Is Decarbonization Dead?

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For a long time in climate politics, the question has been:

what path do we need to be on to avert absolute catastrophe?

And are we on it or do we have any chance of being on it?

And the big win here in the past couple of years in America was the Inflation Reduction Act: $370 billion of the largest renewable energy investment ever to build the infrastructure of decarbonization, to build solar panels, wind turbines, electric vehicles, and so much more.

Was it as much as climate advocates hoped?

No.

Was it more than we've ever done before?

Yeah, by a lot.

Was it working to pull investment forward?

Yeah, it absolutely was.

And now it's been gutted in the Big Beautiful bill.

President Trump won the election.

and he has slashed into the wind credits, the solar credits, the EV credits.

To the winner go the spoils.

So what path are we on now?

And what does climate politics need to learn from this loss?

Are we just sort of courting catastrophe?

Or do we actually still have a shot?

To try and help me answer these questions, I want to have on two people who were involved not just in the Inflation Reduction Act, not just in the lobbying effort against the Big Beautiful bill, but who are doing really important work on both the modeling and the politics side to try to figure out where the climate movement goes from here.

Jesse Jenkins is a professor at Princeton.

He leads the Zero Lab on campus.

And with his teams, he's been one of the leading climate modelers, trying to figure out how much these policies will actually do.

Jane Flagel is the executive director of the Blue Horizons Foundation, and she was a member of the Biden administration's climate policy team.

As always, my email as reclineshow at nytimes.com.

Jane Flagel, Jesse Jenkins, welcome to the show.

Thanks.

Good to be back.

Thanks for having us.

So, Jane, you worked on the Inflation Reduction Act's clean energy investments, incentives as part of the Biden administration.

So, I think the place to begin is what were the most important parts of that bill from your perspective?

Yeah, so as far as climate is concerned, I think there are two broad buckets of interventions that the Inflation Reduction Act made.

One was the tax policy of that bill.

There was a technology neutral clean electricity tax credit, both for production and investment in clean energy technologies, that was extended basically into perpetuity, like until, well, for a long time.

But what was unique about that was historically we had had these sort of fits and starts of very short-term tax credit incentives for solar and wind that kept expiring and then coming back up for renewal.

And we'd have a legislative fight of should they be extended or not, which is that kind of uncertainty is not an environment in which private capital can make smart decisions about investing in energy technologies.

So the IRA really rationalized the clean energy tax credit scheme by making it technology neutral.

So it's not just solar and wind, it's any zero emissions technology from solar to wind to geothermal to nuclear could qualify.

There was also tax subsidies for purchase of electric vehicles, which accounted for a very significant chunk of emissions reductions for advanced manufacturing.

So, building factories in the United States to build the component parts that make up these clean energy technologies.

So, a series of subsidies essentially for investment and production in clean energy technologies.

That was thing one.

Thing two was a series of grant programs, which are in some ways sort of the charismatic megafauna of the bill because it's like, you know, discrete grants going to discrete projects all across the country, not sort of vague tax interventions that are, you know, unleashing capital.

Give me an an example of this charismatic megafauna.

This charismatic megafauna.

There was a grant program called the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund at EPA that funded really incredible, you know, install solar panels on the roof of a school in a disadvantaged community, which is like...

a great thing to do for lots of reasons.

But if you compare the emissions impact of even the sum total of all of those grant projects to what we anticipate the emissions impact of subsidizing solar power for the private sector to deploy at scale.

It's not even close.

The tax subsidies do way more to bend the curve on emissions reductions.

So Jesse, you did a ton of modeling on the Inflation Reduction Act.

So what were the targets we were trying to hit?

And where were we in terms of whether we were on pace to hit them prior to the BBB?

Yeah, I mean, the basic target we're trying to hit is to get our greenhouse gas emissions to the point where whatever we're emitting is being canceled out by some kind of removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere or other greenhouse gases.

So that's the net zero target.

President Biden set that target as 2050 to get to net zero and then set an interim target of cutting emissions to half of our peak levels by 2030.

Our estimates were that from the repeat project, which I run, were that the Inflation Reduction Act, the infrastructure law that passed under the Biden administration, and then the set of regulatory policies that they also implemented collectively would have gotten us about half of the way.

So it was kind of two steps forward.

Now we're taking a big step back, but we should have been taking four steps forward if we were on track for those kinds of targets.

So, Sol, I want to sell this down.

So, the Inflation Reduction Act on paper would have gotten us halfway to Joe Biden's goal.

The Inflation Reduction Act and the other set of bills were going to be a good idea.

That's kind of full total of policies on.

Bidenism would have gotten us halfway to Biden's goal.

So, then we were actually implementing this.

What matters is not the words on the page, but are you actually building solar panels?

Are you building wind wind turbines?

How is deployment implementation going?

Yeah, solar and batteries have been smashing new records each year since the IRA passed.

And so that's going as intended.

Wind power is continuing to struggle to get back even to record levels that it reached in circa 2020 when we built about 15 gigawatts a year of wind.

That's enough for, I don't know, about 10 million households, I guess, per year.

We are only building about six or seven gigawatts a year now.

So like half of that level.

We have been making pretty good progress on electric vehicle adoption.

And there we have seen a pretty substantial degree of market transformation.

When the IRA passed, it was basically just Tesla.

That was it.

Now we have a pretty competitive broad set of entries, dozens of different vehicles on the market.

Some of those have now reached a point where they're at least profitable on paper, like GM.

That's a key threshold to get to.

And I think just the sort of societal penetration of EVs is at a much higher level now, where probably everybody knows somebody that has an electric vehicle or has seen them driving around.

And I think there's a, there's sort of a long-term indelible impact of that degree of penetration.

So those are going relatively close to on track, basically, with what we were, what we were modeling.

I think the EVs are a little bit slower than intended, partly because Tesla has become a bit controversial and it's not selling as many as they intended.

What happened there?

Yeah.

And then wind has been falling behind while solar kind of picks up a bit of that slack.

All right.

So that's where we were prior-ish to the election.

Donald Trump wins the election.

And great news for climate.

He becomes very close with Elon Musk, who runs an electric vehicle company.

So green shoots there.

You get the big, beautiful bill.

What does that do to that set of programs?

What is gone?

What is left?

And what sort of new problems have emerged?

Yeah.

So, and Jesse should jump in here because he's in the weeds probably more than anyone I know.

But the most significant damage in that bill for clean energy was to solar and wind specifically, where the Republicans were quite punitive, actually, which really shortened the timeline for solar and wind.

Anyone who's tried to build a large-scale piece of energy infrastructure will tell you the work and time to get even to commence construction takes years.

I mean, it's a very long process.

So, what it means is that that tax incentive is no longer sending a long-term signal to the market that there will be incentives for them to build.

Instead, we have this like mad rush to try to get to commence construction.

Okay, so we've just decided to, as best we can, wreck the solar and wind industries going forward.

I mean, they even tried to go beyond that with the initial Senate draft adding in a new tax, not just ending the tax cuts that basically lowered the cost of wind and solar by somewhere between 30 and 50 percent.

So we've just like raised taxes 50 percent on wind and solar, our biggest forms of new electricity generation.

They actually proposed an excise tax on top of that to further penalize wind and solar beyond 2027.

That bit was at least removed at the last minute.

But you can see there was a very strong and concerted effort from a kind of ideological contingent of the Republican Party that ran into a bit of a more pragmatic contingent of the party that was like, hey, wait a minute, electricity demand is growing rapidly.

These technologies are contributing to our supply.

They're keeping energy costs low.

They're driving investment in our districts.

Like we don't want to cut this off immediately.

Over 20 House members, half a dozen senators standing up to defend tax credits.

implemented in a partisan Democrat-only budget bill vocally and repeatedly, multiple letters.

Yeah.

And so, you know, there are factions at play here.

And unfortunately, the ideological contingent won out there.

What is, Jane, the ideological contingent?

I know you were involved in the mobilization around defeating the added tax on wind and solar.

