Transcript Zero Episode 9: Will the US Become a Climate Leader?

Akshat Rathi
·37 min read
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(Bloomberg) -- For Episode 9 of the Zero podcast, Bloomberg Green reporter Akshat Rathi interviewed political science professor Leah Stokes about the Inflation Reduction Act and what’s still on her green-policy wish list. Listen to the full episode below, learn more about the podcast here, and subscribe on Apple, Spotify, Google and Stitcher to stay on top of new episodes.

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Akshat Rathi 00:00

One small programming note. From next week zero will be reporting from Sharm el-Sheikh in Egypt, where COP27, the biggest climate meeting of the year will be happening.

Akshat Rathi 00:11

Welcome to Zero. I'm Akshat Rathi. This week: heat pumps, hot air and underground negotiations.

Akshat Rathi 00:31

The United States fancies itself a global climate leader. Yet the past 10 years of its climate policy have been tumultuous. Just look at the Paris Agreement. In 2015, the Obama administration signed it. In 2017 Trump withdrew, then in 2021, Biden brought the US back. And it seemed for a while that was as far as the US would go in meeting science-based climate targets. But then the inflation Reduction Act passed in August, and it has the potential to bring the US closer to meeting its climate targets than any other policy has done so far. There's also a chance that the domestic policies under the IRA may even cut emissions around the world by lowering the cost of green technologies. It's significant to note that the act was not supported in any shape or form by Biden's opposition the Republican Party.

President Joe Biden 01:25

I remember, every single Republican in Congress voted against this bill. Every single one voted against tackling the climate crisis against lowering our energy costs against creating good paying jobs.

Akshat Rathi 01:41

On past episodes, I've spoken with Bill Gates and investor Gabriel Kra about the IRA’s effect on business and technology. For this episode, I wanted to talk to someone with a hand in shaping the act, the politics behind it, and why it might survive whatever comes.

Leah Stokes 01:58

In the United States, what political science research shows is that when you pass a law, it becomes pretty sticky. So once we have companies building heat pumps in the United States and solar panels and electric vehicles, including in Republican districts, they're gonna say, “what do you mean, you're gonna get rid of this policy? We need this policy, we're making a lot of money and employing people.”

Akshat Rathi 02:20

My guest today is Dr. Leah Stokes, professor of politics and political science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She also hosts a climate podcast called A Matter of Degrees with Dr. Katherine Wilkinson. I talked to Leah about her contributions to drafting the IRA, how next week's midterm elections could affect its success, and if it will help the United States return – or maybe arrive at – a place of prominence in climate diplomacy.

Akshat Rathi 00:10

Leah, welcome to the show.

Leah Stokes 03:01

Oh, thank you so much for having me on.

Akshat Rathi 03:13

Now, I'm going to ask you like a really big, broad scene setting question. Joe Biden and the Democrats were elected two years ago, partly because Americans did not want a Trump presidency again. But also partly because many progressives wanted to see climate legislation and in Joe Biden, they saw somebody who could push for it. Two years on, there's a midterm election coming. How would you rate the Biden administration's work on climate from zero to 10?

Leah Stokes 03:40

I think I give them a nine. I think that we've seen more progress under the Biden administration than any other presidency in American history. It's absolutely been transformative. But of course, we're also comparing it to a lot of failure overall. The Obama administration made great efforts, they passed the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act, which was basically the stimulus bill, during the financial crisis way back in 2009. That law had about $90 billion for climate. Fast forward to this year, 2022. And the Biden administration managed to pass the Inflation Reduction Act, which has something like $370 billion for climate, so a lot more money, four times more. But that's actually an underestimation of how much money will be spent, because a lot of it is in tax credits. And those tax credits can be spent in unlimited amounts. So basically, when we say $370 billion, that comes from an estimate from these bodies called the Congressional Budget Office and the Joint Committee on Taxation. These bodies make a guess for how much money can be spent, but they're not going to guess right. We're going to spend way more money in these long-term tax credits. So we could be seeing, you know, $500 billion dollars, maybe if we're lucky, we could get close to a trillion dollars on climate spending.

Akshat Rathi 05:05

Nine out of 10. Now, that's a high ranking. Very few politicians pull that off, where they promise something, and then an analytical take on their work gives them a nine.

