The New Yorker Radio Hour - Elizabeth Kolbert on a Historic Climate Bill, Plus a Lesson from Kansas

Episode Date: August 12, 2022

The Inflation Reduction Act now before Congress is being celebrated as the most important piece of climate legislation in the history of this country—which is “a pretty low bar,” the staff writer and Pulitzer Prize-winner Elizabeth Kolbert tells David Remnick, “because they’ve never really passed a piece of legislation on climate change.” The Inflation Reduction Act is a huge political victory for Democrats; will it help save the planet? And we look at how pro-choice messaging in Kansas delivered a surprise victory for reproductive choice by borrowing a classic conservative theme: government overreach. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. The Inflation Reduction Act, the official name of the climate bill, has been a very long time coming. Much too long. In 1988, this magazine covered the congressional testimony of James Hansen, a NASA scientist who declared that global warming was bound to imperil the planet itself. Hansen said that it was time to stop waffling so much. 34 years later, the evidence of our collective waffling is all around us. Wildfires, floods, temperature records broken year after year.

So while the Inflation Reduction Act is a huge political victory for the Democrats, there's a much bigger question surrounding this bill. What difference will it make? And when? I called up Elizabeth Colbert one of the very best thinkers on climate. Colbert is a staff writer for the New Yorker, a Pulitzer Prize winner, and the author of books including The Sixth Extinction and Under a White Sky. Betsy, we're talking in a week in which the former president of the United States has had his house searched. He's being questioned in New York. All kinds of things are happening second by second.

And yet the week before, we had a political moment that arguably is meaningful. for our grandchildren. How do you assess the political moment and the bill that just passed where climate's concerned? Well, it's certainly, you know, a very significant moment. It was often called the most significant piece of legislation the Senate has ever passed on climate change. As a lot of people pointed out, that was a pretty low bar because they've never really passed a piece of legislation on climate change. But I do think, you know, that potentially it marks, a watershed moment. Well, let's go through the bill, what it is where climate is concerned.

What's there that's positive to begin with? Well, the bill mainly relies on, you know, tax credits. There are a lot of tax credits for industry, so for producing clean energy of all sorts. And then there are a lot of consumer-facing credits, for example, to buy an electric vehicle or put heat pumps in your house, replace your oil burning furnace with heat pumps. So it relies very much on, you know, a carrot approach, as opposed to a stick approach,

urging people trying to make things cheaper. And I think that the fundamental, you know, theory behind this is if you get some of these industries really going, the prices will continue to decline, and non-carbon energy sources will become, they have already become much, much cheaper over the last decade or so. they'll become so cheap that the transition to clean energy will just sort of happen as a result of economics. Trying to battle climate change is so complex, so international, so interwoven,

is there any way to assess in an empirical way what the effect of this bill will be? I don't even think anyone honestly has attempted the international numbers, but people have tried to look at the national numbers, and you know, you get a range of figures about what it will do, because part of it is dependent on the price of fossil fuels. Like what becomes tempting to do kind of depends on how cheap or expensive other options are. If you give me a credit to tax credit to buy an electric vehicle and I'm a rational consumer, let's say, then part of my calculation presumably would be what's the price of gas, right? Right now gas is expensive. So EV might, you know, look very good in those terms, but if gas prices fall again, you know, it might not look as good. So that's

just an example, one example out of many, many that are in this bill. Now, you say the bill is mainly dependent on carrots, incentives, rather than sticks. What are the sticks that are missing? What would you like to have seen in such a bill that would have been even more effective? Well, another version of the bill, you know, when it was back in the days, when it was called build back better, There were penalties. And one of the issues that we're dealing with here is there are two parts to this clean energy transition. One is constructing new energy sources, putting up new sources of energy that don't emit carbon. And the other is backing out the sources that do emit carbon. So both of those have to happen. Concessions were made, to say the least, in order to get the support of Joe Mansion. And they include drilling in Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico. and other concessions, how damaging were those compromises to the larger effort that you described? Well, you know, if you look at, once again, the analyses that have been done,

they would say that they were fairly trivial compared to the good that the bill could do. Now, a lot of people were very upset about them. We can't be burning more fossil fuels. That's just incompatible with the project of fighting climate change. And if you can't acknowledge that and can't say that, then it's not clear how far you can get. Betsy, how do you feel about the name of the bill, the Inflation Reduction Act, the way, essentially they're hiding a climate bill behind a fig leaf of inflation lowering. Yeah, I think that unfortunately speaks volumes. The fact that the Democrats didn't want to go out there with a climate bill, wanted to go out there with an, you know, going into the midterms, wanted to go out there with an inflation,

