Volts

Over the years, readers, I have had numerous occasions to be irritated with economists, particularly economists acting as political pundits. I thought today I would explain why. There are those in climate circles who lay most of the blame for the failure of climate action to date at the feet of economists. I’m not one of those people. I just lay … some of the blame at their feet. The fact is, rapidly transforming the entire industrial base of every country on earth was always going to be difficult — lots of extremely powerful interests stand to lose a great deal of money and power — and was probably going to go slowly no matter what economists did.Nonetheless, I think there’s a good argument to be made that, when it comes to the interface of economics and politics, climate economics and climate economists have blown it pretty comprehensively — and have not necessarily learned all the lessons they should have learned. I’ll start by recounting a notable episode and then contemplate two sorts of lessons that might be learned from it, one of which seems like it’s sinking in and and one of which … less so.The case of carbon pricingThis is a familiar story, so I’ll keep it short.The theoretical benefits of carbon pricing, as explored ad nauseam by economics over the last several decades, are well-understood. If you have all the stocks and flows of an economy in a giant spreadsheet, and you tweak the “price of carbon” variable, changes cascade throughout the spreadsheet. Every column in which carbon plays a part (which is almost every part of the US economy) adjusts.Modern neoliberal economics tends to seek the optimally efficient policy, and on that score — maximum results from minimum intervention in the economy — a price on carbon is the winner. It’s one variable you can adjust to optimize your whole spreadsheet. These arguments on behalf of carbon pricing are, I hasten to emphasize, valid. In a spreadsheet economy, turning the carbon-price knob is the most efficient way to reduce carbon emissions.But the economy isn’t a spreadsheet and carbon pricing isn’t just another knob on some policy console. Carbon pricing faces political-economy problems that are, at this point, almost as well-understood (at least by those who have been paying attention) as its theoretical merits. In fact, the closer a carbon price gets to the economist’s ideal — pegged to the social cost of carbon, equal across sectors, covering the whole economy — the more political-economy problems it faces. Its efficiency varies in inverse proportion to its feasibility.The more sectors are roped in under the carbon price, the more simultaneous enemies the policy makes. Different industries have different levels of power and influence and need to be compensated in different ways for their political acquiescence, but a carbon price applies to all industries equally, so it can not compensate any of them in particular. Thus, it has no friends (except economists).Carbon pricing policies can be and have been tweaked to overcome these difficulties, but with every tweak, optimal efficiency recedes in the rearview mirror. For one thing, pretty much every extant carbon price is the world is too low, well beneath the social cost of carbon. In the real world, other sector-specific industrial policies that are more politically manageable, like feed-in tariffs and renewable energy standards, have prevented far more emissions.Anyway, I won’t rehearse all these arguments again. If you want to read up, start with this piece I did for Vox, this piece from Jesse Jenkins, or this three-part interview I did with David Victor and Danny Cullenward, who wrote a whole book on the subject. For years, economists acted like serious grappling with political-economy constraints was beneath them, and they bullied big environmental groups into becoming economist wannabes, preaching their “market-friendly” gospel. The entire decade of the 2000s was spent preparing for a national climate-pricing push in 2008 that ended up producing precisely nothing. It wasn’t until 2020 that another shot came around at the federal level — thankfully, Dems aren’t repeating their mistake (at least that mistake).The capture of the climate policy debate by carbon-price-obsessed economists in the late 20th century helped send national and international climate policy down a multi-decade cul-de-sac in which very little was accomplished and much precious time was wasted. So what can be learned from that experience? I think there are two broad lessons, the first about the substance of climate economics and the second about the political behavior of economists. Conventional economics has mostly gotten climate change wrongPart of what prompted me to write this post in the first place is this piece by economist Daron Acemoglu about the failures of economics on climate change and some longstanding assumptions that need to be updated. It’s a smart, approachable distillation of some critiques that will be familiar to policy nerds:* Economists have dramatically underestimated the cost of climate damages.* They have treated technology as an exogenous variable, something external that just happens, applied to models at a set rate; models with “endogenous and directed technological change,” which reflects our ability to shape and focus technology development through policy, reveal that much more dramatic emission cuts are affordable. * They have used “discount rates” familiar in short-term market contexts to calculate the value of inter-generational goods. * They have failed to account properly for risk and uncertainty, especially for “long-tail risks,” i.e., low-probability but disastrous outcomes. * They have assessed the costs and benefits of wholesale sociotechnical transformation using utility functions designed to model changes at the margins of existing systems. * They have obsessed over optimally efficient policy in a way that ignores other values and trade-offs. (See Noah Smith and Tom Brookes and Gernot Wagner for other recent fulsome critiques of climate economics.) All these mistakes point in the same basic direction: economists have dramatically underestimated the scale and speed of action needed to address climate change.It’s worth pointing out that, ahem, Not All Economists. There are critiques of climate economics along these same lines that go back decades, from within basic confines of the mainstream — and other critiques from ecological economists and feminist economists and development economists and so on and so forth. Economics is not a monolith. It’s not all or even necessarily most economists that have made these mistakes and arguably the rising vanguard of the profession is busy correcting them.Nonetheless, bad climate economics has reigned for quite a while, long enough that it has developed into a kind of folk wisdom among the US chattering classes, who are convinced that climate change is a problem, but don’t understand how vast the costs of inaction are compared to the costs of action. It will take time to root out all the lingering fallacies and myths in the body politic, and for that, economists share some blame. These failures of economics have created a deficit of trust among climate hawks. Advocates have spent years pushing against economists in pursuit of ambitious industrial policy. That trust deficit is relevant as we contemplate how economists approach current political debates. Policies aren’t abstractions, they are embedded in contexts The other lesson to learn from the carbon pricing experience is that in the unending struggle among rival interests that is politics, optimal efficiency is only one of many valid considerations. One might also hope for a policy to build resiliency and redundancy into important systems, or to be politically durable, or to channel benefits to marginalized communities, or to fit well with the enforcement capabilities of existing institutions.Most of all, in the political realm, the “best” policy is feasible, given the current array of interests — businesses, nonprofit groups, political factions, and others. There are sometimes reasons to push policies that are impossible under the current regime, if only as aspirational targets, but not at the expense of policies that are feasible, certainly not in those rare moments when policy is actually being made. Of course, feasibility is not a binary, it’s a fuzzy judgment, a complex calculation. But for just that reason, to know what the optimum policy is for a particular polity in a particular time and place, one must understand the sociopolitical dynamics of that particular context. Policies are not free-floating conceptual structures that can be compared and ranked in the abstract; they are embedded in social, institutional, and economic relationships among actual, situated people with particular cultures, histories, and habits. A recent paper by UCLA law professor William Boyd, published in the Columbia Journal of Environmental Law, discusses the “instrument choice debate” in Western economics and how it took shape. The paper describes a kind of technocratic turn in economics in the last quarter of the 20th century, during which economists abstracted further and further away from lived examples and histories, increasingly conceiving of policy as a choice of instruments, policy tools, which were characterized according to their abstract design and theoretical merits. It is as though policymakers are surgeons, scrubbed into a cleanroom, choosing which sterilized tool best suits their needs. Viewing the policy space this way has “constrained our conceptions of the regulatory state and its capacity for climate action in jurisdictions around the world,” Boyd writes, and “led to a sharply diminished view of public engagement and government problem solving.”The truth is, policies are not discrete tools in a toolbox, equally at hand. To choose a policy is not to execute an equation in a spreadsheet, it is to invoke a whole skein of institutions, habits, norms, economic interests and counter-interests, and social narratives. We are not in a cleanroom; we are in the opposite. Doing politics, advancing the public welfare, is ultimately a utilitarian game. You are trying to maximize outcomes, to achieve the strongest and most effective policy results possible within a particular set of social and political constraints. In that context, a policy that maximizes spreadsheet results but can not get past the constraints is not “better” than a more limited policy that can pass. The best policy is not the economically optimal policy, it’s the most effective policy that can be implemented and enforced. No specialist expertise can substitute for wisdomIn my experience, climate policy debates frequently find people with technical expertise in a particular area — the hard sciences, say, or engineering, or most often of all, economics — confidently making policy recommendations based on their narrow expertise.When challenged on the political economy of particular policies, they retreat to their credentials: “I’m no expert on politics, I’m just a scientist/engineer/economist.” But here’s the thing. If you’re calculating the optimally efficient policy, you’re an economist; once you go out in public and argue, “legislators should pass this policy,” you’re no longer acting purely as an economist, you’re acting as a citizen, an advocate. You’re no longer merely saying, “this is the optimally efficient policy on paper,” you’re saying, “this is the right policy to push, all things considered.” Economist pundits spent years conflating those two in climate policy, and they’ve inspired a lot of other people to conflate them as well. When you enter the realm of politics and make political arguments and recommendations, you ought to be cognizant of, not merely the likely economic effects of a policy if it is passed and enforced, but the political dynamics that determine its feasibility, the likelihood that it will stay in place if passed, the state’s ability to enforce it, what social and economic interests will gain and lose from it, how equitable its distribution of costs and benefits may be, and how all of it might shape the space of political possibilities in the future. You ought to be cognizant of and feel responsible for the political effects of your intervention — what interests and factions you are strengthening and which you are weakening, where your argument weighs in the current moment, how your words are likely to be used, and by whom. Those are all difficult things to know! And the truth is difficult to glean from the ungainly morass of political journalism and commentary. Unlike disciplines with some academic or professional standards of rigor, political punditry and advocacy are a veritable festival of gut instincts, guesses, bad logic, bad faith, and confirmation bias. Pundits rarely offer empirical evidence; they rarely assess the accuracy of their prior predictions; they rarely change their minds. It drives scientists, economists, and, uh, ex-philosophy students out of their heads. It is tempting to try to claim some authority, to claim that a background in economics (or some other technical field) confers the status of referee, making the final calls on the merits of various policies. But it doesn’t. There are no real “experts” in politics, despite many claims to the contrary. The best we can hope for is to develop a few empirically informed heuristics (including those from economics), to remain open and alive to new evidence, to find trustworthy guides to the current political economy, and to strive toward, for lack of a better word, wisdom. Technical training and specialist knowledge are valuable. Those involved in political analysis and advocacy ought to pull in more from economics, political science, sociology, and ecology, among other disciplines. But those who have technical training should never mistake it for wisdom. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.volts.wtf/subscribe

In this episode, I talk with Sarah Smith of the Clean Air Task Force about methane, the greenhouse gas that falls out of the atmosphere more quickly than carbon dioxide but trap a lot more heat while it’s there. We discuss sources of methane pollution, opportunities for reduction, and recent policy developments. Full transcript of Volts podcast featuring Sarah Smith, September 29, 2021(PDF version)David Roberts:Methane is having a moment. Methane — chemical name CH4 — is a fuel. It is the primary ingredient in natural gas, which generates about 40 percent of US electricity and heats about half of US homes. It is also an air pollutant, a precursor to ground-level ozone, which is toxic to humans. And it is also a greenhouse gas, much shorter lived in the atmosphere than CO2, but much more potent while it is there. Methane in the atmosphere comes from leaks along oil and gas infrastructure, from agriculture (primarily cow burps and manure), and from landfills. Rising concern over methane pollution has culminated in the Global Methane Pledge, announced by President Joe Biden’s White House last week, which would have participating countries (which include the EU, the UK, and Mexico) reduce methane emissions at least 30 percent by 2030. This followed the United Nations Environment Program’s Global Methane Assessment in May, which found that substantially and rapidly reducing methane is the only way to meet the international goal of keeping warming under 1.5°C. Clearly, for those of us who haven’t been paying as close attention as we should, it’s time to tune into the methane debate. The Clean Air Task Force has been tracking methane pollution and advocating for reductions for years. So I was eager to talk to Sarah Smith, the head of CATF’s Super Pollutants program, about the basics of methane: where it comes from, how it can be reduced, and the battles over it in US methane policy. (See also: Smith’s op-ed in Canary.)Without further ado, Sarah Smith, welcome to Volts. Thanks for coming.Sarah Smith:   Thank you so much for having me, David.David Roberts:   For those of us who have not been tracking the details of methane as closely as they might: what exactly is methane? Sarah Smith:   Methane is an invisible, odorless gas that is commonly known as the main constituent of natural gas. It has flown under the radar for far too long. It's currently contributing to about half the warming that we're experiencing today.David Roberts: Methane is a greenhouse gas that traps more heat in the atmosphere than CO2, but for a shorter period of time. What is the climate change potential of methane, and how does it differ from CO2?Sarah Smith:  Every pound of methane heats the climate more than 80 times as much as a pound of CO2. But methane only lasts for about a decade in the atmosphere, which is a big opportunity, because quickly reducing the amount of methane in the atmosphere would very quickly slow warming, whereas carbon dioxide is slowly building up over time and takes much longer to reduce.David Roberts: I’ve seen it compared to stock vs. flow. With CO2, if you stock it up in the atmosphere it stays, so you have to worry about the total amount. Methane is a flow problem; it's constantly coming out of the atmosphere. Is it fair to say that if we reduced the addition of methane into the atmosphere to the rate at which it was coming out of the atmosphere, we would basically stabilize its temperature effect? In other words, theoretically, there is some level of methane emissions at which you're not making things warmer.Sarah Smith:Exactly, and that's the goal: to get back to those pre-industrial concentrations of methane by ensuring that less methane is being added than removed.David Roberts: It is startling that methane has caused half of historical climate warming thus far. How was that discovered, and how did we not know it for so long?Sarah Smith:I ask myself that question all the time. The latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change finally shone a bright light on methane; you saw the CO2 bar next to the methane bar and clearly, methane was causing a substantial amount of the warming, about half as much as CO2. Subsequently, the attention is growing, as it should, and as it has been for years, but finally, we're really reaching a crescendo here.David Roberts:What are the implications for policy? What does this allow us to do if we grab hold of the methane lever?Sarah Smith:   A powerful lever it is. We don't have a lot of time left — perhaps 10 to 15 years, maybe less — to bend the warming curve in order to stave off irreversible changes to our climate, including self-reinforcing feedbacks where the world warms itself, like the loss of the remaining reflective sea ice, which would add the equivalent of a trillion tons of CO2 to what's already been added. There's also the Amazon tipping point, where the Amazon could be canceled out as a carbon sink. And many others. So we're in this race now to slow warming, and the biggest lever we can pull, by far, is cutting methane. We have the technology to quickly cut methane by at least 45 percent by 2030, and that would deliver an astonishing 0.3 degrees Celsius of reduced warming, along with a host of other benefits.David Roberts: When you say reduced warming, you mean relative to baseline, right? Sarah Smith: Exactly. Bending the curve down, reducing the rate of warming. We could reduce this 0.3 degrees C by the early 2040s through reducing methane.David