Biden's Clean Energy Plan Would Save Over 317,000 Lives, Have Estimated Net Value Of $1.43 Trillion

The Biden administration’s plan for renewable energy would cut planet heating emissions and save 317,500 American lives over the next 30 years from deadly air pollution, according to a collaborated research report from Harvard University, Georgia Institute of Technology and Syracuse University.

Biden has sought to have 80% renewable energy use by 2030. The analysis of his "80×30 clean electricity standard (CES) by the Clean Energy Futures project shows that achieving the Biden Administration’s clean electricity goal through a CES would have modest costs and large benefits."

Aside from saving hundreds of thousands of lives, there are also strong cost benefits to the plan.

"This 80×30 CES would also prevent an estimated 317,500 premature deaths between now and 2050 and generate estimated present value health benefits of $1.13 trillion due to cleaner air, bringing the estimated present value net benefits to $1.43 trillion for 2020 to 2050," the report reads.

The authors of the report praised the plan, describing it as a "huge opportunity."

“The cost are much lower than we expected and the deaths avoided are much higher; there really is a huge opportunity here to address climate change and air quality,” said Kathy Fallon Lambert, a study co-author and an air quality expert at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health.

“This would be a huge leap in ambition and we’d see that in the health impacts, there would be millions of fewer asthma attacks, for example. And this doesn’t even consider the health impacts from heat and other climate-related causes.”

Biden has been pushing for stronger efforts to fight climate change since the start of his term in January. In April, the White House released a fact sheet about plans for an over 50% reduction in U.S. Greenhouse Gas Pollution from 2005 levels in 2030 and what that would mean for Americans.

"Meeting the 2030 emissions target will create millions of good-paying, middle class, union jobs – line workers who will lay thousands of miles of transmission lines for a clean, modern, resilient grid; workers capping abandoned wells and reclaiming mines and stopping methane leaks; autoworkers building modern, efficient, electric vehicles and the charging infrastructure to support them; engineers and construction workers expanding carbon capture and green hydrogen to forge cleaner steel and cement; and farmers using cutting-edge tools to make American soil the next frontier of carbon innovation," the statement read.