Janet Yellen, President Biden's nominee to run the Treasury Department, has made clear to senators that her boss supports carbon pricing, but how that backing translates to policy is unknown.

Driving the news: "I am fully supportive of effective carbon pricing and I know that the President is as well," Yellen said in written answers to Senate Finance Committee members' questions published Thursday.

After booming in 2020, stocks of clean-energy companies are poised to keep going up with President Biden pushing policies favorable to their bottom lines.

Where it stands: Cleantech stocks have blown past their last high in the mid-2000’s, which burst in the 2008 financial crisis. Not so far this time despite the pandemic crushing economies everywhere — and the oil industry.

We've written plenty about the big institutional and political headwinds facing Biden's agenda, so here's one of the tailwinds: falling prices for zero-carbon power tech.

Driving the news: A new analysis looking at one of them finds that utility-scale solar is already the cheapest form of new power generation in 16 states.

Investments into clean-energy technologies totaled more than $500 billion for the first time ever, according to a BloombergNEF report released Tuesday.

Why it matters: Technologies making energy and other material cleaner needs to expand rapidly if the world is to adequately address climate change in the coming decades.

This week brought new signs of multinational oil majors' deepening push into offshore wind.

Driving the news: France's Total is teaming up with Spain-based global power giant Iberdrola to develop what they say will be one of the world's largest offshore wind farms off Denmark's coast.

Venture capital investment into technologies aimed at combating climate change reached a record high in 2020, according to PitchBook, a private-market data firm.

Why it matters: Clean-energy technologies must increase substantially to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions over the next 30 years. It’s also notable that the pandemic didn’t dampen the trend.

There's a certain symmetry to a pair of energy sector developments Wednesday: Solar stocks jumped on a day that also brought hard evidence the oil industry has little interest in trying to drill in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

The big picture: Solar and oil aren't really direct competitors, but both will be affected by the incoming Biden administration's policies and the speed of the global transition toward lower-carbon sources.

A new working paper from UC Berkeley business professor Lucas Davis charts the share of U.S. homes that use electricity as their main heating source.

By the numbers: It went from 1% in 1950 to almost 40% by 2018. The paper, using Census data, maps it through the decades (two snapshots are above).

Historically, America has emitted the most greenhouse gases of any country in the world. But over the next 80 years, the U.S. may account for as little as 5% of such emissions.

Why it matters: Installing technologies to address climate change will, therefore, be most critical in places other than America where emissions’ growth is expected to be higher, according to physicist Varun Sivaram.

President-elect Joe Biden will tap Gina McCarthy, who led the Environmental Protection Agency under former President Obama, as White House climate czar, according to a person familiar with the news and multiple reports.

Driving the news: McCarthy will manage domestic climate policy alongside her deputy, Ali Zaidi, New York's current deputy secretary for energy and environment, as first reported by the Washington Post.