Roberts:  This is the key thing about methane. You could cut CO2 almost to zero tomorrow and the warming set in motion by the CO2 that's in the atmosphere would continue. Whereas cutting methane gives us this lever where we can promise visible results within a reasonable lifetime.Sarah Smith:  Decarbonization is critical for slowing long-term warming, but it doesn't provide any reduction in warming for 20 to 30 years, and we simply can't wait. We have to address methane.David Roberts:  Lately, there's been global attention to reducing aerosols and their negative environmental effects. But one of the things aerosols did, perversely, was thicken the atmosphere and shelter us from some warming. There's worry that reducing aerosols globally, while it will have immediate positive environmental effects on ozone, etc., will actually boost short-term warming. So this brings us back to the need to have a short-term tool to fight that effect.Sarah Smith:   That's an important insight and one that this latest report from the IPCC finally highlighted in clear terms.David Roberts:   Notoriously, there's been a big spike in methane emissions in the last few decades, and it's something of a mystery, as I understand it. Do we know where that methane is coming from? Sarah Smith:  We're certain about the spike. But there is a lot of uncertainty around what's driving the spike.David Roberts:    Do we have a list of culprits? Sarah Smith:  We think fossil is a significant part of the search, but probably not the only contributing factor.David Roberts: In terms of knowing how much methane is in the atmosphere, we've historically relied on self-reporting by companies and countries that maybe can't be fully trusted to do transparent self-reporting. Now, we have satellites that can allegedly detect methane. What are the satellites revealing, and what will they reveal when there are more of them?Sarah Smith: The satellite technology is improving, and it's exciting that several are planned for launch in the next few years. That will give us a much more detailed view from the sky of the emissions all around the world; in the case of the Carbon Mapper satellite constellation, near real-time data for the whole planet. That will revolutionize the policymaking landscape and industry, which will suddenly be on the hook to take this on.David Roberts:  Tell me a little bit more about the satellite network.Sarah Smith:  There's one called Carbon Mapper that will be a constellation, as I understand it, of more than 20 satellites, circling the globe, and providing data every few days. David Roberts: Is there a third-grade explanation of the science behind how, from space, you can detect a colorless odorless gas being emitted on the ground? Sarah Smith: Sadly, I'm not a satellite expert. But scientists in NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab have been involved in developing this technology, so I am confident in its ability to work.David Roberts: It's like the entire world having a curtain pulled away: every single source of methane will be exposed. Do you have any guesses about what that's going to show? Are there going to be big surprises? What might we find out that we don't know?Sarah Smith:  Already, some of the satellites in the sky today — which aren’t as good as what's coming, but give us some early clues — have shown massive plumes of methane coming from oil and gas infrastructure, including pipelines, and have already resulted in some cleanup efforts. So I'm excited about the surprises, and hopeful the big sources will be caught more quickly. What satellites won't be able to do is pinpoint every tiny leak, and we need to try to address those too. But satellites will be able to show us where the bigger emissions are coming from.David Roberts:  We keep hearing about giant methane deposits in the Siberian permafrost, in bogs and swamps. There's this constant worry about a tipping point that unleashes giant methane deposits from permafrost. What's the state of science on that? How worried should we be?Sarah Smith:  Right now, more than half of methane is coming from human-caused sources. We should address that as quickly as we possibly can, in part to help prevent a rise in methane from these “natural” sources, the leading one being wetlands. Right now, permafrost is not a huge source compared to others globally, but as temperature rises, it could bit by bit become a bigger source. But I don't think people should lose sleep over a one-day sudden surge.David Roberts: You think the chances of a big dramatic release are relatively low?Sarah Smith: Yes, that's what the science seems to be saying.David Roberts:I guess we can take some relief in that.Sarah Smith: We still have a lot of work to do, but that's one bright spot.David Roberts:What are the biggest human-caused sources of methane emission, both globally and in the US?Sarah Smith: Overall, they're fairly similar, with about a third of the emissions coming from the fossil sector, including oil and gas and coal mines; about a third, maybe a little bit more, coming from agriculture, with the main sources being livestock, manure, and rice cultivation; and then the final amount coming from waste, including landfills.David Roberts:I think we have a pretty good understanding of how methane builds up in coal mines and releases. But where in the oil and gas process are these leaks happening?Sarah Smith:The sad thing is that they're happening throughout the whole supply chain, from the well pad, where the gas or oil is being pumped out of the ground, where there are leaks; unloading of liquids along with gas from wells; pneumatic devices, compressors, storage tanks, dehydrators. All through the supply chain, many of these devices also exist: the pneumatics, the compressors, the tanks. Then, of course, you have the pipelines. All the way from the production through processing, transmission and storage, and even distribution portion of the industry.David Roberts: So there's not one big spot to focus on; that's a little disheartening. Are there no junctures or concentrations we could target first, if we're trying to prioritize?Sarah Smith:You're pointing out a big reason why this emission problem still exists. It is dispersed. We are talking about millions of sources that can and must be cleaned up.David Roberts: There has been a long ongoing argument in the climate world over the perennial question of how clean natural gas electricity is compared to coal electricity. Some say that there's so much leakage of methane in the supply chain before you get natural gas electricity that it wipes out any advantage natural gas has over coal; other estimates say no, the leakage rate is low enough that it still has an advantage. How confident are we that we know the leakage rate in this process?Sarah Smith: The leakage of potent methane substantially erodes the climate benefit of gas over coal, and depending on where that gas is produced, how far it's transported, and how it’s transported, the upstream emissions can vary widely. All of that needs to be factored in.But I think comparison to coal is letting us off too easy. It's not the ambitious benchmark that we need, which is near-zero methane emissions. Flaring needs to end, venting needs to end, these super-emitter plumes and leaks have to be found and fixed, and that antiquated equipment that vents methane to the atmosphere as part of its normal operation should be phased out.David Roberts: Can you explain flaring and venting? When I tell people about flaring, they have trouble believing that I'm telling the truth. Sarah Smith:  I experience that, too. It is remarkable that billions of dollars worth of gas gets lit on fire every year as a disposal mechanism. It turns out that burning it is better than just releasing it straight into the air, which is venting.David Roberts: Natural gas is valuable, used in a lot of different ways, and we go out to mine it and search for it, but oil wells are throwing tons of it away. What's going on there? Why throw away a valuable resource?Sarah Smith:   The oil producers have not yet been forced to capture and utilize or sell the gas.David Roberts: Couldn’t they make money? Why would they have to be forced if they could make money?Sarah Smith:  Certainly money could be made. The question is, could more money be made in other ways? That short-term profit is what they’re after.David Roberts:What would be involved in not venting or flaring, but capturing and transporting the gas? Is it additional infrastructure?Sarah Smith: A lot of times it comes down to planning in advance and making sure that before the well is drilled, there's capacity to use or get rid of the gas. There are a wide range of solutions, from using the excess gas to make power on site, or making sure there’s a pipeline and a compressor there to get it to market. But companies aren't doing that without being required to.David Roberts:   Liquid natural gas is another big source of controversy. There are people advocating for liquid natural gas export terminals in the US; China is supposedly going to start importing a lot more liquid natural gas. Is liquid natural gas, in terms of the methane leakage in the process of making it, worse than normal natural gas?Sarah Smith: There is energy that needs to be used to compress the gas into LNG and transport it. We're also concerned about emissions during that transportation process: boil-off of gas, leaks, even super-emitter events. We have an optical gas imaging camera that can be used to see the emissions that are normally invisible, and we've taken it to some LNG sites in Europe and seen the pollution. We know it exists, and we're concerned about it. It's an area where little study has been done so far, but all of these emissions do need to be factored in.David Roberts:The US fracking industry is likely to collapse soon, and there are thousands upon thousands of wells all over the place, many of which get abandoned because our laws about holding fossil fuel companies responsible for them are rather weak. Are they a source of methane? How big of a problem are abandoned wells? Sarah Smith:  They are another source of methane, and we're especially worried about the ones where there is no longer a clear owner. Unfortunately, the government needs to step up with the resources and cap these pollution sources. Long term, we have to make sure that oil and gas companies are responsible for their wells.David Roberts: What does that policy look like when they're responsible for their wells? Is it just a matter of bonding some extra money upfront?Sarah Smith: I do think that's key, yes; making sure that enough money is actually bonded upfront that the well can be capped and properly maintained.David Roberts: When we say capping a well, are we literally just talking about going and putting a cap on something? Is it just a concrete plug in a tube, or is there something more complicated involved?Sarah Smith:  Generally, this is plumbing, not rocket science, but it can be costly to properly plug these wells and then ensure that they're checked for leaks over time.David Roberts: What's involved in stopping methane leaks in LNG production?Sarah Smith: Step one, find the leaks: if it's with a camera, or a flyover, or, increasingly, satellite technology. Continuous monitoring sensors are also becoming more popular and lower cost. So detecting the emissions and then fixing the problem, which can be as simple as closing a hatch that's been left open, reigniting a flare that's been snuffed out, or fixing a hole in a pipeline or a tank.David Roberts:  It doesn't sound like it's a difficult technical problem or an intellectual challenge.Sarah Smith:  We have the technology today. In fact, the International Energy Agency says that half of the emissions could be cut from oil and gas at no cost, and 75 percent could be done at low cost with existing technologies. So there's a lot of potential here.David Roberts: How can it be costless?Sarah Smith:In enough of the places, the pollutant is the product too. That’s how the minimal costs associated with finding and fixing these leaks and updating the equipment can be recouped.David Roberts: The second big source of methane that you listed is agriculture. This is cow burps and cow poop? Sarah Smith: Those are two of the top ones, indeed.David Roberts:  What can be done about those?Sarah Smith:  On the cow burps, also known as enteric fermentation, there is no silver bullet, but there are solutions that should be pursued, including feed changes and selective breeding. Whenever we improve productivity and animal health and fertility, that's going to reduce methane emissions associated with the products from that animal. So those are good solutions. David Roberts: Breeding cows that burp less?Sarah Smith: Selective breeding to improve productivity. This is an area that New Zealand has pioneered, and the reductions in emissions aren't staggering — they see a 10 percent reduction, often — but if we could extend that over more of the world, that would start to make a real impact.David Roberts: What can be done with the poop? As I understand it, the poop right now goes into giant lagoons and sits there off-gassing. Is that right?Sarah Smith:A lot of that does occur, yes. Some farms have started to adopt these biogas digesters, which require maintenance but can be an important solution. And again, that gas can be utilized, so that's one solution.David Roberts: Is that the main poop solution, capturing the gas and using it? Or are there other methods?Sarah Smith: There are some other actions that can be taken, like decreasing the amount of time it’s stored before it's used, covering it better. There are some emerging technologies, like powdered additives that can be added to the slurry to reduce the emissions. But more study is needed to understand the effectiveness of some of these newer approaches, and more study should be undertaken, because the ag sector as a whole is a huge source of methane that we absolutely need to rein in.David Roberts: A growing source, right, because more and more people are eating more and more meat?Sarah Smith: That's right — projected to continue in that direction as well.David Roberts:It seems to me that one of the obvious solutions in agriculture is just to eat less meat and raise fewer animals. That would be the most straightforward way to reduce this, wouldn't it?Sarah Smith:That would certainly help. David Roberts:It's funny that we have so much more faith in all the technological solutions than we do in the idea of persuading people to eat less meat.Sarah Smith:That's a challenging case to make, yes, even if it's in their own self-interest and would improve health.David Roberts:Is it safe to say that the reductions in agriculture are a bit more difficult, less thorough, and less fully understood than in oil and gas?Sarah Smith:Yes, that's true. There are steps that we could and should take today, but we won't get to zero overnight.David Roberts:The third big one, then, is waste and landfills. As I understand it, the reason they're off-gassing methane is that they contain a lot of organic material. Do we have any large-scale solutions for landfills?Sarah Smith: No, unfortunately, not really. We could take a substantial bite out of the emissions through existing technologies, like header capping, capturing the gas from landfills and using it, or, if there's no way to use it, at least burning it off so that it doesn't vent directly to the atmosphere. As you said, the methane is a result of organic material decomposing in the landfill, so reducing the amount of organic waste that's winding up in landfills is also a important piece of the solution.David Roberts: Which would be primarily food waste, right?Sarah Smith: Right. Food waste is important to consider and important to try to reduce overall.David Roberts:Landfills are huge. What does it look like to capture the gas coming off of a landfill? Sarah Smith:In order to capture the gas, the landfill has to be covered, and the gas essentially rises and gets captured at the centralized points. David Roberts: So that costs more. For your average landfill, can you make enough off the gas to pay for the process of capturing it? What are the economics there?Sarah Smith:The upfront cost can be a barrier. That's where we need to scale up financing and make sure that municipalities and government jurisdictions that are charged with solid waste handling have the resources to invest in better facilities and facilities that pollute less.David Roberts:   Food waste seems like a difficult problem. Are there technological solutions to food waste, or is this mostly a behavior issue that we need to educate people about? Sarah Smith: One of the groups that works on this is called ReFED; I spoke with their executive director a couple of years ago, and he was telling me that there are policy changes that can help, like shifting dates on packaging to ensure that there's maximal time to use the food while safe, improvements in packaging, technology, and so forth. That can all help, but I'm not an expert in food waste.David Roberts: Tell us about the global methane pledge that President Biden just announced. Is it ambitious enough? Do we think that countries signing the pledge will actually do what they're saying they will do?Sarah Smith: EU president Ursula von der Leyen and President Biden together announced this pledge recently. They called on countries around the world to join them in a collective effort to reduce global methane from all sectors by at least 30 percent below 2020 levels by 2030, and, importantly, also to take comprehensive domestic action to achieve this target. So this is a great step in the right direction.David Roberts: So you think 30 percent by 2030 is a good target?Sarah Smith:I do, especially when compared to the 2020 baseline. This would be a big step toward keeping a 1.5 degree C of warming future in reach.David Roberts:Is this styled like the Paris Agreement, where countries are proclaiming they'll do this and we're trusting them based on their goodwill? Sarah Smith: This is a voluntary pledge, yes. I think of it as the launchpad for deep work in every one of these countries, to ensure that policies are put into place and actions are taken on the ground to get these tons of methane out of the air and try to stave off irreversible changes to the climate.David Roberts:Is it fair to say that there's no way to stop short of 1.5 degrees without getting ahold of methane?Sarah Smith: Yes. We cannot keep 1.5 degrees in reach without wringing all of the methane that we can out of the system.David Roberts: Catch us up on US methane policy. What policies do we have in place, especially with oil and gas? What are the big fights going on right now?Sarah Smith:  Fortunately, the US is poised to lead by example on this issue, through new rules from the US Environmental Protection Agency and through action by Congress this year that could put us on strong footing going into the COP and bring more countries onto this pledge.David Roberts: This fight has been going on for a long time. Obama’s EPA put some standards in place, didn’t it?Sarah Smith:  Yes. President Obama's EPA developed standards for new and modified oil and gas sources, but left on the table emissions from the vast network of existing polluting oil and gas equipment all across the country. That is something that EPA Administrator