From New York Times, I'm Michael Obaro. This is Adelaide.

Today, to win over a single Democratic Senator, President Biden is planning to drop the most powerful plan to confront climate change from his congressional agenda.

I spoke with my colleague, Carl Davenport, about why that is, the blowback it has unleashed, and what it means for the future of US climate policy.

It's Wednesday, October 20th.

Carl, the last time you were on the show, back in April, you described to our colleague, Asad Hunden, the Biden administration's plan to tackle climate change and how the President and congressional Democrats were betting that they could incorporate this plan into their sweeping social safety net and infrastructure bill.

So, remind us about that proposal.

Sure. So, this plan really has been at the heart of President Biden's climate agenda since he came into office.

So, this program, it's called the Clean Electricity Program. It's targeted at the generation of electricity, which is the second largest source of greenhouse gas pollution in the US, first largest sources vehicles.

So, you have thousands and thousands of electric power plants all across the country. Most of them are powered by coal and natural gas. These are two very heavily polluting fossil fuels.

So, what this program would do is it targets the electric utilities that own all these polluting power plants, and it would pay them to shut down these power plants, these coal and gas fossil fuel polluting power plants, and replace that electricity with zero carbon sources of electricity, which would be wind or solar or nuclear.

It would pay them to do this at a rate of 4% of their electricity generation per year. So, every year, if I'm a company, and I want to get this money, and I'm generating, say, you know, 20,000 megawatts of electricity a year, then I would shut down 4% of that fossil fuel generation and replace it with clean carbon sources.

And once I did that, the federal government would pay me lots of money. So, that's the incentive. That's kind of the carrot part. That makes it sweet and delicious for companies to want to do this, and then the other part, and this is very important, and part of why this program would be very strong, is the penalty, the stick.

Companies that don't do it have to pay a fine. So, if you do any less than that, you actually have to pay a fine to the federal government. So, there's a carrot and a stick.

So, if that turnover is happening at the rate of 4% a year, then that pretty quickly adds up to a pretty transformational change in where our electricity is coming from.

How transformational?

So, the analysis of that program is that we would actually get to about 80% of our electricity coming from renewable sources, clean zero carbon renewable sources by 2030.

Wow. That's less than a decade. So, that would be a very dramatic drop in U.S. carbon emissions. It would shut down most of the coal and natural gas plants, most of the fossil fuel polluting power plants, so that that really takes you a very long way toward meeting President Biden's extremely ambitious goal of cutting all U.S. emissions 50% by 2030, which would be huge.

So, this would be the government saying that this transition is so important that the government is going to introduce payments and penalties to force electric companies to make the transition faster than they ordinarily would in the private market.

Yes, that transition is already starting to naturally happen in the market, but it would probably more than double the pace.

Wow. And that's really important because of what scientists are telling us now about how rapidly fossil fuel emissions need to come down.

You know, the science is telling us again and again, we're pretty much out of time if we want to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.

So, this would accelerate that and actually allow the U.S. to cut emissions at pretty close to the speed that scientists say is necessary.

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