What A Day - Why Climate Groups Are Optimistic about Kamala

Episode Date: September 21, 2024

Kamala has offered very few details on her climate and energy plans while openly promoting American fossil fuel production. Yet a lot of climate and environmental groups seem to adore her. What’s going on here?! Max and Erin explain how, even though Harris might sound pretty moderate on the campaign trail, Biden has actually tilted the energy economy so heavily that she’s set up for success. What’s Harris’ strategy in showcasing fracking? How can she weild the Supreme Court in her favor? And, at this point, is just being “good” on climate change really enough?

Aaron, there's this one moment from the presidential debate that I still can't get out of my head. Okay, is it eating the pets? Concepts of a plan? Transgender operations on illegal aliens in prison? Man, so many classics. No, it's actually something else. My position is that we have got to invest in diverse sources of energy so we reduce our reliance on foreign oil. They'll go back to destroying our country and oil will be dead. Fossil fuel will be dead. We'll go back to windmills and we'll go back to solar where they need a whole desert to get some energy to come out. Whole desert to get some energy to come out.

OK, out of all the wild debate moments, Max, you're stuck on their tiff over power plants. OK, hear me out. Trump and Harris had exactly one substantive exchange. It was on energy and climate, and it was a lot more interesting than you might think. I've just got to say, the crowd size exchange was also very interesting, but for other reasons. For a different reason, that's true. How substantively interesting was this exchange? Okay, well, for one, energy politics could well decide this election.

And for another, you know, we don't actually know a lot about what Kamala would do on climate. But if we agree it's one of the most important problems facing the world today. And we do. Yes. Then hearing her thinking on climate could be really, really important. And if you read between the lines here, we just learned a lot. I'm Max Fisher. I'm Erin Ryan.

And this is How We Got Here, a series where we explore a big question behind the week's headlines and tell a story that answers that question. So we know Kamala Harris would be better than Trump on climate. But our question this week is, would she be better enough? In other words, would she be a climate hero or just OK? And we'll get into how this issue could decide the election because it really could. So, Max, per How We Got Here custom, before we get into it, let's give away the election because it really could. So, Max, per how we got here custom, before we get into it, let's give away the ending just a little bit. How optimistic should we be on Kamala and climate? So, it's funny. If you listen to Kamala on the campaign trail,

she doesn't sound like a climate champion. She mentioned it just once in her speech to the Democratic National Convention formally accepting the presidential nomination and contrast that with Biden's speech four years earlier, where he called it an existential threat and a major priority of his presidency. Sounds discouraging. Well, but here's the thing. Climate and environmental groups

are actually pretty damn optimistic about her. And not just as a, like, better-than-Trump compromise option, but as a real ally who they are excited about electing. Okay, that is surprising, because, yes, Kamala talks about green policies like renewable energy, but she also talks a lot, and I mean a lot, about fracking, which sounds like it should be a minor swear word. Like, fricking, right? Climate groups hate fracking because it's a method of extracting fossil fuels, which cause climate change, and environmental groups don't

like fracking either because it causes groundwater pollution. There are some weird contradictions here. Yeah. And to square them and to understand why climate groups are enthusiastic about Kamala helps to look at her alongside the last two Democratic presidents. Obama and Biden, you mean. When you see how Kamala's climate strategy follows on the Obama strategy and the Biden strategy, what she will do or is likely to do becomes a lot clearer. And so does, I think, the case for optimism. Let's open up a case of optimism. Let's open it up. Okay. So I talked to a guy named Robinson Meyer. He is the founding executive editor of Heatmap, which is a really fantastic news outlet covering all things climate. And he said that to understand Kamala's likely climate agenda, really to understand where we are broadly in the fight against climate change right now in