Regan under the Biden administration has committed to addressing in forthcoming standards that should be out publicly in the next month.David Roberts: So there are no federal standards on existing wells and mines?Sarah Smith:That's right. They are allowed to release unlimited methane right now.David Roberts: Are Obama's standards on new and modified sources still in place, or did Trump mess with those?Sarah Smith: He certainly tried. They were off the books briefly, but Congress took action through the Congressional Review Act and undid the Trump rollback so that the Obama rules are largely back in place. But they need to be updated, because we've learned a heck of a lot about methane reduction since 2015 and 2016, when those rules were written. We now know emissions could be cut in the US by 65 percent at least, using currently available, low-cost technologies.We know more about how to solve the problem from states that have stepped up and taken leadership on this issue, including Colorado, which has gone through several rounds of rulemakings on this, and even the state of New Mexico, which recently took on flaring. Both Colorado and New Mexico now have finalized phase-outs for flaring of associated gas. Producers are going to have to stop routine flaring and capture the gas, except in emergency situations.David Roberts:Has Colorado shown success? Are methane emissions in Colorado declining? Sarah Smith: The latest data I've seen does show a declining leak rate in Colorado, and I expect that trend to continue with the state continuing to take leadership on this issue.David Roberts: I’ve read that the Democrats’ reconciliation bill is meant to include a methane fee. What can you tell me about that?Sarah Smith: This is a modest fee proposal that would reinforce the specific regulatory requirements that EPA is working on. It would raise revenue, much of which would go to EPA and could help the agency implement the provisions of the rules, improve reporting and monitoring, and even fund environmental restoration projects, including in communities that have been most impacted by air pollution from industry and climate change.David Roberts: Is it intended mostly as a revenue raiser? Sarah Smith: That’s the main thrust, but it's important to note that it would also help reduce emissions quickly and provide an incentive for companies to go above and beyond the regulations that get promulgated under the Clean Air Act.David Roberts: What is the oil and gas industry's current posture toward these upcoming rules? Are they still dug in in opposition? Sarah Smith: I would be hesitant to put the whole industry into one bucket on this. The seas are shifting. Some companies, over the course of the past couple of years, have started to support methane regulation. Even API, the industry trade association, has changed their messaging on this to be much more supportive. I think they see the writing on the wall.David Roberts:  I know they're protesting the fee. They say it's duplicative or it's on top of the rules, it's confusing. Do you put any credence in those kind of objections?Sarah Smith:  No, I really don’t. This is an industry that could so easily minimize its pollution, has had a chance to do that, and hasn't acted quickly enough. So it's time for the hammer to come down.David Roberts:It seems like it would be a political and public relations boon for an oil and gas company to say, “we're going to be a different kind of oil and gas company, we're going to be responsible and clean up our methane emissions.” They could do it at low cost and reap such a PR bonanza. Why have none of them done this, not even a single outlier? Do you have any theories about this?Sarah Smith: I wish I could sit each one of the CEOs down with you, David, because that's exactly right. I think it's a case of short-sightedness, and, in some cases, prioritizing short-term gains over long-term gains.David Roberts: Globally speaking, where are the other big methane sources? What other countries are particularly bad on this? Are there other countries taking action like the US? Sarah Smith:Sadly, there are methane emissions coming from every continent, every country. Because they're so dispersed, we need global action on this global problem. Many of the big economies are the bigger sources right now, but not exclusively. In terms of where we're seeing action, it’s exciting to see the US stepping up, and I'll be curious and hopeful to see strong rules coming out this year and finalized next year. The European Commission has a methane strategy that cuts across a range of sectors; they're starting out with some legislation later this year on the oil and gas sector that will, we hope, take action on venting and flaring, leaks, monitoring, reporting, and the topics that we've discussed today. This would be across the EU.Hopefully the EU will also establish import standards for all of the gas it's purchasing. It's currently the number one importer of gas in the world, so that will put pressure on Russia and Algeria and Qatar and some of these other countries that are supplying fuel into the EU to implement these common-sense best practices.David Roberts:I think of Russia as a huge source of natural gas. Is Russia taking action?Sarah Smith: President Putin spoke about the need to reduce methane and called for global action on the topic during the leaders summit that President Biden organized on climate earlier this year, so it'll be interesting to see how that unfolds. Ultimately, we need certification and monitoring to ensure that the practices are actually being implemented on the ground, and the emissions are being prevented. David Roberts: This radical global transparency on methane emissions seems like it's going to be fascinating to watch from an international politics point of view.Sarah Smith:  It will be. We're going to know a lot more about methane sources and a lot more about carbon dioxide sources, too. I hope both can be tackled simultaneously — they absolutely must be to have a chance of maintaining a safe climate.David Roberts: Do you think there will be substantial developments on methane in the upcoming COP?Sarah Smith: I am hopeful that methane could be a bright spot out of this upcoming COP, and that this global methane pledge, when formally launched, will bring together many more countries to rein in the pollution.David Roberts: It sounds like there's more and easier potential action on methane than on CO2, in some ways.Sarah Smith: It is the low-hanging fruit that has been hiding just out of sight for a long time, and I'm hoping that it will start getting plucked.David Roberts:  It would be truly embarrassing if humanity destroyed itself with a pollutant that it could have reduced at no cost. That would be a terrible epitaph. Thank you, Sarah, for coming on and taking the time. It's very clarifying. Sarah Smith: It was fun to speak with you. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.volts.wtf/subscribe

Here’s a question: is it better to drive somewhere or to take a ride-hailing service like Uber or Lyft? I don’t mean better for you personally — faster or cheaper. I mean better for the world, for society, for the air and atmosphere … better, all things considered. A clever new study from researchers at Carnegie Mellon University attempts to answer that question.Ride-hailing services carry more external costs than private vehiclesIn the paper, Jacob Ward, Jeremy Michalek, and Constantine Samaras attempt to tally up the relative costs to the environment and society of taking a trip via a privately owned vehicle vs. taking the same trip in what they call a transportation network company (TNC) like Uber or Lyft, in six of the companies’ biggest markets.This involves two steps in each market. First, they add up how many miles the respective vehicles travel per trip. Then, they add up the total externalities — in vehicle emissions, congestion, crashes, and noise — represented by each mile traveled. (These externalities, notoriously, are not priced into transportation decisions; thus the name.)To understand the results, you have to understand one key fact: TNC vehicles travel more miles per trip. They have to drive between where they drop off one fare and pick up another, which sometimes involves quite a bit of just wandering around. This time spent with no passenger is called “deadheading,” and those miles must be added to their trip miles.Here’s a clear visual representation:Those dotted black lines on the bottom half? That’s deadheading. Those extra miles traveled represent more externalities — more cost to the environment and society. On average, a TNC trip carries 32 to 37 cents more in external costs than a private vehicle trip. (See also this recent MIT study, which found that TNC vehicles increase urban road congestion.)There are three countervailing factors, but only the third is big enough to flip the equation enough to give TNCs the advantage in some limited circumstances.Ride-hailing services reduce air pollutionFirst, though additional miles lead to more greenhouse gas emissions, congestion, crashes, and noise, somewhat counterintuitively, they lead to less air pollution. The secret here is that the bulk of particulate air pollution is generated from “cold starts,” i.e., engines turning over to start up. By contrast, TNC vehicles arrive “hot.” Their engines are already running, so they don’t do cold starts. In addition, TNC vehicles are, on average, newer, and thus cleaner.On average, TNC trips represent a 50 to 60 percent decline (9–13¢ per trip) in air pollutants like NOx, PM2.5, and VOCs.If TNC vehicles electrify faster than private vehicles, that advantage will grow, because EVs generate no tailpipe pollution. But if private vehicles electrify equally fast, the comparative advantage will stay the same.Regardless, the difference is not enough to overcome the other externalities. TNC trips represent a 20 percent increase in costs from greenhouse gas emissions and a 60 percent increase in costs from congestion, crashes, and noise (all told, about 45¢ more per trip). Overall, a 9–13¢ decrease and a 45¢ increase add up to 32 to 37 cents more per trip, on average.Electric ride-hailing vehicles … are still mostly worse than private vehiclesThe second countervailing factor is vehicle electrification. Doesn’t that reduce externalities? What the researchers found is that a) if the TNC car is electric, while b) the private vehicle alternative is an internal combustion engine car, and c) the TNC car charges entirely with zero-carbon electricity, then the overall environmental and social costs of a TNC trip and a personal vehicle trip are … about the same. Of course, those conditions are rarely met. On real-world grids, which are still powered overwhelmingly by fossil fuels, electrification of TNCs reduces the relative advantage of personal vehicle trips by about 16 or 17 percent. It does not eliminate the advantage. And of course, that advantage will shrink as the private vehicle fleet electrifies. So what, then, is the third countervailing factor, the one that can actually make a TNC trip better than a personal vehicle trip? Shared ride-hailing vehicles are better than private vehiclesMaybe you’ve already guessed the answer: it’s ride-sharing. Put two people in the TNC car — i.e., have one TNC trip substitute for two personal vehicle trips — and voilà, you flip the script and your TNC trip is a net positive for the world. “When a TNC trip is known to be pooled,” the paper says, “shifting travel from a private vehicle reduces net external costs by a mean value of $0.60/trip.”Wow, if you pooled three people you could save even more. Or four people. You could even pool dozens of people on large vehicles that travel on fixed routes and timetables. You could reduce all kinds of externalities! I wonder if anyone has tried that. Speaking of which, what if the TNC trip displaced a trip on public transit, where the marginal cost in externalities of an additional passenger is effectively zero? What if it displaced a trip done via walking or biking, where the marginal externalities are, again, zero?The study looked at that too: “When TNCs displace transit, walking, or biking, rather than personal vehicles, the increase in externalities is about three times larger (+$1.20/trip).”What about avoided vehicle purchases?You might think that, with the easy availability of TNCs, it might be possible for fewer people to buy cars, which would count on the positive side of the ledger. However, there’s no such comfort. I asked the authors about this and it turns out they did another study (out on Jan. 6, d’oh) which found that the arrival of Uber and Lyft to a market tends to be correlated with a small increase in car ownership, especially in places where car ownership is already high and there’s not much population growth. Via email, Michalek adds:Even if Uber/Lyft do cause a reduction in vehicle ownership in some cities, I don’t think that alone would change our analysis about the costs and benefits of ridesourcing to society very much, because vehicle production emissions are a small part of overall lifecycle costs. The main costs come from driving.What could change our results is if Uber/Lyft enable travelers to walk and use transit more than they would have otherwise. This could be, for example, (1) because Uber/Lyft enable a traveler to get to a transit line (providing a first mile / last mile solution); (2) because Uber/Lyft can fill in gaps in transit services, allowing travelers to take the train out to a nightlife area and take an Uber home after the trains stop running; or (3) because not owning a vehicle forces the traveler to walk, carpool, and use transit more often than they would if they had a convenient personal car option.Unfortunately, there’s not a ton of evidence for TNCs enabling more transit trips either. Reviewing the studies done to date on the impact of TNCs on transit, the paper concludes: We also find no statistically significant average effect of TNC entry on fuel economy or transit use, but find evidence of heterogeneity in these effects across urban areas, including larger transit ridership reductions after TNC entry in areas with higher income and more childless households.There’s no way to avoid the conclusion: in most places, in current circumstances, all things considered, it’s worse to take a TNC ride than to drive a private vehicle.What all of this meansI hope the implications of this research are obvious: ban cars.Ha ha, I’m kidding. Kind of. But Uber and Lyft aren’t helping anything. They’re making most things worse. Even if they electrify, they’re still mostly making things worse. The most notable finding in this latest study is something we already knew: moving people out of private vehicles (whether they’re driving or not) into walking, biking, and public transit sharply reduces overall costs to society and the environment. The difference that shift makes swamps any differences between the types of private vehicles we choose. The basic problem with cars — whether they’re private, TNCs, taxis, flying cars, underground cars, or autonomous Personal Air Land Vehicles (PAL-Vs) with 5G and lasers — is a simple matter of geometry: they take up lots of space. You can not have thousands of people living close together, each with their own two-ton vehicle, without congestion, sprawl, noise, crashes, air pollution, climate change, and all the rest of the horrors cars bring. That’s true of big cities, but it’s also true of small towns. If everyone has their own vehicle, there’s going to be traffic congestion or sprawl or both.The only way to tackle all of these externalities at once is to get people out of cars. Out of their own cars, out of the Ubers. That means prioritizing multimodal transportation in infrastructure and spending decisions. Creating protected walking and biking corridors that connect across town. Reclaiming lanes and whole streets from cars and turning them over to transit or simply to neighborhood walking and gathering. Upzoning and increasing density, especially around transit stops. Subsidizing electric bikes. (Basically, doing what Barcelona and Paris are doing.) Electrifying vehicles will help on climate change, especially as the grid gets cleaner, but it’s not a solution to cars. Fancy new kinds of cars, even if they fly or go through tunnels or run on unicorn farts, are not a solution. Apps are not a solution. The only solution to the problem of cars is fewer cars. That should be the goal of policy — not just transportation policy, but land-use policy and urban policy and economic policy and climate policy. For those who care about the public good, Uber and Lyft are a distraction. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.volts.wtf/subscribe

