- Position‹3 of 3
- Neither candidate will do enough for the environment
To support the environment, candidates must disinvest from the auto industry and invest in public transport.
The argument
Biden's transportation plan spends a bulk of the money on improving existing roads and infrastructure and providing subsidies for electric vehicles, which will encourage people in the future to depend on their cars. Donald Trump does not seem to care about public transit.
Premises
Counter-arguments
Supporters of Biden's plan respond that demanding a "100% green" transport policy sets an unreachable bar that erases real differences between the candidates. Large-scale investment in electric vehicles, charging infrastructure and rail was, they argue, a substantial shift toward decarbonising transport even if it did not eliminate car dependence overnight, whereas the alternative rolled back fuel-economy standards and withdrew from climate commitments. Treating a far-reaching but imperfect programme as equivalent to little action, on this view, ignores the scale of the gap and discourages the incremental progress that decarbonisation realistically requires.
Rejecting the premises
[Rejecting P1] Requiring a fully public-transit-based policy sets a standard almost no real plan could meet, so failing it does not show a plan does too little. [Rejecting P2] EV subsidies and infrastructure are widely regarded as a genuine step toward lower-emission transport, not merely the entrenchment of car dependence. [Rejecting C] Even if neither plan is perfect, the sizeable difference between them means "neither will do enough" understates one candidate's substantially greater action.