What was even the argument for taxing wind and solar specifically, right?

We will cut taxes on corporations, but specifically, if you want to build wind turbines or lay down solar panels, you face a new tax.

The people arguing for that, how did they try to justify it?

Okay, let me, I think one thing that I have learned throughout this process is that climate politics is inseparable from all of our other politics.

So going back to the election, I think part of what happened here was we passed the IRA on a purely Democrat, it was a Democrat-only bill.

So we live in a world now that you're quite familiar with where When that happens, there is a tendency to turn up the polarization on whatever is in the Dem-only bill, right?

On

the other side of of the aisle.

So I do think, like, this bill was framed as Biden's signature climate achievement.

It's not in some ways surprising that the Republicans wanted to tear it down.

And in fact, we haven't talked as much about what survived, which we should get to.

But before we get into what survived, it's just, so what you're saying, and this is what I saw, but you can tell me if you think it's wrong.

Just wind and solar became culture war, political culture war issues.

And to some degree, electric vehicles as well, which also have their tax credits, the tax cuts for EVs end September 30th of this this year as well, which is even shorter than the initial proposal.

So as the debate went on, that got shorter and shorter.

So the tax credits for wind, solar, and EVs are gone.

Gone.

What's left?

Lots of stuff, actually.

So President Trump, who has a lot of authority in that party, called for full repeal of the green news scam.

That is not what happened.

So I just, I do think that's an important thing because I've devoted my entire life to climate.

That would have been an unthinkable outcome to me, even four years ago, if you had told me Dems passed a Dem-only climate bill.

Trump tells everyone to repeal the full thing, and a significant chunk survives.

So, we mentioned that they tried to sort of rationalize the clean energy tax incentive program by allowing any zero emissions technology to qualify, right?

Basically, any technology that can claim that it is zero emissions still can get this production or investment tax credit for clean energy.

And through the end of 2010, it's commencing instructions through the end of 2033, they can get the full credit, and then it steps down over a couple more years.

So, basically, Republicans just endorsed a decade-long tax credit for carbon-free electricity.

Just not wind and solar.

Wind and solar cannot get in.

Cannot get in everything but wind and solar, any nuclear plant, any advanced geothermal plant.

If fusion works, that'll qualify.

So I've generally found this to be a puzzling part of Republican energy policy, which is, I can almost understand as a matter of culture war, we are for fossil fuel energy and against renewables, clean energy.

But there seems to be a particular loathing of wind and solar, but at the same time, somewhat of an embrace, at least an openness to nuclear, which I kind of get because a lot of environmentalists don't like it.

So maybe the Republicans do like it.

But then more technology forward, less mature technologies, advanced geothermal, green hydrogen, et cetera.

Those have maintained a kind of neutrality in the political war here.

Is that basically accurate?

I think that's basically true.

And I think the reasons for it, so the culture war stuff is one.

I think it is worth noting that part of the reason there was a larger target on solar and wind is because they are mature technologies that are being widely deployed because it makes economic sense.

So those tax credits look expensive as a matter of fiscal scoring, right?

Whereas tax credits for more innovative technologies tend to not look expensive because no one thinks they're going to get built in the next 10 years.

Well, also then, to steel man the Republican position here,

there's a version of it that goes something like this.

Wind and solar are more mature technologies.

They are, by virtually any measure, now competitive with other forms of energy.

EVs are fairly mature technology.

If we wanted cheaper electric vehicles, we don't need a tax credit.

We could just open our borders to Chinese electric vehicles.

Which Republicans are certainly keen on doing, which they don't want to do.

But the argument is basically we do not need to subsidize these technologies.

Why is that wrong?

Having abundant electrons that we can use to fuel economic growth and meet rising demand for energy in the United States, which is happening for for the first time in decades, is a public good.

We subsidize all kinds of energy development because we know that a robust and large and abundant energy system is good for economic growth.

It underpins the entire economy.

So, and it's good for our national security.

So, there, even if you didn't care about climate change, given that solar in particular, solar and batteries are the most rapid way, and in many cases, the most cost-effective way to meet growing demand, there's absolutely a public argument for subsidizing this stuff, even if it's relatively mature, in the same way we subsidize all kinds of things that are relatively mature because they're good for society.

Then, of course, an argument is most Republicans will not deny that climate change is a problem.

Some do, but many Republicans now will acknowledge climate change is a problem.

They'll just argue for a different kind of solution set than Democrats.

If you believe climate change is a problem, then you're subsidizing not just the public good of abundant energy that's affordable, but also the climate benefit.

What is the solution set?

I try to be fair to Republicans on the show, but I have not heard many Republicans arguing for something that I would, that would qualify to me as a solution set for climate change.

So when you say that, what are you thinking?

I mean, insufficiently ambitious for sure, but the IIJA, the bipartisan infrastructure law, actually contained a fair amount of investments in clean energy technologies that Republicans supported.

So clean hydrogen hubs, direct air capture spending, spending on storage, carbon capture, like a fair amount of technology investment on the more kind of innovation-oriented view.

Where it gets much harder is on anything that is like very seriously about deploying mature clean energy technologies at scale or regulatory mandates that would achieve that aim and or restrict fossil fuels.

Yeah, I mean, I think there's a challenge here, which is that what we see from the Republican Party is they tend to support the technologies that are less mature.

And you can argue that that's sort of a rational technology policy strategy.

There's like a case to be supporting innovative technologies as they mature and come down in cost.

And I've supported that case for years.

But there's also, I worry, that the reason they're doing that is because they're not a direct threat to incumbent energy industries.

So what is driving down consumption of gasoline is the adoption of electric and hybrid vehicles.

What is driving down the consumption of natural gas in the United States is the growth of wind and solar in the power sector.

And so when they become large competitive threats, then you have different factions in the Republican Party standing up to defend the oil and gas industry, industry, channeling the advice from donors and politically connected folks in those industries to try to attack their competitors.

You have an ideological culture war element of this that, well, if liberals like these technologies, we have to hate them.

And in this case, unfortunately, I think Donald Trump is much more strongly aligned with the culture war piece of it and probably a lot more susceptible to input from the fossil fuel aligned donors and members.

And that won out over the more pragmatic bloc.

One thing that was part of the whole political theory of the Inflation Reduction Act was we were going to pull in all this investment in factories and clean energy.

And that was both going to generate economic activity, but it's going to generate jobs.

And it did seem some of that investment was coming forward.

So

what did we achieve on that?

And then what do we think will happen to those factories people were planning, to those people who are getting hired?

Yeah, it's a great question.

I mean, there has been more than $100 billion worth of investment in clean energy-related supply chains and factories in the U.S.

as a result of the IRA.

Much of that has already started to get built.

And the EV investment has been huge with the U.S.

out investing China and all other countries in 2024.

Like, this was working.

That's worth underscoring, yeah, in the global competitiveness context.

Like, we were mounting a competitive defense, and now that's being undermined by these policies.

I mean, I do think like the 45X tax credit, the tax credit for manufacturing was sustained, which tells you something about it's broadly popular.

That's true.

But to Jesse's point, the demand pull for the widgets we are manufacturing got totally taken away.

The demand pull being the subsidies for EVs.

The subsidies for EVs.

So, like, actually, Rhodium Group found that U.S.

demand for EVs by 2030, when most of the manufacturing is online, will be less than half of what it was before this Republican bill because of the termination of the EV tax credits and the rollback of the clean vehicle regulations.

If demand totally craters for the products these factories are now being incentivized to produce, we don't need them anymore.

It's entirely plausible that we have now.

And I do think part of the reason 45X, the manufacturing tax credit, stuck around was because people saw it as like very discreetly tied to a tax credit and they wanted to save that tax credit.

But industrial strategy is not just about the supply side.

You know, it's about the other stuff.

This is a place where what happened last couple of months just feels so strange to me.

So Elon Musk becomes so close close to Trump that he seems like the co-president in the early weeks and months of the administration.

When liberal protesters want to target the right-wing coalition's great vulnerability, they begin protesting outside Tesla distributors.

