Election 2024: The Stark Choice on Climate Change?

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Welcome to Pot Save the World.

I'm Ben Rhodes, and this is our final special episode in the lead up to November's election, where we are looking at what the stakes are for our foreign policy and for the entire world in a Kamala Harris and Donald Trump matchup.

In this episode, we'll talk about the most consequential issue of our time.

Now, a lot of foreign policy can seem pretty distant from our lives, but this is an issue that touches every person on the planet.

It's one issue that we quite literally cannot afford to get wrong.

I'm talking, of course, about climate change.

Now, Climate change rarely features at the top of the list for geopolitics, for foreign policy, or for voter concerns.

And recently, there's even a sense within democracies that voters may be tired of hearing about it or tired of having to make sacrifices to transition away from fossil fuels to clean energy.

But here's the truth.

There's no wishing this away.

Climate change is already here.

It's already driving mass migration.

It's already causing extreme weather events like the hurricanes we recently had here in the United States.

There already are unprecedented temperatures all around the globe.

Now,

no president can solve this issue on their own, nor can any one nation.

This is an existential challenge which can only be met through global cooperation and global action.

But America does have an outsized role to play here.

We are the world's largest economy.

We are one of the world's largest polluters.

And we, more than any nation, can galvanize the kind of collective action that is necessary.

So who we elect in November will have a profound impact on our efforts to combat climate change at home and around the world.

And here's the thing: we're out of time.

The planet is warming.

Kicking the can down the road would be devastating for our children and for ourselves, frankly.

And yet, again, climate change gets surprisingly little airtime or focus on the campaign trail.

There was only one question about it, and it was a last question at the debate between Harris and Trump.

But there are records and plans to evaluate.

The first Trump presidency was a disaster.

This is a guy who has called climate change a hoax repeatedly.

Somebody who pulled out of the Paris Agreement, the most significant global treaty to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in history.

This is a guy whose administration rolled back more than 125 different environmental safeguards.

This is a guy who can stand up in front of a bunch of fossil fuel executives and tell them that he essentially do their bidding as president if they contribute to his campaign.

So it's not hard to imagine what another four years of Donald Trump could bring for the planet.

Well, I'm not a big believer in man-made climate change.

It could be some impact, but I don't believe it's a devastating impact.

You know, the biggest threat is not global warming, where the ocean's going to rise one one-eighth of an inch over the next 400 years.

big and you'll have more you'll have more ocean front property right so obama's talking about all of this with the global warming and that and a lot of it's a hoax it's a hoax i mean it's a money-making industry okay it's a hoax meanwhile by contrast the biden administration passed the most ambitious climate legislation in human history

Now, if you listen to this podcast, you know I've been pretty critical of Joe Biden on some issues, including a lot of the issues we've talked about in this election series.

But But on climate change, we have to acknowledge he did more than any president to invest in clean energy.

It was a big fucking deal.

And yet, even as he made those investments, global cooperation on climate is not where it needs to be.

It's not even what it was when we negotiated the Paris Agreement.

This isn't entirely Biden's fault.

Geopolitical tensions make that kind of global cooperation much, much harder, particularly when they're between the United States and China, the two largest emitters in the world.

So, what do we do about all this?

In today's episode, you'll hear about Kamala Harris's record of taking on polluters in my conversation with Leah Stokes, a University of California at Santa Barbara, UCSB, associate professor of environmental politics.

You'll also hear a perspective from small island developing nations who are bearing the brunt of climate change and what they really need from U.S.

leadership moving forward in my conversation with Ruana Haynes, who's been at the front lines on climate negotiations representing the Caribbean community and the Alliance of Small Island States.

But first, my conversation with Brian Deese.

Brian served as the director of the White House National Economic Council under President Biden, where he did more than anybody to shape the Inflation Reduction Act.

Now, from a climate perspective, This was a pretty unfortunately name piece of legislation.

It made a lot of sense at the time, obviously, to indicate that there are very important things things in that bill that do deal with the cost of living, that deal with inflation.

But the other thing that the Inflation Reduction Act does is make the single largest investment in clean energy ever in human history.

And this is up to $300 billion in tax incentives and investments in things like wind and solar, the clean energy technologies that we need to make here in the United States in order to break our addiction to fossil fuels.

In the Obama White House, he also helped shape the Paris Climate Accord.

So he's a good guy to talk to.

Now, Brian is an Institute Innovation Fellow at MIT.

I asked Brian to give us the big picture from both a domestic and global perspective.

And that started, of course, with laying out the stakes in this election.

Well, they're enormous in a sense that they are obvious, but in other ways, subtle as well.

Look, you've got one candidate that is running on a platform of not only denying the science and the sort of basic physics behind climate change, but also running, basically, sort of cynically mocking the whole enterprise.

And

I think that one of the things that we should take very seriously is that

for a candidate Trump, but also a second Trump presidency, we should really take those words at face value.