the world, you've got to start with the Obama years. And specifically with something unexpected that happened just as Obama was gearing up around 2010 to make his first big push on climate. Here's Rob. When Obama was first elected, the U.S. was becoming a major fossil fuel powerhouse in a way that had not been seen since the 1950s or 1960s. The U.S. was producing a huge amount of natural gas, and that meant both good and bad things as far as the Obama administration was concerned, because all that natural gas was driving a huge amount of coal out of the power system. And so the power grid was becoming much cleaner

and much less CO2 intensive than it had been under George W. Bush. The discovery and the exploitation of these major natural gas reserves in the U.S., hidden at that point in shale in the middle of the country and in Pennsylvania and West Virginia, ended any attempt to expand the coal system and began a major reduction of emissions from the power grid. At the same time, Obama is thinking about his legacy. Climate change is hanging over it as the big thing he wanted to get to that he didn't get to. And so the EPA begins the process under Obama of regulating power plant emissions and tries, ultimately does not succeed because of the Trump administration, but begins to try the process of creating an emissions trading system through an EPA rule. At the same time, by 2014, Republicans control Congress, begins to make some what they see as strategic trades with Republicans in Congress. Strategic trades with Republicans when it comes to climate usually just

means the stick gets shorter and shorter and shorter until the short end of the stick is just barely any stick at all. It was definitely a different time when you could actually do a little bit of that. But it is also it's wild to think back on. It's like this was kind of the first set of climate policies we had ever. But it is also, it's wild to think back on, it's like, this was kind of the first set of climate policies we had ever. And it wasn't that long ago, like the entire idea of doing a climate policy was new. Yeah, that is pretty crazy. Anyway, this fracking boom that comes in the middle of all of this really transforms energy

politics in America. Fossil fuels become a huge industry, especially in Midwestern swing states, which makes promoting it a bipartisan issue. At the same time, though, climate change is completely out of control at this time. Yeah, this is around when we started hearing that climate change had gone from a potential long-term problem to an imminent existential threat. Asian economies like China and India were pumping tons of carbon into the atmosphere on top of the already catastrophic emissions from developed countries like the U.S., scientists projected that average global temperatures were on track to rise by 3.9 degrees Celsius. Which would be utterly disastrous. Rising seas, whole regions, uninhabitable, all of it.

Remember that number, 3.9 degrees global temperature rise, because we'll come back to it. Anyway, this is when Obama devises what becomes basically the first real U.S. strategy for climate change. He has to thread this needle of reducing emissions, even though there's a massive fossil fuel boom at a time when the economy is still just beginning to recover from the Great Recession. And he also has to figure out how to reduce emissions in other countries like China, because the US alone switching to renewables would not be enough. So here's Rob again to talk about what he did. Obama begins a large scale diplomatic initiative to strike the Paris Agreement, which is the first truly international climate change accord that happens in December 2015. At the same time, the Obama administration strikes a deal with the Republicans in Congress to allow the U.S. to export oil for the first time since the 1970s.

They lift the crude oil export ban, and that was largely made possible by the shale boom because suddenly the U.S. had so much oil it didn't know what to do with it. It couldn't consume it all domestically, and it was looking to sell it abroad. In return for lifting the oil export ban, Democrats get a number of initiatives in the federal budget. So Obama can fund the Green Climate Fund, the international pot of money to help developing countries with climate change. Congress also agrees to extend for several more years tax credits for wind and solar energy and to not pass certain existentially threatening provisions for the EPA or for various EPA climate objectives.

So as part of all this, Obama set a bunch of new regulations, especially on cars and power plants that reduced how much greenhouse gases would get produced. He continued tolerating the oil and gas boom, partly to win climate concessions from Republicans who controlled Congress, but also because while oil and gas are bad for climate, they were displaced in coal, which is a lot worse. The Obama administration called it their, quote, all of the above energy policy, as in rather than choosing between the oil and gas boom versus promoting renewable energy sources like wind and solar, do all of them. Kamala's energy strategy, as she has described it so far, actually sounds a lot like this too. Here she is at the presidential debate again. We have had the largest increase in domestic oil production in history because of an approach that recognizes that we cannot over-rely on foreign oil. And I am proud that as vice president over the last four years,