In 2016, Illinois passed a decent enough energy bill. It shored up the state’s (relatively modest) renewable energy standard and kept its existing nuclear power plants open. It was a compromise among varied interests, signed into law by a Democratic legislature and a Republican governor. At the time, I figured it was the best any state in the coal-heavy Midwest was likely to do.Well, that will teach me to go around figuring. Just five years later, Illinois has raised the bar, passing one of the most environmentally ambitious, worker-friendly, justice-focused energy bills of any state in the country: The Climate and Equitable Jobs Act. Illinois is now the first state in the Midwest to commit to net-zero carbon emissions, joining over a dozen other states across the country. It is also a model for how diverse stakeholders can reach consensus. What’s changed in IllinoisA great deal has changed since that 2016 bill was passed.First and foremost, in 2018, Democrats gained a trifecta in state government, increasing their lead in both houses of the Illinois General Assembly and putting Democrat J.B. Pritzker in the governor’s office. As I have emphasized numerous times now, Democratic control is a necessary (if not sufficient) condition for ambitious state energy policy.Soon after the 2018 election, negotiations over a new energy bill began in earnest. The state’s labor community was sensitive to the fact that it had largely been left out of the 2016 bill; the legislation contained no labor standards, and recent years have seen Illinois renewable energy projects importing cheaper out-of-state workforces. Labor didn’t want to get left behind in the state’s energy transition, so it organized a coalition of groups under the banner Climate Jobs Illinois and set about playing an active role in negotiations. Renewable energy developers — cognizant of the fact that Illinois is falling short of its renewable energy goals (it’s at 9 percent; it’s supposed to be at 21) and state funding has dried up for new renewable energy projects — organized as Path to 100. Environmental and climate-justice groups organized as the Illinois Clean Jobs Coalition.All the groups introduced energy bills of their own. And then they spent years banging their heads together.But there was another key difference: this time around, utilities were not at the table. Exelon subsidiary ComEd had been caught up in a bribery scandal that left it disempowered and weak, under a deferred prosecution agreement. The scandal also led to House Speaker Michael Madigan, a reliable utility ally, being removed from his position. Utilities were, to put it crudely, on the s**t list, allowing political leadership to restrain their historic (and largely counterproductive) influence.Nonetheless, by all accounts, negotiations were difficult; the bill was declared dead several times. Senate President Don Harmon (D) said several times that it is the single most complex piece of legislation he’d ever worked on. There were uncertainties and impasses right up through the final week. But they got it done! It passed with bipartisan supermajorities: 83-33 in the House and 37-17 in the Senate. Pritzker signed it on September 15.One crucial piece of the puzzle was new political leadership, from Pritzker on down. Harmon, who became Senate president in 2018, is a longtime champion of renewable energy. In January 2021, Rep. Chris Welch, a widely respected deal-maker, replaced Madigan as House Speaker. Welch pursued what his office calls “distributed, collective leadership” — key members of the House Democratic leadership took responsibility for acting as liaisons to the legislature’s Black caucus, the environmental community, and coal communities.By all accounts, everyone performed their roles ably, holding an unwieldy coalition together through choppy waters. Illinois politics reporter Rich Miller has a nice rundown of the final passage, which he calls “a spectacular victory.”From the beginning, everyone involved was more or less aligned around rapid growth of renewable energy and full decarbonization of the electricity sector by 2045. The most contentious issue proved to be the schedule for decarbonization. The environmentalists in the Clean Jobs Coalition wanted steady 20 percent reductions every five years, starting in 2026. The labor groups in Climate Jobs Illinois were worried that shutting down fossil fuel plants that fast would lead to the state being forced to import fossil fuel power from out of state, sacrificing jobs to no environmental gain.Particularly thorny was a municipally owned coal plant, the 10-year-old Prairie State Energy Campus in southwestern Illinois, which is the state’s biggest greenhouse gas emitter and a horrendous financial boondoggle that costs more to run than its power is worth. Part of the problem is that the plant, owned by a consortium of nine public power agencies, was largely funded by municipal bonds from the communities meant to receive its power; those communities were worried they’d get stiffed if the plant retired early. (Enviros claimed they could close the plant, use the savings to pay off the bonds, and still come out ahead, but that was met with some skepticism.) To make a long story short: first Pritzker wanted the plant’s retirement date at 2035. Then he agree to 2045. Then Senate Democrats voted through a plan that would have let the plant pump out 100 percent of its current emissions through 2045. That was unacceptable to environmentalists and Pritzker, who wanted interim reduction targets. That flummoxed the process for a bit, but in the end, labor agreed to it. Even after that, there was some last-minute drama from the governor’s office, leading to a stalemate with Harmon; finally, they agreed to kick the bill over the House, where Welch dragged it over the finish line.Anyway, that’s probably more process drama than you wanted. Let’s look at what’s in the bill. Clean energy and good wages, justly distributed: the Illinois energy billI’m not going to cover the entire 900-page bill. We’ll just hit the highlights.Emission reductions and clean electricityToday, Illinois gets about 40 percent of its electricity from nuclear power and less than 10 percent from renewable energy. The new renewable portfolio standard (RPS) will raise renewables’ share to 40 percent by 2030 and 50 percent by 2040, with the goal of a zero-carbon electricity sector by 2045 — and beyond that, a net-zero-carbon state economy by 2050. This is extremely ambitious and a new benchmark for the Midwest. Subsidies to renewable energy will roughly double, to around $580 million per year. An additional $317 million the big utilities had previously collected will be spent on clean-energy projects rather than refunded to customers as scheduled. (It’s a long story.)The popular Illinois Solar for All program, which helps get rooftop solar power to low-income renters and homeowners (as well as public buildings and nonprofits serving environmental justice communities), will have its funding increased from $10 million to $50 million a year. Obviously, Illinois will have much more trouble hitting its decarbonization targets if its nuclear power plants shut down, so the bill provides the Byron, Dresden, and Braidwood plants with about $700 million in subsidies over the next five years. (The size of the subsidy, considerably less than the $5 billion Exelon wanted, was informed by an independent analysis commissioned by the governor’s office.)All private coal- and oil-fired power plants must get to zero emissions (i.e., retire) by 2030. Municipally owned coal plants — Prairie State and Dallman Station — must reduce emissions 45 percent by 2035 (which will mean shutting down one of two boilers) and 100 percent by 2045. All private natural gas plants must reach zero emissions — either by retiring or by switching over to hydrogen — by 2045. Until then, their emissions in a given year can not exceed the average of the previous three years, i.e., can not rise. (Plants can stay open if a government assessment finds that they are necessary for grid reliability.)Importantly: fossil fuel plants will be shut down according to their proximity to low-income and marginalized communities, not necessarily according to greenhouse gases or economics. Every five years starting in 2025, the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency, the Illinois Power Agency, and the Illinois Commerce Commission (ICC) must produce a report on the state’s progress toward its renewable energy goals. The ICC will also begin developing a renewables access plan to increase electricity transmission throughout the state. For the record: a recent study led by former Illinois Power Agency Director Mark Pruitt found that getting to 40 percent renewable energy by 2030 “would deliver over $1.2 billion in lower total electricity costs for Illinois.” Transportation decarbonizationThe bill establishes the goal of getting a million electric vehicles on Illinois roads by 2030. In part, that will be achieved through a $4,000-per-vehicle rebate for EV customers (which, added to the EV credit in the current federal bill, would mean a combined rebate of $16,500). Electric utilities will be required to submit clean-electrification plans to the ICC, showing how they plan to drive EV adoption.The Illinois Environmental Protection Agency will rebate up to 80 percent of the cost of EV infrastructure projects that pay prevailing wages. Forty-five percent of those rebates will be channeled to projects in low-income and marginalized communities. Labor and equity standardsAll utility-scale renewable energy projects that qualify under the state’s RPS must use project-labor agreements; all non-residential clean-energy projects must pay prevailing wages. All projects must demonstrate through diversity hiring reports that they have recruited qualified BIPOC candidates and apprentices. As far as I know, this gives Illinois the most stringent labor and equity requirements of any state clean energy program. Similar policies tying renewable energy projects to labor standards have passed in Connecticut, New York, and Washington, but no other state’s energy policy has as comprehensive a package of labor, diversity, and equity standards.Workforce development and transition assistanceThe bill will create an $80 million-a-year Clean Jobs Workforce Network Hubs Program, which will create 13 hubs around the state to deliver workforce-development programs to low-income and underserved populations. Resources will be put toward outreach, recruitment, training, and placement. The Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity and the Illinois Department of Employment Security will work together to develop a “displaced worker bill of rights,” with $40 million a year to go toward transition assistance for areas dependent on fossil fuel production or generation. There will be two green bank–style programs. The Clean Energy Jobs and Justice Fund will provide financing and low-interest lending to clean-energy projects in low-income and marginalized communities. The Illinois Finance Authority Climate Bank, more like a conventional green bank, will provide seed funding and develop public-private partnerships to draw more private capital to clean energy projects. A clean energy incubator program will offer support and low-interest capital to small energy businesses and contractors, to the tune of over $35 million a year. There will be a program to train and place soon-to-be-released incarcerated people in clean-energy fields. And there will be a program meant to encourage the development of solar and storage on the site of closed fossil-fuel plants, to help employ laid-off workers.An Energy Transition Workforce Commission will report on the workforce needs of a decarbonizing economy and recommend further changes to workforce policies. The Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity will create a program to reduce energy transition barriers, a grant program to promote economic development in transitioning communities, and a scholarship fund for children in families of laid-off workers. Notably, companies intending to shut down fossil fuel plants will be required to give affected communities two years’ notice, so that such communities can be identified and receive transition assistance.Consumer protectionsFor low-income ratepayers, the bill eliminates deposit requirements and late fees; it eliminates online payment fees for all ratepayers.Utilities will be required to report their monthly shutoffs and reconnections to the ICC, and the ICC will conduct a comprehensive study of the level and design of low-income rates to ensure that they are working effectively. Utilities will be required to fund the participation of nonprofit representatives in ICC proceedings, to increase community participation. Finally, munis and co-ops will be prohibited from charging discriminatory fees to ratepayers that self-generate solar electricity (as investor-owned utilities already are).Utility ethics and rate reformsSome of these details get technical, but the gist is that the bill contains a range of specific ethics reforms — for example, public officials must declare if any of their relatives work for utilities — and creates a Public Utility Ethics and Compliance Monitor to make sure utilities are implementing those reforms. In addition, each utility must appoint a Chief Ethics and Compliance Officer who reports to the ICC. ComEd is prohibited from forcing ratepayers to pay any criminal penalties or fines associated with its ongoing federal corruption probe.Excitingly for us utility nerds, the bill will end “formula ratemaking” — an opaque process whereby rates are automatically increased based on how much utilities are spending, with no need for approval from regulators — in favor of “performance-based ratemaking,” which ties utility compensation to a series of performance metrics such as “reliability and resiliency, peak load reductions attributable to demand response programs, supplier diversity expansion, affordability, interconnection response time, and customer service performance.” This is good stuff.An independent auditor will assess the state of the Illinois grid and the money spent on it over the last decade. Utilities will be required to file a Multi-Year Integrated Grid Plan that supports the state’s renewable energy targets. They will undergo yearly performance evaluations to track how well they are meeting their planning goals. Finally, and intriguingly, ICC will create a Division of Integrated Distribution Planning, meant to increase public input in local distribution grid decisions.Illinois is showing how democracy should workOver the last three years, climate hawks, environmental justice advocates, renewable energy developers, and labor gathered around a table and worked through their differences about the future of Illinois’ energy system, freed from the usual odious influence of utilities. It was an anxious, fractious, and often white-knuckle process, right up until the very end. No constituency got everything it wanted; each made sacrifices. I expect there’s still quite a bit of residual frustration and some fresh bruises that will take a while to heal. But to my outside eye, representatives from each of these groups can return to their constituents with heads held high. The bill is a model of non-zero-sum cooperation: every group gave a little to get a lot. A special shout-out goes to the environmental-justice community in Illinois, which used three years of relentless grassroots organizing to build an incredible political force, without which the bill couldn’t have passed and wouldn’t have been as equity-focused.For all the disputes at the margins, the resulting bill is momentous, a historic inflection point for Illinois. The state is now a national leader — and a challenge to the rest of the Midwest — in how to transition to clean energy while creating good jobs and lifting up those often left behind. An aggressive transition to clean energy can be good for the economy, good for workers, good for historically marginalized communities, good for the air, and good for the atmosphere. We can have nice things. More and more states are figuring that out. Congratulations to Illinois, particularly to its new generation of political leaders, for figuring it out with such populist flair. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.volts.wtf/subscribe

In this episode, veteran solar advocate Adam Browning reflects on 20 years of running campaigns as the founder and leader of Vote Solar, one of the scrappiest and most successful solar advocacy organizations in the US. Browning, who is stepping down from leadership this year, helped grow the group from four people to 40, and along the way he’s learned a few things about how nonprofit campaigns can succeed against better funded opponents. Full transcript of Volts podcast featuring Adam Browning, September 17, 2021(PDF version)David Roberts:There aren't a lot of positive, hopeful stories competing for attention in the US these days, but one ray of light — if you'll pardon the pun — comes in the form of solar power. During the 21st century it has plunged in price, to the point that it is the cheapest available source of power in most big energy markets. Though it provides just 3 percent of US electricity today, analysts say it could provide close to half by mid-century. Adam Browning has lived through every stage of this extraordinary ongoing story. He co-founded Vote Solar, a nonprofit that advocates for solar energy at the state level, in 2002, to push for solar on public buildings in San Francisco. Since then, he has helped build a team of 40 people that operates across the country and has led numerous campaigns for state policy and regulatory changes. For as long as I’ve been doing energy journalism, I’ve known Adam and Vote Solar to be reliable sources — smart, practical, and results-oriented. I read all their emails, which regular listeners will know is high praise.Now, after 20 years, Browning is stepping back, shifting to an advisory role and handing off day-to-day leadership of Vote Solar. Given his long experience, I thought it would be interesting to talk to him about what he has learned, how much things have changed for solar, and where solar and climate advocacy need to go next. Adam Browning, welcome to Volts.Adam Browning:  Thanks, really pleased to be here.David Roberts:   You’ve been at this for 20 years now. Tell me the Adam Browning origin story. How did you gravitate to this particular field? It must have been relatively soon after you were out of college; it must have been one of the first things you did and stuck with it. Tell us how you got into all of this.Adam Browning:  You're too kind. My youthful demeanor — I’ll have to tell my stylist. It wasn't quite right out of college. I've never had a plan that I put into place; I've always moved from the thing that seemed really interesting to me at the time, and then was open to that next opportunity. After college, I did Peace Corps in West Africa, which was in many ways an incredibly formative experience, a moveable feast that I continue to look back on and think about, and that experience continues to nourish. After that, I joined EPA in San Francisco, the Region 9 office, and worked there for about eight years. The origin story — not of Adam Browning, but really Vote Solar, which is probably more to the point here — was really born out of spending a good chunk of time with the federal government doing environmental protection. I was doing a lot of enforcement and inspecting smokestacks, and fines were exceeding limits in some ways.David Roberts:   This would have been during the Clinton years, yes? Adam Browning:  Yes, and then a little bit of the Bush years. So that experience was a wonderful introduction to how environmental protection works and doesn't work in this country. When I was nearly 30, I had a beer with a college buddy, and he was working for then-San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown. This friend, David Hochschild, is now a California energy commissioner, the chair of the Commission. He had just put solar on his roof at home. At the time, solar was really expensive, and there wasn't much of it; it was very much a hippie pipe dream. But he put it on his house and was enthralled by it. And he was like, “Hey man, we should try to put this on City Hall. We need to have governments take the lead.” Through that beer and subsequent napkin diagramming, we came up with the idea of a revenue bond to put solar and energy efficiency on public buildings in San Francisco and then use the avoided energy costs, the energy payments, to pay down the bonds, so you have long-term, low-interest capital. It all penciled out. That turned into first a campaign to get it on the ballot as a ballot initiative, and then a citywide campaign to pass this ballot initiative. That was Prop B. This is back in 2001. That experience was really galvanizing, transformative for me in a couple of different ways. One: this idea of solar as an emission-free technology. I’d been spending all this time trying to control smokestacks; how about if we just didn't have any at all? That really dropped for me. Secondly, we had this campaign where you could actually do solar — then, again, really expensive — but we could do it cost effectively, the way that we'd had this scoped out. That just gripped the imagination. We had legions of volunteers throughout the city; people were really excited to be a part of something larger than themselves. That ballot initiative passed by 73 percent of the vote, which was really high in those days. Then we started getting calls from around the country — how can we do this in our city? — which was when we decided to quit our jobs and take this grassroots campaign to a much larger campaign. We had this theory, we had analyses that showed that the way to get cheap solar was through economies of scale: you needed to buy a lot of expensive solar, you needed to show a long-term market for this technology, in