Leah Stokes 05:19

Well, you know, I think the Biden administration made a couple of really good decisions. They created a climate office in the White House for the first time, there are a lot of executive orders that maybe have flown under the radar with folks, but that are really mainstreaming climate action throughout the government. Maybe I should take it down to an eight or something, because one area where the Biden administration has been slower than we would have hoped is implementing regulations. The reason why I am sympathetic to that delay is because I think strategically they were waiting for the big climate legislation to make its way through Congress to get Senator Manchin’s vote. This is a senator from a coal state who did not really want to act on climate. And when they got his vote, I think that will allow them to really push much farther and faster on getting those regulations going.

Akshat Rathi 06:13

If you could sum up the IRA, almost like a movie pitch, how would you do it?

Leah Stokes 06:18

A trailer. Actually, rather than watch whole movies, this is maybe why I'm so productive, I watch movie trailers. I watch a lot of movie trailers because you can basically get the whole movie in like two and a half minutes. That's most movie trailers. So that's my secret to productivity.

Akshat Rathi 06:32

So you should be able to come up with the perfect trailer for the IRA.

Leah Stokes 06:37

Yes, hopefully. If I fail, people will be like don't give this woman a job writing movie trailers. The Inflation Reduction Act is about $370 billion in transformative investments to build 21st century clean energy industries here in the United States, to help people manufacture and get good paying jobs in the manufacturing of everything from electric vehicles, to heat pumps, to solar panels, the list goes on. It's really a lot of industrial policy. All throughout the bill, there are incentives that if you build it here, you build it with good paying jobs, you get extra incentive to do that. There's also enormous amounts of money to deploy clean energy technologies, whether at the household level through incentives for electric vehicles, heat pumps, even induction stoves to make it cheaper for everyday Americans to get clean energy technologies and reduce their energy bills. And also for companies to deploy these technologies through these long term tax credits to build wind and solar and batteries.

Akshat Rathi 07:42

No lightsabers that would destroy fossil fuel burning equipment?

Leah Stokes 07:48

Well, there's also money to help retire dirty coal plants, there's probably about $15 billion in this bill, to transition from dirty power plants to clean energy. That's something that's been under the radar, but money for rural coops to get off of coal, to retire their debt, and to move to clean energy. And I would be remiss if I didn't talk about how this policy is more equitable than climate policy has really ever been, maybe even across other countries. There is an enormous amount of money not just through tax credits to help rich people get these technologies, but through programs and grants to help low to moderate income folks get these technologies. The Biden administration has made a commitment to Justice40, which is that 40% of the benefits of this program need to go to disadvantaged communities, including low income communities and communities of color. So there's, for example, $3 billion for environmental justice grants to help communities engage in the process and invest in decarbonization projects that they want to do. There's another $3 billion dollars to clean up ports. If the IRA was movie, it’d be hard to do a movie trailer because there's so many moving parts. We haven't even talked about agriculture. There's also like $20 billion for agriculture, climate smart agriculture. So it’s a big bill, it's very complicated. There's probably like, I don't know 50-plus programs.

Akshat Rathi 09:11

But I also still want to take one step back on a philosophical level and discuss climate policy writ large. There are many ways to do it. There are many pieces that need to go in the right place for it to work. But if we look at climate policy outside of the United States, there is typically a stick involved, which is there's a carbon price. Canada has one, there’s cap and trade emissions. Europe and the UK have one. Alongside all these incentives given to people to build clean technologies, there may be tax credits, there may be actual direct money given in the form of subsidies to be able to build an offshore wind power plant, but it's the carrot and stick play that really makes it work. Most people think of the stick in regulations form: here's a mandate, you have to build this much. There is some of that in the US. But when it comes to this new climate bill, it's all carrots. How do you feel about that as a route to doing climate policy? Will it work in the long term?

