Election 2020
Tanuj Deora is Vice President, Market Development and Regulatory Affairs at Uplight.
President-Elect Joe Biden has pledged to confront the climate crisis head-on. His "Build Back Better" plan calls for two trillion in spending on clean energy, infrastructure, transit, and more. Climate change is one of his administration's top four priorities, along with the pandemic, the economic recovery, and racial equity.
That has elevated some big ideas, from rejoining the Paris climate agreement, to moving to a zero-carbon power system by 2035, to ramping up deployment of electric vehicles. Still more ideas are being piled at the president-elect's door, with an abundance of experts sharing "The Five Things Joe Biden Can Do" on climate, the "9 Things" even — not to be outdone — the "41 things Biden should do first on climate change." Investors Jeff Tannenbaum and Jigar Shah are collecting others through the CLEEN Project.
These big commitments, and the big ideas and conversations they've sparked, are crucial to restoring America's leadership in solving this global challenge and realizing the associated economic opportunity.
Achieving a U.S.-led clean energy future will provide a prosperous, equitable, more resilient economy, and generate millions of well-paying reliable jobs — particularly for the rural families, low-income workers, and communities of color that missed out on the fruits of the decade-long recovery before the pandemic.