we have invested a trillion dollars in a clean energy economy, while we have also increased domestic gas production to historic levels. You know, I would say that a better way to describe this would be diversifying your energy policy. But I also don't have a lot of faith that the man who confused insane asylums and political asylums would understand the difference between a diversified portfolio of energy and diversity in the DEI sense. I was going to say DEI for energy, as this has a certain ring to it that I think you'd probably not like. Okay, so it sounds a lot like the Obama strategy, but when I talked to Rob about this, he argued that it is actually really different legislative push. And so the Biden administration

said, okay, instead of prioritizing something else over climate change, instead of trying to do two things with Congress, we are focusing on climate change. And through the whole Build Back Better negotiation to, I think, the credit of the Biden administration and to the credit of Democrats in Congress, there was a lot of horse trading about what exactly which policies were going to be in or out of what began as Build Back Better and ended as the Inflation Reduction Act. The energy provisions were basically there from the beginning. Here are a handful of those climate wins under Biden. 97% of all new power generation this year has been renewable power. Solar panel production has quadrupled and the cost of panels is now about the same per square foot as plywood. Wow. I think that's pretty cheap. I could finally take the

plywood panels down off my roof. Yes, your neighbors have been complaining. Coal is disappearing, methane is way down, electric car sales are way up. And at the same time, thanks to global emissions reductions over the last decade, the world is now on track for an average temperature rise of 2.7 degrees Celsius. And that's down from 3.9 degrees, but it is still too much. But it's a very big, very promising reduction. And it's halfway to what scientists say should be the global target of 1.5 degrees.

So Rob said that Biden broke with the Obama strategy on climate in two ways. And the first was to pass these way more ambitious climate measures. And the second has to do with how Biden exploited that boom in American fossil fuel production, which is still going on. Here's Rob. So you have this weird dual thing from the Biden administration, where they actually did help the oil industry ramp up in the wake of COVID and in the wake of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. He used the Defense Production Act to make sure they had pipeline and various raw

materials that they needed to ramp up production. He sold oil at great profit into world markets. And yet, the line that America is stronger because it's producing more oil and natural gas is not something you've heard from the Biden administration. And I think that's largely because of his skittishness around climate goals and making sure that he comes across as a good decarbonizing climate champion to progressives in his party. That's interesting. He's trying to kind of have his cake and eat it, too. His oil cake. His oil cake.

Well, olive oil cake is good, but regular crude oil cake, not so great. But yeah, it's an interesting balancing act that he has to do. He has to do something but not scare people who are scared he might be doing too much. Especially, again, as like Obama coming in trying to oversee an economic recovery and so much the economy is relying on fossil fuels. So this is where we get to Kamala. And I would kind of sum up her climate strategy as we know it so far like this. She's taking everything that's popular about the Obama strategy and she's porting it into the much more progressive and more aggressive policy framework of the Biden strategy. Interesting. Go on.

Rob summed it up like this. It gets a little technical, but he explains that hiding in these details are some potentially transformative policies. During the Obama administration, there were some small level of tax credits for wind and solar that came from the federal government. But there was not the widespread cross-sector level of subsidy and grant support that exists in the IRA. Most notably, at the time, the tax credits that existed for solar and wind were set to expire every few years. And so it'd be like, okay, we're putting them in place in 2012, but they're going to expire in 2016. So they had to be renewed by Congress every year. They also only covered certain technologies. Under the IRA, any zero carbon electricity generating resource can use any of the available tax credits. has committed under law to continue that support for those technologies to at least 2032, but actually until the U.S. reduces carbon emissions about 95% below their all-time high from the power sector, which is huge. There's no other place in U.S. law that I'm aware of where the U.S. has

pledged to maintain a form of policy support until we meet a certain emissions goal. And so unlike during the Obama administration, where there was some federal support for wind and solar exclusively, but to some degree, the Obama administration was like, we're we support in all of the above policy, thumbs up, and tossing renewables into the pool a little bit. A pool where coal and natural gas were already circling like sharks. They were the big incumbents with big financial power behind them. The US has put a lot of power behind clean energy, not enough, but the US has put a ton of money behind building up a clean energy economy. And so for Harris to talk about something that sounds like an all of the above policy is very different now, because unlike 10 years ago, the federal government's thumb is very much on the scale of zero carbon technologies.

