Unknown

Good evening! On behalf of everyone at Town Hall Seattle and our friends at Elliott Bay Book Company, it's my pleasure to welcome you to our presentation with Leah C. Stokes and David Roberts discussing Stokes' new book, "The Carbon Wave: A Story of Democracy, Parenthood, and the Race to Protect Our Planet." We acknowledge our institution stands on the unceded traditional territory of the Coast Salish people, notably the Duwamish. We thank them for our continuing use of the natural resources of their ancestral homeland. Leah C. Stokes is the Anton Vonk Associate Professor of Environmental Politics at UC Santa Barbara. She has championed climate policy in the United States at all levels of government and was selected for Time Magazine's Time 100 Next List, as well as Business Insider's Top 30 Global Climate Leaders. She's the author of the award-winning Short-Circuiting Policy and a recipient of a Harvard University Radcliffe Fellowship. David Roberts is the owner and writer of Volts, a newsletter and podcast about clean energy and politics. He previously covered energy and environmental issues for Vox and Grist. His work has been featured in the Chicago Tribune, Reuters, and The Atlantic. He's appeared on CNN and CBC. Please join me in welcoming David Roberts and Leah Stokes. Hi, thanks for coming. Thanks for coming, Leah. Thank you to David for doing this. I don't know, who is a Volts fan in the room? Do we have some Volts fans? Yeah. And do you subscribe with your cash money? Because that's an important thing to do. I did not set any of this up. I was paid a lot to say that. A lot of money. I'm getting a big cut tonight. Yeah. Yes, thank you. So, let's jump in. So, Leah, I read your book. And as you know, I followed the IRA fight very closely at great cost to my mental health. So, I knew all the twists and turns of the IRA fight. And yet, I'm reading your book like sweating, like staying up late at night because I'm like, her kids, are the twins okay? And what's that? It's a pregnancy going to turn out? Is Adrian ever going to get home to his family? So, the personal stuff was very, very interesting to me. And I looked it up right when the bill was about to pass. We did a pod about it when you and Jesse came on. And I looked it up and looked at the book chronology. And I'm pretty sure you did the pod. So, you had this problematic pregnancy, bed bound, early delivery. One of your kids is in the NICU for six months. And you're like, 75 days. And I looked it up. I think literally the day we recorded the pod, you had to cancel their first birthday party because you found out they had COVID. And then you found out you had COVID. Yeah, that's actually true. I knew none of that. You're just cheerful and informative and did the podcast. I was like, that was great. I had no idea. So, I'm just amazed. So, just tell me how you survived all that. And about your decision to weave the personal stories through the book. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for coming, everyone. We're really excited to do this. The book, which you probably haven't had a chance to read yet because it's only been out for two weeks, is a story of how the largest climate law in American history passed. And it follows a few people who happened to sort of be in the middle of their lives and having kids while they were working on this big climate fight. And so, my own story follows my really high-risk pregnancy. I had twins and we didn't know if they would live or not. And spoiler alert, they're alive and happy and learning four languages right now. So, you don't need to stress. A lot of readers are like, are they okay at the end of the book? They are happy and healthy, which is a real blessing and a testament to all the people in the NICU who made that happen. I think you found out that you were having twins as you were in the midst of this 10-hour-a-day fight for the bill itself. No. So, I was a Canadian citizen. Which is relevant because there was literally a conversation happening about, oh, you know, should I go into the White House? Could I take a job? It's really hard for Canadian citizens to take jobs in the White House. Not impossible. But, you know, so when I got this scan, as I tell in the book, and discovered I had twins, I just thought, well, how's this going to work? Because I have all this important work to do. And the thing about a twin pregnancy, if you've experienced it or know someone who has, is that it's really difficult. And so, they quickly were like, we can't do this. We can't do this. We can't do this. We can't do this. So, I'm like, well, we can't do this. We can't do this. We can't do this. We can't do this. We can't do this. We can't do this. We can't do this. What does this mean? It just means, like, are they in one sac or not? And if they are in one inner sac, you have to go to, according to my doctor, baby jail. That was her language. I don't think that's a medical term. Where they put you in the hospital, I believe, at 32 weeks. And they keep you there for as long as possible to monitor continuously three times a day. And I just was like, how am I going to do this work from baby jail? This doesn't seem really doable. I end up in baby jail in this story. But actually, I got a lot of work done in the hospital. I go on TV. I'm doing interviews. If anything, it was easier. The people bring you food. You don't have to go anywhere. There's a very vivid story where your husband wheels in one of the big hospital lights, the surgery lights, to backlight you for a TV appearance. Yeah. For Democracy Now!, right? I mean, wouldn't you go on Democracy Now! if you had the chance? Come on. That's badass. The thing is, Democracy Now! is on the East Coast. So, they want you on at five. Pacific. And so, I was like, the sun's not up then. So, the nurse brought me a giant obstetrics light. But it was broken. So, we were not misusing hospital equipment. I always want to say that, just for clarification. So, yeah, it was kind of crazy. But I feel like, first of all, that was this huge window of opportunity to pass a climate law. And what I write about in the book is that when people think about baby-proofing their lives, they really think very narrowly in terms of sticking things at outlets or coffee tables. And I think much more expansively. Like, I don't know, giving my children a livable planet. And I encourage all of us to think in that way. And that's really the point of the book. So, you know, I just think that as much as it might seem crazy on some level to read about these choices that me and other people were making in this book, it's also about making sure that, like, our kids have a livable and safe world to grow up in. And I want everybody to be part of that story. You know, I want everybody, they don't have to make the same life choices I make, but, you know, pushing for that livable future. It really demonstrated to me that it's good I'm a journalist working alone at home, because, like, I barely survived the IRA fight, and I wasn't even part of it. And I didn't have any kids. Well, you were writing stories, and that is very true. The journalists who shine a light on these issues, including David Roberts, who's been at it for 25-plus years, amazing, and is now running his own independent outlet to keep this attention, that was so important to having an opportunity to pass this law. And that's not just lip service. Like, if we don't have this, we don't have this talk about climate change, if we don't have media attention and conversations, it makes it way harder. Like, this particular moment, per se, it's a lot harder to make progress, because we don't have that air game in terms of conversation. So journalists, including David Roberts, writing about it and talking about it is actually a critical part of the story in terms of how we get this bill to become a law. Well, let's talk a little bit about trying to make change. So you have this analogy, the carbon wave, that you contrast to, the old term carbon footprint. And I think that's a very vivid and interesting contrast. So why don't you spell out what that means? What the carbon footprint is, where it came from, and what you mean by carbon wave? Yeah. So I would bet that every single human being knows what a carbon footprint is in this room, right? Everybody who's going to