Leah Stokes 10:17

Well, a few things. There are sticks in the bill. There's a methane fee, for example, which you can think of as a carbon price, specifically on methane. Some folks wanted to put a carbon price in it as well. I think if we look at American politics, the price of oil, or the price of gasoline at the pump is very important to how the Democrats do. And just raising the price of energy is not a very politically smart thing to do. So personally, I don't think that a stick-forward approach is actually the smartest thing to do, particularly in the United States, but really, in most countries. There's something like 20 to 25%, if I'm correct, of global carbon pollution that's priced right now. And yet, are we dramatically reducing our carbon pollution globally? No, we are not. The thing is that the carbon price that you could pass politically is usually very low, it does not change behavior. People's choice to fill up their car or not is not going to be changed by increasing the price of oil slightly. Instead, what's going to change is that they're going to get mad at you because now it's slightly more expensive to fill up their car. And opponents to carbon pricing, right-wing parties generally globally, will weaponize it, they'll say, “oh, my gosh, all the increase in the price of oil was because of the carbon price.” Whether or not that's true. So I don't think that it's a very effective policy at actually changing people's behaviors. Because using fossil fuels is what we would call inelastic meaning very hard to change. I think that if we want to break our dependence on fossil fuels, what we have to do is get people clean electric machines. This is the theory of change of Rewiring America, an organization I work with. And basically, they've shown that a billion machines in the United States run on fossil fuels, everything from a furnace to a car, to a leaf blower, you name it. And we need to swap out those machines for electric machines. And then a household will not care if the price of oil goes up. When you break the political relationship between getting to work and heating your home and the cost of fossil fuels, that really helps not only with your democracy, quite frankly, but also with decarbonization.

Akshat Rathi 12:37

You said, one way to do it would be to give Americans clean, electricity powered appliances. Now, let's take your favorite example: heat pumps. There is a heat pump tax credit, that is about $2,000 for a product that can cost $10,000. Now, for a median income of an American of about $60,000, that’s still a steep upfront price, even after getting a $2,000 tax credit. Is that the way you think more homeowners will be able to get heat pumps?

Leah Stokes 13:16

So tax credits are usually used by wealthier Americans. So we shouldn't assume that somebody who's going to use that tax credit is only going to make $60,000 a year, they're probably going to make more. That has led to for example, wealthier people having more solar panels on their roof or EVs in their driveway. It's not the best way to go about it. But keep in mind that when a wealthy person adopts a new technology, they actually bring down the cost for everybody else. This is called learning by doing, its innovation. Why do solar panels cost less today? Because a lot of people installed them in Germany and the United States and China, and China also got better at manufacturing them. So that's what we have to do with heat pumps. And when a wealthy person decides to do it, that will bring down the cost for other people too. So that's an important thing to note. Keep in mind that we did not just work very hard to get that $2,000 tax credit. We also got four and a half billion dollars for a program that Senator Heinrich led on with Rewiring America that will help low and moderate income folks get electric appliances. If you're a low income person, you can get up to $14,000 to electrify your house. And you know, when we go back to that $2,000, let's say you're a wealthy person, it's not a question of, you know, “oh my gosh, this machine costs $10,000. And I'm only getting $2,000 back.” It's actually a question of, “I could get a gas furnace, and it'll cost me I don't know, $8,000, or I could get a heat pump and it'll cost me $10,000. Which one should I get?” We need to get that marginal cost covered so that people realize that if I pay a little bit more upfront, I get that heat pump. That heat pump heats and cools my home. It also replaces my air conditioner. So you know, this shift is about covering that marginal cost. I hate to say it, but it's what Bill Gates calls the green premium. I don't love that. But that's what he calls it. There's a little bit more to pay up front. And then you get to save money every single month, every single year. And that thing will pay itself back really quickly.

Akshat Rathi 15:27

You should take a moment to tell me why exactly you hate green premiums?

Leah Stokes 15:33

I just think that the clean technology is often the cheaper technology and constantly saying that it's more expensive isn't quite true. That sometimes it's cheaper to do the clean thing. From my perspective, we want to get the message out there that clean energy is cheap energy. And so I don't necessarily think it is a premium to get the clean item.

Akshat Rathi 15:57

From a math perspective Bill Gates talks about green premiums being negative but because of the word premium, having a negative premium feels wrong. That's what you're getting at.

Leah Stokes 16:12

Yes. I also think it doesn't all come down to the marginal cost of things. But this is why I'm criticizing carbon pricing. Carbon pricing makes something slightly more expensive. You might think that shrinks the gap for the green premium, but it also really pisses people off when they have to pay more. And opponents weaponize that difference and say that it's because of government policy, let's vote those people out of office. And so I think it's not only about changing the prices of things, it's also about how we change the prices of things and how we sell them. Making clean stuff cheap is very different from a political perspective than making dirty stuff that everybody uses right now expensive.

Akshat Rathi 16:49

Now you were involved in writing some of the IRA. What's the process? Is it just like a lot of PhDs like you who sit down at a Google Doc and write thousands and thousands of words that end up in an 800-page document or whatever it is?