order to induce the manufacturers and would-be manufacturers to invest their capital into scaling up factories and the whole supply chain.David Roberts:   Solar has changed so fast: the technology, the prices, the social mores around it, how it's viewed. So take us back to 2002: Was anybody even thinking about solar? Was it viewed as just a hippie affectation? How much did it cost? What was the world of solar like in 2002? Adam Browning:  So back then, solar was about $9 a watt.David Roberts:   We're closing in on $1 a watt now, is that right? Adam Browning:  For the actual panels themselves, you're looking at 25 cents a watt. Utility-scale installations are well under $1. So essentially, nearly an order of magnitude less expensive right now. There was 163 megawatts total installed in the US. So, yeah, back in them old days, people knew of solar; I think it was understood as something that had some degree of promise, but again, the cost put it out of reach for being taken seriously as a long-term, significant portion of our energy resource.David Roberts:   So were people planning for it? Like DOE, when they did their projections at the time — were people saying it was going to grow into something big? Or was it viewed as a niche thing for the century? Adam Browning:  I would compare it to the algae that you see Exxon always advertising. It was ARCO and Mobil that had these investments in solar; Shell did as well. There were many really wonderful, well-meaning people involved in that, so I don't mean to diminish the seriousness of their efforts. There were a lot of oil majors that were investing in it. DOE was putting money into serious research and development. But it all seemed very far off. It was this thing that did not yet exist, and we all hoped that someday it would. Solar then suffered from the start-stop-start-stop of market incentives. Particularly in the California Central Valley, there were installations around with the large parabolic troughs, SEGS plants that had seemed promising, and as soon as everybody scaled up to respond to the incentives, they were then pulled. You never could take advantage of that momentum. So the early history of solar, again: a lot of research and development, not a lot of smart, long-term market support to bring it to scale. In early years, that underestimation of solar's potential really helped in many ways. Like when you scored the federal investment tax credit, no one thought it would really take off, so it scored really low, and that was actually helpful for it to go through.David Roberts:   So you have wildly expensive solar that you can make cost-effective in certain limited applications. You have cheap, patient capital and entities willing to wait for it. I'm sure it was just a series of short-term campaigns at first, but at what point did you have a long-term plan? In retrospect, was your plan as optimistic as reality turned out to be?Adam Browning:  I would say no, the plan was not as optimistic as reality turned out to be, although it was very specific and accurate as to what would happen. There are often times when you have policy that promises an outcome and fails to deliver on it; here was something that absolutely, bullseye. We had analyses of comparable technologies. Solar is basically a semiconductor; you had examples of integrated circuits that were developed and funded by the military, who was willing to pay an enormous premium in order to have a technology that was much lighter than the capacitors it replaced, and through that investment really brought down the cost through economies of scale. So we had examples of other technologies. We had this report from KPMG Netherlands that Greenpeace had paid them to analyze; it said, in essence, that if you brought about a global market that could support a factory that would deliver 500 megawatts a year of solar panels, you would be at grid parity. That was directionally accurate, but we now have factories that are much, much larger than that, of course. So the cost drop of solar exceeded expectations, though it was definitely bumpy. Even though we had predicted this effect by virtue of what these policies would do, this whole long-term market demand, at the same time, we didn't really anticipate that we would be passing legislation this quickly that would require 100 percent clean energy. Yesterday, the Illinois House passed, finally, a bill that will require 100 percent clean energy. It's expected to pass through the Senate on Monday. That makes the tenth state; well over 35 percent of the people who live in this country now live in a state where carbon-based electricity is illegal, will be legally mandated to phase out by a certain date. That's on the basis of having this scale availability of cheap, zero-emission power.David Roberts:   It was not that long ago that the idea that any governmental entity of any size would target 100 percent clean energy was absolutely out of the universe. Early in my career, I remember projections that solar would catch up around 2070; coal was still expected to dominate well past 2050. The scale of the changes is really hard to cram in your head. But now the energy wonk community has developed a pretty good sense of how you scale up a technology and make it cheaper. There's a more formalized understanding of that; solar is the model now of how you go about doing it. But of course, back in 2002, you didn't know that. So I'm curious, when you were thinking about advocacy, what was your plan? What was your instinct about what kind of policies would be both politically possible and efficacious at scaling this up?Adam Browning:  That's a great question. In the beginning, when we first launched, we were like, OK, we’ll do a bunch more of these city-led initiatives: the power of energy democracy to drive choice in energy supply. Solar was this perfect technology because it circumvented the decisionmakers; you could put it on your own roof, you didn't have to wait for the utility to make the right decision. You could take that power and do it yourself. So we initially said, we're going to do a bunch more of these city-led efforts. We got our grant from the Energy Foundation, $50,000, our first grant, and we started looking at some of these other cities, and it was like, oh, wait a minute. Actually, there is state-level policy infrastructure that enables people to be able to install solar upon their own roof and generate their own energy, and those were the preconditions for being able to do a city-led initiative. So that caused us to reevaluate our strategy and really focus on the state-level policy infrastructure. When you're looking at a solar market, you're only as strong as your weakest link. It's never the one thing; it is the four or five things that you have to link together. So one of the key insights that we had early on was that the solution was really at the state level; that was where most energy decisions are made, and you're much closer to democracy there. I don't know how to pass anything through the federal government. I don't know that anybody does. But at the state level, on the legislative side, you are much closer to being able to actually influence the outcome of legislative battles. The other large piece of this, of course, is regulatory, through the public utilities commissions. Our first effort was the California Solar Initiative. This was something that a wonderful advocate, Bernadette Del Chiaro, who headed Environment California then, had been working through the legislature for many years, and it kept not being able to pass. We then, in collaboration with others, worked really hard to get it through the California Public Utilities Commission. So you had then-Governor Schwarzenegger, who really stood out as a strong leader for this, establish a goal for a million solar roofs. It was an ability to get it through the public utilities commission to implement that — that ended up being about a $3 billion effort to incentivize rooftop solar with a really elegant market design through these declining incentives that got you down to grid parity, when you wouldn't need any incentives at all afterwards. David Roberts:   When did that pass? What year was that?Adam Browning:  It was around 2004, 2005, that we finally got those through. That was then also passed through the legislature afterwards and confirmed, which was quite helpful. But that was a really big eye-opener for policymakers and for energy nerds everywhere. That was a large chunk of money, designed to last over 10 years; that was this signal to the manufacturers of the world, to the installers of the state, that this industry, this market is going to be around. There is a commitment to it, time to scale up, go big. Then once you have the fifth-largest economy in the world commit to it, it no longer seems so esoteric. Both Japan and Germany then also were really strong leaders as well, so it was definitely a global effort. But California really helped catalyze that in the early 2000s with this type of campaign.David Roberts:   After California — which in terms of progressive policy, is the low-hanging fruit — did you continue on trying to expand in California, or did you move on to other states? What was the plan of attack?Adam Browning:  A little bit of both. There's a story of how you actually run and grow a nonprofit advocacy organization. So you are fundraising; philanthropy is the lifeblood of your efforts, and you have to be able to fundraise in order to feed your ambitions on this. For many years, we were two people, three people, four people. We were very small. It wasn't until 2008 that we were able to open an east coast office.So I would say, over the course of Vote Solar's history, we had a 70/30 split. The majority of our efforts were in places where we thought we could get traction, that there was a political appetite, that we could have a real line of sight to success. Then we spent a non-trivial part of our time in lonely places where there wasn't much going on, but if we didn't help catalyze, if we didn't plant the early seeds, it wasn't going to happen. Somebody needed to do it. We always wanted to be an organization where we weren't just, me too; we wanted to be involved in fights that weren't going to be won but for our involvement. That was why we also put so much investment in places that it took a long time, a long fuse to actually pay off. So immediately after California: Arizona, New Mexico, and some of these sunnier western states, then really invested in a lot of the east coast policy as well. We opened an office in New York in 2008. Then, gradually, a couple of the midwestern and southeastern states. It was the Turner Foundation that brought us into Florida and Georgia, where there wasn't much going on at the time. But we sent one of our best, smartest advocates down to scope out a plan for how we could help catalyze something in Georgia. That campaign was completely different from what we did and what we looked like in California, but in collaboration with some awesome local advocates, we were able to help move the needle there as well. We are now 40 people working in about 26 states across the country; over 20 years, that's been a lot of growth for a very different organization than we started. David Roberts:   To focus in on these early years: Were you 100 percent about advocating for policies? Was there any communications campaigns or, god forbid, awareness campaigns? Or were you a strictly policy advocacy shop?Adam Browning:  I think you've written beautifully about “change doesn't happen just because you're right.” So there's a huge power-building component to this. I can't overemphasize how much collaboration and partnership with local place-based, community-based organizations in everywhere we've worked has been absolutely crucial to success. Vote Solar as an organization brings pretty deep sophistication around solar policy and then brings some campaigning expertise, as well. So our model has typically been this inside-outside game, where if you're doing legislation, passing bills, you really need to power map who can actually get something done, what kind of campaigns are they going to be receptive to, building all the information necessary in order to get it passed, and then, of course, following the lead of the local organizations that have the relationships, that have the local voice, that have the power as to how that actually happens. Similarly, for the regulatory campaigns, these are legalistic processes in public utility commissions. You have to have a lawyer intervene, have standing, create a docket full of math, full of actual demonstration of facts. You never win just because you're right. You also, at the same time, have to build an outside game, a parade that these policymakers can jump in front of and be responsive to. You need to make sure that policymakers know what the public wants and that they feel accountable to answer to them. That takes a lot of communications work, a lot of grassroots organizing work, a lot of partnership with community-based organizations. Increasingly for us, this has been also about environmental-justice communities. Over the past five years, everything that we have done has been with equity groups and environmental-justice campaigners, listening to them, establishing partnerships with them, and following their lead on these campaigns.David Roberts:   Over 20 years, you’ve run a lot of different campaigns in different places with different people you're targeting. If you had to generalize, what is it that makes a campaign successful? What are the markers that distinguish your successful campaigns from the unsuccessful ones? What needs to be in place?Adam Browning:  Winning, for one. But that's a little too flip. I actually love campaigning, and the parts of it I like are finding creative ways to get people engaged. So much of environmentalism has been about no, and not about, but what do we say yes to. So an organizing ethos of Vote Solar was centered on, this is something that people want. In fact, we poll around the country, and this has been consistent over the past 20 years with some fluctuation in the numbers, but directionally, supermajorities of people in this country on both sides of the aisle want to see this transition.David Roberts:   This is something that is utterly remarkable about solar, and, especially in 2021, almost unique: It polls through the roof. It always has. Were you ever surprised by how resilient and broad that support is? It seems to defy political gravity in a way almost no other issue I can think of does.Adam Browning:  It is remarkable, and we always tried to lean into that by letting people bring their own reasons for why they should go solar to the campaign and not defining it for them. In places with different political outlooks, different hues, the words that we used were different. Some places, this is about freedom; some places, it's about jobs; other places, it's about climate. You need to be very thoughtful as to how you talk about the rationale behind it, but we generally tried to leave a space where people could bring their own rationale. They like solar, we're not going to tell them why they like solar. Let them bring that to the campaign itself. To further reflect on your initial question around what distinguishes a good campaign, I think a good campaign engages people. Positive messaging, giving people that positive alternative, what we want to do, a bright outlook — people want to be a part of something larger than themselves. I think that is a core insight into the human psyche. David Roberts:   I've heard a lot of people around campaigning and the activist world say some version of: it's easier to make people angry than it is to get them to support something. It's easier when you have a clear thing you're saying no to. Do you think that's wrong? Or does solar just have some sort of magic fairy dust that switches that over? Adam Browning:  What you describe certainly powers most of my political giving and my presidential election campaigning on my personal side, so I definitely feel you, I get that. I'm not immune to that. We definitely articulate, ”Why aren’t we seeing more solar? Who's blocking it?” and it definitely creates the accurate picture of why we're not seeing more. You can campaign against that. That said, we've done things like had billboards outside of the Capitol that had the tagline, right after the Gulf oil spill, “When there's a huge spill of solar energy, it's just called a nice day. Yes on bill X.” That got in the paper and had ripple effects. We had airplanes pulling sky banners that said, “This is the prescription for oil addiction” at the same time that we had large rallies with people dressed up in doctor outfits. I guess you had to be there, but it was funny at the time. We tried to work in Texas; Texas is a hard place to work. But we were sponsoring a bill and did analysis that showed how many jobs there would be if this bill passed, and then we ran ads in the Midland newspaper saying, “Help Wanted: 10,000 workers for the solar economy. Call the legislature and tell them to pass X.” Again, that then turned into a press piece on witty campaigns that had a much larger impact than the $230 for that help-wanted ad in the Midland Tribune. So those were parts of the campaigns that I really enjoyed.The thing about nonprofit campaigning is, you are always going to be outspent. You are always going to be out-lobbied. You need to figure out how to bring people-power to it. That is the part that I have enjoyed the most: solar in so many ways is democracy in energy and environmental decisionmaking. We’ve tried to make that true.David Roberts:   I have been gritting my teeth waiting for polarization to swallow solar’s popularity too, as it has swallowed everything else in our public life. But as far as I can tell, it's mostly held up. I’m wondering if you’ve seen any movement in that direction; are you seeing it start to polarize? Are you seeing it associated more now with democratic socialism whatever, or is it still defying political gravity?Adam Browning:  I don't think solar is immune, per se, to being attacked, to politicization. Look at Solyndra, which was an absolutely manufactured scare-quotes scandal of an entirely successful program that made money for the American people. That wasn’t organic, that was — as many things in our politicized culture — advocacy-driven, cynically so. But I have not yet seen this. Right before the 2016 election, in September, there was a Pew poll that showed that 87 percent of would-be Trump voters supported solar and 92 percent of would-be Clinton voters supported solar, despite the obvious division between the two. I do think that solar needs to continue to earn and hold its social capital and abandons that at its own peril. I do think part of the pathway forward is trying to recapture manufacturing for just that reason; we cannot offshore our supply chain if we expect solar to supply nearly half the power of this country going forward, which is why I think passing the Ossoff bill is absolutely critical. It's our last hope for reshoring the manufacturing.David Roberts:   That's a great segue to my next question. The solar campaigns focused heavily on state-level policies: net metering to encourage rooftop solar, renewable portfolio standards to ramp up the percentage of solar. Those have been wildly successful; as