Biden Cannot Declare Victory on Climate Without One of These Policies

In the past few years, a historic shift has occurred in American public opinion: For the first time ever, and across a variety of polling outlets, a majority of Americans say that they want to see the government take serious action on climate change. This shift has accompanied an eruption of climate-related disasters. Wildfires now paralyze the West Coast. Heat waves have killed elderly people in their homes. And record-breaking floods have destroyed farms, shut down cities, and drowned children in basements.

Since he entered the race for his current job, President Joe Biden has stressed the danger of climate change, naming it one of the “four historic crises” that the country faces now. He has promised to zero out carbon pollution from the electricity system by 2035, with 80 percent of U.S. electricity coming from zero-carbon sources by 2030.

These goals are the backbone of Biden’s climate without a realistic, trustworthy plan to hit these electricity goals. There are two different ways to achieve them: the Clean Electricity Program, which incentivizes utilities to increase the amount of zero-carbon power that they generate each year, or a carbon tax, which levies a fee on each ton of greenhouse-gas pollution released into the atmosphere.