Joe Biden plans to build huge offshore wind farms to tackle the climate crisis

• President Joe Biden's administration has detailed a plan to build huge offshore wind farms in the United States.
• The White House said the plans would create up to 44,000 jobs by 2030.
• President Biden has called climate change one of the four "major crises" he plans to tackle as president.

President Joe Biden's administration has detailed a plan to build huge offshore wind farms in the United States as part of his plans to tackle climate change.

The project, which was unveiled on Monday, aims to create 30 extra gigawatts of offshore wind generation to US coastlines by 2030, while creating tens of thousands of jobs.

The White House said meeting that target would cost $12 billion a year in capital investment on both US coastlines and would employ 44,000 workers, as well as 33,000 additional jobs in communities supported by offshore wind generation.

The wind farms would supply power to 10 million homes and cut carbon dioxide emissions by 78 million metric tons, the White House said.

As one part of the efforts, Interior Department announced a new "priority wind energy area" in the New York Bight, a shallow area between Long Island and the New Jersey coastline, where the agency hopes to construct a wind farm by 2030.

"The announcements we're making today I hope will just jump-start everyone's understanding of the potential for offshore wind energy, and move this industry forward in a way that's going to allow us to really focus on the supply chain issue as well, because we're not just talking about erecting wind turbines in the oceans, we're talking about massive turbines that are actually manufactured in the United States," national climate adviser Gina McCarthy said Monday, in comments reported by Politico.

President Biden pledged to make tackling climate change a central part of his agenda in the White House, describing it as one of the four "major crises" facing the United States.

In his first week in office, he issued an executive order calling on the United States to create a "clean energy economy" and create millions of new jobs.