you say, something close to half the population lives in a state now with these requirements. You have the policy pull for solar in place. So what's the next frontier for solar advocacy? Is it a turn to manufacturing and materials? Where do you see it going?Adam Browning:  There are three main things, and I could keep adding on, I could go to 10. But let's just stick with these three right now. One is: the original premise behind my thinking around Vote Solar is, once you made it cheap, it would just continue under the gravitational pull of economics. Solar PPAs right now in sunny spots are like 2 cents per kilowatt hour. They're just crazy, it's awesome. Yet you still see places where they are trying to build ginormous new fossil fuel. Duke Energy, for example, largest utility in this country, knows very well how cheap solar is. It's made these public commitments to net zero by 2050. Their press announcements are wonderful; their plans that they file with regulators tell a very different story. They're trying to build massive amounts of new gas plants. It is still necessary for advocacy to have a seat at the table and drive deployments. We just saw the DOE come out with their solar roadmap for 40 percent by 2035. That will require, according to their numbers, 30 gigawatts a year of solar deployment through 2025 and then 60 gigawatts a year through the next decade after that.David Roberts:   For reference, it's about 15 GW a year now. So we have to double that for the next five years, and then double that for the next 15 years to get to that target. It's pretty big.Adam Browning:  It's all totally doable, but it won't just happen because it's cheaper and cleaner. There are still entrenched interests that want to continue to profit from the fossil-fuel infrastructure and legacy that we have.David Roberts:   When I say to people that it’s cleaner and cheaper, their natural first question is, well then why isn’t everybody already doing it? In a market, it's capitalism, economics ought to be dictating things; at least that's people's intuitive sense of it. So what are those forces now causing utilities or states to still push for fossil fuels, even if it is true that they could get cheaper, renewable energy?Adam Browning:  I think there are two things here. One is, in much of this country we have vertically integrated utilities. That is to say that you have a monopoly: they own the wires, they own the generation, and they in essence get paid based upon how much capital they deploy. There are regulators that are there to approve their investments as prudent and in the customers’ best interest, but there is a real capital bias towards getting a return on equity for how much money they spend. So that's a big part of it. The other part of it also leans into ease, or laziness. When we go into an integrated resource plan, this is when a utility says, “We want to build X,” and if it's gas we'll say, “Well, renewables are cheaper.” First they say they want to do it for economic concerns; then, when we show them renewables are cheaper, they next say, well, we need it to keep the lights on, we need it for reliability. So the moat we have to cross here is cost, but that's the real castle keep: reliability. Because for policymakers, this is a career-ending thing to get wrong. It's a big trump card they play. I was going to lay out the three things that we need to work on: We can run a system nationally with majority renewables in terms of variable generation, and we need to make some changes to make that work. We need to introduce a lot more flexibility into the system. Partly that's batteries; partly that is a focus on demand flexibility, essentially paying people to change when they charge or give them incentives to be good grid citizens. We can talk more about that if you’d like. It is also to some degree some transmission that helps expand balancing areas, interconnects the load centers with the best generating profile. So the reasons why we don't see this happen just because it's cheaper and cleaner and better for everybody have to do mostly with economics, in terms of perverse incentives inside of utilities. It is a lot easier to have a gas plant; you just flip a switch on rather than transforming the system to be more flexible and resilient.David Roberts:   OK, so you said three areas for solar advocacy these days.Adam Browning:  The last — I should have led with it as the number one — is inclusivity. As we make this transition from fossils to renewables, we absolutely have to make sure that it benefits and includes everybody. We cannot continue to replicate some of the inequities of our fossil fuel system. Over the past five-plus years at Vote Solar, we've completely changed how we go about planning our campaigns, how we go about the policies that we work on, and it has really benefited everybody by making this transformation. When we look at some of these largest, most comprehensive climate bills, none of these would have happened if it weren't for the leadership of the environmental justice community. This goes from California’s SB100 to the New York Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, to, as of this week, the Climate and Equitable Jobs Act in Illinois. Across the board, beginning with developing partnerships with the communities that we wish to serve, co-creating the policies to make sure that they include benefits for everybody that everybody can participate in, just builds these much stronger, much more powerful coalitions that can get big things done. I firmly believe that this is the path we need to double down on as we continue to move forward in getting that further deployment of solar. Broadly speaking, the more beneficiaries, the more power building you have in order to make big changes happen.David Roberts:   Solar is everybody's favorite success story. It's one of the few things that give me any hope at all. The tech and the economics and the advocacy all worked together really well for solar, in such a way as to really turbocharge it, and it's been amazing these last 20 years. But of course, solar is not the only thing we need for climate mitigation. So how much of solar’s success is unique to solar? This adaptability to different values, this image of wholesomeness that is seemingly undentable: how much of what has made solar advocacy work can be transferred to other pieces of the puzzle that we need for clean energy, like home power management and storage? Is solar's mojo transferable?Adam Browning:  Yes — and, that's a two-part question. One of the things that's been awesome about solar is these monumental cost declines, from something that was 10 times more expensive than the alternative to something that is quite a bit cheaper than the fossil alternative. Can you see similar cost declines in other climate-necessary technologies? I would argue, absolutely. I would also argue that longtime readers of Dave Roberts will know that the path forward for success is to electrify everything and run it all on renewables. So having this cheap renewable energy is a foundation for our hopes in other sectors as well. But if you're looking at mobility, batteries have come down 87 percent in the last decade, and they are far from done yet, both with the battery technologies that are currently extant and the new ones that are all being worked on. I think you could make a similar argument for the electrification of buildings, for heat pumps, which are nascent.David Roberts:   Make heat pumps as sexy as solar, Adam. That's your next goal.Adam Browning:  Sexy is one thing, but the first question is, can the technology get cheaper through scale? Absolutely. Both the hardware as well as all the soft costs associated with the workforce knowing what the heck it is and then being able to efficiently install it, removing all the bugs and the permitting and etc. So there's a ton of work that can be done to reduce those costs. The other part of this — and I think the key to sexiness — is, does it make your life better? Tell me, what's Tesla's advertising budget?David Roberts:   Right. Zero.Adam Browning:  They shoot a car into space and they go on Twitter, and that's it. It has zero advertising budget because it is absolutely compelling. All the reservation lines for the Rivian trucks; the F150, when they went electric and you could charge your house with it, their reservation lines were absolutely huge. I went to the launch of the Tesla Model 3, and nobody had ever seen a picture of it, no one knew how many wheels it had, and Elon got over a billion dollars worth of free money in terms of $1,000 down payments on reservations. Before anyone had even seen a picture of it! So yes, at least in vehicles, it's definitely sexy. When it comes to home automation: I'm a customer of OhmConnect, which is this company that's trying to help reduce grid costs when the grid needs it most. First it was just by changing behavior, sending people a text and asking them to turn off lights. But now, all my major loads are on wifi-enabled plugs, and when the grid needs it, it automatically turns off my freezer, turns off my fridge. Now, when my kindergartener daughter opens the fridge door and the lights don't go on, she's like, “hey, Daddy, it's an Ohm hour.” We all know every time that happens, for every 15-minute increment, we're making a quarter. Every time they touch our Nest, we're making 75 cents. So you can expect to make somewhere around $300-$400 a year. You don't lift a finger, it's all automated. So, is getting paid to do nothing sexy? For some people, it is. David Roberts:   Yeah, that's my dream. Have you changed your mind at all about the state focus? If anything, it seems even more apt now than it was when you settled on it. Is that still your primary hope for climate progress?Adam Browning:  We do have a generational opportunity right now to get something done with this Congress, especially if we were to get rid of the filibuster, as longtime listeners and readers of your insight well know. I do think there is a way to get to what would effectively be an iteration of what has worked so well in the states: a federal standard for clean energy. You could make that happen. The entire Biden administration has surprised me with their ambition, and it is just rife with superstar leaders. I'm a committed west coaster, but I definitely have some FOMO; working with those people would be awesome. So this is the best scenario that we're going to see on the federal level that we could possibly imagine for quite some time. We've had a longstanding rule of thumb that if your plan involves the federal government, or if your plan involves Congress, you're gonna need another plan. That has always stood us in good stead. But with Jigar Shah over at the Loan Program Office, they're doing some really cool and innovative financing that will create some durable models that will exist beyond his tenure there. The federal government has a lot of money and a lot of power and can do a lot of good; getting stuff through Congress is just another matter entirely. So let's hope we can get something through, but then double down on the states. We're going to continue to have to have state-level advocacy going forward, and we have proven time and time again that you can make big things happen that will have additional impacts elsewhere: by bringing down costs; by bringing the jobs that will, again, impact places where you're not doing it directly; by advocacy; with solar, solar is cheap. There are utilities in Indiana right now that are going ahead and doing their own math and really digging deep on solar, and you just love to see it.David Roberts:   I want to ask about your experience founding an organization and then running it for 20 years as it grows from two people to 40. Navigating that shift, from “we're a tiny band of people who all know each other and are good friends” to an actual organization that’s something like a bureaucracy with levels and managers, is a very difficult transition no matter what you're doing, but especially in the nonprofit world, which is difficult to survive in the best of circumstances. What do you feel like you've learned about how to build an organization? What have you taken away in terms of managerial wisdom?Adam Browning:  That is a great question, and we could do another hour podcast on just that. I don't think that this is something unique to the nonprofit side; there's a literature replete with founders that are good at starting things and less good at scale. For me, I didn't have many models of what a good boss looked like, what successful management structures look like. That was exactly it: we began as a couple of passion-driven, like-minded people, and then grew. There were three, maybe four, big step changes of complexity, where what worked before broke and I had to either learn something new or get out. I tried to take that seriously, to continuously ask myself, am I the best person to run this organization right now? I had to grow a lot. I had to learn a lot of new skills. I had to learn a theory and practice of management that I was not born with. It has been far from a smooth road, but it's been a lovely road full of a lot of those learnings that we've all grown from.But you’ve got to fundraise all the time, and you have to show success in order to be a successful fundraiser all the time. It’s part of what it means to run a nonprofit. Some of the historical regrets I've had were, frankly, being so far attuned to looking at all the external opportunities and wanting to have impact and knowing that I could make change if I hired another campaigner here, or regulatory person there. I wish throughout I had invested a lot more on infrastructure, on the human resources side. We had so many lovely, idealistic, mission-driven people that were constantly overextended and overachieving under budget. There's just a lot more foundational work to a larger organization that I wished I'd invested in earlier. As I step down from Vote Solar, I want to put in this plug: as we look back over this history of success and achievement, this is not my success and achievement. There is such a legacy of awesome alumni and current team members that have made all of this happen. So the extent that I was able to do this was my ability to provide the resources and then to get out of the way of wonderful people doing wonderful things. Trust your people, give them the resources they need, figure out what is blocking them and what their problems are, and then focus your effort on fixing those. That would be my best lessons learned.David Roberts:   What is it from all this experience that you would like to jump back into and do again? Or, what is it that you are looking to do differently now that this 20-year chapter is over?Adam Browning:  That's a great question. For me, the time is ripe right now for me to step aside for a couple of reasons. One is, I do want some new adventures, some new experiences. I am so grateful for this experience, it has been a labor of love every step of the way. Yet I also have a feeling that I want to take on some new challenges. The flip side of this is, it is time for some new perspectives, some new voices, someone with radically different life experiences that looks at the world in a different way to have a chance at running what I think is an incredibly impactful organization. I am encouraged by that type of change. I think it's healthy. As I've shared my decision internally, it's been like a jolt of adrenaline running through the entire org as we've seen everybody step up, step in, and step forward with their individual ways of leadership. It's just lovely to see. I think this is going to be healthy for this organization that I will continue to support for the rest of my life, and I encourage everybody else to do so, because it is a necessary organization going forward; I'm just not necessary to it, is what I came to the conclusion. For me, I’d like a little rest for a bit. This fall isn't in the end turning out to be like I thought it would be, travel isn't in the cards for me right now. But that's OK. I also find I am invigorated by the challenges of climate, I am going to stay in the climate space. I am definitely mission-driven on this front. Look at what we did collectively around solar: there was something that needed to exist but didn't yet, and with a global campaign, we made that happen. There are a lot of other similar blank spaces in the climate sphere, things that we know need to exist, but don't yet. That's where I'd like to focus my efforts. I feel like I'm an entrepreneur at heart. I am kicking around some private sector ideas that I’m going to look to pursue. My entire life has been on the public service side, and I think I would like to try the private side. But in my heart of hearts, I'm a campaigner, I'm an advocate, I love the rush of going out against all odds with the plucky band of joyful solo warriors and winning.David Roberts:   If listeners are looking to get into this the same way you did 20 years ago, where are those blank spaces where they could make a real impact?Adam Browning:  There's a lot of people that will have their own list of these, depending on how far you pull back the lens. I'm on the board of this awesome organization called Power for All, which is in many ways Vote Solar but for the billion people on this planet that don't have any access to electricity at all. There is the ability and the potential to bring decentralized renewables to provide electricity and electrified services in many different business models. It's just an incredibly dynamic space. That is a passion project of mine. When I look closer to home here, the challenge of introducing flexibility into the grid, whether it be through storage or demand response, it does feel nascent compared to where it needs to be. If you read the RMI reports on clean energy portfolios, I'm absolutely convinced that demand response is a gas killer. We need to have it. The policy models for it feel like solar 2007: there's competing different business models, we do not have good transactional space for the value that it can bring. That's a policy problem that needs to be solved. The opportunity for huge scale is there, but there's a lot of roadblocks in the way. I look at electrification of transportation. I'm not a super car guy, but I do think that this premise of interconnecting tons of really large batteries onto the grid provides an opportunity for solving so many other problems, through managed charging as well as potentially, in the future, vehicle-to-grid charging, and a couple of other things besides. That is an enormous opportunity for bringing in efficiencies and bringing down costs for participants and nonparticipants alike that needs a lot further exploration. I could go on and on. But those are some of the ones that are top of mind for me right now.David Roberts:   Well, thanks for that perspective, that's really interesting. Maybe in 20 years, there'll be another Adam at the end of another 20-year career and we'll find that demand response is sexy and ubiquitous.Adam Browning:  You know, here's hoping.David Roberts:   Thanks so much, Adam, for taking the time, and thanks for your 20 years of work.Adam Browning:  Both this hour and the past 20 years have definitely been my pleasure. David, thank you for being such an incisive and insightful reporter in this space. No one does it better than you. I've enjoyed reading your stuff for the last 20 years as well.David Roberts:   Well, I'll get you that check later. Thank you for that. Thanks a lot, Adam. Goodbye.Adam Browning:Take care. Bye. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.volts.wtf/subscribe