listen to this on David's podcast will know. And you know what the crazy thing is? Even normal people who did not come to the event tonight will also know what a carbon footprint is if you ask them, why? Why did that idea travel so far? Well, it wasn't invented by fossil fuel companies. That was academics who really came up with the idea. But it was popularized by BP in the 2005, '06, '07 era when so much popular consciousness was happening around climate change with films like An Inconvenient Truth. And we started to talk about these issues for the first time, really, after Hurricane Katrina and things like that. The fossil fuel industry tried to make the narrative about individuals and what we need to do. And we're going to do a lot of work on that. And so BP spent upwards of $100 million a year on this advertising campaign. And they also built a carbon footprint calculator and put it on their website. And in their first year of that calculator, 250,000 people went and checked out their carbon footprints. And it was like, did I take a plane? Should I feel bad about that? Yes. It wasn't like, is that fossil fuel executive capturing our political system so that we don't have other alternatives? No. So that paradigm is so ubiquitous. And what I'm trying to do in this book is throw the paradigm out. And some people, including environmentalists, feel a little bit of, hmm, they feel a little way about that. They want to hold on to that carbon footprint a little bit. But what is the carbon wave idea? It's about, rather than an individual by themselves trying to reduce their footprint within a fossil fuel based energy system, it's about groups of people joining together to rip down the fossil fuel based energy system. It's a lot more empowering, wouldn't you say? So it's about structural change, not individual. change and not behavior change. And so that means the carbon wave could look like you electrifying your house, because that is potentially fossil fuel infrastructure that you're owning and operating. It could look like getting an electric vehicle or an electric bike, and it could scroll, it could go all the way up to electrifying a school in your community, or weighing in on a law in your city council, or working on state policy, working on national or international policy. And you cannot do that work alone. That's why this book is kind of a tapestry. The idea of the metaphor is that we're each like a drop, but when we join together, we can become a wave. And it's really only through that collective action aimed at structural change that we can really rip down the fossil fuel energy system. And a big enough wave can wash away all our footprints. Yes, that's the other nice part of the metaphor. A wave washes away footprints. And I've had this paradigm for a long time. Like, if you. If you feel bad because you took a plane or something like that, why don't you just, like, go run a radical campaign to, like, electrify all the schools in your community? And then you don't need to worry about that plane, because you fixed all those heat pumps. And, like, that gives you good karma points forever. I mean, it gives you carbon pollution tons that you collectively reduced. Which, if that's your metric of choice, which I support, there's a lot of easier ways to change the. I mean, I wouldn't necessarily say they're always easy, but they're bigger ways. They're more structural ways. And, like, why does getting a heat pump in your house matter? Because let's say you sold the house to someone else, then they're moving into an electrified house, right? So that's infrastructure. That's a structural change that you control. And so I'm hoping that this makes people feel empowered and that, like, they can change the system, that they can join with others to really be a bigger part of society. And even if you don't want to do it on climate change, you know, go do it on another topic. There's so many important ways that we can create structural change. And I want people to. to sort of envision themselves as actors with agency. Because if we're just scrolling on our phones all the time, which all of you didn't do tonight, so gold stars all around. But if we're just doing that, that's keeping us alone and isolated. If we go out into community and join with others, that's how we can actually change the system. And so that's the sort of story I really want to leave people with, with this book. And as a bonus, you can stop stressing out about the number and variety of grocery bags you use at the store. Oh, yeah. That's like, you don't even have to think about that one again, unless you're becoming like a plastics radical. But again, if you want to be plastics person, which I fully support, go up the system, man, change the laws, because otherwise there's just plastic everywhere, my friends. This is your little tip of the iceberg there. Let's give a little shout out to Seattle, since we're in Seattle. One of the. Woohoo, Seattle! One of the central ideas in the book was born in Seattle. Yes, it's true. One of the central characters in the book. Via Seattle. Via Seattle, who worked for our beloved Jay Inslee. Why don't you tell a little bit about 100% Electricity by 2035 and where that came from? Yeah. So I don't know if anyone knows Sam Ricketts in the room, but woohoo! We got some Sam Ricketts. I believe we have some Ricketts in the house. I hope we have some Ricketts, because Sam, when I was texting him before this was like, I don't know if they're coming. So I'll tell him he was wrong. Sam fans, good. So Sam Ricketts is from Seattle. His mom actually ran a book series and did a lot of community events and was a really cool person. So she's a really cool person. She's a really cool person that I write about in the book. And he kind of was a young progressive activist looking for something to do. And he stumbles across Jay Inslee when Inslee was a congressman and ends up working for him and driving him around the state before he becomes governor. And when Jay Inslee decides to run for president, Sam Ricketts gets drafted to write a lot of his climate plans. And the thing about Sam Ricketts, if you were to know him, is that he is a very verbose guy. In the best way. In the best way. It's like, if you give him a writing assignment for 100 words, he'll give you 1,000. That's just his energy. And so he really took the idea of a Green New Deal and fleshed it out. He wrote, I believe, more than 200 pages of climate policy ideas during his primary. I think I'm one of maybe a dozen people who read every one of those. Yeah. Me and David Roberts were pouring over every word. The rest of the world was like, what? So he put out five climate plans while Jay Inslee was still running. And he didn't get that deep into the primary, if you forgot. And so after that ended, they decided that rather than having a campaign for a politician, they would have a campaign for an idea for climate policy. And one of the things he wanted to do was pass a policy for 100% clean electricity by 2035. And when I came across this idea, I thought, what is this? This is too ambitious. Could we actually do it? And I just kind of became obsessed with it. And the first time I met Sam over the phone, I was probably a little rude. And I was like, do you really think you can do this? Let me grill you on the subject. And he really won me over with his infectious energy and ideas. And together, we went on a sort of quest like siblings fighting with each other on occasion to try to get that idea into law. And that's a bunch of the story of the book. And the other fun thing about Sam is that the very first episode of David's podcast was us. It was me and Sam Ricketts talking about this idea of 100% clean electricity. And since Sam Ricketts is such a historian, he's always talking about this fact. So there you go from the deep cut. And something else I took from that story, and this gets back to the carbon wave thing, is you might hear carbon wave and you're just like, well, I'm just some schmo, whatever. I have a literature degree. And who am I? Everyone who's a hero of this story in one way or another stumbled into their role that ended up being absolutely central to crucial policymaking. And it was just a matter of like, no one's doing this. I'll do it. And you start doing it. And everybody looks at you