And so, not only a disregard for the issue, but actually a disdain for any credible approach to addressing addressing it.

And then on the other hand, you've got a candidate who has a long experience working on these issues, a varied experience working on them from the perspective of national policy as vice president, but also as a litigator and

as an attorney general, and a real vision for how to build on what we've done, but take it further as well.

And so, you know, that means that the stakes for the planet, but also the stakes for our economy are pretty enormous.

Okay, so I want to focus to begin with on both the Biden record and how that might transition into a Harris presidency.

To begin with, let's take the Inflation Reduction Act.

What is the strategy that you feel was achieved through that piece of legislation and where does it stand to date?

Because obviously a lot of it is in the future in terms of additional spending.

We've had a lot of debates in energy policy and climate policy for a long time.

A lot of focus on the idea of how can you make pollution more expensive?

How can you, through pricing or taxes or otherwise,

internalize that externality, as economists would say, but basically make pollution more expensive?

The Inflation Reduction Act was built on a different theory, which was how can we make clean technologies cheap and how can we make them cheap enough to be deployed faster across the economy?

both whether that's how we produce power,

how do we produce more clean power through wind and solar, geothermal, nuclear, but also then how we use electricity and how we use energy across our economy, decarbonizing the transportation sector by making clean alternatives cheaper, decarbonizing the way we live and the houses we live in, the buildings we work in by making more efficient things cheaper.

And so that's the theory.

In practice, the way that it did that in core was to lock in these long-term, in many cases, technology-neutral incentives, public incentives to drive private capital into our economy, into cleaner sources of energy.

And so if you think about the basic question of is the Inflation Reduction Act working, the first question to ask is how much private capital are we seeing going into clean alternatives that can actually scale?

And so

the good news is two years in, we have a basic answer to that question.

In the last two years, we've seen almost $500 billion of private investment in clean technologies, which which for you and I, having worked on this issue in the Obama administration, it's just hard to overstate how significant that is.

We were looking at individual five, $10 billion of investment as a big breakthrough, and it was at the time.

But

the half a trillion dollars represents roughly a doubling of private investment.

And what it's doing is it's going into making these technologies that are low carbon or zero carbon cheaper and deploying them faster across our economy.

All right, I want to get to the global piece in a second, but just in terms of the U.S.

and the energy transition that is taking place and needs to take place here,

what does it do for the scale of the ambition that the United States can bring to the table globally in terms of its emissions reductions, the kinds of targets that we were setting in the Paris Agreement, and how that fits into the global transition.

I mean, obviously, we can't do this alone, but to me, this is such an historic, I mean,

it's hard to think of a bigger achievement of this administration or any administration in terms of an investment in a clean energy transition.

How does this raise the level of ambition?

How could you capture that for people?

Sure.

I'll do it quantitatively and then also maybe diplomatically more broadly as well.

Quantitatively, we'd set a goal that says that the U.S.

is going to reduce its emissions by at least 50% from 2005 levels by the year 2030.

And prior to the Inflation Reduction Act passing, that was a goal, but we had no credible way of saying that we were actually on pace to do that.

If you look at what the Inflation Reduction Act is doing in terms of the deployment of clean solutions across the economy, that piece of legislation alone puts us on track to reduce emissions by about 40%.

And then, if you look at the other regulations and incentives that the Biden administration has put forward as a full package, then we can, for the first time

in history, stand up and credibly say the United States has the policy architecture in place to hit that 2030 goal.

Those are the numbers.

In broader terms, your point is the right one.

We can't solve the issue of climate change without action globally, but we can't move global action without the United States credibly stepping up and saying we not only will set goals, but we have a strategy

to hit those.

And the Inflation Reduction Act

gives us that tool.

It also gives us something else as we think about the international, which is globally, the game is really about how can we make clean technologies cheap so we can deploy them broadly as well.

And the price reductions that come from the technological improvements that the Inflation Reduction Act is driving will have a global benefit.

Because when we drive down the cost of advanced nuclear technologies or we drive down the cost of geothermal technologies here in the U.S., that means where there are global markets, those prices go down as well.

Okay, so I'm going to make a bit of a pivot towards what a Harris administration could do.

But in doing that pivot, I want to bring in that global conversation because one of the things I hear, and I'm sure you've heard plenty of this, Brian, when you travel to places like Europe in particular, is that

the scale of the ambition in the Inflation Reduction Act is welcomed by climate hawks, but that the approach of kind of subsidies and kind of prioritization of American industry

makes people grumpy in Europe.

It could be competitive or redundant to things they're doing.

Rather than a kind of coordinated global push towards a clean energy transition, there's a risk that this kind of sets up this competitive dynamic that could be counterproductive.

How do you take all the good in the Inflation Reduction Act and begin to kind of globalize it in a coordinated way so it doesn't kind of become this

more competitive environment?