Donald Trump does like a Tesla infomercial on the lawn of the White House.

They still keep all of the policy wrecking the EV credits.

And now, of course, whether it's because of that or not, I'm sort of skeptical.

That's why Musk broke with Trump.

But now, obviously, Musk is on the outs and saying he'll start an America party.

But there almost seemed like this moment where if there could have been one good thing out of the Elon Musk-Donald Trump alliance, it would have been Trump softening a bit on electric vehicles, Musk selling electric vehicles to Republicans.

But instead, it's like the Republican antipathy to electric vehicles was much stronger than the Trump-Musk alliance.

And that's the thing that held.

It also was true that Elon was not advocating for retaining the EV.

Yes, that's why I don't believe that's what shaped their relationship.

Musk seemed perfectly willing to light Tessa on fire.

Whatever else you want to say about Elon Musk's politics, Tesla was America's most capable national champion in electric vehicles.

It was a world-leading, world-beating company.

The only globally competitive company.

But now it has destroyed its reputation among the people who buy its cars here and in Europe.

So when you think about what's going to happen to the most capable American manufacturer of electric vehicles versus the Chinese manufacturers, it doesn't have support from Trump.

It has lost support among liberals here and again in Europe.

And it's getting crushed by competition in China.

And the Chinese cars are good.

Yeah, yeah.

So good, we can't let them in here.

Yeah.

Because we're terrified that it would just take over our market functionally instantly.

If we let them in here, they would be the cheapest electric cars on the market.

That's right.

Yeah.

And so we've just ended this whole Elon Musk, Donald Trump saga with like America in a much weaker position

in one of these central industries we were trying to compete with China in.

Exactly.

I mean, all the talk about how tough Trump is on China, Biden had left our EV system in a much stronger position and Trump and Musk collaborated to destroy it.

Absolutely.

I mean,

beyond how depressing the big step backwards is on the climate side, and this is the other, I think, big lasting legacy of this bill.

There's all kinds of other anti-China provisions that they threw into all the other tax credits that we haven't talked about.

Like you now have to basically demonstrate that there's no Chinese content in your supply chain to get any of the remaining tax credits that persisted.

But you can't compete globally by just throwing up walls to Chinese influence or Chinese competition.

You have to actually have a domestic competitiveness strategy.

And there isn't one right now.

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We've talked about the ways in which this bill gutted wind solar electric vehicles.

What did the bill do?

And what have been other Trump administration moves to actually accelerate the construction of fossil fuel infrastructure to try to help coal, right?

Is there anything on the other side of that ledger?

There's a real wackadoodle coal thing in the GOP law, which is there is now a production tax credit for metallurgical coal, which is really nonsensical on just about every front, not least because if you're concerned about China and/or the domestic steel industry, metallurgical coal is by and large exported, much of which is exported to China.

You want to say what metallurgical coal is?

It's coal that's used mostly for industrial processes.

Not for power generation.

Largely steel production.

So we are now subsidizing American metallurgical coal to be shipped to China so they can make cheap and dirty steel, which they dump on global markets that undercuts American steel producers.

Yeah, I mean, this is by no means the worst thing in this one big term bill, but it is just a glaring example of how backwards the policy is and how much of a corporate giveaway it is.

It's a tiny subsidy.

It's 2.5% and it's only in place for a few years.

So it is absolutely not going to affect any investment decisions to like expand U.S.

metallurgical coal production.

It's just a straight giveaway to whoever owns those coal mines.

And so we're subsidizing coal production while raising taxes on clean energy production.

It's hard to swallow that for sure.

You said earlier that the IRA and the other associated legislation got us to 50%

of the interim net zero target.

Just beautiful language here.

What does the model say now?

Yeah, so our estimates that are under the current Biden-era policies, we're on track to get to about 40 to 43% below peak emissions levels.

Now we're probably going to be on the order of 20 to 24 percent below by 2030, and maybe closing in on 28 percent by 2035.

So cut about half.

Yeah, so cut about half of the progress that we've made.

Okay, that's actually a helpful thing.

And can I actually say one thing here without repeating talking points that sometimes climate deniers and delayers use?

It is absolutely important that the U.S.

reduces its emissions very rapidly.

It's a moral imperative.

It's important for demonstrating to the world that a developed economy can decarbonize without major sacrifice.

That is important.

That leadership is important.

And the U.S.

is going to be like 13%.

of emissions.

All of the emissions are going to come from non-OECD economies that are developing.

So one way to think about the U.S.'s role in addressing climate is to actually take a step back and think like, it's not just about us decreasing our internal emissions as rapidly as possible.

That is an important piece of it.

But the investments in the innovative technologies that are going to represent 40% of the global emissions reductions, we now have a policy framework in the U.S.

for those more innovative technologies where we have an opportunity to actually lead in innovating, building, and deploying those things, and importantly, diffusing them internationally.

So like, I get a little

about the modeling anyway.

I mean, I love Jesse and it's important, but like,

I get a little, it's also Mr.

Model over here.

Yeah, like, okay, enough.

But, but I do think in debates about democratic politics and strategy, there's been a lot of conversation about impulses of the coalition toward maximalism.

And climate has this thing where it has been framed as a physical scientific problem where there are hard limits.

If we do not fully solve the problem and get to net zero emissions or get there by some deadline or in the next 10 years, if we don't keep to one and a half degrees, the planet's going to fall off a cliff.

That is A, scientifically incorrect.

It is true that there are uncertainties in the climate system, but every degree of warming, every fraction of a degree of warming that we don't cause matters.

It matters a lot for the risks of climate change.

And I kind of think that there's a way in which we framed this such that it encourages that kind of impulse among the Democratic Party to sort of say, it's all or nothing.

Like progress is not worth considering because we have to solve this problem completely in the next five years, or the planet is doomed.

That is just not true.

And that also contributes, I think, to a mindset that, well, we've just suffered this big political loss.

It's a truly substantive step backwards.

Some people interpret that, well, now we're done.

Like, we've lost.

It's over.

Like, there's nothing we can do.

We're going to run out of time.

And that's not how it works.

Let me try to get at how I understood the targets, because you're, of course, right that every degree matters.

There is no on-off switch for climate risk.

But the way that this has been talked about almost universally within the climate movement, what I understood Biden's net zero targets to mean, what I understood all of your modeling to mean, is that the scientific community, however you want to define that, has looked at all of its models, looked at all of its research.

and described zones that are of

really frightening levels of climate risk.

No, that's actually not what the science says.

And it's a huge

communication failure.

If that's a communication failure, it sounds to me a little bit like, I can't tell the difference here between every degree matters

and

we have been scaring you all unscientifically for decades in order to get you to move faster, but now that we're moving slower, don't worry too much.

We were justn't scaring people with that kind of rhetoric.

I mean, so the science is very clear.

Get there as fast as possible.

We're already seeing dangerous climate change around us today.

So the idea that there's sort of some safe zone and some dangerous zone and there's a threshold between the two is just not scientifically true.

And the IPCC has never said that.

There's no consensus in the scientific documents that frame it that way.

What they've said is that every degree involves increasing risk.

And that's true.

And so we have a sense of urgency.

We want to make as much progress as possible as rapidly as possible.

But that's what the science says.

And the as possible part, that's what politics and technology and society have to determine.

And there's no science science that says what that is.

That's all us trying to hash this out and muddle through as best we can.

Well, there is social science.

Well,

it's the war.

Well, give me the social science perspective, Jane.

The way that I've been thinking about this lately, because all of what Jesse said is right.

And one of the reasons that I remain very anxious about climate risk is because there is a lot of uncertainty in the climate system.

There are things we don't yet understand.

While it is true that our emissions trajectories seem to be improving relative to what they thought thought we would be, and I can say more about that in a minute, how the climate will respond to those emissions and importantly, what the potential for positive, which are actually negative feedback loops in the climate system might be or tipping points, which is another set of concerns, there is a lot of uncertainty about those things and it's scary.

So like, and we don't know, but the point is that we don't know

where they are.