Leah Stokes 17:06

No, there's very few PhDs involved, I would say. Me and Jesse Jenkins, who I did my PhD with at MIT, we were both involved. Initially, I helped set up two working groups, coalitions you can think of, one with advocates for clean electricity and one for electrification. And I think if you go even farther back, that was at the beginning of 2021 those coalitions. The Inslee campaign for president was really important too, because they wrote 200 pages –

Akshat Rathi 17:39

He ran as a presidential candidate, but he is the governor of the state of Washington.

Leah Stokes 17:45

Yeah, his campaign basically involved writing hundreds of pages of ideas for climate policy and I got involved with them and we continued to write these policies. So there's a lot of people involved, different groups. There's then the staffers who work on specific committees who work for specific members, there’s staff working for the White House for agencies, it takes like hundreds of people to get a bill written. This bill is like 700 pages long. And yet and still, at the end of the day, the very end of the process was a secret process involving two senators and their staff: Senator Schumer, who's the majority leader of the Democrats in the Senate, and Senator Manchin, that coal baron who didn't really want to do things. The whole thing fell apart. We were all devastated. And secretly, the staff, probably a dozen people went into the basement of the Capitol and negotiated this and didn't tell anybody what they were doing.

Akshat Rathi 18:42

And they were doing a lot of cutting and pasting. Right, the negotiations are just like, here's a bit of text, I can take it.

Leah Stokes 18:48

Yes. So all the work that the advocacy groups did in advance, and the staff and the White House and the agencies and all these different people, they got the bill to a certain stage. And then at the end of the day, it was really Schumer and Manchin making decisions. As far as I understand, the people who were in that basement weren’t even allowed to tell their spouses. It was very secret. And what was in the final bill text was some stuff that nobody agreed to or wanted. Things like saying in order to build clean energy on government owned land, what's called public lands, you also have to lease, put an auction out, to give the opportunity for companies to build dirty energy on public lands. This was really upsetting to a lot of groups who are trying to stop, let's say, offshore development of oil in the Gulf of Mexico and in Alaska, trying to stop development of fossil fuels on public lands. Myself and other groups were thrilled that so much of the work of the community was still in the bill. But other groups were really upset because Manchin had put some poison pills in there. Different groups came to conclusions about whether or not they supported the bill. At the end of the day, I looked to groups like Energy Innovation, which did an analysis that said, the good parts of the bill in terms of reducing pollution, including in communities of color, including global pollution for the whole planet, there were 24 times bigger and better than the bad parts of the bill in terms of adding pollution. So, you know, all of us had to say, was this good enough? Was this better than living in the world with no climate action from the federal government? And I personally felt that it was better than the status quo.

Akshat Rathi 20:36

After the break, I talk to Leah about international negotiations, how the midterm elections might change things, and how to build coalitions.

Akshat Rathi 20:59

You recently interviewed Vice President Kamala Harris about the climate credentials of the Biden-Harris administration. And at the end of it, you mentioned a recent success in climate diplomacy. That has nothing to do with the COP meetings that happen annually. It was the Kigali Amendment, where the US ratified an amendment to the Montreal Protocol that is going to address greenhouse gases used in refrigeration and help cool the planet as much as point five degrees Celsius. How did we miss that?

Leah Stokes 21:33

Yeah, it was great to talk with the Vice President. If folks want to listen to it, it's on our podcast A Matter of Degrees. She brought this up - when we think about what did the Biden administration get done on climate change? We can think about the Inflation Reduction Act. And she pointed out that they also got through the Senate, the Kigali Amendment, which is an amendment to the Montreal Protocol. For those who remember, the Montreal Protocol is an agreement to deal with the ozone problem. This was a really big problem where we were emitting chemicals that were creating a hole in the ozone, and countries around the world got together and passed this important agreement, which has been wildly successful in terms of reducing ozone depleting substances, and is often pointed to as the most successful international environmental agreement. Because the ozone hole is healing. This is a model we could think of for climate change. And what people may not know is that some of the chemicals that are terrible for the ozone layer are also terrible for our climate, because they don't only create a hole in the ozone layer, they also warm the planet. And so the Kigali Amendment is basically targeting specific chemicals that have high global warming potential, very, very high global warming potential. And they also go after the ozone layer. And because we can go after the super pollutants as a global community, that means that we can actually limit warming by an enormous amount - half a degree centigrade, because each time you release one of these chemicals, it's something like 23,000 times more potent than a single molecule of carbon dioxide. So this is something that was done in a bipartisan way in the United States. It's a really big win. And it's also a really big win internationally.