But I think we have to step back and say, what is the economic theory behind the Inflation Reduction Act?

Why did we do this as Americans?

And first and foremost, we did it because by providing those incentives and driving private capital into these growing industries, we create jobs and economic opportunity for people in the United States.

And that's not something that I think we should ever apologize for.

And in fact, it's the core policy rationale that we're going to build economic strength by actually building the clean energy economy of the future.

Some of that, to some of our allies, looks like we are being too American-centric, and we're actually going to create a dynamic that is zero-sum.

Whereas we build this clean energy capacity, we wall ourselves off from the rest of the world and make it harder to do that elsewhere.

I think the flip side of that, though, is that actually, in order to solve

the clean energy deployment issue globally, we need to expand scale and capacity everywhere.

This is not a fixed market that is going to shrink over time, and the goal is to try to fight over a smaller and smaller pool.

We need to deploy clean electricity in every jurisdiction in the world.

And in every jurisdiction in the world, the right way to deploy clean electricity is in those countries, right?

We're not going to, for the most part, we're not going to build grid and electricity production for Europe somewhere other than in Europe, right?

So we can harmonize these things.

It's going to take work and it's going to take sort of getting over some of the things internationally that have been barriers to do that in the past.

Well, yeah, so I want to use that to ask about this Clean Energy Marshall Plan, which is your article in Foreign Affairs.

It's something you've talked about.

It's a great blueprint for what a Harris administration could do.

Now we're in this situation where

it's getting kind of harder in some ways because of geopolitical tensions and in some cases because of domestic politics for governments

to act in a coordinated and ambitious way across the board.

What can the U.S.

do

to try to give a shot of momentum?

You know, if Akamala Harris is elected,

how can she draw from kind of your proposal for a clean energy Marshall Plan to kind of globalize all the progress we're making in this country around clean energy?

The analogy to the Marshall Plan was one that initially made me roll my eyes in general.

I still roll my eyes at analogies to the Marshall Plan.

Welcome to the foreign policy community, man.

You always need a Marshall Plan.

But on this one, I think you're right.

But the key insight that I took away from doing a little bit more research about Marshall was that what Marshall and Truman there did was they put forward a plan that was unapologetically pro-American.

We were going to help companies in the post-World War II mobilization that had excess capacity.

Actually, we're going to create markets for them, for the goods that they were producing.

But it was equally generous to our allies at a moment where they needed help solving their biggest problem.

And this idea of doing something that is unapologetically pro-American, but also very genuine and generous to our allies, is to me the insight that I think we should scale now.

And so I think that we could go to capitals, whether it's Delhi or anywhere else

in Southeast Asia and say, look, we're prepared to put real capital on the table to help you scale clean energy in your economy so that it works in the circumstances that you uh you find yourself.

But as we do that and as we put that capital on the table, we're going to bring U.S.

companies and U.S.

innovators to the table to help make sure that they're helping drive this as well.

And

that is an opportunity that would have been hard to do five or 10 years ago when our own domestic industries were not on the upswing.

And it will be hard to do five or 10 years from now if we haven't stepped into that role and that China is really the only major exporting power to be playing that role.

You know, I have had some people say to me, wouldn't it just be easier to just like let China own the clean energy markets of the future?

And we and the Europeans and others could go find other things to do?

Yeah.

And I think the challenge with that, in addition to it sort of not being a reflection of how the global economy works, is that I don't think it's sustainable.

I think that having one country and particularly China dominate a number of these supply chains means that if their focus deviates away from decarbonizing as quickly as possible to something else, then we don't have other recourse to do that.

But in order to actually drive this transition, the U.S.

has to be in the lead.

Not in the lead in terms of its all-U.S.

technology, but the lead in terms of diplomatically using our tools, our economic foreign policy tools, to actually say, how are we going to help the Indian government, for example, significantly increase its rate of deployment of zero carbon energy, whether that's solar or that's advanced nuclear, right?

And does that mean that we have to demand that the Indian government not engage with China at all in those applied changes?

Absolutely not.

But we need the United States to get in that game and get in that game in a serious way.

You can't count on much these days.

No way, Jim.

This is incredible.

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Okay, so you heard Brian mention the Marshall Plan in the context of what needs to happen globally on climate change.

Just to refresh, the Marshall Plan was the U.S.-led plan to essentially rebuild Europe from the ashes after World War II.

One of the most successful efforts in U.S.

foreign policy history, where essentially the United States was able to kick in funding that galvanized a transformation in Europe, a transformation that made the world a much better place.

So what Brian is talking about is how can the United States assemble the different pieces that we have available?

capital to invest, regulations to change the emissions picture, diplomacy to get other nations to come with us, work with the private sector to kind of unlock the kind of finance that has to come not just from governments, but has to be invested in the developing world, both to prevent the development of new dirty energy, also to create new forms of clean energy, but also importantly to help small and developing states deal with the effects of climate change that they can't afford to deal with themselves.

