The NPR Politics Podcast - White House Climate Adviser Gina McCarthy On Summit

Episode Date: April 20, 2021

How will the US slash emissions by 2030? White House climate adviser Gina McCarthy talks to NPR's Scott Detrow ahead of this week's climate summit with world leaders.This episode: White House correspondents Ayesha Rascoe and Scott Detrow.Connect:Subscribe to the NPR Politics Podcast here.Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Listen to our playlist The NPR Politics Daily Workout.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Find and support your local public radio station.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

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It is 1 11 p.m. on Tuesday, April 20th. I'm Ayesha Roscoe. I cover the White House. And I'm Scott Detrow. I also cover the White House. And Scott, this morning you talked to White House climate advisor Gina McCarthy. She used to head the EPA under the Obama administration, and she was also head of the Natural Resources Defense Council, that, you know, massive environmental group. You had an in-depth conversation with her. And we are going to hear some of that conversation right now. The reason why you talked to her is because they've got the summit this week. What did you, you know, what did you learn when you talked to her?

Yeah, yeah. The summit is going to be this major chance for President Biden to bring world leaders together and also to make the point that the U.S. cares about climate change again after four years of the Trump administration undoing Obama-era regulations and leaving the Paris Climate Accord. Before that, though, there's going to be this major announcement from the White House that really lays out a very specific roadmap of how the U.S. is going to cut its carbon emissions. We are expecting that to be released tomorrow. I did give my best effort to get her to talk about it first on our podcast, but it did not go super well. And a big part of that

is this big proposal that's coming out in the next few days from the administration, the technical term nationally determined contribution about how the US is going to lower its emissions by 2030. I guess, first of all, would you like to announce that plan on our podcast right now? Yeah, sure. That'd be great. And then right after that, I'll announce my resignation. No, I would not like to do that, Scott. So she didn't want to, you know, put her job at risk and give us the big scoop. Too bad. That's not helpful. We did get into the broad themes of what we can expect later in the interview. But we started with this summit because, you know, as we mentioned, as we've talked about, a big part of what President Biden is trying to do is say to the rest of the world, Trumpism is over. The U.S. cares about climate. We want to be engaged with allies.

And the first thing he did, you know, he did this on the campaign trail. He said, I want to have a big summit on Earth Day to talk about climate. So I asked her about the fact that a lot of other countries are still just skeptical of the fact that the US is going to keep focusing on climate and not veer back and forth, depending on who's in the White House. You know, I particularly focused in on a pretty cutting quote from a Chinese diplomat about what this summit and the U.S. rejoining Paris means. And let's start listening to the interview there. One of the reasons I asked about that is a quote caught our eye from a Chinese official saying the U.S. rejoining climate is, quote,

the student playing truant, getting back to class. What was your response to that? Well, I think my response is that the U.S. is back in the game. They're not wrong that we have lost some time, but frankly, the U.S. is looking at this as a tremendous opportunity to shift to clean energy. And we would hope that China and our other countries would look at it similarly. You know, let's look at the future and let's win it. Part of the challenge that we're facing with China is that all those electric vehicles are getting sold in China. All the battery technology is getting manufactured in China. And we're just starting to pull that back. So if we want America to be the strongest country and we want to lead it, then the investments in

the American Jobs Plan is essential. It will allow us to maximize our ability to meet our commitments, which are going to be strong. but we don't need those investments. We deserve them for our country. We have almost 10 million people that have lost their jobs over the pandemic. It is time for us to turn from that dire straits to a moment of hope and opportunity. So I don't want people to think climate change and think hopelessness. I want them to realize that if you follow the science and you really use the power of the United States to drive this, that we can get not just where we need to go, but to a better place and a better world. You're getting calls from a pretty interesting diverse group, you know, everyone from the NRDC who used to lead to companies like McDonald's saying the goal should be a 50% reduction of emissions below 2005 levels.

Is a reduction like that in such a short time span possible? Well, from what we can see, we have every opportunity to get an aggressive goal. I know you and I agree with you, a lot of folks are talking about 50% reduction, that's cutting it in half. And many would think that that's not doable. But I would argue that there's opportunities for us to be able to be very aggressive in what I'm going to take, take that opportunity. So what does that look like, though, regardless, you know, what the number is? Obviously, that is a massive change to the country's energy infrastructure, to a lot of other things. I was on a trip yesterday where the vice president toured an electric vehicle, electric school bus company, and the president is big on converting,

you know, all vehicles to electric in a short time frame. But what are other ways that people would see this change in their everyday life? You know, I think you're right. It is a massive investment in people. It's a recognition that climate change is about human beings. And right now we need some investment in the United States of America if we hope to stay competitive. So it's about building a modern and resilient infrastructure, and not just roads and bridges, but you pointed it out. It's about building actually infrastructure at our ports, airports. We are talking about trains. We are talking about ships. We are talking about an opportunity to advance our transportation sector by investing in electric vehicles and battery manufacturing here in the United States, both for vehicles but also for battery storage opportunities. grid. We're talking about opportunities for new clean energy and a wealth of it that has been cheaper for a while and will only get cheaper over time because it's massively competitive.

