White House Climate Advisor on Biden's clean energy program
Yahoo Finance's Akiko Fujita spoke with White House National Climate Advisor Gina McCarthy about the details of Biden's clean energy plan.
Video transcript
AKIKO FUJITA: One of the key pillars of the Biden climate agenda has been this clean electricity performance program. For those who aren't as familiar, it essentially incentivizes utility companies to transition to clean energy and penalizes those that don't. Is that still on the table in discussions right now?
GINA MCCARTHY: Well, it seems pretty clear that there are folks that disagree with the clean electricity performance plan. And so we are looking both to continue those discussions, but even more importantly, to look at the many other ways in which we're going to make up for those reductions. So we have a lot of ways to get over the finish line. Look, the president has committed to achieving net zero by 2050, to achieving clean electricity by 2035, and to recognize our commitment we have made on a nationally determined contribution to achieve a 50% to 52% reduction in our emissions by 2030.
This is going to be done. We're going to move forward with the kind of investments that are going to make that happen. And while the CEPP was a really exciting opportunity, there are many others available to us. So no matter how you cut it, there are pathways to achieve these kind of reductions. And we're going to make them happen.
AKIKO FUJITA: So how do you get to that goal of decarbonizing the power grid by 2035 without CEPP?
GINA MCCARTHY: Well, there's already been some tremendous movement among the utility industry to recognize that clean electricity is not just the future, but it's cheaper. So if you look at the rate of transition to renewable energy, over the past few years, it's been extraordinary. So our task is to move forward and accelerate that. There are tax credit opportunities in this package that are going to do just that.
So we have to look at those opportunities and also recognize that in 2020, the fastest growing sector of electricity generation was solar. We know how to do this. Look at the offshore wind. We have permitted in just this short period of time that President Biden has been here. We're talking about offshore in the eastern coast, offshore on the western coast. We're looking at New York and New Jersey. We're looking at the Gulf.
These are opportunities for up to three gigawatts of greenhouse gas reductions and electricity generated. And so we need to move forward. We are not going to be stopped by any one initiative. It is jam packed with ideas that recognize that we have a clean energy future. Just look at what it means to work with the automakers and the auto workers, to come to an agreement that electric vehicles are going to be 50% of our car sales by 2030. Transportation is the highest sector of our greenhouse gas emissions now, not the utility sector.
We can make tremendous progress all through every sector. We're looking at manufacturing and how to make progress there. We're looking at opportunities in our ports. We're looking at opportunities for investments in environmental justice, because we know that the president has made a commitment for the benefits of clean energy and clean electricity to actually be first and foremost benefited by those environmental justice communities.
So we can make this happen in a way that delivers environmental justice, delivers the kind of reductions we need, and provides the opportunities of the future to embed clean electricity as the way in which we grow our healthy, sustainable, and secure economy.