Brian gave us a great overview of what's been done under the Biden administration and how that might be extended globally.

It's a really convincing argument for why pursuing a climate agenda is both an environmental and an economic and a national security imperative, and also why being a global leader on this issue will have huge benefits for the United States.

Geopolitically, this is what the rest of the world wants to work with us on.

The global south doesn't want us coming around just talking to them about Ukraine.

They want to talk about this.

And so this is in our own self-interest in terms of protecting the planet.

It's also in our interest if we want to kind of win more friends and influence around the world.

Next, we're going to zero in on some of the concrete ways that investing in this clean energy transition is already impacting Americans through the Inflation Reduction Act, as well as where there are opportunities to do more.

To talk through this, as well as what Kamala Harris's record in California and the U.S.

Senate shows us, I caught up with Leah Stokes.

She's associate professor of environmental politics at UC Santa Barbara.

Yeah, so I looked at Kamala Harris's record, and not only did she cast that tie-breaking vote for that huge climate legislation, what we call the Inflation Reduction Act,

just two years ago, you know, she actually was the ideas person behind a bunch of that legislation.

So, for example, cleaning up pollution from ports.

That is something that she took on when she was attorney general in California.

She took on the Los Angeles port and the Long Beach port, who were polluting nearby communities.

Clean water, getting rid of lead pipes.

This is actually in the different bill, the bipartisan bill.

But again, that was something that she sponsored legislation for when she was a senator.

She really cares about pollution in communities.

Electric school blesses, again, that's in the bipartisan law.

That was something that she was a champion of.

And there's also this really big $20 billion bucket of money to help disadvantaged communities transition to things like solar panels and heat pumps.

It's called the Greenhouse Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund.

And again, she was one of just five senators who sponsored that legislation.

So it's not just that she voted very critically to pass that law, thank the Lord, but also that it was her ideas that were embedded in that.

And that really dates back to when she was district attorney and attorney general in California.

And she took on a lot of big polluters.

Like just in Santa Barbara, where I live, we had oil spills and she went after them.

There was this big methane leak just a couple hundred miles away.

She went after those people.

So she really is about protecting people from polluters.

A lot of the IRA is yet to be implemented.

I mean, it's a lot of money and tax breaks and

government policy that hasn't been fully followed through on yet because there's a tale to these things.

Now, Trump has said he wants to turn it off.

So again, the contrast is pretty clear.

He claims he's going to repeal it or at least he will not be robustly pursuing it.

Let's just stay with the IRA for a second before you can get any additional actions.

What is, you know, in a Harris presidency, what is necessary to make that law work as effectively as possible in terms of a clean energy transition?

So there are tax credits that are already implemented, but they've only been around for really one year so far.

Treasury actually just released data about how many people have adopted, you know, solar panels and heat pumps and heat pump water heaters.

And 3.4 million Americans took advantage of those tax credits.

This is just everyday Americans in the first year alone.

So every single year that we keep those policies in place, more people can save money on their energy bills, can reduce pollution in their home and communities.

It really matters that we keep it in place.

There's a little bit of hopeful news, which is that recently a bunch of House Republicans sent a letter saying that they didn't to the Speaker, that they did not want to repeal parts of this policy.

And why did they do that?

Well, it turns out that a lot of the money is actually flowing into Republican districts.

So if you go to cleaneconomytracker.org, you can look like, where's all this money going to build like new solar panel factories or heat pump factories or, you know, electric vehicle manufacturing or battery recycling.

And a lot of it is going into rural districts, into Republican districts.

Like, I think three quarters is the number for the Republicans versus the Democratic districts.

And so it actually makes sense for a bunch of these Republicans to keep some of this policy in place, but not the whole package, right?

There's a lot of different pieces to what the Inflation Reduction Act did on climate alone.

And I cannot imagine that the Republicans would protect every single part of it.

So it's really important

that this election be won by Kamala Harris and Tim Walls so that we can keep this policy in place.

And if we lose, hopefully some of it will still be salvageable because there's a lot of benefits flowing to Republican districts.

And if she wins, in addition to kind of, you know, the effective and competent fulfillment of the promise of the Inflation Reduction Act, what do you see as the next phase of domestic climate action that

she could lead, whether it's legislatively or on a regulatory basis?

Where are climate activists and

climate specialists like you seeing the kind of next frontier post-IRA?

Yeah, you know, the Inflation Reduction Act was negotiated with Senator Manchin as the 50th vote.

And that was for good and for bad, so to speak.

I do feel like we're going to miss him when he's gone.

I I was looking at the Senate map, actually, and the projection.

And gosh, it would be nice to have his vote, to be honest, because it's looking a little bit tough.

We'll see how the election goes, how Tester does in Montana.

But it depends a lot on who's the majority leader in the Senate, if Schumer can hold on to that or not,

if you can do new legislation.