So like, I've been thinking about it as like a race between feedback loops, kind of.

It's like a race of like the positive but bad feedback loops in the climate system and the feedback loops that we've been trying to cultivate politically where you're driving down the cost of technologies building political will and that's the problem when you said a minute ago i want to make sure we don't forget this that

We are seeing somewhat better outcomes than we might have feared at the levels of warming that we're currently experiencing.

Just expand on that because I think most people haven't heard that.

Yeah, what I actually mean is not that the impacts are better than we thought.

It's that our emissions themselves are not as high as we predicted them to be.

That's largely because we've seen such rapid cost declines in these technologies and wide-scale deployment of these technologies.

The world is decarbonizing faster than we thought that it would.

But the climate is not responding in the ways that we predicted that it would.

When you say the climate is not responding,

you're referring to the fact that...

things have been extraordinarily hot.

Yeah, things are warming much more rapidly.

And this is where you got to get Zeke on the show, but there's lots of people.

Zeke House father, who's an excellent climate modeler.

Yeah.

So like we're trying to figure out what's causing that more rapid warming climate response.

But the thing that we can definitely control is bending the emissions trajectory down, which we've been more successful at than we thought we would be.

All right.

So there's another then dimension of how the world is changing that seems important here.

So Jesse and I used to talk a lot about the basic theory of decarbonization was we're going to electrify everything we can possibly electrify.

That's going to mean we need a lot more electricity.

We're going to hopefully generate that electricity using clean sources, and then we're going to lay down a bunch of transmission lines to get that electricity where it's going to need to go.

When people modeled how much electricity we would need, they were thinking about the trends as they existed in 2015 and 2018 and 2020.

But now AI has become this absolutely massive consumer of electricity.

So

how has that changed the amount of electricity we are projecting that we will need in the next five, 10 years?

Our latest estimate is when we account for the sort of reduced electrification due to the end of these tax cuts for heat pumps and for EVs and other things due to the Republican tax bill and the addition of data centers and AI to our forecasts.

We're expecting electricity demand to grow at a sustained rate of about 2% per year over the next decade.

That's enough to increase it by about 25% through 2035 from current levels.

That's a lot of additional electricity.

So that's like more than our entire nuclear fleet worth of additional generation.

No, that's all demand growth, of which AI is probably about a quarter of that.

And so it's big.

It's an added trend.

And it's increasing the challenge that we face in the power sector when it comes to decarbonization, which is twofold.

It's to both meet all of that demand growth with clean electricity sources so we don't dig a deeper hole, while simultaneously reducing our reliance on fossil fuels for power generation.

We're still going to do that, but not as much as we thought.

In fact, our estimates are that we're going to lose about a nuclear fleet's worth of clean generation that would have been added if we'd sustained tax cuts for wind and solar through 2035.

That goes away.

However, we're still going to see wind and solar meet most of that demand growth, probably all of it on net.

It's just that we're not going to eat as deeply into our existing coal fleet.

So we're going to have to go to the bottom.

And it'll be more expensive than it would have been if we had retained the credits in the IRA.

We're basically taxing our cheapest and most widely deployed energy supply.

The one other thing about the demand, though, that's worth noting, that's different about the sort of broader economy-wide and electrification demand is the AI demand is going to happen fast.

Like that, that is like

nearly localized

consumption of like a city scale in one spot, as opposed to EVs, which are diffused over wide areas.

So it's a particular challenge for the grid, particularly the transmission and distribution grids.

I know people who are big nerds on energy, not as big as you, but the big, who tell me that they are worried now about the grid being able to hold up, that they are worried in the next five, 10 years about outages, about blackouts, about different kinds of grid failures, because we're adding so much of such a different kind of electricity demand.

How do you think about that, that interaction between the grid we have and the energy we're about to need?

That's certainly a risk.

I mean, we're going to see demand growing rapidly.

If we can't grow supply rapidly enough, then the risk is twofold.

One, energy prices are going to go up because supply is not keeping pace with demand.

And the risk of outages goes up because we might have, you know, sort of, might have the sort of normal demands met.

But if things go out of sample, right, we get an extreme heat wave or an extreme cold event or something like that happens, we have far less slack in the system to absorb that if we haven't added enough new supply.

What the Republicans have basically done is ensured that we're going to deploy less new electricity, that the new electricity we deploy is more expensive, and that because of that, we rely more on existing coal and gas plants that weren't otherwise used.

So we're going to be paying more for new clean electricity and paying more to use dirty old power plants and raising the risk that we're not able to keep up with demand growth, all because we've raised taxes on the most important sources of new electricity.

You gestured at this a minute ago, but we've been talking a lot about the effect of all this on decarbonization.

What about the effect on the energy bills people pay?

Yeah, I mean, this is really quite brutal.

I don't know if I have the numbers on the top of my head, but there have been a bunch of analyses that large electricity buyers and others have done, independent analysts, of the impact on electricity rates associated with repeal of the IRA.

And they are significant and they vary across the country.

But in some cases, I think it's like.

It's on the order of like 15% on average, a 15%

increase in retail bills.

But of course, that can be 2% in some states and 30% in other states.

It's quite substantial.

I mean, it's really quite bad.

And we're in a moment, as you know, where affordability and cost of living is quite top of mind for the purpose of supposedly for the president, but also for everybody.

The other thing that's going to happen, though, is we're, because we're deploying less electric vehicles, we're going to consume more gasoline nationally and diesel, and that's going to drive up prices at the pump, too.

The estimates are that could be on the order of a 5% increase in gasoline prices.

So another way to think about it is that Republicans just voted for a 5% gas tax, right, by slowing the deployment of EVs, right?

And so none of this stuff makes good.

economic sense, even if you don't care about climate, you know, especially if you care about the affordability challenge.

And so I do think it's going to exacerbate something Jane and I have talked about a lot.

Like the next wave of energy politics, I think, is going to be centered around affordability and the rising stress of meeting energy bills.

Our estimates are from the repeat project that energy bills will go up by about $280 per household per year in 2035, again, with a lot of variation across households.

That's like a 13% increase in how much we pay for energy, both utility bills and gasoline and heating.

Anything, Jane, about the politics of affordability here on the Democratic or or climate-concerned side?

Because there's always been a tension.

On the one hand, you want to care about affordability, right?

You want energy to be affordable for people who need it.

And on the other,

if you are trying to phase out a bunch of fossil fuel infrastructure, that's not just a relentless race for the cheapest energy possible.

You are making energy.

on the margin more expensive by trying to phase all this out and move us on to renewables.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, the politics of those things are bad and brutal, and we should be very honest with ourselves about this.

I mean, one of the lessons going into the IRA, and I think coming out of it, is that there is a mythology that there are a silent block of climate voters that represent the majority of the American public who are willing to sacrifice in the name of climate.

And while I may wish that to be true, it is obviously not true.

We have run the experiment many times now.

I think for solar, wind, and batteries,

the most important thing we can do going forward if we take affordability seriously and we take climate seriously is remove all of the non-market barriers to deploying this stuff as rapidly as possible everywhere.

And that's going to be tough for the environmental.

There are very significant challenges around planning and transmission planning and siting.

We just don't really do it well.

There are huge issues with permitting that you will be not unfamiliar with, both at the federal level and frankly, a ton of state and local.

I mean,

you have renewable energy projects fighting at county commissions everywhere across the U.S.

and often losing.

And you have localities and counties just banning the building of clean energy projects.

So here's a frustration I had with the Biden administration.

I would talk to people in it.

You were in it.

We didn't have this conversation that much, but I had it with your colleagues.

And they knew all these problems.

The only permitting reform they ever backed

was this sort of half-hearted backing

of Joe Manchin sidecar deals

that was not their ideal permitting reform and was, of course, somewhat poisoned in the eyes of progressives because it was what Joe Manchin wanted and it would clear out way for this pipeline and so on.

But they never, and frankly, Democrats in Congress really didn't propose, this is what we think the ideal permitting system

to accelerate clean energy deployment would look like.