reduction act, I think, is unfortunately pretty telling about our climate politics. But this is something that's very hard to fathom. I understand why people want inflation to come down. Everybody wants that to happen. But at the same time, no one goes unaffected by climate change. At this point, everyone is seeing it, whether you're living in spitting distance of, you know, extraordinary fires, or just the general heat that's affected us in so many ways. Who is unaffected by it? Who is able psychologically at this late date to turn a blind eye to what is facing us all? Well, I mean, that's such a good question, David,

and I have spent a lot of time thinking about it. I certainly do think that this summer a lot of people should have gotten the message, But, you know, we've run pieces, and many people have run pieces of, you know, just going out and talking to voters who are being directly affected. You know, I have to sell my cattle because there's, you know, not enough water. And people find ways. This has just become an ideological issue. What we've found in recent years is that ideology is really, really powerful. And people can believe, even in the face of overwhelming evidence, even when it's really hurting them.

I mean, we just saw these incredible floods in Kentucky, a red state. Is Kentucky now going to go vote for people who are firmly committed to climate action? I sadly don't expect that to happen. What is the ideology exactly of disbelief in climate change, of trying to ignore it, of putting it off the political table? Well, I think that climate change, if you really start thinking about it, it does raise a lot of of issues that do intersect with people's ideology. And ultimately, you know, George Bush famously said back in, you know, the early 90s when he signed the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, you know, our way of life is not up for negotiation. Well, climate change challenges that. Our way of life may not be compatible with dealing with climate change. And when you come to that, when you come down to that realization, then I think it raises for people a lot of very visceral concerns. And it's, you know, and I can understand that.

How would you spell them out? What are the specifics of it? Well, you know, for example, I mean, I'm a trucker. I'm a, you know, there's a million economic interests and jobs that are potentially affected. If you say, look, our priority is fighting climate change. you really do have to rebuild the American economy from the bottom up, because right now, pretty much everything we do is dependent on fossil fuels. The way that Americans have always lived, you know, you can call it exuberant or you can call it wasteful, you do the, you pick,

we live in suburbs, very much spread out suburbs, people are, you know, especially after COVID, going back into their cars, all the ways that we live, the people, the people, potentially do have to be rethought because they're very energy intensive. And so I think that people would really rather just say, well, it's not happening. Or it can't be that. That can't be. My driving around cannot be responsible for, you know, this flooding that just happened. It's just easier to feel that way. Now, the bill hopes to get people to buy electric vehicles and make their homes more energy efficient. Can we make a real difference by making these kinds of changes in our daily lives?

How far does this get us? If the process needs to be far more radical, what does it need to take in? You know, if we all drove electric cars and there are a lot of cars in this country, you know, in trucks, if they were all converted to electricity and that electricity were generated from carbon-free sources, it would make a very big difference. So that is the case. Now, you know, the other issue of climate change is it ramifies throughout the world. the U.S.'s emissions, which historically speaking, we are the biggest contributor to climate change.

The U.S. is responsible for a quarter of the CO2 that's up there, added CO2 that's up there. So that's huge. But we are responsible for going forward, we're going to be responsible for a smaller and smaller proportion because other countries' emissions are still rising and ours are declining. So this problem, you know, it's not one that gets solved. That's another political problem here. You do not solve climate change. You simply make it worse or less worse.

A bill doesn't get past and we then have a sunny and breezy summer next time around. Exactly. Do you think that this new bill will have any political effect on other countries, and particularly the countries that are, along with the United States, the principal culprits in warming? Well, you know, one sort of sad thing. yeah, problematic, let's put it that way, is that, you know, this bill is coming right after Nancy Pelosi, you know, went to Taiwan, the Chinese announced, well, we're not going to cooperate with the U.S. on a bunch of issues anymore, and one of those was climate change. Now, does that, is that really make any

difference? I can't tell you, but the Chinese who now are the by far, far, far in a way, the world's biggest emitter on a year-by-year basis, you know, they're all. You know, they're also suffering. They had terrible heat waves this summer. They are suffering tremendously from climate change. And they know that. The leadership certainly knows that. And they, like us, you know, are trying to be leaders in these new technologies, but also like the U.S., they are very focused on immediate economic growth. And whenever there's sort of a dip in growth, you know, the leadership then, you know, tries to pump up the economy and that often involves and has recently involved using a lot of coal.

