deal gets two things right, that the world “urgently needs to embrace greater ambition on an epic scale to meet the scope of this challenge,” and that the environment and American economy “are completely and totally connected.” The Green New Deal seeks to completely eliminate carbon emissions by 2030 at the cost of nearly $100 trillion. Biden’s plan, which would cost less than an estimated $2 trillion, has a similar but more realistic target, 2050.
After decades in Washington, Biden has struggled to reconcile his long and moderate voting record with the extreme views of a radicalized Democratic party. Besides being attacked from the left on climate change, Biden has apologized for his past support of tough-on-crime policies, and he has flip-flopped drastically on immigration from supporting border security to wanting healthcare for illegal immigrants.
It was reported recently that Biden also reversed his position on the Hyde Amendment, which bans federal funding for abortions. However, Biden claimed this week that he “misheard” the question that gave rise to that claim.
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