If you were writing that bill, Jane, what would you write in it?

Well, I think one thing to say is that Texas is quite a good example of where this has gone reasonably well.

So, just looking at Texas, if we're to take a couple of lessons here, one thing is that Texas, unlike many other markets in the United States, has done very proactive transmission planning.

So, they had these, what was it, the CRES, cleaner renewable energy zones.

And they did it, by the way, way, under George W.

Bush and Perry.

So, like, so that's that.

We should be doing that across the country, which is basically saying, like, we know where the renewable potential is.

We don't need to wait for a developer to come and say, Hey, I'd like to connect to the grid.

Just build the big highway out there and let people connect the on-ramps.

And, you know, and that's what they did.

And it worked very well.

So, basically, they created the transmission infrastructure before they built the energy.

Exactly.

Yeah.

There's also, I think, easier interconnection processes, which is getting more attention now.

There are more than a thousand gigawatts of clean energy projects.

I mean, maybe they're not all real, but they're waiting to be connected and cannot get connected.

And we haven't even really done the work to fully diagnose the problem, but a part of it is just automating the application process.

Let's slow this down.

Every energy wonk talks about this endlessly.

I don't think it makes any sense when a normal person hears it.

When we are talking about the problems in these interconnection cues, what are we talking about?

Basically, if you want to connect to to the power grid, because the physics of the power grid is complicated and it's all connected and we don't want the grid to ever fail, they have to basically run a study to make sure that under any conditions that you're connected to the grid, you're not going to cause a problem.

You're not going to cause something to blow out and, you know, some cascading failure.

And right now, those studies are meticulously done by individual, highly skilled power engineers who are in short supply.

And they can take years.

More than the average time is more than three years.

Which is just insane.

Could chat GPT do?

Chat GPT could not, but a chat agent could run all the simulations and then a smart power engineer could assess them at the end of the day, right?

Like we can make these limited skilled positions superpowered with AI.

And in fact, that's exactly what's happening now because this has become such an issue just recently.

I do think there's a lot of like politics of why this hasn't been solved because basically the incumbents in the industry like having high barriers to entry to new competitors.

But as demand has started to grow rapidly, as capacity prices, prices, you know, to bring on new electricity spiked in one of the biggest power markets in the country, and that's driving now 20% rate hikes in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland, it's become very politically salient.

You've got Governor Shapiro in Pennsylvania like suing the grid operator to be like, hey, do a better job.

And you've got large data centers being like, hey, we'd like to connect in three months, not in three years.

All of a sudden, now that they've got this pressure, the grid operator is like, oh, actually, we could do this in three months.

So we could be doing this much faster.

We should be.

And I don't frankly think we should stand for anything longer than a few months to complete that process.

So that's one thing.

Also, just like straight up permitting issues.

I mean, one advantage Texas does have on this front is they have basically no federal land.

Yeah.

So that is helpful on permitting.

But in general, they just have much lax or kind of, you know, friendly to industry regulations on permitting new energy projects in Texas.

And that certainly helps.

They also have, and this is like well beyond the bounds of my expertise, but the structure of their particular electricity market tends to be much friendlier to new entrants and building a new generation.

Highly competitive and easy to get into the market, basically.

But I think what's frustrating to me, candidly, is like we have ample evidence now.

Many of these are mature technologies that we both say as the climate movement, these are the cheapest and easiest things to build.

And then when it comes to getting serious about why it's not happening at the rate it needs to happen.

It does raise some difficult questions for our own coalition around balancing conservation objectives and community engagement processes with our decarbonization goals.

And for that reason, I think there's just been a lot of hesitancy around leaning in on this stuff.

And if we're being honest, like any deal that happens federally on this stuff is probably going to have to apply not just preferentially to clean energy technologies, right?

It will probably be like a truly all of the above permitting regime.

But the thing is, If you look at currently all energy projects in the U.S.

that have competed environmental impact statements under NEPA, for instance, over the last decade, clean energy dominates fossil projects.

Like it would almost undoubtedly advantage clean energy over fossil.

Yeah, just in the power sector, 95% of the new capacity we're adding to the grid right now and over the next couple of years is wind, solar, and batteries.

95%.

And so just making it easier to build, period, will structurally advantage building clean energy because that's most of what we want to build.

Climate change is an emergency and we have to solve it in seven years.

And you think the primary way to do that is to block all fossil infrastructure, why would you take that deal?

Yeah.

This is why I think the misunderstanding of the climate problem and the science of the problem has been really problematic for this kind of agenda.

So I want to slow down what you just said though, that you're saying that the climate movement sort of trained itself on the idea that the thing we have to do is keep the dirty energy in the ground.

And stop all new fossil infrastructure from being built because that would dig us a deeper hole and lock in these assets.

And so proposals that would make it much, much easier to build energy of all kinds, even though it would disproportionately lead to clean energy being built sort of runs afoul of that intuition that there is i always saw this in the the fight over the mansion the various mansion bills there was much more activation around like this one big

pipeline than there was excitement over the much bigger and total emissions impact changes to transmission line permitting and siting and and and authorities yeah but i want to hold here on the the biden administration for a minute what you just said a minute ago is probably right that any big deal would have had to have been in all of the above deal because you would have needed Republican votes given the structure of Congress.

But that's often true at the end of a process.

There could have been a proposal on this is what we would like it to look like.

This is what we think progressive or liberal or democratic permitting reform would look like.

And yes, now we need to get into the negotiations and there's going to be horse trading and concessions.

How come I never saw that?

I think there were very smart people working very much behind the scenes, but I think there was a real fear.

I think, frankly, probably a misguided fear, although I understand why people had it, that sticking your neck out on this publicly in any way as a self-proclaimed climate champion, you would be tormented basically if you did this.

And

you might lose funding.

And if you're an environmental organization, you might be viewed as an enemy of environmental justice.

And that's brutal.

Like that's a deeply unfun position to be in.

And we haven't yet, I think it's a reflection of the fact that we have not yet successfully built an environmental or a climate movement that creates the permission structure or incentive to really lean in on this stuff.

I mean, I mean, like you've written about this, Ezra.

I mean, the environmental movement that provided most of the horsepower to date for climate politics and climate policy was built to stop bad stuff, not to build good stuff.

And there's been a recognition of that for years.

I mean, Bill McKibben, who is a big proponent of the, you know, the sort of maximalist approach in many ways to climate politics, also recognizes that the only way we solve the problem is to build lots of stuff.

And he's trying to figure out how to activate people around, you know, coming to county commissions and fighting for wind farms or solar farms now, right?

But this is a big shift for that kind of political coalition.

And it's going to require basically cleaning the slate and starting from scratch in many ways to build institutions and processes that are fit for purpose.

And that's going to remove some of the key tools that environmental groups have been and are still using to stop the bad stuff.

And that's just a really difficult coalitional politics to navigate.

So I think you're right to like finger this is the area where the Biden administration fell short in proposing something.

Even to date, congressional Democrats have not proposed a comprehensive pro-abundance energy permitting reform proposal that could be used to anchor a further discussion with Republicans going forward.

And I think they should.

Let me grab two other pieces of that.

So one, which has come up a few times here, is the planning capacity.

I think oftentimes people hear these sort of arguments for pro-energy abundance permitting, and all they hear is a deregulatory dimension of it.

In all of my reporting on this, there need to to be more bodies and capacity.

There's like the question of various kinds of environmental reviews, which both have, which both raise a question of do we need such intensive environmental reviews on things that we know to be clean energy, but also raises a question of do we have the people needed to create and then respond to all the environmental reviews ping-ponging back and forth from the states and the government and so on.

How about that dimension of it?

What would it look like to add state capacity to the planning functions and implementation functions that allowed these things to get built.

To be fair, the IRA did include actually a billion dollars of enhanced funding for all of the agencies involved in NEPA review.

Did that survive?

Well, it was spent under the glass several years.

So ideally, that would be like an ongoing appropriation, right?

But that's just one piece of this broader mess.

