Policy Reports
Powering Toward 100 Percent Clean Power by 2035
Charles Harper, Sam Krasnow, Leah Stokes, Lissa Lynch, Sam Ricketts, Amanda Levin, Daniela Schulman, Jeff Slyfield, & Christy Walsh. January 2023.
President Biden won the White House on the boldest climate agenda of any presidential candidate in history. He made a commitment to the American people that the United States would achieve 100 percent clean, carbon-free electricity by 2035.
Clean electricity is essential to America’s response to the climate crisis. And reaching 80 percent clean power by 2030 is key to achieving the U.S. economy-wide goal of at least halving carbon pollution this decade. The U.S. took a historic step on clean energy investment in 2022, when Congress and President Biden enacted the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). This critical climate legislation contains over $370 billion in investments towards building America’s clean energy economy. But the work is far from over.
This paper from Evergreen and NRDC outlines an updated roadmap toward 80 percent clean power by 2030 and 100 percent clean electricity by 2035 now that the IRA is law. With two years remaining in his first term, President Biden must continue to pursue his agenda using standards, investments, and justice to tackle the climate crisis and build a thriving, just, and inclusive clean energy economy.
A National Roadmap for Clean Buildings: How President Biden Can Use Executive Action to Drive Toward 100% Zero-Emission Buildings
Nate Kinsey, Molly Freed, Trevor Dolan, Leah Stokes, Daniela Schulman & Sam Ricketts. October 2022.
America’s built environment consists of 124 million residential and 5.9 million commercial buildings, which together generate toxic amounts of air pollution and account for 13 percent of national carbon pollution. For the Biden administration to meet its ambitious climate goals, the White House must now implement rigorous pollution and efficiency standards to swiftly transition America's buildings to efficient, clean appliances like heat pumps and induction stoves.
The first two years of President Joe Biden’s administration have included historic progress for climate action, but there remains so much more to do. In order to meet his target of a 50-52 percent reduction in climate pollution below 2005 levels by 2030, and to prepare the nation to reach net-zero emissions by midcentury, the Biden administration must move aggressively on executive action.
The Dirty Truth About Utility Climate Pledges: Version 2
Cara Bottorff, Noah Ver Beek, and Leah C. Stokes. October 2022.
The next decade is critical to averting the worst impacts of the climate crisis and transforming our economy to run entirely on clean energy.
Studies show that unless utilities retire all their coal plants by 2030, abandon all plans to build gas plants, and aggressively build out renewable energy resources, we risk destabilizing our livable climate. Despite this pressing deadline, utilities are either not moving fast enough toward these goals, or not moving at all.
Dozens of utilities may have pledged to become “carbon neutral” by 2050, but research conducted by the Sierra Club in its inaugural Dirty Truth Report showed that nearly all utilities in the United States lack the plans needed to move toward clean energy in the time frame needed to avoid the worst of the climate crisis. In an update to that report a year and a half later, Sierra Club found that most utilities have continued to drag their feet, making little progress in the transition from fossil fuels to clean energy.
Clean and Healthy Schools are Electric: Aligning California’s School Infrastructure Investments with our Climate and Health Goals
Justin Barra, Noah Goldmann, Jonathan Klein, Sara Ross, and Leah C. Stokes. August 2022.
California is home to 10,000 schools totalling 730 million square feet of buildings, making our K-12 school system one of the largest public infrastructure systems in the state. The state spends $15 billion every year on building, renovating, maintaining, and operating its school facilities, which serve 16 percent of California’s population each day. But as air pollution, wildfires, and COVID-19 threaten California’s schoolchildren, HVAC systems are proving costly to operate and maintain and unable to ensure student health and safety.
Years of disruption — by heat waves, wildfires, mudslides and the COVID-19 pandemic — have demonstrated that California’s schools are not equipped to keep students safe and healthy. Aging HVAC systems cannot filter wildfire smoke or viruses, so schools close and students fall behind. Students in schools without HVAC systems altogether face even worse outcomes.
The good news is that we have the technology we need to provide healthy learning environments for California’s kids. Upgrading to all-electric HVAC systems with advanced filtration can deliver enormous educational and health benefits to California’s students and school staff, all while cutting operating costs. Electric machines like heat pumps — along with the right policies to lower their upfront cost — are a feasible, efficient, and cost-effective solution to prioritize our students and schools.
Meeting the Moment on Climate Through the American Household: Proposed Adjustments to the Build Back Better Act
Alex Laskey, Ari Matusiak, Sam Calisch, Rachael Grace, and Leah C. Stokes. October 2021.
Congress is negotiating historic legislation that will invest in our families, build our communities and address the climate crisis. When it comes to the scale of the moment before us, there is simply no time left for half-measures and “next time” ambition. We must come together as a country, mobilize the scale of resources necessary to unlock the next generation of American prosperity, and secure our future for generations to come.
