To avoid the worst impacts of climate change, we have to make two big transitions at once: First, we have to generate all of our electricity from clean sources, like wind turbines and solar panels, rather than power plants that run on coal and methane gas. Second, we have to retool nearly everything else that burns oil and gas — like cars, buses and furnaces that heat buildings — to run on that clean electricity.These changes are underway, but their speed and ultimate success depend greatly on one kind of company: the utilities that have monopolies to sell us electricity and gas.But around the country, utility companies are using their outsize political power to slow down the clean energy transition, and they are probably using your money to do it.State regulators are supposed to make sure that customers’ monthly utility bills cover only the cost of delivering electricity or gas and to set limits on how much utilities can profit. But large investor-owned utilities, with legions of lawyers to help them evade scrutiny, bake many of their political costs into rates right alongside their investments in electrical poles and wires. In doing so, they are conscripting their customers into an unknowing army of millions of small-dollar donors to prolong the era of dirty energy.Fortunately, Colorado, Connecticut and Maine passed laws this spring that prohibit utilities from charging customers for their lobbying, public relations spending and dues to political trade associations like the American Gas Association and the Edison Electric Institute. Regulators in Louisiana are considering similar policy changes. Every state in the country should follow those leads.These reforms are crucial because while all corporations in the United States can spend money on politics, in most cases, consumers who don’t approve can take their business elsewhere. Utilities — as regulated monopolies — have the unique ability to force customers to participate.It’s not that utilities aren’t interested in building and profiting from clean energy. Many are doing so, and the Inflation Reduction Act offers utilities extensive tax incentives to increase their investments in wind, solar and batteries. But that does not mean that utilities want others to do the same. They will support a clean energy transition only if it happens exclusively on their terms and at their pace — a stance at odds with the scope and urgency of the herculean task of decarbonizing our electric grid.Most electric utilities view distributed energy — technologies owned by customers that generate electricity in smaller amounts — as a threat to their business. They have tried for years to stop their customers in many states from investing in rooftop solar by rigging rates to make it less economically attractive. They’ve also funded opposition to policies that would speed clean energy.Florida Power & Light spent millions of dollars on political consultants who are accused of engineering a scheme to siphon votes to third-party ghost candidates, according to reporting by The Orlando Sentinel. The ghost candidates never campaigned, but their names appeared on ballots for competitive State Senate seats in an effort to spoil the chances of Democrats who had been critical of the utilities. One of the Democrats had repeatedly introduced legislation supportive of rooftop solar power, which Florida Power & Light has crusaded against for years, including writing legislation in 2021 that would have slowed its growth. “I want you to make his life a living hell,” the utility’s chief executive wrote in an internal email. The legislator lost by fewer than 40 votes. Florida Power & Light has denied wrongdoing in the ghost candidate scandal.Utilities also have also fought to cling to plants powered by fossil fuels as long as possible. In Ohio the utility FirstEnergy concealed $60 million in bribes through a web of dark-money groups to the political organization of the state’s speaker of the House. Before his conviction and sentencing for this instance of racketeering, he helped pass a law that secured a $1.3 billion ratepayer-funded bailout for FirstEnergy’s bankrupt nuclear and coal plants, gutted the state’s renewable energy and energy efficiency standards for utilities and bailed out coal plants owned by other utilities. Audits showed that FirstEnergy used money collected from ratepayers in its scheme.Electric utilities have even opposed policies to hasten the development of desperately needed long-range transmission wires for clean energy, as NextEra Energy, Florida Power & Light’s parent company, spent millions to do in New England, where NextEra generates and sells power from oil and gas.And many utility conglomerates don’t just sell electricity; they also sell methane gas, a serious threat to decarbonization efforts. Many of those gas utilities are fighting tooth and nail against local communities’ efforts to electrify our buildings and using ratepayers’ money to do so. In California, SoCalGas, the nation’s largest gas distribution utility, has been caught illicitly and repeatedly misusing ratepayer money to fight cities’ building electrification plans. In New York the gas utility National Fuel reportedly made its customers pay for advocacy materials directing New Yorkers to oppose pro-electrification policies.The Colorado, Connecticut and Maine laws address these tactics by prohibiting utilities from charging customers for a suite of political activities. Other states and the federal government should go further in two ways:First, they should add mandatory enforcement provisions so that if utilities illegally charge customers for political activities, stiff and automatic fines would kick in.Second, policymakers should, at minimum, require that utilities disclose all political spending. The recently passed state laws won’t stop utilities from spending their profits on politics. The post-Citizens United campaign finance landscape makes it difficult to restrict such expenditures, but it does not protect companies’ ability to spend secretly, which is how utilities like FirstEnergy, Florida Power & Light and SoCalGas have attempted their most noxious influence campaigns.Utilities are too central to the clean energy transition to be allowed to dictate our energy and climate policies based on their profit motives. Limiting their influence gives us the best chance to move quickly and affordably to a safer and cleaner future.David Pomerantz is the executive director of the Energy and Policy Institute, a utility watchdog organization.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

