Biden apparently plagiarized several sentences in his climate change plan

Former Vice President Joe Biden's presidential campaign acknowledged late Tuesday that some of the language in Biden's $1.7 trillion climate change plan unveiled earlier in the day was copied from other sources without attribution. "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," a Biden spokesperson told Politico. "As soon as we were made aware of it, we updated to include the proper citations."

Josh Nelson at the progressive group CREDO first noticed word-for-word similarities between some sentences in Biden's plan on carbon capture and publications from the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions as well as the BlueGreen Alliance. "Other campaigns have used unattributed language similar to that crafted by primary sources," The Washington Post notes, and several of the groups Biden's staff cribbed from said they were happy to have a campaign use their work. "But the issue was a particularly sensitive one for Biden, whose 1988 campaign was derailed after he plagiarized, in speeches, rhetoric used by British politician Neil Kinnock" and other politicians.

On top of the ghosts of plagiarism past, said U.C. Santa Barbara political scientist Leah Stokes, this unforced error "speaks of pulling an all-nighter and reading off of your friend's essay."

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