That being said, there's probably going to be a tax bill next year because the Trump tax cuts are expiring.

There's a bunch of things that I would have liked in the tax policy parts of the Inflation Reduction Act to be stronger.

Just as an example, and this might sound in the weeds, but it's really important.

There, if you want to get a heat pump,

HVAC system, meaning to heat and cool your home, you can get $2,000 off that system.

And that's great.

And I personally did that, as did millions of other Americans, but

those.

those machines cost a fair amount of money.

And so what we would really like is for you to get 30% off of that install, just like you can get for solar panels and batteries.

That's already at 30%.

And we would also really like it that you could get 30% off regardless of how much you owe the federal government, right?

This is this nerdy thing called direct pay.

And a lot of people worked really hard to try to get that.

We only got it for nonprofit utilities.

We didn't get it for everyday Americans.

And so I would really like it so that anybody who wants to get a heat pump, a solar panel, that they can do that with a federal help regardless of how much they owe the federal government.

And then there are other things that, you know, we got some money for, but not enough.

You know, know, I think a lot of people feel like, well, you did the climate thing.

So we're done.

I wish it was so.

Trust me, I could sleep more.

I have twin toddlers.

Like that would be great for my personal lifestyle, but it is not so.

We need more money for affordable housing that is built.

clean and all electric from day one.

We need more money to clean up pollution from our schools.

There are just these things that we didn't touch at all, really.

Oh, and how can I forget the most important thing?

We also did not get a clean electricity standard.

We really need utilities to have a requirement to move at the pace and scale that's necessary because right now all we have is these carrots and that's great.

But as I predicted alongside some other friends, those utilities don't pick up the carrots that are right in front of them.

Even though it makes the most financial sense for them, for their customers to build clean technology, they are proposing in the case of Duke Energy, the Tennessee Valley Authority, and Southern, massive amounts of new fossil gas plants.

So we need to say, hey, it's not just like an option for you to do the right thing for the planet, for your customers.

It's actually a requirement.

Talk about the contrast between, you know, why does it matter if Project 2025 is going to come in and not only kind of dismantle whole agencies, but obviously the EPA, you know, basically gets completely gets an axe taken to it between the Supreme Court and what Project 2025 would do.

You're kind of almost putting the EPA out of business.

Why does it matter?

What's the contrast for people?

Why does it matter, Project 2025?

Well, we saw what four years of the Trump administration did, and it was bad, but that was an administration that was very ill-prepared to govern.

They didn't think they were going to win.

They didn't really have a lot of super smart, competent people.

They were kind of fumbling along as they, sort of like a bull in a china shop, breaking stuff semi-accidentally.

This is a plan to systematically gut our climate policy in this country.

There was a video released that was kind of a training video for Project 2025, which is these two white white ladies sitting down talking about climate change and how we need to get rid of every mention of climate change from the federal government, as if not talking about it would make, you know, the hurricanes and the fires and the drought go away.

It's a real sticking your head in the sand kind of thing.

But it goes much worse than just not talking about it.

You know, the Environmental Protection Agency dates back to the Nixon administration, and it does everything from keeping us our water clean to our air clean.

You know, this is just bedrock protections for people.

And gutting that would not just be bad for the climate, it would be really bad for everyday Americans.

If, for example, the weather service, the National Weather Service, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration were gutted, how exactly would people know when hurricanes are coming?

Some people joke, and I don't know if it's true or not, that that's a goal of Trump because remember when he was president, there was like a hurricane coming and he like drew his own hurricane on the NOAA map.

They got really mad at that.

That's what we had to look forward to.

Yeah.

Yeah, exactly.

I think if people say it's it's like a personal vendetta that maybe that's why he wants to kill the weather service.

But like, I'm sorry, that's absolutely horrible for Republicans, for Democrats, for Independents, that we would have no public ability to forecast who's going to be impacted.

So

this is a terrible plan.

And what we saw with the first Trump administration is that if you control the executive branch, you get to appoint judges, you get to appoint administrators, secretaries of all these different agencies.

That has a long-term effect.

People blame Biden a fair amount for not doing enough on leasing, let's say, on fossil fuel extraction, essentially.

But what they forget is that he actually did a lot.

The first eight months of the Biden administration, there was no new fossil fuel leasing on public lands.

And then a Trump-appointed judge overturned that decision.

So that's what happens when somebody gets to decide who's on the Supreme Court, who's in the federal courts, all throughout the country.

These people stay in place for years, and it's kind of like a hangover from the administration that really constrains what, what, for example, a democratic government can do.

And one more thing we're going to cover, which is you've looked at public opinion, the nexus of public opinion and climate.

There's kind of a lot of effort, I think, you know, put into making people think it's unpopular to talk about climate change or to take climate action to kind of suggest that the entire, you know, that working class people, middle class people in this country, but also you hear this in Europe a lot too, you know, they're tired of the burden of an energy transition.

