Sure, President-elect Donald Trump will likely try to blow up efforts to address climate change as soon as he takes office. There is still not enough renewable energy available to meet the United States' climate goals or even meet the growing demand for electricity from ai. And time is running out to spend the Inflation Reduction Act climate funds before the Trump administration can try to recover them. Despite everything, Joe Biden's main advisor on climate change, Ali Zaidi, is not worried.
He has managed to maintain the perhaps cloyingly optimistic optimism that has become a trademark of the Biden and Harris camp, even when that enthusiasm does not necessarily reflect the sentiment on the ground. The edge This week he spoke with White House national climate advisor Zaidi about what he sees in the future for clean energy technologies and where there might still be room to move forward.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
You have experience in law. How did climate change become your thing?
I came to the United States at the age of six and for me, for my family, the history of the United States is the history of economic mobility. I really came to Washington wanting to work to put more rungs on the ladder of the American dream, and it turns out that the greatest economic opportunity of the moment is to address this crisis that affects the most vulnerable Americans and the most vulnerable people around the world. .
“A technologically agnostic career”
I didn't come to this job from the side of the movement that hugs the trees. I came to this with a real, deep conviction that this was my way of giving back to the engine of economic opportunity that this country has been for so many striving to achieve the American dream.
President-elect Donald Trump says that pull the United States out of the Paris climate agreement and “drill, baby, drill.” How worried are you that the Trump administration will undo the progress the United States has made on clean energy?
You know, I think America's progress will continue pretty robustly. This project is not just a project about climate and emissions reduction. It is a project to revitalize our energy security and bring economic reactivation to places that have been excluded and left behind.
The incentive to finish work is stronger because it is shared, and that's how we've purposely structured it. The other thing that I think is really powerful is that we have really started a technologically independent race to achieve net zero emissions like the North Star.
When we talk about decarbonizing the electric grid, making it more modern, making it more resilient, sometimes that conversation is caricatured as a conversation about solar and wind energy. But look what has been happening in the United States: it has a megaproject now under construction in Utah. It's a two-gigawatt project, the size of the Hoover Dam in terms of electricity, that will produce energy from hot rocks beneath our feet: geothermal energy. There is the wind, which is not only unfolding on the plains as it has been doing for decades, but is now supplying electricity from the high seas.
We have a nuclear renaissance in the United States, the First new nuclear reactor in decades.. I was there in Georgia when it came online. Plants that have been retired, such as the Palisades plant in western Michigan. I went to the Palisades plant coming out of retirement, workers coming out of retirement to return electricity to the grid and the next generation of reactors.
We, as a federal government, should be a partner in helping to catalyze all that progress, whatever form it takes. And that is repeated in other sectors. In the transportation sector, we don't care if it is strong, hybrid, all-electric, hydrogen, sustainable aviation or biofuels. What matters to us are two things: bending the emissions curve and expanding the opening to economic opportunities.
The culture war over clean energy often revolves around this idea of individual choice: I should be able to choose to drive a gas-guzzling car if I want or to cook on a gas stove instead of using electricity. What is your opinion on that?
We have to meet people where they are as we confront the climate crisis, period, period. One of the things the world has learned so clearly about decarbonization is that there is no social license to adopt decarbonization pathways that put upward pressure on consumer prices. So part of decarbonization has to be about improving people's lives, giving them a better product and winning them over.
We saw this with LEDs. I was there at the beginning of the Obama administration when, for the first time, the United States got into the LED light bulb manufacturing business. They used to cost a lot of money, but there was a technological cost curve there. And because we invested in it, the United States was able to help make them cheaper and more affordable, and it turned out to be a better product. And now, across the country, that technology is ubiquitous. I think that's the way we're going to win the future: by giving people a better product that, by the way, doesn't put a lot of pollution into the sky.
Countries that signed the Paris agreement are supposed to update their national climate plans this year, and the Biden administration last month unveiled a more ambitious plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by more than 60 percent by 2035. How can the United States still achieve it? goal?