After months of anticipation, Democrats have begun to reveal pieces of their upcoming Build Back Better Act (aka the budget reconciliation bill), including the key clean energy provisions. On Monday, the House Energy and Commerce Committee began markup of its full set of recommendations for the bill. Meanwhile, the House Ways and Means Committee released its draft tax package for the bill, including the clean energy tax credits.As negotiations around the reconciliation bill move forward, I’ll have more to say about the politics, economics, and larger implications of all this Democratic energy policy. For now, I just want to get the specifics on the record. For one thing, there’s a lot of policy here, and it will take some time to think it through. For another, it will be important to track what gets added and (more likely) cut when the bill goes to the Senate, so this post can serve as our baseline for comparison.Let’s start with Energy and Commerce and its Clean Electricity Performance Program (CEPP), arguably the most important single piece of energy policy on offer.E&C: the CEPP and some other good spending (For a quick introduction to the CEPP, see highlights from my interview with Sen. Tina Smith.)The $150 billion CEPP would offer grants to utilities that increase their year-on-year share of clean energy by at least 4 percentage points; it would charge fines to utilities that fall short of that goal. (“Utilities” here includes any and all end-use electricity providers: vertically integrated utilities, investor-owned utilities, co-ops and munis, etc.)For the purposes of the bill, “clean energy” is energy that emits no more than 0.1 tons of CO2-equivalent per megawatt-hour of electricity generated. This 0.1t/MWh threshold is notably stringent — it would exclude all fossil fuels and biomass unless they are equipped with carbon capture and storage.The grants are based on a somewhat complicated formula: $150/MWh x (YoY percentage point increase in clean share - 1.5 percentage point) x total retail sales.Say a utility boosted its year-on-year clean share by 5 percentage points. Five percentage points minus 1.5 percentage points is 3.5 percentage points. So the utility would get a one-time grant of $150/MWh for 3.5 percent of it retail sales that year.The formula for the fines is: $40/MWh x (4 percentage points - YoY percentage point increase in clean share) x total retail sales.Say a utility grew its share 3 percentage points. Four percentage points minus 3 percentage points is 1 percentage point, so it would pay a one-time fine of $40/MWh for 1 percent of its retail sales. (The exception here is utilities with a clean share at 85 percent or above; they are exempt from fines, but still eligible for grants.)A utility is not allowed to fall steadily behind; any shortfall is added to the following year’s target. If it only hits 3 percentage points growth one year, the next year a utility must hit 5 percentage points growth. Utilities can choose to tally up their performance over a two- or three-year period, to smooth over year-to-year spikes or valleys; for instance, if a utility hits 3 percentage points in year one and 3 percentage points in year two but 6 percentage points in year three, it averages out to 4 percentage points a year and it receives the grants.This is all a bit convoluted; it would definitely keep accountants and lawyers busy. There are five things worth noting about the CEPP at this point.First, $150/MWh is real money. Spread out over a 10-year power purchase agreement (PPA), it’s about $15/MWh/year, not that different from (but additive to) the clean-energy tax credits. That, coupled with the tight definition of clean energy, makes this a relatively strong offering, design-wise. Second, a lot of details would be left up to the Department of Energy, which would administer the program, such as how distributed and behind-the-meter resources will be counted, how much compliance can be done through renewable energy credits (RECs), and so forth. There are lots of devils in those details.Third, it is not accurate to say that the CEPP targets, much less guarantees, 80 percent emission reductions in the electricity sector by 2030. That is Biden’s goal, and the aspiration for the full suite of policies Dems are trying to pass, but the CEPP, by design, does not guarantee any particular outcome. How would utilities respond to this level of incentives and fines? We hope to find out! It’s a new program; it’s never been tried before. (It would kick off in 2023.)Fourth, a study by the independent firm Analysis Group found that, through 2031, the CEPP would expand the US workforce by 7.7 million new jobs, add $907 billion to the national economy, raise $154 billion in tax revenue, and lead to over 600 gigawatts of new clean energy. It’s not a cost, it’s an investment.Fifth, there’s no guarantee Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) will let this pass unmolested, or let it pass at all. He chairs the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, which will be marking up the energy parts of the bill. He could kill the CEPP. He could weaken the carbon-intensity requirements to allow for dirtier energy; he could lower the required rate of clean energy growth; he could reduce the incentives or the fines. Nobody knows what Manchin will do, or why, so we’ll just have to wait and see.Also! Other items worth noting in the E&C package. * There is $9 billion for home energy retrofits — $2,000 rebates for projects that save 20 percent relative to average energy use, or $4,000 for 35 percent. (Both numbers are doubled for low-income projects.)* There’s another $9 billion for home electrification — $3,000 per heat pump with greater than 27,500 BTU-per-hour capacity and $4,000 if it's cold-climate rated; $6,000/$7,000 for low-income projects. For heat pumps under 27,500 BTU/hour, it’s $1,500/$2,000; $3,000/$3,500 for low-income projects. In that same section are rebates of $1,250 per heat-pump water heater, $3,000 per smart electric panel, and other, smaller grants for electric stoves and dryers.* $13.5 billion for electric vehicle infrastructure, focused on underserved areas.* $5 billion to replace heavy-duty vehicles like fire trucks and school buses with zero-emission vehicles.* $9 billion for electricity transmission, including funds for DOE’s transmission planning and modeling capabilities and for state transmission planning processes.* $17.5 billion for decarbonizing federal buildings and fleets (including, one hopes, the Postal Service fleet).* $27.5 billion for a green bank, which we’re not supposed to call a green bank, but rather “nonprofit, state, and local climate finance institutions that support the rapid deployment of low- and zero-emission technologies.” (40 percent goes to vulnerable communities.)* $2.5 billion for low-income solar.* $5 billion for community-led environmental and climate justice programs.* An unspecified methane fee on leaked methane (which the industry is furiously lobbying against).All these numbers are, based on the need, too small — especially the retrofit and electrification numbers. The heat pump money, for instance, is likely to be used up after a year or two.Nonetheless, with a limited pot of money, E&C Dems have managed to cover quite a few bases. Let’s move on to the Ways and Means tax package.W&M: a bonanza of clean-energy tax creditsThe tax package, which itself only covers a limited subset of policy areas, is a monster; even the section-by-section summary is 41 pages long. The green energy part (subtitle G) starts on page 9. It is basically a long list of technologies and practices that will receive tax credits.Before getting to individual items, it’s worth noting three intriguing provisions that apply to all the credits.First, there are now strong prevailing wage standards built in. To receive the full value of the credit, a project must show that it is paying prevailing wages and using qualified apprentices; without doing so, it can receive only a fifth of the credit value (called the “base rate”). Second, projects that use domestic content — defined as 55 percent of total project cost from made-in-USA components and services — can get another 10 percent on top of the value of the credit.These are important policies for the domestic workforce, drawn from successful states (like Washington), and will increase the amount of credit value that goes to good US jobs and supply chains. Third, the energy tax credits are now “direct pay,” which means projects can get the full value without having to offset it against taxes owed. This opens up the credits to many more projects and eliminates a lot of wasteful lawyerly games around tax equity financing. (Note: the percentage available for direct pay declines over time for projects not using domestic content.)On to some of the individual credits:* The production tax credit (PTC) would be extended through the decade. It would go to qualifying clean electricity sources — wind, solar, geothermal, landfill gas, methane gas with CCS — based on MWhs produced: $25/MWh ($5/MWh base rate). * The investment tax credit (ITC) would also be extended; it would be available to solar and geothermal, and now, as of this bill, energy storage, biogas, microgrid controllers, and, uh, “dynamic glass.” It would cover 30 percent (6 percent base rate) of the cost of a project. (A solar project could choose the PTC or ITC, but couldn’t get both.)* A bonus ITC would be available to projects that locate in a low-income area (additional 10 percent) or are themselves low-income benefit or housing projects (additional 20 percent). This is an excellent way of building environmental justice into the tax system.Note: both the PTC and ITC would be restored to their full original value, higher than any current credit, and extended through the decade. This is a very big deal.* The electric vehicle (EV) tax credit has been revived and expanded. It would now be fully refundable and no longer limited by manufacturer. It starts at $4,000 per vehicle; for vehicles that go into service before 2027, there’s an additional $3,500 (that’s $7,500); for vehicles built at a US assembly plant with a union-negotiated collective bargaining agreement, there’s an additional $4,500 (that’s $12,000); for vehicles assembled at plants that use at least 50 percent domestic content, there’s an additional $500. So, for a domestically manufactured, domestically sourced EV purchased next year, the total available credit is $12,500 (limited to half the vehicle purchase price). That’s huge!Note: The EV tax credit would be available only for vehicles under specific price limits: $55,000 for sedans, $64,000 for vans, $69,000 for SUVs, and $74,000 for pickup trucks. Also, the amount of available credit phases out quickly for joint households above $800,000 income, or single households above $600,000. In short, the credit is meant to be available primarily to middle-class voters buying mid-range EVs.Note 2: Automakers that use non-unionized workforces, like Toyota, Honda, and Tesla, are furious about the union provisions. The awkward truth is that some of the best automakers on EVs have been non-union, while union shops like Ford and GM have been among the worst. It’s a bit of a dilemma for progressives. * There is also a credit for commercial EVs, worth up to 30 percent of vehicle cost.* Happily, there’s a credit for used EVs, ranging from $1,250 to $2,500, depending on battery capacity; the credit would be capped at 30 percent of the sale price, for vehicles costing no more than $25,000 and at least two years old.* Even more happily, there’s a new electric bicycle credit, worth 15 percent of the purchase price. The max available credit is $1,500 (joint filers can use it toward two bikes). The credit starts phasing out at incomes above $75,000; the maximum total price of a qualifying bike is $8,000. Note: Folks are grousing on Twitter about how much more generous the EV credit is than the bicycle credit, and how the bicycle credit should be bigger, and how absurd it is to means-test a friggin’ bicycle credit, and they’re right about all of it. Still, it’s nice e-bikes at least got a nod.* The 45Q tax credit for carbon capture, utilization, and storage has been extended through the decade: $50 per ton for sequestered carbon dioxide; $35 per ton for use of CO2 in products or enhanced oil recovery. * Added to 45Q is a new $180-per-ton credit for direct air capture of CO2.* Hooray, a new investment tax credit for transmission lines! Lines of at least 275 kilovolts, capable of carrying at least 500 megawatts, placed in service before 2032, receive a credit worth 30 percent of project costs. (Read my transmission series to understand why this is a good thing.)* Also worth cheering, though more controversial: a production tax credit for existing nuclear power plants, calculated via a formula I do not pretend to understand.* A new sustainable aviation fuel credit would offer $1.25 per gallon for aviation fuels that cut lifetime GHG emissions (vs. jet fuel) at least 50 percent, with another penny per gallon available for each percentage point above 50. * A new clean hydrogen production tax credit would offer $3 per kilogram to hydrogen with 95 percent fewer lifecycle GHG emissions than hydrogen made through the currently dominant method, steam reforming. That could include hydrogen made through electrolysis driven by renewable energy or through biomass gasification with CCS. Credits of $0.60 to $1.02 would be available to hydrogen with between 40 and 95 percent fewer GHGs, which could include “blue hydrogen” made by steam reforming with CCS. * There are credits for energy-efficient homes, up to $2,500, with a bonus tier of $5,000 for certified zero-energy homes.* The clean manufacturing tax credit (48C) has been extended. It would offer up to 30 percent of the value of investments in clean manufacturing facilities, i.e., facilities manufacturing solar panels, wind turbines, EVs, batteries, etc. $400 million a year of the credit money would be reserved for projects in “automotive communities.”* A credit for environmental justice programs would distribute $1 billion a year, on a competitive basis, to institutions of higher learning that gather data to help improve environmental justice outcomes. Notably missing from this list is any reduction in fossil fuel subsidies. This is frustrating, since less than 24 hours before the package was released, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer was saying, “we need to take away all the subsidies for oil, gas, and coal. We will have that in our bill.” (It’s at minute 26 of this video.) Where did the subsidy cuts go? Who took them out? Anyway, all told, the Joint Committee on Taxation estimates that the Ways and Means tax package would cost $1.2 trillion over 10 years; the “green energy” subtitle would account for $235 billion. Of course, that’s just an estimate — it could be lower or higher in practice, depending on the uptake of the credits and the growth they spur. Now let’s see how much survives the SenateLike I said, there will be more to talk about as the bill is negotiated. For now, I’ll leave you with three observations.First, is this enough? Ha ha, no. No climate policy is ever enough. This is far short of the $10 trillion that would be needed for a true Green New Deal. It’s far short of the $6 trillion bill Sen. Bernie Sanders first proposed, back in June. It is, from a climate perspective, a ludicrously low level of investment and mobilization. Nonetheless, this is what the lamentably small group of climate-focused legislators were able to squeeze from a chaotic process. This is a reflection of the relative weight climate carries in the House. Second, this is the high-water mark, so enjoy it while it lasts. Sens. Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) are going to try to hack down the overall level of spending, and Manchin has already signaled his intention to go after some of the energy provisions, including the CEPP. I have no idea what will happen in the Senate — my brain is tired from trying to predict — but given that Manchin is involved, it’s likely to be unpleasant.Third, I know this isn’t helpful right now, but damn is it stupid for a wealthy democracy to make policy the way we do. Because every policy of any size has to be crammed through the budget reconciliation process, it all ends up in the tax code, a complicated skein of credits and loopholes that encourages rent-seeking and keep armies of lawyers employed. This is not how any energy wonk, including the energy wonks on Democratic congressional staffs, would write policy if offered a blank sheet of paper. It is kludge upon kludge, a Rube Goldberg mechanism reverse-engineered to conform to anachronistic budget rules administered by a parliamentarian-cum-shaman. But it is what’s possible now. American democracy is staggering, barely upright, and people of good will are scrambling to do the best they can under the circumstances. There’s no time left for infighting. Let’s just get this thing over the finish line. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.volts.wtf/subscribe

As a dog walker and kitchen cleaner, I listen to a lot of podcasts. One that I’ve been enjoying quite a bit lately is Know Your Enemy, which bills itself as “a leftist's guide to the conservative movement.” Sponsored by Dissent Magazine and hosted by Matthew Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell, it typically interviews experts, analysts, and activists about the current (lamentable) state of the US conservative movement. It is unusually smart and thoughtful, offering more illumination than rage bait.Recently it had a different kind of episode: a pod on climate change. The guests were Daniel Sherrell, an activist and organizer who just released a book called Warmth: Coming of Age at the End of the World, and Dorothy Fortenberry, a playwright and television writer currently working on Extrapolations, an upcoming limited series for Apple TV+ that focuses on climate change.I’ll be honest: I don’t typically enjoy climate change content. It’s mostly a bunch stuff I already know, arguments I already agree with, and exhortations I don’t need. But this one was different. Rather than focusing on politics, policy, or science, it’s about, well, living with climate change. How to think about it. How to acknowledge its horror and weight without being crushed and immobilized. How to make fiction about it. How to imagine a future in its shadow. Lots of philosophical and even spiritual stuff that I haven’t focused on much here at Volts.Anyway, I asked Matthew and Sam if I could share it with Volts listeners and they were kind enough to say yes. It is long, but rich and full of interesting ideas. I hope you enjoy it. Don’t forget to support Know Your Enemy on Patreon! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.volts.wtf/subscribe