What do you actually see in the the public opinion research about public attitudes about climate and how it interacts with other issues?

Yeah,

well, the reality is that fossil fuel companies and electric utilities spent decades trying to block climate action.

They spread climate denial, they said that it's not real, it's not happening.

That has permeated our culture.

And so, a lot of everyday people are confused because, for example, fossil fuel companies put in high school textbooks when I was growing up in the early 2000s that climate change wasn't real.

So, when I first heard about climate change, I can remember this, it was in high school, it was presented as a debate.

Well, correlation doesn't equal causation, da-da-da-da-da.

So, it's not surprising that people are sometimes confused.

But, what has happened in the 20 years since the climate denial heyday is that climate change started happening at an unprecedented pace, and people began to see extreme fires, drought, and flooding.

So, this kind of impact, you know, hurricanes happening in California, like what?

These derechos over the Midwest,

you know, people are waking up because they can see it with their own eyes.

They can see their insurance prices going through the roof.

And so I think that a lot of everyday people understand that climate change is happening.

So, you know, I think sometimes you are going to see opposition at the local level to doing some of these things.

And we really need sort of brave governments to say.

The point of power, the point of holding government is to govern.

We have to make as much progress as possible.

And in aggregate, aggregate, the people are with us.

They don't want to leave a broken planet to their children and grandchildren.

They want us to act on climate.

And that's been a real change in the last, let's say, five, six years than before.

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Okay, so to follow up on what Leah was saying, and to provide just one example, let's look at a Pew Research poll from 2023.

It found that overwhelmingly, Americans want our leaders to do more.

Two-thirds said they want the U.S.

to prioritize renewable sources of energy, and they want the government to encourage it.

Two-thirds said businesses and corporations are not doing enough to reduce the effects of climate change.

Three-quarters of respondents said that they support America having a role in global efforts to address climate change.

Maybe not the numbers that the fossil fuel industry wants you to believe and their outsized influence on our politics may seem like that's not the public opinion that exists, but it is.

So the question is no longer whether or not the American people can agree on whether climate change exists.

We're past that.

It's whether or not our political leaders have the will to do something about it.

And with Donald Trump, we know he doesn't.

We know we'd be moving in the wrong direction.

We know we'd be making a huge gamble with the future of our planet.

I can only imagine it's been pretty frustrating for other countries to try to negotiate with the United States, given the uncertainty of which direction our political winds could blow.

You know, I want to say I felt this pretty acutely myself.

The last two or three years of the Obama administration, we were really proud of all the momentum that we built to get into a Paris Agreement.

to make bilateral agreements with countries like China to move towards clean energy, to try to galvanize resources to help countries that are dealing with the impacts of climate change, and to see Donald Trump just tear that up.

Because, I don't know, he didn't like Barack Obama having an achievement or he wanted to give a gift to the fossil fuel industry or just wanted to tear things down.

I knew when Donald Trump withdrew from that agreement that that was going to send shockwaves out among all of the people, thousands, hundreds of thousands of people in some way who are working on climate change around the world.

So, in order to to get at the stakes globally, I wanted to speak to someone who's been at the table and who represents the reality for millions of people around the world who can't put up with the bullshit of American politics because they are living in places where their lives are literally on the line because of the effects of climate change.

Now, no place is immune from the effects of climate change.

We know this in the United States.

We're dealing with this in lots of parts of this country.

But for some places, particularly small island nations, this is totally existential to the viability of their communities and their countries.

I spoke with Rana Haynes.

Rana is an international climate law and government specialist who has participated in key UN negotiations and been a Trinidad and Tobago diplomat.

She's currently the head of diplomacy, climate analytics, and director of climate analytics, Caribbean.

I think from the outside world, those of us involved in the process are having a bit of PTSD.

We've been here before in 2016.

In fact, the 2016 election took place during a climate conference.

And so we all experienced in real time the impact of a change in administration in the US on the climate process.

I would say

considering where we are,

It is the most critical decade for climate action.

We are extremely behind in terms of where we should be in order to meet the goals of the the Paris Agreement and have a fighting chance of being able to limit the average increase in global temperatures to one and a half degrees Celsius.

So every decision that is taken in the next five years, six years will make a real difference at the end of the day.

And so in that vein, having a drastic change in approach

and engagement on global climate policy, as well as, I guess, implementation and policy direction at the national level in one of the two largest emitters in the world.

You know, it's extremely high stakes for the rest of us.

And there are always countries who prefer to sit back and wait to see where the tide is going and then they will follow along.

In that sense, the US plays a really key role in setting the direction of where the tide is going.

Without the US playing that type of forward-leading, more ambitious role and joining the ranks of the countries who prefer to sit back,

it changes the landscape of what is achievable, at least at the level of governments and in the context of the multilateral process.

