from WNYC studios. I'm Brian Lerer. This is my daily politics podcast. It's Tuesday, February 13th.

Now our climate story of the week, which we're doing every Tuesday on the show, again all this year.

Today, Elizabeth Weiss from

USA Today, who's got a series that comes to the following star conclusion in this headline,

Across America, clean energy plants are being banned faster than they're being built. Across America,

clean energy plants are being banned faster than they're being built. Let's

find out where and why and who's for and against and what it means for the world. So with us now is

Elizabeth Weiss, who has long covered science and technology, and for the last two years, has been

focusing on climate change and the energy transition. Elizabeth,

thanks for coming on. Welcome to WNYC. Oh, you're so welcome. Let's define some terms to start out.

What falls under the category in that headline of clean energy plants? Okay, so here, what we

were looking at specifically was utility scale.

So this is not rooftop solar and this isn't even utility scale solar, which is a small blocker

to solar array.

This is something big enough that it can take the place of a power plant. So utility scale, wind, and

solar. And in the United States, we have definitions of clean, varied depending on who you are, but

carbon neutral energy includes hydroelectric power and nuclear power, a little bit of biomass,

but nuclear and hydro are not going to grow significantly in the coming years. So really,

if we want to reach our targets of 100% clean energy by 2035, we have to build out more

utility scale wind and solar. So that's what we looked at.

Wind and solar. And you just mentioned some of the context there, which is that the U.S.

set a goal of 100% clean energy, that is, I guess, clean energy driving power plants by 2035.

...