like, oh, that's the person who's doing it. And then you're officially the person doing it. It was like, there's no magic to it. It's just like, just do the thing. Yeah. Sam and I are very close friends. And whenever we find somebody in the activist space, like Caroline Spears, for example, who runs Climate Cabinet, it's like a way that you can think about how to donate to different candidates and state and local races who are climate champions and find out who they are. She's awesome. And we're always like, oh my gosh, thank God Caroline Spears exists because she's off doing that thing. Activism is an improvisational act. You know, nobody's going to tell you we need you to go do X. What it really involves is people kind of raising their hand and saying, hey, we should have a way that people can figure out who to donate to who are climate champions. So maybe I should build a whole organization around that. Before you know it, that exists and it's got staff and it is helping drive money into these low salience down ballot races. So that's really the magic of the story here, especially because I follow more everyday people. It's like the protagonists of the book are not by Haydn or Manchin or something like that. They're these more everyday people. And I can only tell, of course, so many stories in one book, but really this is like thousands and thousands of people who came together to make this climate bill a reality. And some of those people were working for decades before this bill passed. So, you know, it really is this symphony performance rather than the sort of solo act. Yeah, you can just do the thing. Let's get slightly nerdy here for a minute. This is an obsession of mine. It's practically the founding principle of Volz. The reason Volz has its name. I think when ordinary people hear climate, I think they still just sort of vaguely hear environment. Plastic straws. Recycling something. And if they think about energy at all, they just think clean energy. Explain briefly, and you tell the story of sort of staring at this pie chart and this sort of insight coming to you. And I think it sort of like hit a lot of people in our world. Yeah. Roughly at the same time, why specifically electricity, clean electricity is the core of solving climate change. Not just clean energy generically. Yes. Not just environment generically, specifically clean electricity. Talk about why that's so central. Yeah. So when you think about climate change, the way it's often depicted is a pie chart of the different sectors of pollution. Has anybody ever looked at that? Like the green house gas inventory for the United States? It's really cool. I recommend it. That's how I spend my weeknights. So that has all these slices. And like one slice will be the pollution that comes from the electricity system, which is like coal and gas plants churning out pollution. And then another slice will be buildings and it's like furnaces and hot water tanks running on gas and, or even oil some places. And then another slice will be transportation and that's like trucks and cars and of course airplanes, but they're really small guys. Let's be real. And then, you know, you'll have industry, which is like factories making potato chips and milk processing plants and pulp and paper. And I have gone very deep into that particular wedge recently. So if you're interested, let me know. And then there's another slice, which is direct emissions from oil and gas, which obviously my goal is to eliminate, spoiler alert. And then there's an agriculture one, which is like direct, you know, methane or whatever. So you're like, oh my gosh, I've lost you there. That's so many slices. How did you even remember them all? So here's the trick. If you want to take that pie that shows you how to do it, you're going to have to go to the you really just need two big things. Clean electricity plus electrification. What does that mean? It means you take the electricity system and you stop using coal and gas and you run it all on solar and wind and batteries and even the legacy nuclear fleet that exists, right? Like you clean up. Geothermal. Oh, and hydro. We're in, we're of course here, but you can't do a lot more hydro, spoiler alert. And geothermal, yes, with like the Fervos of the world. So, you know, you've got this whole set of technologies and you use those to run the electricity system. Once the electricity system is clean as it is. is, for example, in Washington state largely, you can run all the other machines of your society on that clean power. So you can plug your car into the electricity system with an electric vehicle. Suddenly it's running on clean power. You can plug your heat pump in, you know, there are so many, and you can plug a heat pump water heater in. And even in the factories, you can plug in a giant heat pump, which can then make low and medium temperature steam and make your potato chips and your milk without fossil fuels. So clean electricity plus electrification actually can cut about three quarters of all of our carbon pollution. So that's really the only thing you need to remember if you want to go forth and, you know, change the system. We try to clean up the electricity system and then we run every machine that we can on electricity. And of course, this framework really builds off the work of Saul Griffith and Sam Kalish. Saul Griffith wrote this great book, Electrify, that I recommend. And, you know, he really helped people see this because he counted up all the machines that run on fossil fuels in the United States, and it's one billion. So on the one hand, you might be like, oh my gosh, that's a big homework assignment. We have to change one billion machines. On the other hand, well, now each of us can adopt three or four of them, and then we'll change all the machines. And so, and what do you want to adopt? You can adopt the furnace in your house. You could adopt the furnace in your kid's school. You could adopt a coal power plant. A lot of people have done that. done that, too, at the Sierra Club's Beyond Coal campaign, like Marianne hit. So, you know, you can think about what are the machines that you want to take responsibility for and join with others. School buses. Or what about postal trucks, too, right? Postal trucks, my personal obsession. Yes, that's your, that's his baby right there. So you want to adopt some machines and figure out how you can change them. And you can, and often you got to go to the systems level to do that. So that's really the framework that I hope people will go forth and carry, because it's very empowering, actually. It focuses your attention on the things that really matter and allows you to stress out a lot less about the plastic straws, which I personally feel like is a good psychological coping mechanism. The way Saul puts it is, the way to solve climate change is anytime any machine that involves combustion dies, replace it with a machine that does not involve combustion. Do that to the horizon and bada bing, bada boom, problem solved. It really simplifies, I think, people's, because it can seem overwhelming, like Leah says, because everything is, fossil fuel is everywhere, but this is it. Just like, replace the machines. That's it. Yeah. And it also, like, there's one political aspect of this, too, which I did want to ask you about, which you raise in the book, and I have questions about. So, like, one of the insights you had is, another advantage of this electrification lens is, you can take two of the big beasties in your way, big oil and utilities, and you can get utilities on your side in the fight against big oil, because utilities, it seems like, ought to like the idea of electrification. If they run electricity and they sell electricity, they ought to love the idea of running everything on electricity, and then you've tamed one of the beasties and turned it again one of the other beasties. Yeah, that was a political theory. That's the idea. Yeah. It doesn't totally seem like it's worked out that way. I'm curious your thoughts on that. Yeah. One thing about the book is that it's not all, like, I did everything right, and I'm a genius. I'm not writing that flavor of book. I'll leave that to the tech bros to do. Like, you know, I reflect on mistakes that I make. I think about, you know, the different strategies we were coming