UN President, Joe Biden marked Monday’s Earth Day with an announcement of a $7bn investment in solar energy projects nationwide, focusing on disadvantaged communities, and unveiling a week-long series of what the White House say will be “historic climate actions”.
The president was speaking at Prince William Forest Park, in Triangle, Virginia, touting his environmental record and unveiling measures to tackle the climate crisis and increase access to, and lower costs of, clean energy.
The centerpiece was the announcement of $7bn in grants through the Environmental Protection Agency’s “solar for all” program, funded by last year’s $369bn Inflation Reduction Act, and which Biden said will benefit hundreds of thousands of mostly low-income families who currently spend up to 30% of their income on energy.
“These awards across the country [are to] states, territories, tribal governments, municipalities and non-profits to develop programs to enable low income and disadvantaged communities to benefit from residential solar power. And it’s a big deal,” he said.
“Solar for all program means 900,000 households will have solar on the rooftops for the first time and soon, millions of families will save over $400 a year on utility bills.”
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The EPA has calculated that the investment, will be distributed through grants to 60 applicant organizations nationwide, will generate $8bn in household electricity bill savings over the life of the program.
Biden said that projects funded by the solar for all program will create 200,000 jobs and advance his Justice40 initiative, in which at least 40% of the benefits of investments in federal climate clean energy, and affordable and sustainable housing projects, are directed to communities “marginalized by underinvestment and overburdened by pollution”.
Biden also announced a new website to encourage citizens to join the American Climate Corps, a volunteer government organization modeled on former president Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s much-vaunted Civilian Conservation Corps of the 1930s.
The site, climatecorps.gov, aims to initially fill about 2,000 positions across 36 states, Washington DC and Puerto Rico, hosted by organizations working on clean energy, conservation and climate resilience projects. Ultimately the corps will employ more than 20,000 young people, the White House says.
Aimed mainly at young people, the administration said in a press release that the scheme’s objective was “to make it easy for any American to find work tackling the climate crisis while gaining the skills necessary for the clean energy and climate resilience workforce of the future”.
Story was adapted from the Guardian.
