President-elect Joe Biden has committed more explicitly than any nominee before him to dramatic steps against the climate crisis, but he faces the same geographic puzzle that has precluded congressional action on the challenge for years.
Although Biden won the popular vote by a margin well over 5 million and expanded the Democrats’ Electoral College map, he still confronted an impregnable wall of opposition from the states most tightly integrated into the fossil fuel economy, a CNN analysis of the results has found.
Biden dominated the largely post-industrial states, many of them along the two coasts, that generate the least amount of carbon emissions per dollar of economic activity, according to figures from the federal Energy Information Administration. But as in 2016, President Donald Trump won almost all of the states that emit the most carbon per dollar of economic output, a measure that tracks which states rely most on fossil fuels, either as producers or consumers. CONTINUED
Ronald Brownstein, CNN