Clean Energy Will Be Key to a Robust Climate and Public Health Plan | Sierra Club

Source: Clean Energy Will Be Key to a Robust Climate and Public Health Plan | Sierra Club

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The five years since 2015—the same year that both the Clean Power Plan was finalized and nations around the world committed to the Paris Agreement—have been the five hottest years on record. And the associated costs of that global heating—both in terms of lives lost and in treasure—are dramatically rising. According to a study published by Lancet last month, more people are dying from climate-related disasters worldwide. In 2019, according to the report, vulnerable populations were exposed to an additional 475 million heatwave events globally, leading to excess morbidity and mortality. In the United States, in 2020 alone over 20 climate-related disasters cost at least $1 billion each. Last year also had the worst fire season on record and the most active hurricane season on record. According to a report by the Environmental Defense Fund, the federal government, including FEMA and other agencies, spent at least $450 billion on weather-disaster assistance between 2005 and 2019.

The EPA’s rulemaking process for pursuing 100 percent clean energy for the nation’s power grid will have to take these new conditions into account and set far more aggressive targets than those proposed under the original Clean Power Plan. 

“The facts are quite different now from what they were when EPA adopted the Clean Power Plan,” Spaulding says, “but also, we now know that we can get much greater emissions reductions from the electricity sector than EPA considered at the time when it adopted that plan.” 

Also in contrast to 2015, market forces are now on Biden’s side. The economics driving the retirement of coal plants and the build-out of renewables versus gas has shifted decidedly in favor of clean energy, even without a federal rule like the Clean Power Plan regulating emissions. 

“Despite former President Trump’s promises to revitalize the coal industry, coal retirements continued apace,” says Dan Lashof, the director of the World Resources Institute. “In fact, electric generation from coal has declined by about half in the last decade. We need to complete that phase-out in the next decade. That’s one of the few areas where the pace of change is consistent with where we need to go.”

While the battle between the Clean Power Plan and the Affordable Clean Energy rule played out in the courts, many states and utilities went ahead with establishing their own clean energy methods anyway. Those market trends, combined with a robust federal rulemaking process for emissions reductions and other green job creation and economic stimulus programs, may finally deliver a viable path to the 100 percent clean energy grid Biden promised in his executive order.