And just to drive home the stakes here, I mean, you've written a lot about the burden of climate impacts on small island states, you know, who, as you pointed out in a recent piece, contribute something like half a percent of carbon emissions globally, but often are the most vulnerable to the effects of climate change.

How would you describe, you know, you're in Trinidad and Tobago,

you've been a voice for excluded smaller island states.

How would you explain to our audience what kind of challenges island nations are already dealing with?

So

in the U.S., in Florida, there was recently a hurricane that passed through and did major damage.

I think people are still in recovery mode.

Persons would have died, lost property.

There were all sorts of, you know, terrible photos floating around online about what was happening.

By and large, for the rest of the US, yes, this is concerning, but it didn't really make an impact

on the bottom line.

It didn't make an impact, a major impact on the overall GDP of the United States.

In the context of a small island developing state,

one hurricane can

actually wipe out something like up to 200%

of the GDP of a nation.

So there's no individual that is unaffected.

What we are seeing now as climate impacts ramp up, we're now at about 1.1, 1.2 degrees of warming above pre-industrial times.

And absolutely every aspect of life in island nations is being impacted.

The daily lives of farmers, for example, who are being impacted by drought,

the daily lives of workers who work outside and are being impacted by heat stress.

We are experiencing a level of heat in the Caribbean, in particular, that I have never experienced in my entire life.

And it is very notable.

It's impacting school children going to school.

It's impacting, you know, those who have no access to or less access to shelter, those who may not have air conditions in their homes.

And so

it's an issue that

is

very present with us in Islam of Nations.

When you go to the Pacific, it's even more visceral.

You see there,

you drive in from the airport when you land in Samoa and you see the airport road, the sea encroaching on the airport road.

Every time I go back to Samoa, there's more sea and less road.

And so

it's difficult to describe the scale of the difference of the experience

from a small island lens as opposed to those who are

living in much larger, well-equipped

nations.

Let's focus now on the possibility of a Kamala Harris victory and what needs to be done, because Trump is obviously not going to try to do anything.

And I want to break this into two pieces.

There's the kind of the emissions and energy transition piece, and then there's the adaptation and mitigation piece.

So starting with the emissions.

What needs to happen?

If she wins, what would you like to see her do in the international climate space to bring about greater coordination of a clean energy transition?

In order for us to be able to reach the Paris Agreement goals, if we look at the global level, what we need is actually an investment to the tune of trillions, right?

To the tune of at least probably, according to one study, $2 trillion

annually

out till 2035 or 2050.

And so

a large part of that

needs to be able to stimulate growth and stimulate transition in developing countries because that's going to make the crucial difference.

The U.S.

is a very big player and what they do and how they influence the market is going to have an impact.

But there needs to be more of an international cooperation aspect to that effort.

As it is, if we look at a grouping like the G20, for example, the 20 most advanced economies in the world, world, we know that the G20 is responsible for 80 plus percent of global emissions.

And so regardless of what the US does,

if there isn't a real transformation by the G20 as a collective, and this includes the EU, but it also includes China, Brazil, South Africa, others, if there isn't that level of transformation and that level of effort at the G20 level, we will not get to where we need to be.

So hearing you talk, I mean, one of the things that's frustrating, frustrating, of course, is that sounds like a big number, the trillion-dollar number, but we do find a way to spend a trillion dollars a year on our defense budget, right?

So it should just be noted that the resources exist.

Now, another area that needs resourcing is adaptation, mitigation, support to countries like small island developing states.

When I was in government, it was a very insufficient effort to fund what was called the Green Climate Fund.

Now there's been a focus on things like the Loss and Damages Fund through the World Bank.

What are the needs and what needs to happen to help countries just deal with effects that are happening already in terms of what wealthier countries need to contribute, the countries that created this problem, to deal with the kind of effects that you described earlier?

One of my colleagues famously says,

we should not be expected to borrow our way to resilience, right?

It increases the basic injustice of the entire, I mean, of the entire paradigm, the fact that countries who are not responsible for this crisis, who are being impacted by this crisis, are then expected to borrow themselves to resilience and borrow money that has to be paid back to countries that are largely responsible for the crisis.

there is a huge adaptation financing gap.

And when we look at it, when we look at it, even the adaptation finance that is being made available,

small island developing states are accessing about maybe 2%.

They're not even accessing the limited finance that's there.

Often you have one person that is the focal point for every single fund that is even remotely linked to climate.

And so it is a very, very significant reality that in small island developing states, we do not have the human capacity to be able to

actually access the funding that is even available.

One, and two, most of the funding instruments are not suitable to our needs because they come in the form of loans when, in fact, in small island developing states, what we need to see is concessional and grant-based financing.

Yeah, well, that leads to the last question I wanted to ask, which is kind of about representation and whose voices are in these rooms and what perspectives are informing the kind of global climate action effort.