Akshat Rathi 23:28

In that climate win though, we have to acknowledge how the US has been quite an unreliable climate ally. The US signing up to the Kigali Amendment took a while. There were major countries that had signed on to it five years ago, or more than that. We can go through the history of the US not playing ball with international agreements. It did not do so going back all the way to the Kyoto agreement in 1997. It did not really play ball at the Copenhagen summit in 2009 that could have been the Paris Agreement. It did come through in Paris in 2015, while Obama was president, but then it pulled out. And so the US credibility on climate has been very shaky.

Leah Stokes 24:14

I think looking at the United States as a monolith is part of the challenge, because the reason why the United States has been terrible on some of these international agreements is because they have to be ratified by the Senate. The Senate is an institution with 100 people from each of the 50 states. And it's not actually very representative of the American people. It overwhelmingly gives voice to more conservative areas. So that leads to bad outcomes on lots of things, including on ratifying global agreements, because it's the Senate that has to do that. If we think about the Trump Administration, obviously, former President Trump was terrible on the climate, but at that same time, there was also a coalition, [that] Michael Bloomberg actually was very involved in, getting states and cities who were committed to climate action to tell the international community they were still making progress. California could be seen as something like the fifth largest economy globally, it's a huge place, massive economy, and really one of the global leaders on decarbonization period. This is a place that has gone big on solar panels on electric vehicles, it's about to go big on heat pumps, it has a carbon price, if that's what you like. It has it all. And that is within the United States. It's a really big part of the United States. Keep in mind, California just spent $54 billion this summer on a climate bill. It's much bigger on a per capita basis than what just happened federally. New York just banned gas in new construction in New York City. And they're trying to do that statewide. So everywhere people are trying to turn levers.

Akshat Rathi 25:58

Let's talk best case scenario, worst case scenario. There is an election coming up in the US. Tt's the midterms, most of the time outside the US, they don't make that much noise because these are between the two presidential elections. But they can matter a lot because they can determine whether Democrats or Republicans control the House of Representatives or the Senate. Let's guess that the Biden administration keeps both the House and the Senate and maybe even wins more seats in the Senate, taking away the power that Senator Manchin holds over the Senate today. What would be your wildest dreams to accomplish in climate policy over the next two years?

Leah Stokes 26:46

Well, that's an optimistic forecast. But sure, let's dream a little dream. I would love to spend more money on electrifying schools in the United States. That's not something that we got a lot of money for and it's really important. There's like 10,000 schools in California alone, probably like 100,000 in America, I don't know the actual number. But there's a lot of these buildings. They're places where kids learn, we need to electrify them. That'll make it healthier to learn. It'll also give kids air conditioning, which is super important given heat waves because of climate change. So that's a dream. I'd love more money to help clean up affordable housing, electrify it. I would want to put a lot more money into those low and moderate income electrification rebates, we got four and a half billion dollars, but we're going to run through that money really quickly. So let's get more for that. I would love to fix some of the garbage that Manchin shoved into the bill. So for example, the requirement that you have to auction offshore and onshore leases for oil and gas development. Let's not do that. That sounds terrible. So I'd love to fix that. I'd love to do reform to make transmission easier to build but without gutting environmental protections, which is another big debate that's going on right now. I don't know we'd probably need 60 votes to do that, though. So that one might not be doable.

Akshat Rathi 28:01

Let's take the worst case scenario. The Democrats lose both the House and the Senate. How resilient do you think the IRA is in the face of such a challenge? And what, if anything, can the Biden administration continue to do on climate policy?

Leah Stokes 28:20

I think that the IRA is going to be very resilient. The Republicans talked a big game, when it came to repealing the Affordable Care Act. This is sometimes called Obamacare. It's a health care law that helped millions of Americans get access to health care. They said, we're going to repeal it, we're going to repeal it. They made it their life's mission. And guess what, they never repealed it. In the United States, what political science research shows is that when you pass a law, it becomes pretty sticky. And it's actually quite hard to repeal it. So once we have companies building heat pumps in the United States and solar panels and electric vehicles, including in Republican districts, they're gonna say, “what do you mean, you're gonna get rid of this policy, we need this policy, we're making a lot of money and employing people.” This is great stuff. So I think it's actually going to be quite sticky. In the first two years, let's say the House and Senate went Republican, it would be bad, don't get me wrong, but we still have the Democratic president. And therefore they couldn't really repeal the law, because President Biden would just veto anything that actually managed to pass. So I think that we have at least two years solid to really make progress on this. Probably three or more. And that will create what we call policy feedback, which means that the policy itself will restructure the politics and make the policy stickier.