up with, and if they worked or they failed, because that's really what campaigning and change-making is like. You're not, like, the super evil or, I guess, not evil genius that coordinates everything, and everything you say happens. Like, you're in a complex system. You're in a democracy. And so, you know, I think that's one of the things. And so, you know, you make mistakes. And so, yeah, one of the theories of the book, when I wrote my first book, it was all about utility politics. And bizarrely, people read that book, quite a lot of them. They even brought some, if you want to buy that book tonight. But it's, like, a pretty nerdy book about utility politics. And the challenging thing with utilities is that they tend to be staffed in a really conservative, small-c conservative way. What do I mean by that? I mean, like, they struggle with sort of change. And what we're talking about with the clean-up, clean electricity and electrification revolution is a big change. It's a big change. And so, the utilities are slow to get on board with that. Like, what Sam Ricketts and I and a bunch of other advocates, like hundreds and hundreds of people in this group that we helped build this coalition, we tried to pass this clean electricity performance program, which was going to pay the utilities $150 billion with a B dollars to do the right thing and build more clean electricity. And they just, like, couldn't really see that. They're like, but, like, why? Why would I take money? It was a help us, help you type situation. It was a help us, help you, and they really struggled with that. So, that's a challenge, right? Like, trying to get utilities to think about distributed energy, by which I mean solar and batteries, as equally good resources and assets to the grid as other kinds of, you know, power plants. And, you know, thinking about investing on the distribution system and not just the transmission system. There are both incentive reasons why they're bad at that, but also sort of culture and technology. And history reasons why they're bad at that. So, I do feel like we made some progress along this goal of trying to get utilities to sort of see the future. The challenge now, which we certainly don't need to get into, is that, of course, we now have this huge other demander of electricity, which is AI and hyperscalers and tech companies. And that is really starting to complicate the story. Because when I'm telling this book story, we had the tech companies on the side of trying to pass clean electricity tax credits. We had the tech companies on the side of trying to pass this clean electricity performance program because they wanted to meet their climate goals. You know, we're in the town of the climate pledge arena here right now. That was an Amazon pledge, right? And they're not doing a great job on that pledge. Spoiler alert. Not great. But they're not the worst. We also have Meta, which is literally building a giant data center the size of Manhattan that's going to be powered by a, like, bunch of gas plants. So, that's the challenge. It would have been really helpful had the tech companies stayed the course on this whole. Climate change apocalypse thing before they decided to take a right turn to another apocalypse. But, alas. It's ironic, though, that now it's the tech bros who think that they're, you know, gods and can make anything happen. No, they're banging their heads on the utilities. And the utilities are still old and stodgy and won't do what they want either. And they can't get an interconnection either. I know. And they're starting to be pretty darn unpopular, those folks. So, that's going to complicate things. But, yeah. We need to build a lot of. Clean electricity. And we need to run all our machines with it. That is the takeaway. And, you know, there is a real tension now about, like, one thing I'm very worried about because I'm doing all this work on industrial electrification. And, for example, let's get a milk pasteurization plant to run on a heat pump. Well, you might need to increase your interconnection and bring more power into that plant because you're going to use that on electricity rather than burning gas on site. And that could be a pretty large load, right? And we're having all these conversations around large load. And we're having all these conversations around large load tariffs for data centers that kind of ignore the whole electrification. We need to have cheaper power for good things part of the equation. So, yeah. I think we really have to get clear that electricity is a really important asset and lifeblood of our society. And it needs to be used for electrification because, you know, that is the number one north star of what we have to do to deal with climate change. And I also feel like another thing that fighting this fight over many, many years really teaches you is that I think a lot of people come into this with this sort of naive idea that business is not about money. Don't worry, I'm not going to tell you about a new mattress or push a credit card on you. This isn't an ad. There are no ads on Volts. It is supported entirely by listeners like you. If you'll indulge me for a second, I'd like to ask for your support. I started Volts because we're all surrounded by depressing news about climate change and misinformation about clean energy. And it's never been more important to share the stories of the real people on the ground doing the real work of transition. And all the ingenuity. The courage. The public spirit they are bringing to it. People are hungry to hear these stories. To learn from and find inspiration in them. I've heard from people who've changed majors or careers after hearing episodes of Volts. People using it in classrooms, community groups, even state legislators who have passed bills inspired by specific episodes. Sharing these stories matters. It makes a difference. If you have found value in it and want to help me continue doing it, I hope you will join the community of paid subscribers. at volts.wtf. It's about the cost of a cup of coffee a month. If you don't like subscriptions, you can make a one-time contribution. Leave a review on Apple or Spotify or just tell a friend about Volts. I am grateful for any and all support. If you're already a paid subscriber, thank you. And now, back to the show. Speaking of clueless dummies. I know where this is going. The reason your beloved clean electricity performance program, ultimately did not make it into the bill, it had 49 out of 50 votes and the 50th vote was one joe mansion of west virginia let's talk about him for a minute i mean just to begin with just narrowly on the electricity program he didn't like it and even in the book you admit that like it's really hard to grasp onto why like he would say one thing about it and then he would say another thing about it he would say things about it that were so patently obviously wrong that you would have to think is he lying on purpose is he super dumb is he just repeating the last thing the last lobbyist in his office told him like for instance he said i don't want to pay utilities to do what they're doing anyway yeah and it's like well joe if they're doing it the program wouldn't pay them like it only pays them if they're not doing it pays them to do it if they're not doing it it won't cost anything if they're already doing it joe so and like just generally like he was the problem he was the singular problem getting this whole thing passed from start to finish and like did you ever feel like throughout this entire process that you got a good grasp on his psychology why joe mansion well one thing i tried to do in this book it's a reported book what do i mean by that i interviewed a lot of people and it's a work of narrative non-fiction so this is a story and it's a braided narrative of a bunch of different people who are working from different vantage points outside of government in congress in the white house and you see things from different perspectives and i wanted to try to see things from senator joe mansion's perspective because i just feel like that was my duty for the book you know like i want to make this person a real person and really understand his motives and why he why he thought the way that he did because i don't you know he's not like a cartoon villain and i certainly didn't