So it's really, really hard to say, I think one of the questions, and it's a big question mark is, you know, do these new technologies get developed that turn out to be, you know, both carbon-free and cheap and convenient and all the things that we look for in our technologies? And I'm not just talking about, you know, your electric car. I am talking about these huge industrial processes. Let's talk about two crises at once.

and arguably the two most urgent, which is climate change and at the same time a not only national but global movement, not everywhere, but in so many places, toward authoritarianism and away from either democracy or democratization. How do you relate those two things? I think it is very interesting, and I think it is, possible that will look back in history and say, you know, historians will connect them. They'll say, these people were facing a crisis and they turn to authoritarian governments. You know, people do these scenarios, scenario, you know, building for climate change. And one of the bad scenarios for climate change is rising nationalism. Everyone is just siloed and does what they think is good for themselves. And that might involve, you know, burning a lot of coal. If you've got coal, whole, you know, I think there's in the climate circles, you know, governance circles, there's a sort of general sense that that nationalism, rising nationalism, is not good for climate change. But, you know, perhaps there'll be some benevolent dictator out there who will show us the way to actually make changes, which have been hard to make in a democracy as well. You know, I think we have to be honest about that.

Are you saying this tension between democratic government and fighting climate change? Well, I mean, so far, if you look at this country, you know, we just haven't seen a tremendous amount of political support for fighting climate change that a lot of people would argue this is, you know, a ginned up controversy. It's been ginned up by the fossil fuel industry. And I think there's a lot of truth of that. There's been a tremendous amount of misinformation. There's been a tremendous amount of fossil fuel money that's gone into campaigns. But we haven't mustered the political will in this country, in this democracy, to really do take meaningful action until just now. How's that? You know, now I would say in Europe, Europe is much further along than we are.

The EU has much more comprehensive legislation. and I would say some people, a lot of people would probably say that the EU countries rank higher on the scale of democracy than we do. So I don't think there's necessarily an inherent tension, but I do think that, you know, we do have to acknowledge that so far democracy has not risen to the challenge. What is the further responsibility of a country, a rich country like the United States, when I see that Congo, for example, is going to, increase mining deforestation just as we see it we see in Brazil and and those countries explicitly or implicitly say look we are developing countries this is the only way we can make our way out of poverty someplace like Congo for example what is the responsibility on the place like the United States or or Europe to answer that really

urgent challenge that if left untended makes the problem dramatically worse? Well, I think it's a huge responsibility. I mean, we are the historical emitters, you know, between the U.S. and the EU. So we have a really big responsibility. And, you know, I don't think there's any standard that you could use, honestly, by which we have lived up to that. I mean, The Americans always tout their quote, unquote, leadership on climate change. The U.S. has actually been constantly at the forefront of blocking a lot of climate action, right? I mean, Donald Trump withdrew from the Paris Treaty, which, you know, didn't even have any mandatory provisions. You're just withdrew out of peak.

There was a fund that the basically wealthy nations agreed that they were going to devote 100 billion. billion dollars a year, direct $100 billion a year in financing to developing countries for both clean energy development and adaptation. They have, that's supposed to be $100 billion a year by 2020. They've never met that goal. That is, I was just talking to someone in, in Bangladesh, just the other day about this. And he said, you know, it really shows. that they don't give a damn. And I think that is the message that we've put out time and time again. And that message has been received. Betsy, maybe we owe ourselves maybe a day, maybe a week of self-congratulation after this bill. But when we wake up, what's the next step? What is absolutely

necessary in your view? Well, you know, the challenge is on so many fronts. It's basically huge research and development push. It would mean streamlining a lot of permitting for these projects. One of the issues that we're going to increasingly get into is siting a lot of these clean energy projects, siding solar, siding winds, siding offshore wind. So we probably need to change some of our regulatory regimes. And we need to figure out whether that is by penalizing or putting a price on. we need to figure out, as I said, ways to back out this carbon energy. We can't just add the clean energy. We have to close down the natural gas plants, the coal plants.

We need to rebuild our grid. This is huge. So a lot of this is pretty boring, technical, technocratic stuff that needs to get done. Elizabeth Colbert, thanks so much. Thanks, David. Elizabeth Colbert is a staff writer, and you can find her work on climate change and much more at New Yorker done. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour.

More to come. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Two weeks ago, supporters of abortion rights won a surprise victory, maybe the first victory of the post-Roe era. It was in Kansas. Not a state normally known for its progressive politics. A proposed constitutional amendment would have allowed state lawmakers to enact a total ban on abortion, but it was defeated by a very wide margin.