You know, because when we talk about things like climate finance too, you know, not only are you dealing with people like high-level officials in the U.S.

government or G20 governments, then you're dealing with asset managers and

finance people.

We can all guess what they look like and where they're from.

It seems to me that

you're representative of the people that are on the front lines and dealing with this effort.

You're focused on it day after day, year after after year, in a way that other people are more episodic.

They come in, they're bankers, they're finance people, or maybe they're government officials for a few years.

What needs to be done to kind of have greater representation in the rooms where these decisions are being made?

Well, representation is something that

we could discuss at multiple levels.

So one of the reasons why small island developing states and I think other vulnerable countries have always been very supportive of the UN climate process

is because we do have a seat at the table there, at least at the state level.

We do have a seat at the table.

It's not, you know, it's not a voting system, it's not weighted, our economic strength doesn't come into the paradigm.

And by and large, as much as the UN climate process has been very, very slow and too incremental, it has gotten us to this point where, at the global policy level, we have the vast majority of tools that we need in order to be able to do what needs to be done.

And we actually know what needs to be done.

There is an issue, though.

When it comes to finance,

there is a complete and utter lack of representation in the rooms where the real decisions are being taken.

So, this is where the discussion becomes difficult, right?

Because climate change and addressing climate change, it's not an environmental issue.

It's actually a justice issue.

And when you look at inequalities and where they sit and where they exist and how very difficult it has been to try to address those, I mean, you have to ask yourself

who is really committed to this cause as opposed to who is paying it lip service because it's convenient.

Okay, so that was a very powerful powerful perspective from Rana, which really drives this home.

And I just want to note here, congratulations to everybody, all you worldos who made it this far.

Climate content, I know, can be scary, it can be a little depressing, it can be a little complicated, but it is also really, really important.

And I think all these perspectives brought that home to bear.

I just want you for a moment, you know, to put yourself in the shoes of someone like Rana, who's looking at this crazy election, right?

Who's looking at Donald Trump doing grow podcasts and the kind of insanity of what we've all been dealing with and the kind of doom scrolling that we've all been doing the last couple of weeks.

And this is someone who's literally traveling to places that are going underwater because of a mess that we made.

At the same time that we're having all these arguments in this country about sometimes really small things and sometimes big things, obviously, like the future of democracy is really important.

But sometimes we're arguing about, like, you know, who worked at McDonald's, right?

The same time that is happening in this country, you've got these gigantic hurricanes that have hit places like Florida and North Carolina just in the last few weeks.

And, you know, you would barely know that that is different than the kind of hurricanes that hit this country 10 years ago, 15 years ago.

This is here.

It is here.

It is all around us.

Climate change is happening now.

And this is actually a very good place to end this election series on because some people may be very excited to vote for Kamala Harris.

I know some other people who are thinking, well, I don't know, I don't like the Biden policy on Gaza.

Neither do I.

Okay.

I know some people who just think, well, maybe things don't change that much.

Things change a lot.

You just heard from Mirana, when Donald Trump pulls out of the Paris Agreement, all the air goes out of the room.

The U.S.

isn't at the table.

And just because when we're at the table, we're far from perfect, as you also heard her say, doesn't mean that we shouldn't be there trying to make this better, trying to make this work.

I've got kids.

How could I look them in the eye if I voted for someone?

who was going to tear up efforts to deal with climate change internationally or or I couldn't bother to vote myself.

So if there's one issue, if there's one issue to vote on in this election, and I know it's not a pocketbook issue for people, but it is a pocketbook issue for people.

Because I got to tell you, it's going to cost a lot of money if we don't deal with climate change.

It's going to cost a lot of money already to pick up and clean up after the hurricanes that have hit places like North Carolina and Florida.

This is the number one issue.

of our lives and of our time.

And I say this as someone who cares a lot about democracy, who cares a lot about Ukraine, who cares a a lot about Gaza.

This is it.

This is an issue that should get you to the polls.

Because if we let Donald Trump be president for the four years that are absolutely consequential, we will not get those years back, people.

If that happens, we are in deep, deep trouble.

We're already in deep trouble.

We're in much worse trouble.

But we also have an opportunity.

And again, this is a foreign policy podcast.

This This can be the issue that the United States brings to the world.

If you are tired of the the United States showing up in places with our military, if you're tired of forever wars, if you're tired of arms to autocrats, or if you're tired of the U.S.

foreign policy being defined around the world by the weapons that we're giving to Bibi Nanyao, this is what we should be doing instead.

Ultimately, our government is an expression of who we are and who we vote for.

So I think it's very important to end this election series on this issue of climate change, because it may not be the hot button issue.

It may not get all the headlines, but it's going to be the issue that does more to determine the kind of future we have than anything else.

So, thank you for listening.

Thanks for making this journey with us.

We will be watching the election results with you.

We'll be biting the last of our nails on Tuesday night.

Hopefully, not into Wednesday morning, but we'll see.

Thanks again.

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