I gotcha. So when Kamala talks up oil and gas, she might sound like Obama charting a middle way climate policy through a Republican Congress. But Biden has tilted the energy economy so heavily in just the last three or four years. helps to explain both why Kamala is taking the tack she is right now, and also why she sounds a little different than she did four years ago when she ran in the 2020 Democratic primary to Biden's left on climate. Here's Rob. During the Trump administration, there was a lot of polling that progressives saw that convinced them that the public was on their side for this stuff, and that the public supported an aggressive and costly transition to clean electricity and to a decarbonized economy. I think more recent polling has not shown that. I think the experience of the Biden administration dealing with high gas prices,

of dealing with inflation, has taught progressives broadly and the environmental group specifically that, in fact, this is very hard, that people are not willing to pay a lot for the clean energy transition. And, of course, gas prices did not go up because of the clean energy transition. They went up because Russia invaded Ukraine and completely threw global oil markets into turmoil. But, like, as an object lesson, the takeaway from that episode was that, wow, Americans really hate when gas prices go up. You know, if you look at polling now, there's kind of a classic, like a thermostatic effect to polls where the public moves in the opposite direction as the president's party. But you could just think of it as a bounce back. Americans seem to really support a lot of climate action when Trump was president, because Trump did not support climate action. Now that Biden is president and he supports climate action, the U.S. public has moved closer to a more fossil fuel friendly approach, let's say.

And even among Democrats, a quarter of Democrats support expanding fracking and offshore drilling. Forty five percent of independents support it. And obviously, an overwhelming majority of Republicans support expanding fossil fuel extraction. That is what I call the, eh, I'll be dead before they have to worry about it, approach to climate change and politics. That's the George W. Bush administration policy. Yeah, eh, you know what? We'll be dead by the time this all comes back to bite us in the ass, which gets us to the Pennsylvania of it all.

It does. Yes. It's a major fracking state, a major natural gas state. Tons of Pennsylvanians work either directly in the fossil fuel industry or live in a community that's supported by it. So, boy, do they care about fracking. understand the climate policy landscape that Kamala is walking into after Obama and Trump and Biden. But that still doesn't tell me what she'd actually do as president. Are we talking like big transformative wins, little incremental changes? So I think there's like good news and bad news there. The bad news is that we just don't have a ton of information on her likely climate agenda. Like we don't have a ton of information on a lot of her policy agendas. She took some big left-wing positions around the 2020 primary, like co-sponsoring a bill called the Green New Deal that didn't make it out of committee, but was a big climate signaling bill. But she's been hazy on details this time around. And maybe that's because her presidential campaign is so new, or maybe it's because she's focused on being strategic in swing states where voters, as Rob said, are pretty

moderate on climate. But again, it's hazy. Yeah, that's the bad news. Here's the good news. If you were wondering whether she'd go big on climate or go small, we already kind of have the answer because if all she did in office was continue to see through Biden's big piece of climate legislation, which is the Inflation Reduction Act, then those provisions alone would amount to a huge series of climate measures. Like what? So the IRA is this sweeping long-term set of plans to remake the U.S. energy economy, expand renewable power, transition cars and fossil fuels to electric, all things that are already coming online but will continue building for years to come. Look, that is great and all, but if I'm someone who feels strongly

about the importance of fighting climate change or who feels strongly about environmental protections, is that really enough? Yeah, it's a fair question. And I asked Rob about something that has kind of puzzled me. Kamala's offered so few details on her climate and energy plans,

