I would say a watered down CEPP may be worse than no CEPP, as long as the clean energy tax credit package is in at the scale and ambition people have been talking about for months, you're already going to have increased acceleration of clean energy in America.

John Larsen

There will be a limit to what increasingly cheap renewable power and continuously cheap natural gas can deliver with respect to emissions reductions.

When [the 2010 bill] fizzled out, there was no discussion or action on climate after that until after 2012 election, should you repeat that part of the history again, we'll be five years out from 2030.

What I am looking for is a coordinated agency wide response at the executive level that is utilizing every tool and agency at their disposal to address the climate crisis. when [the 2010 bill] fizzled out, there was no discussion or action on climate after that until after 2012 election.

These opportunities don't present John Podesta very often -- the last one was 12 years ago, walking away is just going to completely close that window, maybe before it should have been closed.

It's really hard for the President through executive action to take 30 % off the cost of every new renewable installation in America for the next decade, all of the tax credits, grant programs and other incentives in Build Back Better would make everything else the executive branch has to do easier, as far as getting a handle on greenhouse gas emissions and getting the US on a course to meet its 2030 target.

As long as the clean energy tax credit package is in at the scale and ambition people have been talking about for months, you're already going to have increased acceleration of clean energy in America, there are other pieces of the tax credit package that could be amped up to make up for lost ground.

There's not going to be one big thing that Congress or EPA or states do that just solves it, there will be a few actions that are going to have outsized impact on their own like a congressional bill, but no one should look to congress and expect that's the lion's share of the contribution.

We can't say for sure this will make it a slam dunk for EPA to do all the things they've got to do to get to the target, but it's got to make it easier.

This is a really big deal, it would be the single largest action the federal government's ever taken to deal with climate change.

There's no reason why any utility wouldn't get paid to overachieve, if I do better than 4 % per year, you could actually get paid for even more of doing the right thing. I think between the tax credits and the [ clean electricity program ], it's a no-brainer for utilities to meet these goals.

We estimate that this could close about half the gap between where the US is likely to be and where it needs to be to hit the target.