try to paint him that way you were entitled to your own opinions on the subject he's a cartoon villain and of course of course all readers are going to read the book however they want to too right but at least from a writing perspective i really tried to report it and understand and some of the things that i think really mattered are the first bill that they pass you know in congress joe biden is elected they get the majority that will they pass the first thing they try to do is the covid recovery bill right the american recovery act and that bill includes an enormous amount of spending to help people and joe mansion gets pushed pretty hard to pass that bill by schumer and he gets mad after the fact because he feels that that led to inflation and that it was paying people to stay home and that people needed to get back to work and so that view that he was pushed too hard that they spent too much money that they were paying people to do things they were going to do otherwise really affects how he approaches this climate negotiation he doesn't want to pay people to do things they're going to do anyway and he doesn't want to put a bunch of money into the economy where it's going to burn hot so you see when the inflation report comes out in july 2022 when they're really really close and they've been doing a lot of work they've been working with mansion's team for months and months to get to yes he suddenly gets cold feet again because he's worried that if they put too much money into the economy it's going to lead to inflation so i think he had some legitimate concerns you know and i also think he did have a character because people say this that he kind of was listening to whoever he last talked to he was a bit of a weather vane and the fossil fuel industry we know was going and talking to him all the time because during this time period he was talking to people all the time and he was talking to people all the time and he was talking to people all the time and he was talking to people all the time during this time period greenpeace does this sort of sting operation where they fake interview an executive from exxon and the poor guy thinks he's going to a job interview when really he's being filmed and he's going to go on the internet and he's like oh yeah we meet with senator mansion's office every week so you know we kind of got a little they have a regular conference call like a scheduled thing i don't think activist groups have a regular standing call with senator mansion's office but exxon did at that time period and it's also true that he took the most money from the fossil fuel industry from campaign donations at that time and he also personally benefited from the fossil fuel industry in that he made money out of this coal company and that was reported on in the new york times and things like that so i think he was you know he had some conflicts of interest when it came to dismantling the fossil fuel industry but i also think he had some genuine concerns and why does he get to yes at the end of the day we were talking about this earlier i think there's sort of two reasons one there were things he was going to lose for his community if he didn't pass this bill he had spent months getting everything he really wanted into this bill including you know tax credits specifically targeted to disadvantaged you know communities like coal communities that had been left behind in the energy transition he gets up re-upping of the black lung disability trust fund he's going to theoretically get this whole other package through with permitting there were several times we should just make it clear there were several times when there when like adrian when like people were in his office saying tell us what you want yeah write the bill say whatever you want put it on paper we'll pass that as the bill and he still yes wouldn't do it yes and i think he was really just conflicted based on you know the fossil fuel industry and the inflation concerns but then when he steps away again and schumer tells the press this the outpouring of anger against him including notably from famous people and why do i say that well at one point we meet with senator heinrich from new mexico me and sol and a bunch of other people and we're talking about the fact that we're talking about a bunch of other people go we give like testimony in the middle of the book and we learn from senator heinrich because they've got offices right next to each other that mansion's office is full of photographs of him with famous people and you'll see this at the inauguration i think there's a picture of him with lady gaga senator mansion and lady gaga for example and so bill gates is one of those famous people who is meeting with mansion and talking to him and trying to get him to yes on this climate bill so i think being the super villain in history was not senator mansion's goal and you have to remember there was this horrible heat wave hitting at that moment because it's summer in planet earth at the time and europe was under this huge heat wave and so all the anger of the world when it came to the climate crisis was really just being directed at one person and i heard afterwards that all these people were texting him and messaging him and you know telling him why'd you do this i write an op-ed at this time period for the new york times this base i don't know how they ran it given the kinds of things they run these days but it was like joe f you an op-ed and so you know that's why the mansion people don't love me sorry guys and even people like john podesta who sort of bedrock democratic establishment he was saying he was trash talking mansion publicly so i think he didn't want to go down in history as being the super villain you know i take it at face value that he cares about his grandchildren and you know he didn't want to like screw everybody over so you know there's lots of kind of threads in the book as to why he did what he did did i get to the bottom of it no i feel like i didn't i would love to interview senator mansion one day i would absolutely love to but i don't think that's happening leah never says that he's vain and shallow as a puddle so if you see that between the lines that's on you uh okay in fairness david roberts came in with that perspective before he read my book okay he just confirmed his priors okay we're running out of time i got a time though i want to get to a little more time i want to get to some some audience questions so yes they have direct yes he makes financial incentive to keep coal yes he made more money from the coal business than from his senator salary at this is my thing about mansion like that would make sense to me if he was just evil and about his own money that would make sense to me being vain and inconstant like a weather vane and moving whichever way the last important person in your office in a suit told you to move is worse somehow to me there are billions of dollars millions of lives on the line and then at the end he's like i'm not gonna do it and then everybody got mad at him and he's like okay i guess i'll do it you know she's like well and in fairness in fairness as the mansion apologist somehow in this conversation i don't know how that happened um in fairness he goes on to sell the bill on fox news he stays firm to his commitment to schumer that he will vote down the line and he's going to sell the bill to schumer that he will vote down every amendment and senator cinema doesn't do that you know she ends up in the middle of the night during this votorama insane process where they stay up all night and one of the senators has covid this part of the book is very dramatic i like reported it and even when i read it i'm like my gosh this is dramatic um this crazy stuff going down and cinema decides to go hang out with the republican in the middle of the night and she decides actually let's reopen negotiations on a few tax credits and anna taylor who works for schumer is in the hospital recovering from birth she'd just given birth and she's like i've got to get in on this negotiation over those tax things because we've got to land this deal and she does so kudos to her and they land the deal so you know it's like he says i will say yes and he goes and sells the bill on fox news and he he sticks to his word and i think that is you know