Akshat Rathi 29:40

So that's trying to protect what the IRA does, and also putting it in action. But can Biden go further in the next few years, even if he doesn't have the House or the Senate and its support?

Leah Stokes 29:51

Absolutely. If the legislature is Republican, that doesn't mean that Biden can't do lots of things. In fact, a lot of the executive action, the regulations, have been put on hold, because they've been trying to get the big prize of legislation. And so now in the second half of the Biden-Harris administration, I expect to see a lot of focus on implementing, let's say, the Clean Air Act. The Clean Air Act is a bedrock law that can regulate fossil fuel power plants. So they can say, “hey, you want to build a new fossil fuel power plant, you need to pass this standard in order to do it, hey, you got an existing fossil fuel power plant, you need to have it operate at this level.” And actually, the Biden administration could even put requirements in under the Clean Air Act for appliances. So you're standing in your home, you're cooking something in your stove or in the oven using gas, and you're creating levels of indoor air pollution that are 234 times higher than what is considered safe outdoors. So the Environmental Protection Agency could regulate that. They could say, you can't sell people appliances that are poisoning them in their homes, that's not okay. That's something that Evergreen Action, which I work with, has been advocating for and a recent paper where we outlined actions that the Biden administration can take to electrify buildings, for example, to support building decarbonization, there's a lot they can do.

Akshat Rathi 31:14

One other place where the US continues to lag, despite this progress on climate policy, is how much money the US gives to the rest of the world as part of climate financing. So the first fall is where the US makes very small contributions towards a $100 billion fund that's supposed to fund cutting emissions or adapting to a warming planet activities in developing countries. The US contribution is, you know, closer to $40 billion, if you do it on an economic strength basis, but the US contributes $2, $3 billion a year at most. Biden wants to raise it all the way to $11 billion, he hasn't been able to get that approval from Congress. That's just step one. Step two, which is going to be the big battle that's going to happen at COP27 in Egypt, is around something called loss and damage, where developed countries agreed under the Paris agreement to pay developing countries for the losses and damages caused by climate impacts. We still don't know how much money that would be, how it would be transferred, what the structure would be, and all of that is to be fought for at this COP summit. How do you think, given progress at the domestic level, will it affect international diplomacy, when the US cannot put forth the money that it must.

Leah Stokes 32:41

Well, it's sad to hear you say that because I wrote a paper back in 2009, which looked at this exact issue. And it was folks calling for $100 billion globally and folks paying like, no billions of dollars globally, and to hear the update. It's basically the same. We can fast forward 13 years, and we're in the same place. This is a big area where we could say G8, G7 nations have talked a big game, that they're going to support developing countries, they're going to give money and they never do. I fear that the loss and damage conversation may be similar. It certainly has seemed that way so far, that countries talk a big game, and they don't really deliver. That's very frustrating, I'm sure for developing countries, particularly for small island nations that are literally losing their entire land, livelihoods, communities, histories to the rising oceans. That’s very depressing. I think that the Biden administration has good intentions, and wants to do more. But there are limits. The executive has to get the legislature to actually appropriate funds to then put towards this, and that clearly has not been a big priority. And if the Republicans are in charge of the legislature, that will not be happening. So it's a frustrating situation, for sure. And I do think that developing nations deserve more.

Akshat Rathi 34:18

If we take your learning and your scholarship on the political science of how to build good climate policy domestically, but also how to make climate policy be effective on a global stage, what is it do you think that's missing to bring the politics domestically right, so that you can fund what is the US’s responsibility for global funding towards adaptation, towards mitigations, toward damages and losses of climate impacts?

Leah Stokes 34:50

I think that part of the issue here is also siloing. Where this conversation often happens in the development community. Through USAID or through the United Nations and that is somewhat separate from the domestic conversation through the Department of Energy or the Environmental Protection Agency or even just the committees in Congress that are responsible for funding one part of it versus another part of it. I came across this a bunch in California. I was advocating to try to get money to electrify schools, and the education people are different than the climate people. And so in order to talk about school buildings, you have to talk to the education people, but the education people don't really know or care that much about climate. And so you end up in a sort of siloed conversation. I think that's probably similar to what's going on in the United States where the development people are trying to think about that conversation and moving forward funds to help developing countries. But that's quite separate from the climate community in the United States, which is focused on decarbonization domestically. So that may be part of the reason why this wasn't a big focus of it. I think it is unfortunate. I do. I wish we had gotten more money, period, for all the things including to help developing nations transition. We did as well as we could, given the math in the Senate. And given that last vote was Senator Manchin and I doubt very much that he was super interested and in funding developing countries to transition unfortunately.