I mean, my view of this is that we should be thinking about creating a one-stop shop process for all federal approvals required for these pieces of key national infrastructure.

And that process should have a finite length, and it should not necessarily be a thumbs up decision every time, right?

But as long as it's a clear, short decision and it is appropriately staffed to do that job well, then industry can go in and make the best case for the project and get an answer pretty quickly.

And if the answer is no, they can pivot to the next project.

And so it's not that we need to disregard all environmental impact, it's that we need to make these processes streamlined, centralized, and fast so you can get a thumbs up or thumbs down decision that can't be dragged out in court for 50 years or 30, you you know.

This is what, like the Department of Commerce creates a strategic infrastructure agency.

Sure.

I mean, we didn't electrify the country to begin with by just tweaking existing regulatory institutions.

We created whole new agencies, created publicly owned utilities.

We created, you know, rural electrification loan programs.

Like we have to be that creative if we want to be building at scale a new set of infrastructure across the country.

Like the like the Department of Defense today announced a quite muscular industrial policy intervention to basically like take equity, meaningful equity stakes in a domestic critical minerals company.

Yeah, to produce rarers for electric motors and defense operations.

There's a version of this agenda on permitting, on planning, and industrial policy that is actually not deregulatory, that is really about a much more muscular and centralized state.

I mean, look, I worked in the White House.

I think.

Like, I used to be of the view, like, oh, hire more people to like have more state capacity to like do a better job on the, if you do not have the political permission structure, you could just have a lot of people do block.

Like it doesn't, it actually doesn't matter.

So that actually is the core of the problem.

I mean, look, yeah.

Look what they did for the Chips, you know, Act, like trying to build these semiconductor fabs is they recognized that like they weren't going to get their permits done on time to actually get built.

They were just like, we're just going to reorient this stuff and try to do it very fast and waive a whole bunch of things.

Yeah, they exempted it to get things done.

They exempted it from the National Environmental Policy Act.

Exactly.

If we think it's important as a national priority to build more energy infrastructure, to have cheap, affordable, clean electricity to power economic growth, to power the industries of the future, we're not going to get there with the status quo.

So it's 2025.

There's going to be a midterm election next year.

It is very likely, or at least very plausible, the Democrats win the House.

It is less likely, but not totally implausible that they win the Senate, though that would be quite hard.

Rough math.

But in a world where Democrats have a lever of power.

And so that they're now, if the Trump administration wants appropriations, Speaker Arkeem Jeffries has to sign off on it.

Before we even talk about like next time Democrats wield unified power,

what should be on their agenda for 2027?

Okay, I think as a general matter, kind of even leaving the electoral stuff aside, like if we just took a step back and said, what are the most important things to do in the next few years?

Because there's ways to make progress on all of them in most political contexts.

You're just not going to get exactly what you want.

Thing one is remove non-market barriers to wide-scale deployment of the commercial clean energy tech.

I think that a permitting bill needs to be a huge priority of the climate movement.

That's a thing we've always thought could be a bipartisan.

There would be things things liberals don't like in it, but you can imagine a divided government doing totally

almost only, actually, in a way.

Like, I, but I think the intra-coalitional politics within the Democratic Party on this are potentially going to be tough.

And the climate movement needs to figure out where they want to land on this.

Because if you actually care about deploying clean energy rapidly and at scale, we have to do this.

There just is no question.

So that's thing one.

Thing two, in my view, is the sort of deployment-led innovation agenda.

So, roughly half, probably less, of global emissions reductions that we're going to see are going to come from not renewables and electric vehicles, all the other stuff that's not yet at commercial scale.

The U.S.

is remarkably good at inventing new technologies and demonstrating them.

And, like, we're trying to get better at deploying them too.

So, that's things like technologies in the power sector that generate electricity that are not solar and wind, like advanced nuclear power or geothermal or carbon capture or whatever.

I think there's an innovation agenda on that that could garner bipartisan support.

The third pillar, I think, is how do we get serious about diffusing all of these technologies from OECD to non-OECD economies?

And even there, I mean, look, what's happening with development funding?

A lot of that is.

clean energy for economic development.

So what's happening to development funding as a matter of U.S.

politics is deeply disturbing for many reasons.

But I do think there may be some opportunity on trade.

We'll see, to better integrate climate into our trade policy.

And I think the U.S.

is going to be more muscular in its kind of approach to economic statecraft as it relates to energy and supply chains, whether that's countering the rise of China in other countries or whatever.

But you'll see that third pillar is not what people typically think of when they think of international climate action.

What I'm proposing is something that I think could happen even in a world where it's not run entirely by Democrats.

I mean, I think a long-term tax credit, an investment tax credit on the order of 10% for all new carbon-free electricity beyond the ones that are less mature and get the higher level currently would make sense from a public policy perspective, right?

I mean, there is a public good value to having more and cheaper energy.

There's a public good value for that energy being cleaner.

And if we're not going to subsidize it and we're not going to penalize the dirty stuff, it's not going to be provided at the scale that we want.

But that's a much smaller and much less expensive subsidy than the one that was implemented under the IRA.

I don't think we're going to get back to that regime where we're basically covering half of the cost of a wind or solar farm for the next decade.

One of the areas that I'm most concerned about beyond climate of the impacts of this bill is that it has basically upended the electric vehicle and battery competitiveness strategy that was implemented over the last several years in a pretty thoughtful way to try to counter the rise of China, which is just utterly dominating global markets right now for electric vehicles.

We were just at the point where we were starting to see major investment in the U.S.

battery supply chain and electric vehicle deployment.

We were seeing new models, you know, a more competitive market, and our electric, our automakers sort of investing in a real strategy to be competitive in that space.

And if you look globally at the future of the auto industry, it's all electric and autonomous.

And if you want to do autonomous vehicles, you also need them to be electric for the most part.

They have to have large enough batteries and onboard power infrastructure to run all the computers and sensors that you need to run an autonomous vehicle.

And China is all in on that stuff, right?

Its entire market is devoted to that now.

And the U.S., if it doesn't find a way to compete in that space, will find itself with an automotive industry that is basically shut off from all other global markets and that is only supplying a shrinking share of even our own domestic market where internal combustion engine vehicle sales peaked long ago and are only declining and

we just blew that all up right our whole industrial strategy there was just basically destroyed by this bill something has to replace that and i do think there is bipartisan interest in having a competitive auto industry and in having the ability to produce batteries.

I mean, just look at this executive order around rare earths, like just from a defense-only interest, like the future of warfighting will involve batteries everywhere as well.

The Times ran this piece recently comparing energy and sort of energy-related exports of China and the U.S., and it was really striking.

I mean, U.S.

exports $117 billion in crude oil, China, $844 million.

We export $42 billion in natural gas, China, $3 billion.

So it's like, you look at the sort of energy of the past and we're way ahead.

But then China exports $40 billion in solar panels and modules.

We export $69 million worth of it.

They export $65 billion worth of lithium-ion batteries.

We export $3 billion.

Their EV exports are way ahead of ours right now.

I mean, China's been absolutely going all out to try to win these industries.

Part of the IRA was trying to win some part of them back.

And even if you don't care at all about the clean energy implications, it's pretty clear these are growing.

industries.

Yeah, I mean, I look at China and I look at the emergence of what is like the first global electro-state, right?

Like, you know, it's got petro states.

Like, we're basically doubling down now as a petro state with the Republican strategy.

We are, we should be clear, way behind.

It's not that we're like losing our edge.

We are already way behind in these industries.

And the IRA and the infrastructure law were pretty concerted efforts to try to get back to a point where we could compete.

And if those are gone, something else has to be there, or we're basically just giving up.

We're unilaterally disarming and saying, you know what, China, go for it.

The entire world auto market is yours.

You had sort of signaled that maybe in the list of innovative technologies we are still funding, there is something that could become a big deal.

When you look at those more nascent technologies, you know, green hydrogen, I mean, people were very excited about advanced geothermal a couple of years ago.

I can't quite tell if that is sustained at the same level.

