Charges of plagiarism are once again being lodged against former Vice President Joe Biden, the current frontrunner for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination. Not content merely to swipe other politicians’ speeches, as he had previously done, Biden is now being accused of copying parts of his campaign website’s climate plan from other sources without proper attribution.
Josh Nelson, vice president of CREDO Mobile, a San Francisco-based cellphone company that donates heavily to left-wing and environmentalist causes, used his Twitter account to inform the world of two examples of Biden’s climate plagiarism.
“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,” tweeted Nelson.
For example, this archived version of “The Biden Plan for a Clean Energy Revolution and Environmental Justice” (remember when presidential candidates merely promised “a chicken in every pot”?) says, “Carbon capture, use, and storage (CCUS) is a rapidly growing technology that has the potential to create economic benefits for multiple industries while significantly reducing carbon dioxide emissions.”
That, observed Nelson, appears to have been cribbed, with only slight modification, from a 2017 letter to the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works. In that letter, Kim Glas, executive director of the BlueGreen Alliance, a coalition of labor unions and environmental organizations, wrote, “Carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) is a rapidly growing technology that has potential to create economic benefits for multiple industries while significantly reducing carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.”
Nelson also cited this sentence from Biden’s website: “Biden’s goal is to make CCUS a widely available, cost-effective, and rapidly scalable solution to reduce carbon emissions to meet mid-century climate goals.”
Meanwhile, the Carbon Capture Coalition, which describes itself as “a broad coalition of business, labor, and environmental groups working to accelerate commercial deployment of carbon capture technologies,” says on its website that its “goal is to make carbon capture, use and storage (CCUS) a widely available, cost-effective, and rapidly scalable solution to reduce carbon emissions to meet mid-century climate goals.”
The Daily Caller found three other instances of plagiarism in Biden’s plan, from Vox, American Rivers, and Climate.gov.
Biden has been caught in the act of plagiarism before. When he ran for president in 1988, then-Senator Biden appropriated language from a speech by British Labor Party leader Neil Kinnock in which Kinnock contrasted his life with the lives of his ancestors. Not only did Biden fail to credit Kinnock with the speech on every occasion he gave it, but he also “miscast some of his own forbears, painting them as having rather more humble origins than they in fact did,” according to the New York Times. In addition, Biden was caught quoting without attribution speeches by previous Democratic presidential candidates John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, and Hubert H. Humphrey.
Nor was this the first time Biden had been fingered as a phrase-filcher. In law school in 1965, he was found to have plagiarized large sections of prose from a Fordham Law Review article in the course of writing a paper for a legal methodology class. He was flunked and forced to repeat the course.
Since the plagiarism on Biden’s website came to light, the Biden team has hastily attributed the similar sentences to their originators. In their haste, however, they failed to modify the duplicated passages to match the originals exactly, so the website now contains some attributed quotations that are not, in fact, word-for-word copies.
Unfortunately, plagiarism is the puniest of the problems with Biden’s climate plan, which calls for massively increasing federal spending and intervention, rejoining the Paris Agreement, using “every tool of American foreign policy to push the rest of the world” to engage in the same climate-change madness, and injecting racial politics into the fight against pollution. In other words, it’s the Green New Deal on steroids.
Photo: AP Images
