STOKES: Yeah, they would get there maybe three days later, after the marathon was over, right? And in the case of climate change, they'd get there so late that we would have cooked the entire planet. And it's like, no, you have to finish before the sun goes down.
SHAPIRO: It's like somebody's walking a marathon route and they're saying, like, I'm going to finish the race. It put a requirement that utilities had to deploy 4% clean power every year and get on the trajectory we need.
And that's actually what the program was designed to do. We need to be doing something like four to five percentage points of clean power every year. If we just inch along at about 2.5 points a year, are we going to get to 100% by 2035? No, we are not. STOKES: Unfortunately, utilities are not moving fast enough. There's no reason to spend money on pushing energy companies to do something they're already doing. SHAPIRO: So Senator Manchin is saying, look, utilities are already moving in this direction. So if we don't have that program, we need something else that cleans up our power sector. The Clean Electricity Performance Program was going to deliver one-third of those pollution cuts. They have to put forward an investment package that takes on the climate crisis at the scale that's necessary and meets those goals that the Biden administration has laid out, which is that they plan to cut pollution by half this decade. You know, Congress and the White House have a big responsibility right now. SHAPIRO: To be clear, it sounds like you're saying if there isn't something addressing the energy sector and electricity, then there's no way the Biden administration can meet its goal of cutting emissions in half by 2030, and more broadly, the world meet its goal of keeping global temperatures from rising by 1.5 degrees Celsius. You can't just blow a hole a size of a third of the pollution cuts into the package and say, oh, it's still good enough. STOKES: I think that we must have something for the power sector that cleans up carbon pollution from our electricity system. And so which do you think is true? Can the U.S. On the other hand, the Biden administration has been saying, look, even if this clean electricity program dies, there are lots of other ways to cut carbon emissions from the energy sector. SHAPIRO: So, on the one hand, scientists say that countries have to be way more ambitious cutting emissions if they want to avoid the worst climate-related disasters. LEAH STOKES: Oh, thanks for having me on. She is an environmental policy expert at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and she's here now to talk about what eliminating this program from the legislation could mean. Leah Stokes is helping Senate Democrats write their climate provisions. Democratic Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia has financial ties to the coal industry, and he reportedly opposes the idea. But Democrats may not have enough votes to pass it. The Clean Electricity Performance Program would pay utilities to switch to clean electricity sources like wind and solar, and those that didn't transition fast enough would face government fines. President Biden's ambitious climate agenda is in jeopardy.
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