I love it.

Hot rocks.

Hot rocks, yeah.

What looks most promising there?

If you were really placing bets, what should we really be throwing ourselves behind?

I mean, I do think that advanced geothermal is the most promising thing right now.

And it's not surprising that the United States, as a petrostate,

is extremely good at drilling wells and has drilled millions of them.

What makes advanced geothermal advanced?

So there's two different flavors of it, but the one that's advancing most rapidly is basically using directional drilling and hydraulic fracturing, techniques that were developed originally to extract shale gas and oil are now being applied in a very different geology to create very different reservoirs, so totally different engineering design, but the same kind of core techniques to basically create a bunch of fractures in the ground that you can circulate water through through and extract the heat from the earth.

The other strategy is a closed loop geothermal technology.

And I should disclose I'm on an advisory board of a company that does this called Eber Technologies.

And they basically just drill lots of out-and-back loops.

And both of those technologies allow us to basically build geothermal anywhere we can drill into hot rock, as opposed to needing a kind of natural...

you know, like hot springs type formation of fissures that naturally circulate water.

Whereas these technologies could allow geothermal to be built at, you know, terawatt scale globally.

So we could could be building hundreds of gigawatts, like nuclear fleets worth of advanced geothermal in the long term.

And the U.S.

has by far the best competitive position in that area because of the strength of our oil and gas industry.

So this could be one where we do have a competitive edge.

But it'd be nice if we had a longer list than that.

I mean, advanced nuclear.

I don't buy it.

I mean, this is one of the ones where we're like, yes, maybe.

Talk that out because I think people are interested to know is advanced nuclear something I should believe in.

Give me the case for advanced nuclear.

So it is, but whether the U.S.

can compete.

Yeah, I mean, I think.

Yeah, absolutely.

I think Jesse and I are totally agree that advanced nuclear is worth investing in, both fusion and fission.

What makes it advanced?

Really much smaller, more sort of compartmentalized and contained, slightly different designs, mechanisms to self-cool so that you're not dealing with the large-scale cooling infrastructure that you need at Generation 3 plants.

Some of them use different coolant loops and things like that, but just, you know, they're new flavors of nuclear that we hope will be both inherently safe and I think more importantly, since the nuclear fleet is already incredibly safe, are hopefully cheaper to build.

And that's the key one.

Which is why the smaller, it's sort of like, can you get economies to scale by manufacturing?

So your skepticism was not that the technology is real.

Your skepticism was that we would be good at it.

Exactly.

And so like the first designs will be approved in the next couple of years.

The first one just was, but there'll be a few more coming.

It just takes years to build these things.

So the first demonstration reactors, the first of a kind, will come online in 2029 or 30 or 31 or 32.

Meanwhile, China is already building them, right?

They have small modular reactors that they're building.

They have gas-cooled high-temperature reactors that they're already building.

The Koreans are out there selling large-scale reactors and building them in the UAE on time and on budget.

The Chinese are offering that now to competitors around the world too.

And so, while it is an area where we have a lot of engineering know-how and a lot of technical capability in the United States and a good investment environment to support innovative firms, we are starting, we're starting a decade behind.

That's my problem.

We're starting five, 10 years behind our competitors in South Korea Korea and China.

And so, you know, I hope we can compete there, but it's by no means a slam dunk.

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Two things that I think are more relevant as we go up the risk ladder of climate change.

One is that various forms of carbon capture and removal or direct air capture, which I know you've been involved in, become more salient.

So most of the technologies we're talking about are ways of generating energy without creating any emissions.

But if we can begin to suck emissions out of the atmosphere and do something with them, maybe we can begin to reverse the damage you've already done or about to do.

I know you've been engaged in efforts to create a market for that.

Why don't we start with that one?

What do you think of direct air capture?

How plausible is it at what scale?

Like in a situation where we're in really bad shape, where the risk is turning out to be worse than we had hoped,

how much could we actually pump into that?

Or pump out through that, I guess.

Yeah, I mean,

I think there are a lot of open questions here and we need to work to figure it out as quickly as possible my view on this has always been the models are assuming that it exists at large scale to solve for the climate problem so we have an obligation to do the instrumental work to figure out if that's possible to begin with and we're starting to do that which i think is very good the challenge with removing co2 from the ambient air and putting it somewhere permanently is that a it's hard to do thermodynamically it can be difficult to do and the bigger problem is what i've been spending you know had spent time working on which is the market development problem, which is who will pay for cleaning up this invisible trash that no one seems to actually care about.

I think that is the bigger challenge than the technology or the economics.

It's largely just like who pays?

I mean, it is a pure.

And so what was going on, the thing you worked on, just to be clear about it, was Stripe, which is a digital payments processing company.

basically created a side project to create some market for people to try to demonstrate they could do this and Stripe would pay them.

When you talk about things the government should be doing, that really felt to me like one where the government should be putting money behind a very risky technology in order to try to create a market, in order to try to create the innovative loop that would make this viable.

And it was.

And it has.

I mean, it has.

So the bipartisan infrastructure law had several billion dollars to demonstrate direct air capture facilities.

There also, there is a tax credit that we got enhanced in the Inflation Reduction Act, which remains in the new bill.

That's the only tax extended.

That would give you $180 per ton of CO2 that you pull from the ambient air and store permanently.

So, there are some policy infrastructures that is nowhere near the scale of investment that you need to make these things real.

So, that's first of all.

One of the things we're discovering is that there are permanent carbon removal pathways.

So, there's direct air capture, but there are other pathways that had not really been top of mind for folks a few years ago, things like enhanced rock weathering, where you're grinding up a bunch of basalt rocks and increasing their surface area and exposing them to moisture so that they more rapidly do what they would do anyway, which is draw CO2 down and store it permanently.

Jane loves rocks.

I love rocks.

I love rocks.

But the point with some of these technologies is that there are non-climate co-benefits.

There are agricultural benefits.

You can have productivity and yield increases as a consequence of doing this on fields where you're better managing the pH of soil so the land is more productive.

So I tend to be more optimistic because I really believe that for now we need to be very candid with ourselves, which is painful for those of us who are concerned about the climate crisis, that society's willingness to pay for pure climate action is very low.

It is certainly not high enough to do large-scale carbon removal at the cost today at scale.

Our view, I think, that's somewhat shared here is that the role of technology and politics and economics here, this goes to my feedback versus feedback analogy or metaphor, is that

our job is to get the cost of these technologies down as much as possible such that the marginal unit of political will for the sake of pure climate benefit required to do this stuff is as low as humanly possible.

So the role of these technologies and our impact now should be to sort of keep them alive or give birth to them in many cases, right?

And get them to a level where we understand the risks, we understand the benefits, and ideally we've reduced the cost by some degree.

So that if we get to a point where we decide, okay, we really need these, then they're a real option and not an option in a model or a made-up, you know, you know, option on a piece of paper.

Well, then how does that affect the set of technologies we call geoengineering?

For all sorts of very good reasons, people, I think, worry about trying to manipulate the climate with our slightly better than monkey brains.

But if we have screwed it up, we might try to unscrew it up if things get particularly bad.

Totally.

How do you think about the funding and exploration of geoengineering as a kind of hedge?

Yeah.

My view on this, and I did a dissertation on solar geoengineering, which is the set of ideas we're talking about here.

I think, like, for me, the right way to think about the potential value of solar geoengineering for managing climate risk is that we don't have that many tools to manage increased temperatures that are fast acting.

And solar geoengineering, masking some of the incoming warming in the way that you could, is one of very few tools that could work really fast if we were in a dire situation.

So, is this worthy of scientific inquiry?

For me, the answer is yes.

Now,

technologies aren't just inherently good or bad.

They need to be governed and steered in ways.

And my concern about solar geoengineering, research, and deployment is that we have such low trust in institutions right now that the ability to kind of do science in these domains in a way that's like truly aligned with global societal benefit is just difficult to imagine.

On the other hand, we're spending a lot of money and time on a lot of other technologies that I'm quite concerned about the global impact of them and that we don't subject them to the same level of scrutiny.