Without the Clean Electricity Performance Program or a carbon tax, the Build Back Better Act (BBB) needs to include additional climate investments or we will not meet President Biden’s goal to cut carbon pollution in half this decade. We need larger investments in our building sector to deliver a climate package that takes on the crisis in every sector, at scale. The reason is twofold: 1) the amount of emissions determined by our kitchen table decisions requires it; and 2) the accelerating impact of electrifying our end-use machines will result in required investments in clean electric supply.
It is time to treat the American household as the keystone of our climate infrastructure. Rewiring America proposes expanding the level of investment within the BBB in three key ways to drive incremental emissions reductions:
Front-end consumer electrification and weatherization rebates or grants for low-and moderate-income (LMI) households.
Individual- and business-facing tax credits to incentivize the rest of the market.
Subsidized, low-cost financing, lowering monthly payments for all.
This memo outlines modifications that would benefit approximately 50 million households and reduce emissions by 110 MMT annually by 2030.
A Roadmap to 100% Clean Electricity by 2035: August 2021 Update
Leah C. Stokes, Sam Ricketts, Olivia Quinn. August 2021.
President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris campaigned and won on a bold platform for confronting the climate crisis and building a clean energy economic recovery—including a clean energy standard to achieve 100% clean electricity by 2035. Now, Senate Democrats have included a Clean Electricity Performance Program (CEPP), an investment program designed to achieve the goals of President Biden’s proposed clean electricity standard, in their $3.5 trillion budget resolution, along with complementary investments that will help decarbonize the power sector.
In this updated report, we explain why action this year is essential for 100% clean electricity, and how a CEPP and complementary investments (all of which fit with Senate budget reconciliation rules) will unlock the rapid decarbonization we need.
The Clean Electricity Performance Program is the most powerful tool in our toolbox to reduce America’s carbon pollution and help us avoid the worst impacts of the climate crisis—and the program will be a powerful driver to eliminate deadly air pollution, create millions of new clean energy jobs, and put money back in consumers’ pockets by delivering cheaper, cleaner energy. Now it’s up to President Biden and Congressional Democrats to get it across the finish line.
A Roadmap to 100% Clean Electricity by 2035: Power Sector Decarbonization through a Federal Clean Electricity Standard and Robust Clean Energy Investments and Justice-Centered Policies
Leah C. Stokes, Sam Ricketts, Olivia Quinn, Narayan Subramanian and Bracken Hendricks. February 2021.
President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris campaigned and won on a bold platform for confronting the climate crisis and building a clean energy economic recovery—including a 100% clean energy standard for electricity by 2035, plus a $2 trillion investment in clean energy and infrastructure, and deep commitments to confronting systemic environmental injustice.
Congress must act on these commitments, and pass a federal Clean Electricity Standard (CES). This approach is proven in states—already one in three Americans live in a place targeting 100% clean, carbon-free power. It is popular, with more than two-thirds of voters supporting this policy. It is also a practical approach, which can ensure job creation and justice are at the center of a rapid clean energy transition.
Clean energy standard policies are a proven, popular, and practical approach to effectively drive clean energy transformation on the ground. In this report:
We outline how Congress can use a CES to put the U.S. on a path to 100% clean electricity by 2035.
We show how a CES can be designed to rapidly decarbonize the power sector and center equity, good jobs, and community benefits while doing so.
We also outline a number of investments and justice-centered policies that will be required to achieve this rapid 100% clean power goal.
And we argue that this crucial policy commitment made by Democratic leaders can and must overcome any potential legislative barriers. This includes eliminating the filibuster in the United States Senate, or pass CES legislation through budget reconciliation.
The Dirty Truth About Utility Climate Pledges
John Romankiewicz, Cara Bottorff, and Leah C. Stokes. January 2021.
Cleaning up the electricity sector is the key to economy-wide decarbonization, and electric utilities have a large role to play in making sure we are on the path toward a livable future. Many utilities have stated climate goals. However, those goals are meaningless greenwashing without utilities taking the necessary actions to decarbonize. There are three key things utilities must do to enable us to avoid catastrophic warming: They must retire existing coal plants by 2030, terminate plans to build new gas plants, and build clean energy much faster.
In this report, we examine utilities’ performance on each of these three necessary actions. Our analysis is based on integrated resource plans (IRPs) and major announcements for the 50 utilities that remain the most invested in fossil fuel generation.3These include investor- owned utilities, power authorities (like the Tennessee Valley Authority), generation and transmission co-ops, and large municipal utilities. Overall, we examine plans for 79 operating companies owned by 50 different parent companies, as detailed in the appendices. 50 companies own half of all remaining coal and gas generation in the nation — 1,310 million megawatt-hours (MWh) of coal and gas generation. We find there is a stark difference between utilities’ existing coal and gas generation (1,310 million MWh) and how much clean energy they plan to add this decade (only 250 million MWh). In other words, despite 33 of these companies having a public climate goal, there is an enormous gap between utilities’ current practices and what they need to do to protect people and the planet.
We scored companies based on their plans to retire coal-fired power plants, stop building new gas plants, and build clean energy, all of which are necessary steps to keep warming under 1.5°C. We find that, apart from a few leaders, these companies are falling short on all three of these necessary actions.