that's impressive i will say however that the thing that senator cinema wanted was paid leave for new parents and mansion wouldn't let that happen so that's a bummer because that would have been a good policy for america to have in the year 2022 anywho i had a lot more to say on that subject we got to move on let's talk about where things stand one of the things you say repeatedly you and sam both i think are simpatico on this point which is that despair is contagious like there's a million points during this fight where someone like for instance me would have given up and run screaming into the woods to raise sheep on a farm somewhere and you guys just are like i don't care if it looks dead we're gonna say it's not dead we're gonna will we're gonna will it back to life yes and sam has a very memorable line he says when it looked dead and he was out telling reporters it's not dead yet there's still a chance he says i'd rather look like an idiot than a cynic i read that line i was like that is the difference between an activist and a journalist i would way rather look like a cynic than an idiot so like there's this almost like psychotic like force of will like it's not dead it's good things are good we're moving we're doing this you know yeah the reason i've framed this is like i read your epilogue about you're bringing your cynicism into the room trump coming along and stamping on all our dreams stamping on all the work you did and sort of where things stand now and you sort of like oh it's like we're treading water instead of moving forward now and i'm like are we feels a little like drowning you know like uh you know i didn't say on immigration or women's rights or other subjects like u.s surveillance state i just said on climate policy u.s emissions are rising u.s emissions are rising all the forecasters are dialing back their forecasts for emission cuts for 2030 and 2050 like it looks pretty bad so so from where i'm sitting it's pretty depressing yeah so give us your honest assessment of like where think because even you wrote that in december 2025 and since then he's done several horrible things including just a couple days ago we learned that epa is now going to scrap all regulations on greenhouse gases from power plants or cars which was sort of your and sam's fallback plan if if this didn't work so like what's your level of of optimism or how do where do you think things stand now honestly yes well funny enough right before i came here i was texting with sam and sonia agarwal who works in the white house and is one of the main characters in the book and is a brilliant person and she was saying and i wish i had fact-checked it before i came but she was saying that more coal has shut down under trump than under biden so yes it is true that a lot of things in our country are depressing right now i am with you on that but when it comes to climate policy i think a lot of people feel like with the inflation reduction act we were ten steps forward and with trump they feel like we're 12 steps back so we're minus two and what i'm saying is we're more like 10 steps forward three steps back which means we're plus seven okay that's what i'm trying to say so why do i say that the largest tax credits in this law were two tax credits one was to manufacture clean technologies in the united states these are things like solar panels and batteries and electric vehicles there are more than 500 of those batteries still moving forward so when we counted them all up nine in ten of them still exist that is going to change the political economy and it already is not a single republican voted for this climate law and yet when it came time to repeal it we had republicans in both the house and the senate renegotiating and saying no no no you're not going to get rid of that tax credit you're not going to get this they didn't want to throw it all out why because there were jobs in their community in these clean technologies and that isn't just like pie in the sky they wrote a letter in the middle of the night when the one big beautiful bill act was moving through the senate the same votorama process i write about in the book you had republicans saying actually no let's keep the tax credit for batteries for example and so we still have a tax credit for batteries this is because these senators these republican senators now had a stake in the clean technologies of the future and i'll also say that the clean energy industry is not the only country in the world that has a tax credit for batteries because the clean energy industry is getting a lot more politically savvy so chip roy in the house he ends up in the middle of the night gutting a bunch of this these policies and when he goes to try to run for higher statewide office in texas it's the clean energy industry that shows up and spends a bunch of money in the primary and he loses that race so i think that we're starting to see the politics shift here and that's what's really going to unlock us and also those tax credits to deploy solar and wind and batteries are really going to unlock us and also those tax credits to deploy solar and wind and batteries and batteries are you know mangled but they're still alive and they're still moving forward for the next several years and if you've looked at the history of tax credits which i have unfortunately done you could read academic papers on the subject that i have authored they go back to 1992 they go back to the bush the george h.w bush administration and they're constantly being repealed being extended expiring getting extended so this is just another continuation of this choppy story precisely what ira was supposed to like yeah solve that was the point it will these these tax credits will get extended again i absolutely believe that and so and yes you can talk about the clean air act regulations and get super bummed about that but the really sad story there is that they were never really implemented they never they never really existed in full force despite people's heroic efforts to the contrary you know but that has been an endless fight that has never exactly worked so losing them sucks but since they weren't really in place anyway that's not as big of a loss and the last thing i'll say is that trump is turning out to be a wonderful advertisement for electrification globally i don't know if people have noticed but he has started multiple wars that have jacked up the price of oil everywhere and that has caused electrification rates to go through the roof if you're depressed you need to go start reading about solar in pakistan you know what i mean it's cheaper to put up a solar fence than a wood fence there that you should go look up the deployment rates and tragically i'll say in nepal where people are adopting electric scooters at just insane rates so yeah right now america is not the hot bed for the clean electric future that we're dreaming about but the rest of the world has watched putin invade ukraine jacking up like energy bills and then watch trump invade venezuela and iran jacking up oil prices and they've said you know this whole fossil fuel thing seems kind of sketchy maybe we should move to electricity so these are the things these are the bright lights that keep me moving you know it's funny one of the smarter critiques of ira from the climate community is that it focused too much on u.s emissions and not enough on what the u.s could do to make it easier for other countries yeah to decarbonize and you could say that trump came along and just absolutely solved that problem tariffs oil wars absolutely accelerating the rest of the world and let me tell you those canadians hate hate our president i mean i have my own prime minister and president because i got two citizenships here but i mean the things that are going on in canada right they're bringing in chinese electric vehicles and they're starting to talk about doing manufacturing plants for electric vehicles with chinese companies rather than american companies so this is not good news for america but it is a good news for electrification you know i think the rest of the world really gets it and someday there alexandria ocasio-cortez likes to say this there was a day before trump and there will be a day after trump and that is a day that will be a great day for clean electricity and electrification