So yeah, let's create a godlike artificial intelligence that we explicitly intend to use to replace human beings in the work that gives them both wages and dignity.

But yeah,

and have no plan.

They're just like, and you know, whatever.

Like people seem like they can make a lot of money at it.

Go forth.

But this, how dare we even think about it?

Having worked on geoengineering for a long time, it is very frustrating because I've been in countless social scientific academic meetings where we all opine and opine, should we or shouldn't we?

Should we even do the research?

Who should do the research?

And at the same time that we were doing that, there's this is happening, and no one

actually is.

And then, once it happens, it's like almost unquestionable.

We're just going to build all the data centers and hope for the best.

Totally, because I see that there is potential promise in solar geoengineering for reducing suffering.

I'm very worried about research on this topic and agenda setting on this topic and the cultural politics of this topic being overtaken by Silicon Valley, essentially.

Like, I don't think that is good for the long-term politics or substance of solar geoengineering.

And so I am concerned about cultivating even less trust in this set of potential technologies based on who seems to be excited about them and who isn't.

So

imagine some world Democrats take back power in 2028.

They do win the Senate, they do win the presidency.

They're going to be facing after this bill, a very different fiscal position than the Biden administration was facing.

So the idea that it'll be easy to spend hundreds of billions of dollars may or may not be true by then.

It's always hard to raise taxes.

And the tax code is going to be pretty broken after this.

I mean, just it's so shoppful of holes that I've at least come to the view that full-on tax reform might be something we need to consider in a way we haven't in a very long time.

And taxes can work in a lot of different ways, but one way you can use them is you can raise money by taxing things you don't like.

Carbon taxes, which used to be a thing we talked about all the time in the climate space, have fallen out of favor.

They're considered too politically hard.

They've not been all that politically stable.

On the other hand, nothing else is working out exactly perfectly either.

In a world where you are in a very, very difficult fiscal position, are carbon taxes something that we should be putting back on the table?

Is that an idea that in 2029, its time will have finally come?

Yeah, let me say that what I think we need to be doing at that point is figuring out a way that we can continue to drive accelerated deployment of mature technologies and solutions solutions to decarbonize the economy.

Maybe it's a much smaller tax credit.

Maybe it's a regulatory policy that doesn't have a direct fiscal impact, but its impact on household expenditures is small enough that it doesn't have political blowback or it's indirect enough.

Look, the Highway Trust Fund has been bankrupt, and we have not been able to raise the gas tax, even at the rate of inflation.

And so the idea that we're going to have a substantive carbon price, even because it's fiscally necessary, I just don't think is very plausible.

But, you know, a $10 a ton one, which would make a difference in the power sector at making coal less competitive and making renewables more so, would only raise the price of gasoline by less than 10 cents a gallon in a world where EVs are a competitive option.

Maybe that's politically possible.

But I think we need to be very clear.

It's not going to be $100 per ton carbon price that is going to transform the energy economy.

The other thing I will say about carbon pricing is that it does run into your broader point about the politics of regulation and the constraints on increasing increasing energy prices.

Yeah, the politics of affordability.

Yeah.

When you talk about

tax for energy.

So like, do you want to advise the Democratic Party to take that position in the name of climate?

I mean, that's a hard sell.

It would have to be in the context of a tax reform that did other things people really liked.

This is a thing I want to think about in the coming months or years, but what would it look like if we actually tried to rethink the tax code such that I don't think if you step forward and your pitch is, hey, I have a carbon tax, your life is what it is now, plus a carbon tax.

That's not going to work.

Nope.

But if you said this tax code is completely broken,

it is taxing the wrong things.

We are taxing too much work from the wrong people.

We are letting too many things we want less of proliferate, right?

We have made it too easy to be a hedge fund manager.

You could imagine something that is part of a much bigger pitch.

And as part of that pitch, there's a modest tax on pollution, which is what we're talking about here.

And so, no, I would not say that the centerpiece of a Democratic administration that cares about this should be a carbon tax.

But I would say that we are going to be in a world in the next Democratic administration where the fiscal position is much worse and the tax code is completely broken.

And I think it'd be a mistake for the entire debate to be, can you reverse some of Donald Trump's tax cuts?

Yeah, I agree.

I think you have to begin to rethink this and then ask yourself, what is a set of principles at the core of that rethinking that make both actual, like substantive sense, policy sense, and make political sense.

Doesn't mean every component of that will be hugely popular.

Nobody likes paying taxes on anything.

But would they prefer there's a little bit more tax on pollution as opposed to more taxes on them working, right?

Like there are things you could think about.

The problem I have with this is that it's so hard to like proactively predict the way this will pay out politically.

And you will see so much polling that supports what you're saying, as we have seen for ever on climate.

Everyone's like, oh, the polls show.

Everyone will look for and then we run the experiment where there's state ballot initiatives or whatever, even for modest carbon prices and they fail.

So, but I don't disagree with you.

And I'm happy to run whatever experiments that we want to run.

I just say that on the evidence from like the world's experiments with carbon pricing is that it generally works best when it is not carbon pricing for the sake of carbon pricing, but carbon pricing that is raising revenue, that's providing public goods that people want, right?

Like, we got to pay for schools, we got to pay for roads, we got to pay for all this stuff, right?

And so, how are we going to raise that money?

Well, one of the ways we're going to do it is through.

We're doing congestion pricing in New York City right now.

It's working quite well.

Well, so I do think in the context of we need revenue raisers to make a fairer, more progressive tax code, it shouldn't be off the table.

But I do think we have to be very clear about like the politics of affordability will also be quite high at that point.

I think that is a good place to end.

So as our final question, what are three books you'd recommend to the audience?

And Jane, as we started with you, we'll start, Jesse, with you.

He's going to say abundance.

No.

Classic.

As I have just finished reading abundance, the next one on my list is Mark Dunkelman's Why Nothing Works, which I think is probably a great place for folks who have read your book to pick up next.

The next one, I would say, is Energy, Human History by Richard Rhodes, a historian that I think rightfully puts energy at the sort of center of the human story.

How we make and use energy is sort of central to how we structure society.

And I guess maybe in that note, I read a lot of science fiction and fantasy to sort of take a break from all this heavy stuff.

And so one that I'll call out is Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy.

I think it's a great example.

example of a story of sort of how humanity might muddle through the next couple hundred years that I think grapples with how changing technology co-evolves with society in really interesting ways.

And I've always found it sort of that sort of futurism helps open my mind to like, maybe this could go in a different way than we think, right?

We don't know what the future is going to look like.

We don't know what options are going to emerge to give us a new tool in our toolkit.

We definitely don't know how that's going to have ramifications for society, whether that's AI or something else.

And so Robinson's work, I think, is a really great way to sort of just engage in speculative history of the future.

Well, I'm way less nerdy than Jesse.

So my first recommendation is

Norman Rush's Mating, which is just-I just read that.

Did you love it?

I love the first two-thirds of it.

Okay.

In my view, that novel is sublime and beautiful and funny, and an exploration of love and anthropology and science and justice.

And I love that book.

So, that's a social scientist recommended the social science love story.

That's exactly right.

That's exactly right.

The second one is Frontiers of Illusion by Daniel Sarowitz, who is just a brilliant thinker around science and technology policy and science and society.

And it just does a really great job sort of laying out both the myths that we believe about science and how it operates and how we need to be...

we need to seriously take a look at those myths in order to enhance the relationship of science to social outcomes that we want to achieve.

And then the last one is Donald McKenzie's An Engine, Not a Camera, which is also kind of a social studies of science book, but it's a really brilliant analysis of the role of economic models and theory of finance, not as like descriptive representations of empirical reality, but as actual drivers of how those markets operate themselves.

These modelers need to understand their power.

And it's just a great, it's a great book.

And I think about it all the time in the context of the role of models in climate and environmental policy.

Jane Flegel, Jesse Jenkins, thank you very much.

Thank you.

Thanks, Ezra.

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