Climate expert suggests Biden will have to 'admit there will be tradeoffs' to reach zero carbon goal

Joe Biden.
(Image credit: BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images)

Climate activists and scientists have generally received former Vice President Joe Biden's plan to eliminate U.S. carbon emissions by 2035 warmly, but there will likely be some backlash ahead, especially regarding a potential reliance on wind and solar alternatives, The Guardian reports.

David Keith, a climate and energy expert at Harvard University who co-authored research in 2018 that found America's transition to solar and particularly wind would require up to 20 times more land area than previously thought, said windmills certainly shouldn't be abandoned moving forward, but suggested they could be limited. "You should tilt the energy system toward low land footprints, which means focusing on solar, nuclear, and carbon capture and storage, with wind at the margins," he told The Guardian.

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Tim O'Donnell

Tim is a staff writer at The Week and has contributed to Bedford and Bowery and The New York Transatlantic. He is a graduate of Occidental College and NYU's journalism school. Tim enjoys writing about baseball, Europe, and extinct megafauna. He lives in New York City.