President Joe Biden ran on a platform that promised climate action on a scale never seen before in American politics. One of the supporting beams of that plan is something called a clean energy standard — a mandate for utilities to generate a certain amount of clean electricity by a set date. Biden’s proposed standard targeted a carbon-free electricity sector — the second-most polluting slice of the emissions pie in the U.S. behind transportation — by 2035.
Congressional Democrats sought to put that clean energy standard into Biden’s first major legislative priority — a $2 trillion infrastructure package aimed at improving the nation’s infrastructure and simultaneously reducing emissions. But a handful of centrist Republicans and Democrats succeeded in whittling down the package by about a trillion dollars and removing the standard from the bill, which has already passed the Senate and is poised for a vote in the House this week. Biden and progressives promised to get their clean energy standard done another way. That’s how something called the Clean Electricity Performance Program, a wonky and complicated climate policy that nobody had e... Read more