Donald Trump

News that the president has contracted coronavirus prompted alarm, confusion and schadenfreude among Trump supporters More

The first debate between President Trump and Joseph R. Biden Jr. will begin at 9 p.m. Eastern on Tuesday and run for 90 minutes without commercial interruptions. The Times will livestream the event, accompanied by analysis and fact-checking from our reporters. The debate will also be carried on channels including CNN, Fox News, CBS, ABC, C-SPAN, NBC and MSNBC.Chris Wallace, the anchor of “Fox News Sunday,” will moderate the debate. He played that role in one of the 2016 debates between Mr. Trump and Hillary Clinton. The moderator chooses the debate topics. For Tuesday night, Mr. Wallace chose Mr. Trump’s and Mr. Biden’s records, the Supreme Court, the coronavirus pandemic, the economy, race and violence in cities and the integrity of the election. There will be 15 minutes to discuss each topic.For Trump and Biden, the debate comes with different incentives.Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden will walk onto the first presidential debate stage of the 2020 general election with a very different set of political incentives.For Mr. Trump, it is a much-welcomed chance to shake up a race in which he is currently behind. For Mr. Biden, the debate is a risky but necessary step, a close encounter with an unorthodox rival who can and will say almost anything.After complaining for months about Mr. Biden’s “basement” strategy, the debate is Mr. Trump’s biggest opportunity to reframe the election as a choice between two competing visions. The Biden campaign continues to cast the race chiefly as a referendum on Mr. Trump’s failures in responding to the coronavirus pandemic.Two things can be true at once about the stakes of the debate.First, the presidential race so far has been an extremely stable affair, with little disrupting Mr. Biden’s consistent polling lead — not a pandemic, not record joblessness, not mass protests over policing and racism, and not an unexpected Supreme Court vacancy. A 90-minute debate will be hard-pressed to move the needle more than those factors.Second, the debate still represents one of Mr. Trump’s best opportunities to jostle the current dynamic, his first chance to speak directly to an audience of tens of millions of Americans alongside Mr. Biden.With that in mind, here is what to watch during the debate. The Times will be livestreaming the event and providing live analysis.How quickly does it go off the rails?Mr. Trump has always been a showman, and debates have been some of his biggest stages as a politician. He jawbones, interrupts and lashes out in unusually personal ways, and he generally exerts an intense gravitational pull toward whatever he wants the spectacle to be about.He is all but certain to attack Mr. Biden. It’s also possible he will go after the moderator, Mr. Wallace, whom the president has repeatedly compared unfavorably to his father, the former TV correspondent Mike Wallace.What past campaigns have shown is that the first half of the first debate often sets the tone — and the tone of news coverage.Mr. Biden has been pretty clear that he believes that Mrs. Clinton erred four years ago in her debates with Mr. Trump by getting into a back-and-forth argument about character. “She did what every other candidate probably would have done,” Mr. Biden said in January. The resulting debate was an ugly spectacle and, he said, “it all went down the drain.”Mr. Biden wants to avoid that — and he has been stress-tested by advisers not to respond to Mr. Trump’s obvious provocations if they are not central to his own message.“I hope I don’t get baited into getting into a brawl,” Mr. Biden said this month.One wild card is how Mr. Trump’s tactics and antics will play — and how the president, who feeds off the feedback of a crowd, will respond in a debate hall without a large audience.Biden could benefit from greatly diminished expectations.For months, Mr. Trump and his surrogates have distributed unflattering and sometimes manipulative clips of Mr. Biden pausing awkwardly, stumbling verbally or just looking lost. It has been part of a concerted campaign to insinuate — and sometimes say aloud — that Mr. Biden’s mental faculties are too diminished for him to serve as president.This is not typically how expectations-setting works.Mr. Trump has lowered the bar so far — even demanding Mr. Biden take some kind of drug test — that his supporters are primed to expect a blowout on Tuesday. But Mr. Biden, even if he meandered onstage at times, ultimately won his party’s nomination after navigating 11 primary debates.Mr. Biden was memorably knocked off guard by the rival who would become his running mate, Senator Kamala Harris of California, when she attacked him for his opposition to busing decades ago.Mr. Trump has repeatedly benefited in news coverage from an expectations gap of his own: Whenever he tones down his bombast — however fleetingly — some praise tends to come in for a new tone.“Any time he utters a complete and calm sentence, people fall over themselves to call him presidential,” said an exasperated Lis Smith, a Democratic strategist who helped run Pete Buttigieg’s debate preparations during the 2020 primary.Can Trump get under Biden’s skin?Will Mr. Trump successfully goad Mr. Biden into losing his temper? Or will Mr. Biden be able to avoid walking into the trap? More

