Did the Biden Campaign Plagiarize Under Pressure from Greenpeace?
Lifted Climate Plan Praising Green New Deal Bumped Biden From ‘D-‘ to ‘B’ on Greenpeace Scorecard
Joe Biden is once again facing charges of plagiarism. Several passages in his newly-released $1.7 trillion climate change plan, which praises the Green New Deal, appear to have been lifted from non-profits.
Further, the plagiarism-plagued climate change plan was released only days after Greenpeace USA gave him a D- on their report card and pressed him for a proposal. The timeline raises the question of whether the campaign hastily put together and published the plan for political expediency.
The leftwing group CREDO Action first accused the former vice president and current 2020 Democratic frontrunner of copying passages from Blue Green Alliance and the Carbon Capture Coalition.
“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,” Josh Nelson, the Vice President at CREDO tweeted.
Vox, The Daily Caller, American Rivers, and Climate.gov have since piled on with their own allegations that significant parts of the plan were plagiarized.
“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 spokesperson for the Biden Campaign wrote POLITICO in an email. “As soon as we were made aware of it, we updated to include the proper citations.”
Mr. Biden has long been plagued by charges of plagiarism.
In 1987, Mr. Biden’s first presidential campaign was derailed by a series of plagiarism scandals. He was caught plagiarizing passages from Robert Kennedy, Hubert Humphrey and British Labor leader Neil Kinnock.
He also plagiarized while attending law school at Syracuse. The New York Times reported at the time Mr. Biden “used five pages from a published law review article without quotation or attribution.”
The plan was released by the Biden Campaign on Tuesday as an effort to placate the far-left shift in his party. Interestingly, it was published only days after Greenpeace released their new evaluations for 19 candidates on May 30.
In Bernie Soars and Biden Stumbles in New Greenpeace Ranking of 2020 Candidates’ Climate Platforms, the socialist senator from Vermont initially led the pack with a “B+” grade. Mr. Biden was initially dead last, receiving a D- on his climate change report card.
“If he [Biden] wants to translate his front-runner status in the polls to actual leadership on climate, we need him to come out with a bold, concrete plan in line with the scale of the crisis we’re facing,” Greenpeace USA Climate Campaign Director Janet Redman, said.
The scorecard rates candidates based on commitments to ending fossil fuels, prior statements in support of various policies, legislative records and published proposals. The organization said some candidates also filled out a 29-question survey.
In the proposal, Mr. Biden embraced the Green New Deal as “a crucial framework” to his climate change agenda. The plan would also repeal the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), President Donald Trump’s signature achievement and the first overhaul to the U.S. tax code in 31 years.
While that may appeal to younger voters in the party’s coalition, it threatens to turn off working class voters.
The environmental activist wing of the Democratic Party supports the Green New Deal and has used it as a litmus test for candidates. However, labor unions and workers do not.
The AFL-CIO denounced it as a job and wage killer.
Cecil Roberts, president of the United Mine Workers of America, and Lonnie Stephenson, president of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, said proposals in the Green New Deal are “threats to our members’ jobs and their families’ standard of living.”
Consequently, Greenpeace revealed amid the controversy that Mr. Biden’s climate change plan “helped him achieve a new grade of ‘B,’ moving him into seventh place ahead of Beto O’Rourke and behind Tulsi Gabbard.”
Governor Jay Inslee, D-Wa., now leads the climate change scorecard with an A-. President Donald Trump received an F. He scored zero out of a possible 100 points.
UPDATE: Less than 24 hours after allegations the Biden Campaign plagiarized the climate change plan, it has come to light that his education plan contains several lifted passages. The Washington Post reported “Biden used a sentence word for word from an education policy publication from the group XQ Institute.”
“Joe Biden’s presidential campaign lifted language without credit, at times word for word, when crafting its education and climate plans, incidents the campaign acknowledged and said were inadvertent.”