in this country all right all right we talked too long but we got a little bit of time for questions i think the um idea of clean electricity over here and putting out all the machines making them electrical over there there's the connection piece the transmission issue that i still haven't quite figured out how that's going to get fixed if it's utilities if it's state government if the fed should be doing it i mean how do we fix sort of the gridlock in transmission what a fantastic question that is if only anyone in the world had a great answer for that question i mean i think the main thing is just nobody's planning the way utilities grew up they grew up inside states and so all transmission planning such as there is any is inside states and trying to build transmission across states much less regionally much less nationally there's just no authority yeah so like firk is trying taking halting steps in that direction i don't know if there's anything else you want to call out but like yeah that's that is the transmission it's who pays right that's an issue who pays for that line there's another issue of how do you permit it across state lines it's very unpopular like building things including transmission is unpopular and so you know people talk about permitting reform and how we can make it easier to do it but there's also cost issues transmission is a big problem i will say i'm a big evangelist for the distribution scale system and i do not feel like we've maxed that out like if you really start to think about all the solar electricity in the middle of the day i mean maybe not in seattle but in other places you can store that in the form of and you store it in a battery you can store it in a car an electric vehicle you can store it in thermal energy in a hot water tank a heat pump hot water tank right like there's a way that we can actually maximize the amount of electricity on the grid because in california and texas we're already wasting about 10 percent of the solar energy that we create in a year so yes transmission of course but also distribution that's fun too yeah but both and and i'll leave you with one little fact which is natural gas pipelines get permitted by the government saying we're doing this and deal with it deal with it and yet transmission lines have to ask permission from every single farmer and city council that they run through so yeah maybe we could flip that around yeah hey uh jason huff with pacific northwest climate week thanks for the book in advance and this is a super good teaser zoom out and forward ezra klein just had this fantastic podcast friday talking about hyper politics how easy it is for people to get so passionate about different things but all those passions all these movements in the current moment oftentimes aren't tied to institutions that bring about longer change talk a little bit about some of the organizational institutional lessons that you've learned from you know both such these bills in the current moment as far as like how do we organize better for longer term change that gets past the whipsaw of the politics well two things i think it's really important when we talk about a carbon wave to talk about joining groups like you are not going to be able to change policies and do all these things by yourself you need to be networked and there's a bunch of folks who advertise this event and are here and there's amazing organizations in your community you should be part of them you should support them that's not second order work it's really first order work and the second thing i'll say a really big lesson which i write about in the end of the book is that some of the money in the inflation reduction act was in the form of grants and it took too long to get that money out the door and that's a real tragedy because a lot of that money was to help disadvantaged communities indigenous communities you know places that have been on the front lines of fossil fuel pollution and had that money just been a little bit further away from the ground and so i think a lot of the ideas that folks in the abundance movement talk about about moving faster is to slow down justice right and every year that we chill and wait and don't remove pollution from communities that is costing people in their lives and so speed is a progressive value in my book and so i think we have to build institutions that can move a lot faster amen and i'll add one thing taking a step even further back a lot of the reasons the bill got squeezed into the weird shapes it got squeezed into has to do with structural features of our government work the people that have been around so long that people stop thinking about them like the filibuster yeah you can't write a normal bill because you need 60 votes in the senate now and you're not going to get 60 votes for anything so this had to be a reconciliation bill and a lot of weird policy choices were downstream of that and you can go down the line gerrymandering malapportionment of the senate money in politics on and on the supreme court you forgot that one court a lot of these structural features of our government that have strengthened our government and that's why i think it's so our ability to do anything and we find ourselves wiggling around in the tiny space left we need to think about how to break some of those barriers and the only way like all those barriers serve in action and so they all serve conservatives and the only way you're going to change any of those barriers is democratic super majorities yeah or getting rid of filibuster and packing the supreme court it's another idea just another idea you'll never get that without democratic super majorities i'll just well i love i love your hopeful vision i think there's going to be a very big blue wave this fall because that's what political science suggests it's also what all the measures and metrics suggest americans don't like things swinging too far in one direction or the other this is called thermostatic backlash you know you have a backlash in the other direction and remember that 2018 was two years into the first trump administration and that's where the green new deal idea comes from that's where aoc runs for office right and a lot of the resistance to trump's first term is the seeds of all of these shifts that we then see you know years later and i'll say like final thing voters tend to hate hearing about process and procedure issues they find those boring but like nothing happens without them so just like what you can do is insist that court reform not slip away not slip down the priority list if there's a chance for it people have got to speak up and make politicians understand that that almost everything else we want to happen hello uh paulie here former department of energy was dozed oh sorry but thank you for your service can we all clap for this amazing person yeah yet another person who helped make all this happen there's thousands and thousands of them so dovetailing on the previous point so assuming we win back the house what next and then we pack the court assuming all that utopian future yeah well it's interesting because when sam ricketts was involved in the obama era uh you know he was working for inslee at that time in congress and i tell some of the story in that book and when they were writing the recovery act they didn't have enough shovel ready projects on clean energy to just pile money in so there's 90 billion dollars in that law for clean energy but it's not more because we didn't have ideas the cool downside of you know trump trampling all these dreams that we had is that there's a lot more shovel ready projects you know i have a friend jade bagay who worked with an alaskan community to try to electrify a seaweed harvesting boat i mean how that's awesome right and that's a whole plan ready to go you've got community centers that wanted to put solar on their roof right like all these ideas that folks had ready i think that it's going to be very important to put those into packages and make sure that we fund them and one of the key lessons in this story that adrian devaney from the schumer's office really tells is that when we're talking about when our issues go further down the list and we don't do it in the first bill and we don't do it in the second bill and you know there's often not that many