Akshat Rathi 36:22

What in the last two years of having elected Biden to be president and then gotten him to work on all these climate policies and get them through have you learned about coalition building?

Leah Stokes 36:35

You know, I started a lot of this advocacy work as a professor, I began to write reviews of candidates for presidents in the Democratic primary - their plans on climate, and I just used my expertise from working on climate change for 17-plus years now, but I wasn't necessarily involved in the political system. At the time, I wasn't even a US citizen, I was just a person who knew a bunch about a topic. And over time, I got more involved with advocacy groups. I'd written this book called Short Circuiting Policy, where I'd interviewed people who had passed really important clean energy and renewable energy laws at the state level, and kind of inspired by all these advocates I talked to, I thought, well, maybe I could do that as well. So I stumbled into becoming a very prominent advocate for this work. In the early days, when we were trying to figure out how to pass a clean electricity standard through reconciliation, which we figured out how to do, we just couldn't get Manchin to agree to it. We talked to a bunch of advocates, we talked to a bunch of experts, we sort of figured it out. And some people when we published that report, which was hugely successful, they were mad that we didn't talk to them before we wrote it. But I was used to being a professor and writing an article and going through peer review, and why do I have to talk to every group in order to write a report? The advocacy community is different. You have to make sure that you're bringing lots of people to the table, that you're listening to folks. And one thing I learned from my book was that you needed networks of advocates working together in order to pass a law. And so with Rewiring America, we set up an electrification coalition that still runs today, it has hundreds of groups operating. We set up with Evergreen Action a clean electricity coalition. And that was really informed by my work. I thought, okay, let's find everybody who wants to work on this together, let's work together. We're trying to make it diverse, especially having environmental justice groups and folks who represent disadvantaged communities at the table, there's always more work that can be done to make sure that those groups have the resources to participate. That has not been perfect. But I have tried to use the bizarre platform that I have built, created, been gifted, I don't know, to lift up decarbonization and lift up pollution reduction for communities all across the United States. And if you look at the parts of the bill that I really worked on like helping low income folks get a heat pump, or helping wealthy people get a heat pump or making it easier to shut down coal plants, there are things that I'm really proud of, and I think that the movement can be really proud of.

Akshat Rathi 39:21

That was a lot of fun. Thanks for coming on the show, Leah.

Leah Stokes 39:24

Oh, thank you so much for having me on.

Akshat Rathi 39:36

If we are talking about bringing people to the table, it's a good thing that the US is back to participating in the challenge of cutting emissions. Yet it has a lot of work to do to prove to be a reliable ally. The result of the midterm elections next week might make it harder for Biden to pursue his climate agenda. And then the 2024 presidential election might put a climate denier Back in the White House. But as Leah puts it, climate advocates are ready for the fight. The network she describes will keep some of the many parts of the US doing what needs doing.

If you enjoyed listening to Leah, I want to recommend her podcast a matter of degrees. Along with Dr. Katharine Wilkinson, Leah talks about the forces behind climate change and the tools we have to fix it. They just put out a bunch of episodes about what individuals can do. I recommend Part Two - The Professional, where you can follow along as an oil worker tries to change jobs and go green.

Thanks so much for listening to Zero. If you like the show, please rate review and subscribe. Tell a friend or tell the richest American you know to get a heat pump. If you've got a suggestion for a guest or topic or something you just want us to look into get in touch at zeropod@bloomberg.net. Zero’s producer is Oscar Boyd and senior producer is Christine Driscoll. Our theme music is composed by Wonderly

Many people help make the show a success. This week's special thanks to Stacey Wong. She's a producer on the Bloomberg podcast team and a source of renewable energy herself.

I'm Akshat Rathi, back next week from Sharm el-Sheikh in Egypt, where I'll be covering COP27. We'll be putting out more episodes than usual as we bring you inside the tent of the biggest climate meeting of the year.

--With assistance from Christine Driscoll and Oscar Boyd.

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