and she's been so outspoken about promoting fossil fuel production, and yet a lot of climate and energy plans. And she's been so outspoken about promoting fossil fuel production. And yet a lot of climate and environmental groups seem to like kind of adore her. So here's how we squared that circle. I think the Harris administration will continue to do two more policy initiatives that are important and relevant to climate policy and decarbonization. The first is that it will continue to pass EPA rules. I think it might adjust or modify some of the rules that were proposed during the Biden administration. But I think it will generally push to reduce emissions across the economy using EPA regulation. And I think secondly, of course, she would, if elected and if she had a Democratic Senate as well, and even if she didn't have a Democratic Senate, appoint Supreme Court justices.

And the Supreme Court has become a major opponent of the EPA and of the EPA's attempts to regulate climate change. And so even if the only thing that were to happen during the Harris administration was the EPA just continues along the path that it's on, and the Supreme Court looking at demographic factors become slightly less conservative than it's on, and the Supreme Court, looking at demographic factors, becomes slightly less conservative than it is now, even if those justices were not to be replaced, because, you know, Republican intransigence in the Senate, that would still lead to a more favorable judiciary for climate policy than exists right now. And so, to some degree, Harris could do nothing except oversee the IRA, continue to implement the IRA as legislated, oversee a fairly functional EPA and not appoint far right conservative justices and climate people would be very happy. The bar is low. The bar is pretty low. I mean, I'm glad that he brought up the Supreme Court because I think that that's the big giant wrench in all of this because it doesn't seem like the Supreme Court really cares about precedent or even making sense because they have a 6-3 supermajority of people who have made no secret of the fact that the EPA is something they have their eye on dismantling. So many of the recent rulings have been about neutering the EPA specifically and its ability to pass environmental regulations. Yeah, I had not thought about the

judiciary, but I thought that was a really good point. Somebody check Samuel Alito's wife's flag chest and see if there's any EPA-themed flags in there, because if there's a flag that's like anti-EPA in that flag chest, you know something bad's coming down the pike. She's got a flag that says, come and take it, but it's a picture of a lead pipe. A lead line pipe. You know what? Lead pipes would explain a lot. So, okay, Erin, what do you think?

Based on what we've seen from Harris's statements and positioning, are you excited for her climate agenda? Are you more like kind of grudging acceptance on the grounds that she'd be better than the alternative? Like, where are you at on her? Not to sound like I've been Silicon Valley pilled, but I do think that this is an arena where it really does feel like corporate-led innovation can help drive some consumer level change. Like the availability of a wide array of very usable, fun-to-drive electric vehicles

and the way that it's exploded in the last few years. I mean, Tesla used to be like the only place that was really doing that. But now there's so many places where you can get a well-made, fairly reasonably priced electric vehicle. And in a lot of states, you can get a state-level tax credit for buying one. So they make a lot of sense to purchase. And I think that that's not necessarily something that the government can force people to do. If there aren't enough electric vehicles being made to meet consumer demand or to meet the demand of everyone

who would want to take advantage of one of those tax credits, then that's kind of a moot point. So that's what I mean by corporate innovation. I don't mean like, oh, they're going to figure out a way to pay fewer taxes or whatever. I think that just them developing the infrastructure necessary for consumers to just integrate more climate friendly solutions to just how they go through their lives, how their houses are run, what they use to get around. I also want to say I will miss Joe Biden in the Oval Office, partly because of his train advocacy. I feel like in a country as big as the U.S. without a viable nationwide train network

that people can use to get from place to place without having to rely on airplanes, I think that is something that I would love to see Harris prioritize. But I don't know if we're ever going to see her do it because she's not as in love with trains as Biden is. A lot of it is state level too, which has been like when they tried to build a big high-speed rail in California, a lot of that was through like state regulations and state government. I think your point about corporate innovation is like a really good case for being excited about Harris administration policy on climate because so much of the change you've seen in the last few years in the energy economy to shift towards things like electric cars has been from the federal government. A ton of it is financial and tax incentives that are built into the IRA, like getting a tax credit for buying an electric car or a lot of credits that go