I want to talk about the politics of this for a few minutes. First of all, you've been making the pitch for this infrastructure plan a lot lately. There are a ton of climate components in it. You've had a front row seat to two different trend lines moving in different directions. On one hand, you have seen in polls and a lot of other indications, more and more people taking climate seriously, wanting to see big changes. On the other hand, it has become more and more of an entrenched political issue in Washington, with many Republicans not interested in the major changes that your administration is talking about. How, from your point of view, how do you get those two back on the same path? How do you put together some sort

of bipartisan deal that does make meaningful reductions? Well, Scott, I think, you know, the president is making sure that his plan really speaks to the American people, not the politicians. And so I think it's really important to consider that. You know, it speaks to everybody's community. It speaks to the workers that are in transition, many of which have lost their jobs in the coal industry. How do we put them back to work? We're investing in those workers again. We're looking at the communities that have been left behind so that they can actually prosper in the future and we can get them into the middle class and start making sure that our country grows again. And so there's every reason to believe, and I'm seeing it already,

that this is not going to be a climate argument. This is going to be an argument about the size of the investment. And this is going to be, you know, an argument about how you pay. But honestly, Scott, this is absolutely beneficial to clean energy and a climate commitment. But we don't need it to make a commitment. We know how to get there. And secondly, I just don't think that's how it speaks to the American people. And I'm not worried about that. So, Scott, it sounds like she's confident that they don't need the Republicans on board to get these climate measures done, right? Her argument is, look, if Republicans want to talk about how to structure the tax rates in this, things like that, the administration's on board. But at least according to McCarthy,

she does not see the White House sitting down and saying, okay, we'll take out all of the green energy stuff, all of the clean energy stuff in this proposal, we'll take out the electric vehicles. In her mind, the infrastructure proposal includes massive spending on climate change. Okay, we'll take a break now and we'll talk more about your interview when we get back. In stressful times, you want to spend your time checking out not just what's best, but what's best for you. We know you care about what you watch, what you read, and what you listen to. NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast is with you five days a week to make sure that time is well spent. Listen now to the Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast from NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast is with you five days a week to make sure that time is well spent.

Listen now to the Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast from NPR. And we're back. Scott, so when the Paris climate deal was done, one big criticism of it was that it is not binding. Environmental groups were upset because there's no way to enforce these targets, right? They're targets, but you can't enforce them. Business groups were upset because it meant that the U.S. had these rules to cut emissions that other countries didn't have. And the thought was that they could lose business because their costs could rise, whereas in other countries, they might not rise as much. So that is the framework under which the deal was done. How does McCarthy kind of deal with that pushback that just the

very structure of the deal has faced. Yeah, I raised that point with her. And I noted that we had begun the interview with me asking, you know, why should the rest of the world trust the US? But the flip side of that, and you've heard it from business groups, and you hear it from congressional Republicans, especially, is the worry that if the US does cut a ton of carbon emissions going forward under the Biden administration, and other countries aren't as committed to that, maybe they have an advantage. So I flipped it around and said, you know, how can the U.S. trust the rest of the world to go on the same pace? And this is what she said. Well, I think that the summit is really a time for us to rally together

with other countries. We're not looking to stay neutral. We're looking to get everybody to begin to really be more aggressive. The science tells us that we have to achieve 1.5 degrees centigrade as our top or not two, and we have to move more quickly. And I think as far as I can remember, the rest of the world has not been in denial of a climate change. It's been the U.S. And so once we're back, I think we can work this through in a global way in order to match the kind of threat that we are facing today that the rest of the world readily acknowledges. And so I have every expectation that the rest of the world will rejoin the United States. And yes, we lost four years, but the next decade is it. This is when

we have to really start getting serious or we face some significant consequences. Those consequences are here already, though. You know, you talk about it. The president talks a lot about it. Extreme wildfires, endless hurricane seasons. I mean, even if the U.S. and the rest of the world meet these aggressive goals, that's all going to get worse, isn't it? Well, we definitely have work to do. That's part of the reason why you want to start looking at resiliency in your infrastructure. That's why you have to think about basically arming our coastal communities with plan B. You know, that's why you have to look at how we better manage our forests. How do we begin to really make an investment in the kind of resilience and adaptation that we're going to actually we have to have now, never mind the future. So Scott, you're not wrong.

We've lost a lot of time. But rather than look back at that, my hope is that this Earth Day, this Earth Week, we can celebrate the fact that we have climate solutions. We need the courage and the commitment to deploy them. And then we need investment in innovation. And so we will get there. We don't have any choice. This is an existential challenge and nobody can remain on the sidelines. So Scott, there is a plan coming out tomorrow that the White House is going to release. What are you expecting? And what are some of the big questions that you still have about what that plan will look like? I think so far the administration has really signaled

how much it cares about climate change and how much it wants to really cut into this country's emissions and catch up with where it needed to be, honestly, decades ago. And I think this week really begins the process of how exactly that happens and when exactly that happens. So I think my biggest question is when we see this plan, probably tomorrow, sometime soon, how much of it is stuff that can happen on the administration's own?

And how much of it is action that requires major legislation to take place, right? The infrastructure proposal does have a ton of stuff that if it all went into place, it really would lower emissions. But a lot of experts really insist that along with that, you still need some sort of major bill that puts a tax on carbon or puts limits on carbon, the type of bill that you could not pass through reconciliation. So is this just another conversation about can there be bipartisan support to have a major piece of legislation passed? Or is it here is exactly how the US is going to reach these goals, and it's happening already? And that's the thing with all of this is that it seems like what the administration is focused on is less of a price on carbon and more the investment piece of it, the kind could do so many podcasts on them. But this is one of those major changes. They are banking, it's a lot less about regulation and a lot more about private

industry is starting to do this anyway. Let's give them funding, let's give them loans, let's give them certainty, and let's then give them incentive to do it faster. And that goes back to what McCarthy was saying in this conversation that she feels like, like so many parts of the economy are already moving in this direction anyway. and that's the big difference. All right. Well, on that hopeful note, I think. I think. I think. Let's leave it there. I'm Aisha Roscoe. I cover the White House. And I'm Scott Detrow. I also cover the White House.

Thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.