I think the way to go far and reach the next goal in 2035 is to continue investing in the United States, and that's what it looks like. He agricultural bill It will be in front of Congress. It is delayed, but it will be before the next Congress. They have the opportunity to act on whether they invest in greater total factor productivity in the agricultural sector. It turns out that precision agriculture is also climate-smart agriculture. So will Congress, through the farm bill, invest more in climate-smart agriculture, in precision agriculture technologies, in things that prop up the economy of our family farmers and drive the competitiveness of the sector?
What we are seeing at the state level is a massive mobilization to continue accelerating decarbonization in the network and in the transportation sector. There's also this incredible industrial capacity. When we took office, there were hardly any batteries manufactured in the United States. Tesla, maybe some others, but with very limited battery capacity. By 2030, factories already in place, either in operation or under construction, will have the capacity to make batteries for 10 million vehicles in the United States. We sell, on average, 15 million vehicles a year. I think we'll really see private equity continue to build on the momentum of that transformation.
And another reason why we think we are going to continue to gain momentum is because private capital sees victory and in fact is going to continue making that bet in sectors like energy and transportation. Clean energy is literally cheaper than dirtier energy. And that is precisely where the smart money is headed. By 2024, for example, we expect that 96 percent of what will have been built will be clean energy.
I think what we'll need to do more of as a country (and that means at the state and local level, too) is help families reduce their utility bills at home. There is a huge opportunity in our built environment to reduce energy waste and put consumers in control of their energy bills. And if we do that, it's obviously going to be great economics at the retail level. It will also be a big win for the climate.
When it comes to reducing Americans' utility bills and taking action on climate change, one of the concerns I hear a lot is ai and the energy demand of data centers. How are you thinking about that?
I have participated in meetings with CEOs of technology companies. I have also met with general directors of the electrical sector. There is a consensus in the industry and in the US government that we will and should seize the opportunity for leadership in the development of artificial intelligence technologies. And that means we must remove barriers to the deployment of clean energy on the grid that is necessary to facilitate the construction of these data centers.
I have complete confidence, not only in the federal government and the technology entrepreneurs and their companies, but also in the state and local governments that they see the economic opportunity, they see the security imperative and they also achieve it by implementing clean energy in almost all areas. countries. cases it will be the cheapest, fastest and safest way to bring electricity to these new data centers.
That's why I don't see that these objectives contradict each other. In fact, I see ai as an accelerator of our ambition in the electric grid. ai as an accelerator to advance network modernization. This is a great opportunity. But I'm also the person who often sees opportunity in headwinds. So maybe that's my bias.
We have to talk about the Inflation Reduction Law — the largest piece of climate legislation to date, creating $369 billion for climate action and clean energy. But Trump says rescind any unspent funds. How much is left to distribute??
Very little. I remember it was a Google doc on my computer in the summer of 2020 and Zoom was calling the candidate at that time. One of the most important things we did when we were designing what became the Inflation Reduction Act was to make sure it was structured in a way that reached all sectors of the economy. Which was structured in such a way that the IRA or the government intervened as reinforcements for a rocket. The rocket was the private sector. And I think what you're discovering now with the Inflation Reduction Act is that the rocket has reached escape velocity in many parts of the economy. You have 100 gigawatts of energy that relied on these tax credits to get off the ground, but now it's up in the air. It's flying. You can't put that back in the bottle.
In terms of unspent funds, we are at a place where we are over $9 out of every $10 of grants and other similar dollars that have already affected the economic flow across the country.
The question then becomes: do you want to go and turn the plug on the economic opportunity that is now responsible for thousands of factory jobs and construction jobs across the country? And I think it's a challenging economic proposition and also a very challenging political proposition. That's why what you've heard even in Congress is that maybe they're interested in a scalpel approach, if I'm quoting the incoming speaker. This remains a challenge. The way I think about it is, you know, Jenga blocks. When you're removing blocks from a Jenga tower, you don't know which one is going to threaten the structural integrity of the whole thing.
We are in a time of economic improvement and revitalization, a manufacturing renaissance. The United States on the frontier of energy security and energy technology, ultimately fighting to win global competition and generating jobs and opportunities locally. I don't know if I'd like to go into the business of removing blocks from the Jenga tower, but we'll leave that to the team that arrives in a few weeks.