towards the manufacturers of electric cars. There's also a ton of stuff like big investments the federal government has made in battery manufacturing domestically. So that like, because we had a big bottleneck where there weren't enough batteries. So you were not going to be able to have more electric cars or have them cheaper. And they're like, the Biden administration

put a ton of energy behind getting more of the minerals for the batteries to make more batteries, make them domestically, which made electric cars a lot cheaper. Something I was really struck by kind of going back and reading a little bit about the Obama stuff on climate is both like how small it seems now compared to what we're doing and also being reminded that like there was not a climate policy or climate strategy more than 14 years ago. And I think it's so easy to be cynical or pessimistic on what is the government doing about climate. If you open up TikTok, everything is like they're doing nothing. They don't care. The world is burning. We're all doomed. But if you that it needs to go to get to the red line of 1.5 degrees Celsius rise.

We've gone from 3.9 to 2.7 already in 10 years. Yeah. It's encouraging and it's not enough. Like no one is saying that just continue the status quo and be fine. But seeing how much has been done just in the last couple of years under the IRA. Like every time I read there's another like plant going up that's making solar panels. There's another big investment in the electricity grid or in batteries that work with wind or solar to make it more viable. Like there's always so much more stuff happening. And Rob really convinced me that if Kamala can just

continue to see that through, that's not going to be, again, like, that's not going to solve the climate crisis, but it's like, just continuing that path is going to do so much because there's so much happening every day under the IRA. It did make me a lot more excited about her coming on and also a lot more scared about the stakes if Trump comes in and guts it, which he has like all but promised to do. Yeah, I agree. And then one final thought is I think something I would like to see the Harris campaign and eventually the Harris administration employ in messaging around this is that green jobs would be going out to people who've been pushed out of like auto manufacturing. People who are blue collar in more physical jobs maybe don't have as high of a level of education. this is the natural place for them to move into, get paid well, do something that is worthwhile and helpful for their communities. Retrofitting buildings, for example. Yeah, it's a huge one. Yeah, to make them more sustainable and so that they're a little bit more efficient to heat and cool. It's a huge task. And the people that are

going to do it are not some like, you know, pencil-necked, uh, uh-oh, guys, this is the newest calculation. Not that I love pencil necks. I love a pencil neck. Sure, you co-host a podcast with one. But to package it and message it as something that benefits people that have been left on the sidelines in the last 10 years, rather than something that's like a concern of the elites of like Leonardo DiCaprio lecturing people from his private jet.

I hope that the Harris administration has a plan for messaging around it because I think it could be a very effective strategy. I think that's almost where you see the gap between like climate groups love her on climate. And then I think a lot of people who come to it more casually, just like watching clips on their phone, they hear about manufacturing jobs and they hear about fracking and natural gas. And they're like, what the hell? This doesn't sound like someone who's going to solve the climate crisis because you do kind of have to know how to like read a few layers deeper to know that this is all coming through the IRA and all the green plans in it. Okay.

Well, as a reminder of the stakes here, let's hear from someone we haven't discussed as much today. Here is former President Trump at a rally last year just offering up some thoughts on wind-generated energy. Their windmills are causing whales to die in numbers never seen before. Nobody does anything about that. They're washing up a show. I saw it this weekend. Three of them came up. You wouldn't see it once a year.

Now they're coming up on a weekly basis. The windmills are driving them crazy. They're driving the whales, I think, a little batty. How We Got Here is written and hosted by me, Max Fisher, and Aaron Ryan. Our producer is Emma Illick-Frank. Evan Sutton mixes and masters the show. Jordan Cantor sound engineers the show. Audio support from Kyle Seglin, Charlotte Landis, and Vasilis Fotopoulos.

Production support from Leo Duran, Raven Yamamoto, and Adrian Hill. 다음 시간에 만나요.