Yes, the G.O.P. has a structural edge in the House, but it isn’t anything near insurmountable for Democrats.There is no shortage of reasons Republicans are expected to retake the House this year, including President Biden’s low approval ratings and the long history of struggles for the president’s party in midterm elections.But there’s another issue that looms over the race for the House, one that doesn’t have anything to do with the candidates or the voters at all: the fairness of the newly redrawn congressional maps.You might assume that the House map is heavily gerrymandered toward Republicans, especially after Republicans enacted aggressive gerrymanders in critical states like Texas and Florida. Many of you might even presume that this gerrymandering means that the House isn’t merely likely to go to the Republicans, but that it’s also out of reach for Democrats under any realistic circumstances.In reality, Republicans do have a structural edge in the House, but it isn’t anything near insurmountable for the Democrats. By some measures, this is the fairest House map of the last 40 years. More

For once, a presidential Q. and A. was must-see TV. But it didn’t put an end to the summer’s biggest drama.There were many questions at President Biden’s nearly hourlong news conference on Thursday night — questions about Gaza, Ukraine, the campaign, his health, his record.But at its heart there was only one question: Could he do it?That is, could Mr. Biden, who stunned viewers and his party and George Clooney with a doddering performance at the first presidential debate two weeks ago, stand and deliver? Could he be coherent? Could he dispel the talk of age and frailty and decline? Could he beat the doubters who want him to step down from the ticket? Could he look like a winner?On a national TV stage, Mr. Biden answered the individual questions, often comfortably, sometimes defensively, with depth and engagement and flashes of passion. As for the uber-question, the answer was incomplete. He was not the uncomfortable, lost presence of the debate, but he didn’t erase the memory of that version of himself either. He came across as the president he wants to be, but not necessarily the candidate his critics have said he needs to be.Presidential news conferences are rarely must-see TV. But the stakes — heightened by reports that some Democrats were waiting for it before weighing in on whether Mr. Biden should remain the nominee — gave this one the air of a test, if not a last stand.The telecast had the daredevil feel of a live walk through a minefield. The first false step came before the news conference proper, at remarks after the afternoon’s NATO meeting, when Mr. Biden introduced President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine: “Ladies and gentlemen, President Putin.”The president caught himself and recovered. “I’m better,” Mr. Zelensky joked; “You’re a hell of a lot better,” Mr. Biden said. The audience laughed. Anybody can mix up a name once.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More