Democrats around the country, of course, wanted to know how they did it. The ads featured voters in Kansas, like a woman who identifies herself as a Catholic grandmother. It could ban any abortion in Kansas, even when a mother's life is on the line or with rape or incest. If it were my granddaughter, I wouldn't want the government making that decision for her. And an interesting twist to the pro-choice messaging is that they borrowed a familiar theme, from conservatives, government overreach. This confusing constitutional amendment is a slippery slope for Kansas.

It gives government more power over your privacy and your personal medical decisions. Peter Slevin covered the Kansas vote and he talked about the politics of privacy with Ashley All, a spokesperson for the coalition called Kansans for Constitutional Freedom.

Did you ever think as a Democrat you'd be running a government overreach, anti-government overreach campaign? No, but you know, I mean, I think it's actually like a much more complicated message. If you think about some of the slogans for pro-choice organizations bands off my body, my body, my choice, those are absolutely, you know, variations on the same topic. And we can talk about personal freedom, equal rights, and personal liberty. and those are all absolutely values that Democrats share, moderate share, progressive share.

We'd love to talk about the ads. Tell us what the process was in choosing the characters for the ads. Yeah, I think, you know, for us it was really critical that we find diverse messengers for a lot of these ads. We wanted to make sure that people could see themselves. or, you know, really identify personally with either the individual who is in the ad or the situation. And so that is really what we focused on. And we were able to work with folks from communities across the state to participate. So let's hear one of those ads. As a pastor for over 50 years, I counsel and pray with individuals facing difficult personal

decisions. Sometimes those conversations are about abortion. As Christians, we are instructed to love one another. We do so when we respect and trust women as God does. I'm voting no on the proposed amendment because it replaces religious freedom with government control. It restricts women's rights and it puts their very lives at risk. Join me in thousands of Christians in voting no. What was your thinking actually in that message and in choosing a retired pastor to deliver it? In Kansas, it was really important for us to have someone of the faith community participate in these ads because for a lot of Kansans, that is core to who they are. And for us, we wanted to make sure that people of faith understood that you could both be religious or be spiritual, but also support access to abortion. We actually released a long list of pastors and clergy from numerous denominations who supported access to abortion, and we're encouraging people to vote no.

Let's listen to another one, and perhaps you can tell us the backstory. They call it a constitutional amendment. The truth, it's a strict government mandate designed to interfere with private medical decisions, a slippery slope that could put more of your individual. individual and personal rights at risk. The ballot language is confusing, but one thing is clear. Kansans don't want another government mandate. So on August 2nd, send a message. Say no to more government control.

Vote no on changing the Constitution. Now that ad doesn't mention the word abortion. Why did you do that? You know, I'm not sure that that was like particularly intentional with that ad. I mean, I really think that we were focusing on the government, the government interference portion of it. This definitely picked up on some cultural cues that really resonated with Kansas voters and things that they were concerned about. And it were an easy way to demonstrate, you know, just how problematic government interference with personal decisions can be. And just to be clear, those cultural cues,

what visuals stood out in that ad to you? You know, I mean, we were just talking about faith, and there was, I think, a sign that says something about, you know, churches being closed and mask mandates and things like that. And so we were intentional about that. And I think for some Kansans, that was something that they did not care for. Other Kansans, I think, were less bothered by it. But for us, we wanted to make sure.

that we were connecting with a broad set of voters across the political spectrum who had differing opinions on government interference with private medical decisions. In devising this ad campaign, you got a lot of attention. There was an extraordinary amount of coverage of what went on in Kansas. And I understand that you have heard from advocates and people working on campaigns in other states who want to know what you've learned and what they might be able to use. I believe Kentucky was one of those. Absolutely. There has been an incredible amount of outreach to us about what we did here and how unique it was, how successful it was. You know, one of the things that we really learned, and I found maybe the most interesting, was when you talk to real people about this issue, it is not partisan.

It is something that people find to be incredibly personal, incredibly complicated. it's, you know, to some, it's a private medical decision. To others, it's a moral and religious issue. And so you have to be able to have a conversation where you give people space to have their own personal views, but also at the same time ensuring that they want to join you in supporting, you know, access and protecting constitutional rights for their neighbors to make these decisions for themselves.

Peter Slevin is based in Chicago, and you can find all his reporting on the Kansas vote and much more at New Yorker.com. I'm David Remnick. That's the New Yorker Radio Hour for today. Thanks so much for listening. See you next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Yards. This episode was produced by Emily Boutin, Ave Carrillo, Breda, Breeda Green, Calilea, David Krasnow, Louis-Mitchell, and Gau-Fennem-Poutubelli. along with Jeffrey Masters, Will Coley, and Michael May.

And we had assistance from Harrison Keithline and James Napoli. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.