Carbon Pricing and Innovation in a World of Political Constraints
Jesse Jenkins, Leah C. Stokes & Gernot Wagner
Carbon pricing adoption and implementation faces several practical challenges ranging from political constraints to negative consequences of poor policy design and challenges related to integration with existing policies. In particular, the distributional impacts of climate policy invariably collide with the political economy of a given jurisdiction to constrain the real-world implementation of carbon pricing. For example, in the simplest sense, carbon pricing creates direct, visible costs on carbon-intensive industries, which are generally politically powerful. It also imposes costs on consumers, in the form of higher energy prices. This combination of concentrated costs on key industries, visible costs to the general public, and diffuse and delayed benefits of reduced carbon emissions, makes it politically challenging to adopt carbon pricing, especially at the ambitious level—in terms of price and covered sectors—that is necessary to drive deep economy-wide emissions cuts. Even in sectors where lowcarbon substitutes are readily available and cost-competitive, from a political economy perspective, it is not likely to be the most effective tool to achieve long-term deep decarbonization, at least not on its own.
In March 2020, we convened a workshop, Carbon Pricing and Innovation in a World of Political Constraints, bringing together an interdisciplinary group of academic and policy experts including economists, political scientists, energy innovation scholars and policy practitioners. Participants discussed the experience with carbon pricing in practice around the world, challenges, and the way forward for carbon pricing as a climate policy tool, including discussion of environmental efficacy, political feasibility, economic efficiency, and the interaction and integration of carbon pricing with other policy mechanisms. This report summarizes the workshop discussion.
State and Local Decarbonization Policies for the South
Mark Paul & Leah C. Stokes. June 2020.
Communities in the South are coming to terms with their new reality: life in the era of climate change. The region is highly exposed to climate change impacts given its extreme vulnerabilty to increased temperatures and rising sea levels, low levels of climate mitigation and adaptation to date, and high level of inequality (GCRP, 2018; Muro et al., 2019). A recent study showed that as global warming intensifies, economic losses will disproportionately affect the South (Hsiang et al., 2017). While some warming and sea level rise are already locked in, bold action on climate mitigation and adaptation policy now can wean the region off fossil fuels, leading to a healthier, safer, and more resilient South.
In short, the South has untapped potential for economic growth and climate leadership. This report aims to inform state and local policymakers, as well as other stakeholders, about policies the Southern states could adopt to decarbonize and create well-paying jobs. While decarbonizing is front and center, equity is also incorporated throughout; as a more resilient South means not only addressing the climate crisis, but confronting the economic insecurity crisis simultaneously.
Green stimulus, not dirty bailouts, is the smart investment strategy during the coronavirus recession
Leah C. Stokes and Matto Mildenberger. May 2020.
We do not have to use dirty energy that damages peoples’ lungs to power our societies. The CARES Act could have helped protect Americans’ health during this pandemic by moving us away from polluting fossil fuels. Yet rather than supporting clean energy, the law is being used to bail out the dirty fossil fuel sector. If we continue along this terrible path, the accelerating climate crisis will disrupt employment, cause property damage, and destabilize the financial system. Why use the rescue programs from the current crisis to subsidize the industry most likely to cause the next one?
This issue brief examines how the CARES Act was deliberately misapplied to the fossil fuel industry, which was already on the ropes before the coronavirus recession. We also examine how future stimulus funds could be targeted toward clean energy, which would create more and better-paying jobs to power our economic recovery. This approach would not just help us tackle the coronavirus recession, but the climate crisis as well.
A Plan for Equitable Climate Policy in the United States
Leah C. Stokes & Matto Mildenberger. February 2020.
This climate crisis will dramatically exacerbate economic inequality in the United States. Low- and middle-income Americans have minimal safety net protections from the impact of climate change. These communities are more vulnerable to health-related risks, don’t have the financial resources to recover from climate disasters, and are more vulnerable to climate-related hazards in the first instance. And U.S. workers and communities who may face economic costs from the energy transition to a more clean economy don’t have guaranteed access to healthcare, pensions, and the necessary assistance to maintain their dignity and quality of life.
Already, insurers are declining coverage for housing against growing climate risks such as flooding and wildfires. Without equitable climate policies in place, low-income Americans will have to face a double threat. They will be more likely to die in heatwaves, struggle to recover from hurricanes and wildfires, and, without health insurance, face greater burdens from diseases pushing into new ranges as the planet warms. At the same time, they will struggle the most to pay for the costs associated with preventing even worse climate change impacts.
In this essay, we make the case that equitable climate policy is both good economic policy and good politics. We then present specific policy proposals to support the decarbonization of the U.S. economy by 2050, in line with what climate scientists tell us is necessary to limit warming. We follow with a number of economic and social policies that need to be part of equitable climate policy, such as:
Community Benefits Agreements for clean energy projects that ensure communities and firms share the profits from wind and solar farms
Subsidies for clean transportation targeted at low-income Americans
Retirement with dignity or retraining for fossil fuel industry workers into good-paying clean energy jobs
These and other energy transition investments presented in this essay can be structured to support equitable growth in the United States.
