And so if that turnover is happening at the rate of 4 percent a year, then that pretty quickly adds up to a pretty transformational change in where our electricity is coming from. So if you do any less than that, you actually have to pay a fine to the federal government. Companies that don’t do it have to pay a fine. 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. That makes it sweet and delicious for companies to want to do this. And once I did that, the federal government would pay me lots of money. So every year, if I’m a company and I want to get this money, and I’m generating, say, 20,000 megawatts of electricity a year, then I would shut down 4 percent of that fossil fuel generation and replace it with clean carbon sources. It would pay them to do this at a rate of 4 percent of their electricity generation per year. 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. These are two very heavily-polluting fossil fuels. Most of them are powered by coal and natural gas. So you have thousands and thousands of electric power plants all across the country. It’s targeted at the generation of electricity, which is the second-largest source of greenhouse gas pollution in the U.S. So this program, it’s called the Clean Electricity Program. So this plan really has been at the heart of President Biden’s climate agenda since he came into office. climate policy.Ĭoral, the last time you were on the show, back in April, you described to our colleague Astead Herndon 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. I spoke with my colleague Coral Davenport about why that is, the blowback it has unleashed, and what it means for the future of U.S. 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. Wednesday, October 20th, 2021 michael barbaroįrom The New York Times, I’m Michael Barbaro. Transcript How a Single Senator Derailed Biden’s Climate Plan The centerpiece of the president’s environmental agenda has fallen apart because of the objections of a single senator.