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Fossil fuels play a role in Biden's climate fight: WH advisor

Yahoo Finance’s Rick Newman joins the Yahoo Finance Live panel to discuss Pres. Biden’s role in the climate fight.

Video transcript

AKIKO FUJITA: The White House has said fossil fuels will remain a part of the country's energy mix, even as the president pushes to make the energy grid carbon free by 2035. He's likely to face a lot of pushback, though, from those within his own party. Yahoo Finance's Rick Newman following that story for us on this Earth Day. And Rick, you heard Gina McCarthy there say that, look, this is-- fossil fuels have to be a part of the transition. You can offset that with carbon capture and sequestration, but there's a lot of Democrats who've said that that really is just a short-term answer to a larger problem that should be addressed in more detail.

RICK NEWMAN: Yeah, I think she's actually being realistic about this. So to be specific, I think the kind of fossil fuels we're going to see remain in the system are natural gas fired power plants. I'm not sure about coal, but natural gas. And then we know that automobiles are going to run on gasoline, at least some of the automobiles will, for decades. I mean, you know, the average lifespan of a car is 20 years. And, you know, right now, we're only talking about less than 2% of new car sales are electric. So we're going to have gasoline powered cars in the system for a long time.

You know, Bernie Sanders and AOC, they can complain that the Biden plan doesn't go far enough. But look, I think it's going to actually be quite difficult to hit those targets Biden is talking about. This is not simple. This requires, among other things, massive changes to the electrical grid, a lot of stuff that's difficult to get permitting for across states in different parts of the country, big questions about who's going to pay for all this. I mean, we're talking about stuff the country has never done before. So, give Biden a shot. You know, what he's trying it's pretty difficult.

ZACK GUZMAN: No, it is very difficult. And I remember you talking about this all the way back early on in the campaign trail when we saw him kind of straddling this. And it's very tricky because he didn't want to lose those jobs in key-- or voters who had those jobs in key swing states, Pennsylvania being one of the ones that we talked about in quite detail.

But when you look at it and step back and think about where he's at with Democrats in the Senate, Joe Manchin in West Virginia, one of those states that's still heavily dependent on coal-- there aren't a lot of them that have a big coal lobby, but that would be one of them. So where do you put maybe how he sits politically with some of these more progressive agenda items when it comes to climate and how that battle looks in getting things done?

RICK NEWMAN: We're going to see exactly how this plays out during the next few months. So Senator Ron Wyden yesterday introduced a new tax plan that would repeal all the tax breaks for oil and gas companies and coal providers producers and replace them with just three tax breaks that incentivize green energy. So somebody asked him, is Joe Manchin going to go along with this? That's the obvious question because they need every single Democratic vote to pass something like that.

And Wyden basically said, look, I talk to Joe all the time. He knows what's in my bill. We have a plan. He didn't say how he's going to get Manchin's support and probably the support of a few other Democrats who are backed by energy interests. But they're going to have to do things like put tons of federal clean energy programs in states like West Virginia. Earmarks are back in Congress. So, Manchin may say, I want this, that, and the other thing for my state.

So I think the way this gets done, if it does and it's going to be tough, is, there's going to be a windfall of federal programs and federal money going to some of these states that are the toughest ones to get on board. I'm very interested to see how it plays out because, again, none of this is going to be easy because we're talking about major change. The energy, the oil and gas industry remains very powerful, very well-funded. And it is a source of a lot of high-paying jobs.