bills yes there's only a couple of swings there's only a couple swings and so it's really important that we be creative if we're going to be talking about affordability or institutional reforms how do we get our ideas into that bill right like we have to be flexible and creative because you don't get a lot of swings at bat when it comes to changing laws yeah and i just i totally agree and would say in support of that one of the things i love about progressive congressional aides and think tank people and all of them is that they're all super smart and they all want to do super clever really well thought out policies but like clever takes time you know we've learned that time is the resource so maybe next time let's think big dumb fast give people stuff especially heat pumps give people stuff yeah hi pete erickson a bit of a too clever climate wonk myself thank you so much leah you talked about joe mansion and permitting reform even a little bit i wonder if you had any thoughts on the current debate around permitting reform potentially also in a lame duck session and where you see that with regards to nipa or other issues that are being discussed thank you yeah so the first thing i always say when i talk about permitting reform is i am not a world-leading expert on the subject of nipa i'm just not that's i'm not a world-leading expert on the subject of nipa i'm just not that's from reading reports and talking to people who are more deep in the weeds on this is that there's a question here right which is like can we get a permitting reform package that does more to accelerate clean electricity and all the good stuff transmission and doesn't do quite as much to accelerate fossil fuels and can we do that you know with it's on the democratic side it's senator whitehouse and senator heinrich who are wonderful people who really care about climate change working on this and with president trump and would he sign such a bill right so there's a lot of questions about even getting the bill to become a law and it's also possible that in the last two years of the trump administration we could see more fossil fuels accelerated by such a bill but in the long run it's really going to accelerate clean electricity and electrification and transmission and that's just a really hard deal for some people to get to the table on because they think well we can't have anything bad happen right like the same dynamic played out with this climate law that i write about in the book there were some bad things that mansion put in the bill and there were some people who said well i can't accept you know if there's two bad things and 40 good things i don't i won't say yes to that right and so that's the challenge trying to get people to agree that this is a package that is going to you know do good things for clean electricity and also get trump to sign it i mean think about the heroic work that people like senator tina smith and senator elizabeth warren did to pass this bipartisan housing bill i mean did you guys notice that happened and trump like wouldn't even sign it now the good news is it became law anyway he said it was boring yeah he said it was boring yeah so but they managed to package together this amazing bipartisan deal and we could see something similar on permitting what trump does about that what progressive people do about that i think is a question mark but it is very clear that we are not building fast enough on transmission on clean electricity and we do need to reduce barriers at all levels of government so yeah i think that we're going to see how this plays out i talked to somebody much closer to that issue in the last few weeks and he said he gave it a 20 percent odds that it'll happen which indeed is pretty good yeah that's probably not bad actually that's probably good yeah one thing i'd add on that too is some people want to wait until like there are more democrats in congress i think you'll get a better deal it's gonna have to be bipartisan and right now we're in a situation where both sides think that if you make permitting easier their favored form of energy will win i worry if we put this off republicans are going to figure out that if we make permitting easier clean energy is going to win and they're going to back off on all their support so i really think like as much as it will require eating some crap sandwiches doing what's on the table right now i think it absolutely should be done insofar as it's possible i'm dick fiddler i one of my great privileges in life is to be working with the people on the beyond coal campaign yes and nice to see you dick yes thank you for your work and to be a good friend of marianne hits who is one of marianne is a wonderful people to walk the face of the earth this is marvelous stuff at the federal level and i just wanted to see if you could shine a little love on what's happening at public utility commissions at the state level where we've got a bunch of lawyers and activists that have just been kicking the crap out of utilities and local industries it's one of the things that we really can do it's why coal plants are being shut down at a high rate under trump is because trump doesn't have any way to stop it but it isn't a federal thing and i wonder if you could just shine a little love on some of the state-based activity and things of that sort and in addition to all the work which we're so grateful that you've been doing well the good news is i wrote a whole other book on that subject so for those fabulous people who care about public utility commissions and all the inner workings of that there are a few copies of short-circuiting policy to buy and there are passionate people working on this and it's so true public utility commissions are these under the radar institutions that dramatically shape our energy system and sometimes they have elected people sometimes they have appointed people and you know shaping the decisions that these people make is the whole ball game and it really is the story of the beyond coal campaign marianne hit wrote about this in this collection of essays that i was part of called all we can save but that campaign really looked at all the coal plants across the country and all the decision-making bodies which are often public utility commissions and then just worked it year after year through a whole network of activists i'll also say that third act has been working on this more in these days too which is an amazing organization that bill mckibben founded um and so yeah like plugging into sierra club campaigns plugging into third act these are great ways to get involved and imagine if you shut down a coal plant you never have to worry about your carbon footprint ever again right so yeah and in terms of the carbon wave like if you're looking for a place where big important decisions are made and a very little bit of attention and pressure can have a very large effect like these are very boring regulatory meetings so no one goes and no one pays attention so if five people show up that's an earthquake yeah for a puc so a little bit of a little bit of attention can have a huge effect on those nodes yes in in that book short-circuiting policy i tell a story of this fight over solar at the arizona corporation commission which is their public utility and they managed to organize 400 people to do a protest and it was just it freaked the commissioners out they were like oh my god we have never had a protest this large in history and like 400 people's good i'm not trying to say it's not but think about how much bigger the protests have been in seattle right like they're not 400 people so that outsized leverage when you work at the public utility commission or you work at rural electric co-op boards you know we can actually really shape the system when we try to you know use these institutions so do i ever have a book for you if you're interested in that subject yeah all right thank you everybody thank you leah and thanks to everybody who worked on the bill yes thanks everybody you've been listening to volts founded and hosted by me david roberts produced by nate peavy and supported entirely through the generosity of listeners like you if you enjoyed this conversation please consider telling a friend about volts that's how this show grows and survives through word of mouth see you next time