Democratic nominee Joe Biden has made climate change an integral component throughout his platform, even closely tying his plan for economic recovery from the pandemic to combating the climate crisis.
On the other hand, President Donald Trump has doubted the science of climate change and believes that its effects have been overstated, thus not warranting what he considers unnecessarily burdensome regulations on industry that he says could kill jobs and hurt the economy. As such, he has moved to deregulate many environmental protection rules.
In 2018, Indiana ranked second among the states in coal consumption and 59% of its electricity in 2019 was fueled from coal. Renewable sources — including wind, solar, biomass and hydropower — accounted for only 7% of Indiana's energy generation in 2019, according to the EIA.
With that in mind, according to environmental advocates, 15 years is not much time.
The technology exists and that is the trajectory, according to Janet McCabe, but she said it will take an “all-hands-on-deck approach” to speed up the time frame.
“We as a state don’t have a policy or a public plan for moving into clean energy in the future,” said McCabe, a former EPA air official who now runs the Environmental Resilience Institute at Indiana University. “But as a state that depends so significantly on coal, we can certainly expect this plan to have an impact on Indiana.”