In this episode, Sen. Tina Smith (D-MN) discusses a policy that she has proposed in the Senate and is working to get included in the upcoming reconciliation bill: a Clean Electricity Payment Program (CEPP), which would aim to reduce carbon emissions in the US electricity sector 80 percent by 2030. She also shares some excellent thoughts on the filibuster!Full transcript of Volts podcast featuring Sen. Tina Smith (D-MN), September 1, 2021(PDF version)David Roberts:There are lots and lots of policies being discussed for inclusion in the Democrats’ upcoming budget reconciliation bill, from a childcare tax credit to universal pre-K to a wide range of climate and clean-energy measures.According to the office of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), the climate provisions in the bill would collectively reduce total US greenhouse gas emissions 45 percent below 2005 levels by 2030 — getting us close to America’s Paris agreement pledge. Schumer’s numbers have not yet been backed up by outside analysts, so they should be taken with a grain of salt for now. But what’s clear, and unlikely to change, is that the bulk of the emission reductions will come from the electricity sector — specifically, from the clean-energy tax credits and the Clean Electricity Payment Program. As regular Volts readers know, the Clean Electricity Payment Program is a version of the more familiar Clean Energy Standard that has been modified to fit within the rules of budget reconciliation. It would set up a federal program that would offer utilities financial incentives to increase their proportion of clean energy and levy fines on those that failed to do so. Its goal would be to reduce emissions from the US electricity sector 80 percent by 2030.As Schumer’s graph shows, the Clean Electricity Payment Program, in combination with the extension and expansion of the clean-energy tax credits, would be responsible for almost 42 percent of the bill’s total reductions. To hear more about the program and how it will work, I talked with Minnesota Senator Tina Smith (D), the policy’s sponsor and its greatest champion in the Senate. Smith is one of the handful of senators with in-depth knowledge of the dynamics in the US electricity sector, and she’s deeply involved in budget negotiations, so I was excited to ask her about how the program would work, what kinds of jobs and projects it might produce, how it might affect coal states, and of course, because I am me, what she thinks about the filibuster. Senator Tina Smith, thank you so much for coming on Volts. Sen. Tina Smith:Well, thank you, David. It is terrific to be with you. David Roberts:We're going to talk today about clean electricity policy and the politics of getting it passed, which are two of my very favorite subjects in the world, so let's just dive right in. Senator Smith, I’m pretty confident that Volts listeners are familiar with state-level policies, renewable portfolio standards or clean energy standards at the state level, that mandate that utilities in the state increase their proportion of clean energy. It’s a regulatory mandate passed by the state government; these are familiar, there are dozens of them across the country. The Clean Electricity Payment Program that you have proposed is not quite that. So why don't you start by telling us what it is and how it is similar and different to these more familiar state policies? Sen. Tina Smith: Well, the basic goal is the same. We want to move the power generating sector so that it is adding clean energy. One way of doing that is to have a regulatory framework that says, you will add clean energy, and if you don't, you'll pay a penalty. But another way of achieving that goal of adding clean power is to do what we're doing with the Clean Electricity Payment Program. This is a plan that says: We will provide financial incentives to utilities to add clean power; there'll be a fee if you fail to add clean power; and our goal is to get, on a national average, 80 percent of our power generation from clean energy sources by 2030. So the goal is the same: adding clean power. The mechanism is a little bit different. I think this mechanism has some real advantages, because under a regulatory framework, adding that clean power costs money in the short term (though it saves money in the long term) and often those costs are passed on to ratepayers. With the clean electricity plan that we're proposing, this federal incentive would defray the costs that utility ratepayers would normally pay. That's the real advantage of this approach.David Roberts: It’s worth pointing out something I've heard from a couple of the architects: costs on ratepayers tend to be regressive, whereas federal money comes from more progressive income taxes. So you get a progressivity advantage by drawing the money from the federal pot.Sen. Tina Smith: Absolutely. That's exactly right. We need to be on this path to a clean energy transition, but what you don't want to have happen is for the cost of that transition to be disproportionately borne by people who can least afford it. This is especially important to me, because the costs of the fossil fuel economy have been disproportionately borne — in bad health outcomes and in all sorts of other external costs — by poor people, Black and brown people, people who are sited right next to freeways or right next to that coal-burning power plant.David Roberts:The details of this thing obviously matter. I'm curious, to what extent are the details of the program fixed and in place vs. being negotiated right now? Do we know the size of the payments? Are we sure that the target is going to stay the same through negotiations? What's in place and what's still up in the air?Sen. Tina Smith: Well, of course, everything is in the midst of being negotiated all the time, as you well know. Negotiations will be finalized when the budget reconciliation bill is completed. But for me, there are a couple of key aspects of this. One, the goal of achieving 80 percent clean power in the power sector nationally, on average, is set in stone. That was described in the Democratic budget resolutions that we passed at the end of the last session. That is described as the goal of the president. So to me, that's the starting point. Then there are a couple of other things that are crucial to this. One is that this clean electricity plan is technology neutral, which means we don't say this kind of clean energy is better than that kind of clean energy, or it must be renewables vs. carbon capture, for example. That technology neutrality is clear. Also clear is the core idea that each utility starts from where they are, and they improve from there. This is a big deal, because some utilities and regions are already well along the path of adding clean power, and others are just starting. You don't want to unfairly penalize that utility that maybe is only at 10 percent clean power. David Roberts:Can you expand on that a little bit? Utilities are at very different places — financially, in terms of power mix, etc. How is the plan customized on a per-utility basis? If I'm a coal-heavy utility, what does it look like to me?Sen. Tina Smith:If you are a coal-heavy utility, this is very much in your favor, because you need to figure out how to add clean while you have a lot of assets in coal power. Rather than having your utility ratepayers end up having higher rates in the short term because you're adding new, clean power capital infrastructure, this would help you to add clean. You may be a utility that's only 10 to 20 percent clean; so under our plan, we would still ask you to add clean power every year at a percentage level yet to be negotiated, at a pace that is moving you strongly and speedily in the right direction. But there's no expectation that a utility that starts at, say, a 10 percent clean power percentage must catch up with a utility in the Pacific Northwest that relies heavily on hydropower and may easily get to 85 or 90 percent clean within a 10-year period. At the end of that 10-year period, you're going to have some utilities that are over 80 percent, and some that are below 80 percent. The utilities I speak to that are farther along will probably argue that it's harder for them to add that incremental 20 percent of clean, whereas the utility that’s starting with ample, untapped renewable resources, you could argue that they could add quicker.David Roberts: So there's a national average target, but it's not that each utility has to hit that same target.Sen. Tina Smith:That is exactly right. That's the flexibility. It makes it much more appealing to utilities that are not as far along the curve. David Roberts:This brings up another question. You're trying to figure out from our present vantage point what level of payments and what pace of change would yield 80 percent by 2030. It seems like it's hard to know right now exactly what those numbers are. So if the program is put in place, and payments are at a certain level, and the pace of change is set at a certain level, and it turns out in 2024 we find out we're not on track to hit the national target, are there provisions in place to adjust those numbers as we go?Sen. Tina Smith: That is a great and interesting question. I'm now going to get really wonky into the details about Senate process, because what we're using here is a process called budget reconciliation, which is a budget-driven process. What that means in practical terms is that much of the implementation and the rules around how this plan gets implemented will be left to the Department of Energy. They are writing the rules, because this is a budget process, it's not a regular process. But let me see if I can answer your question a little bit at least. One thing I would point out is that historically, the cost curve of clean power has gone down more quickly than we anticipated. So it seems to me that, particularly for solar, for which we know the cost is going down really dramatically, we are just as likely to see power added more quickly than we originally anticipated as taking longer than we anticipated. The overall question about how the Department of Energy would write the rules to accomplish this would probably end up being addressed in rulemaking. It gets to the question of: what do you anticipate? What do you think is going to happen? The way that we've designed this is based on a ton of modeling from the Department of Energy, and also from outside groups who have expertise in modeling. That gives us a good framework for making some assumptions about how this is going to pan out in the real world.David Roberts:You've said before that you don't actually expect utilities to be fined very often, since they'd be dumb not to take incentives that are on the table. But are there protections written in about where the fines come from? And how the incentive payments are used? How closely is that specified in the bill?Sen. Tina Smith:This gets at a real strength of the policy. First of all, the answer is yes, we want to write into this what are allowable uses for the incentive payments. It could be building out clean resources. It could be deploying carbon capture technology. It could be adding energy efficiency resources to a system, because if you think about it, if you are reducing electricity demand at the same time that you're adding clean, the percentage of clean of your overall system goes up faster. So that would be an allowable use. I speak to utilities and power generators that have coal power plants or natural gas plants that they want to phase out, but they have a stranded asset; you could potentially use these resources to help to retire those resources more quickly. Then, similarly, we need to have rules around who bears the cost of the penalties, in order to protect ratepayers as much as possible. But as I said, this isn't like the old cap-and-trade mentality, where a utility is looking at this and saying, my cost of paying the fee is lower than making the investment — this just isn't set up that way. That's a strength.David Roberts:It's a little bit more transparent than cap-and-trade; the money is more in the headline and less something you have to deduce. How do you pitch this program to a person — say, for instance, a friend of yours named Joe — in a coal-heavy state, with a lot of coal-related jobs? Fossil fuel-heavy states have traditionally been resistant to things like this because they feel like they're starting on the back foot. In terms of both the power mix and the job mix, how do you pitch this program to a coal state?Sen. Tina Smith:It's interesting. I think about answering that question from the perspective of a place in Minnesota that is similar in many ways to parts of West Virginia, which is Minnesota’s Iron Range. This is a part of my state where the bread and butter of the economy, and historically the culture and the source of pride, has been mining iron, and then taconite, and producing the iron that has driven the economy of the United States. There is a real sense in that part of Minnesota, just as I think there is in West Virginia — though Joe Manchin knows way more about West Virginia than anybody — that this economy is getting passed by. There are new opportunities out there, but is it ever going to come to me, to my community, to my world? That is one of the real strengths of this idea. First of all, clean power, including renewable energy, is rural energy. That's where it is most likely developed. In fact, West Virginia has abundant renewable energy assets that are waiting to be developed. If you care about wanting to be a part of this clean-energy transition — which is, by the way, going to happen — the question is: Do you want to lead? Do you want to be in the forefront of that? Or do you want to be behind?The opportunities for West Virginia, and other states that are part of the traditional fossil fuel economy, to seize this moment, to move forward with the kinds of proposals that Joe Manchin has put forward, like the American Jobs in Energy Manufacturing Act, and deploying carbon capture and storage technology, and taking advantage of the skills and expertise of the working folks in West Virginia to drive those innovations — to me, that's all about being in the forefront.In fact, the West Virginia University Law School just put out a really excellent summary of what moving to this clean energy future could mean for West Virginia in terms of increase in employment, growth, and state GDP, opportunity for new investment that creates new jobs. It demonstrates where the opportunity is, in West Virginia and other places.David Roberts:As a matter of fact, I just posted a piece yesterday about West Virginia and that study. One of the interesting things about that study is it shows pretty substantial benefits for West Virginia, but the analysis was done before the Clean Electricity Payment Program was on the table. So the Clean Electricity Payment Program would more than double all those benefits; the amount of money that could flow into the state from federal coffers just through the Clean Electricity Payment Program is pretty enormous.Sen. Tina Smith:It is. It's such a perfect case study of how, the way that this is structured, along with the other clean and renewable energy tax credits, is actually a giant boost to employment and jobs, and not a gloom and doom, “we're going to all have to sacrifice because the climate is warming” mindset that has too often been the way that these issues have been approached.David Roberts:  Of course, the question for West Virginia is: compared to what? What is the alternative? Coal is on its way out, according to the markets, so it’s now or never. Sen. Tina Smith:That's exactly right. Coal demand has gone down substantially, and as I said, this transition is occurring. A lot of times people will point to, why should we make sacrifices in the United States when we see China increasingly being a source of carbon pollution? What I like to point out is that China added substantially more wind and solar resources than the United States over the last 10 years or so. They are making significant investments in wind and solar, not to mention electric vehicles and other new energy technologies. So, let's lead on this.David Roberts:How much of a sacrifice is it, really, to get more GDP and more jobs and less air pollution and better health outcomes? Pretty nice sacrifice as sacrifices go.Sen. Tina Smith:But I think we also can acknowledge that, as a very dear friend always loved to say, everybody loves change as long as it happens to somebody else. You could understand why Minnesotans who live on the Iron Range, or coal miners that live in Wyoming or West Virginia, are questioning whether at the end of the day these benefits are actually going to come to them and their communities. So it is incumbent upon us to make sure that we're putting in place the policies that make sure that happens. I've spoken with Secretary Granholm about this a lot. She gets this, not only from being head of the Department of Energy, but being a former governor. You have to have a real place-based strategy for making sure that these benefits don't just happen anywhere, but they happen specifically where they need to. It’s the same issue as the environmental justice needs we have as well.David Roberts: A couple of broader questions about the politics of this. One of the vexations about US policy these days is that it seems to swing back and forth wildly depending on who's in charge. We saw Obama pass a bunch of stuff, and then Trump take over and spend four years frantically undoing it all, and now it's being redone. Is there anything about the Clean Electricity Payment Program that will make it resilient, even if Republicans take back over Congress and/or the presidency?Sen. Tina Smith:What you just said makes the strong argument for why it is so important to make these kinds of policy and budgetary decisions legislatively, rather than through executive action. You're absolutely right. When Obama was so tired of being stymied by a recalcitrant Congress, he took steps through his executive power with the Clean Power Plan, for example; that and other steps that he took around renewable fuel standards and so forth are relatively easy to wind back. But I think there's another lesson here, which is when you legislatively pass budget bills that are not only smart policy but are broadly approved of by the public, it becomes very difficult to unwind them. I look at the case of the Affordable Care Act — the Republican Party opposed that, spent how many years, over and over and over again, tried to unwind it, with no policy to replace it, because they really didn't know what their other idea was — that became more and more popular. Ultimately, they failed in unwinding it because people liked it. The same can be said of this clean electricity plan, because polling data shows that this is the direction people want. Businesses know this too. This is why businesses like Walmart, and Kroger, and others, are saying, oh, our customers want more clean power. This is what they want. There's a lot of public pressure to move in this direction. David Roberts:Notably, both large employers in the state of West Virginia.Sen. Tina Smith:Yes. It's interesting, I was just looking at this: The percentage of people in West Virginia that are employed in coal is 2 percent. So again, similar to Minnesota's Iron Range, it looms large in the history and the economic foundation of the state, but it's a relatively small percentage.David Roberts:In some ways this is the energy analogue of Medicaid expansion, in that it is the federal government saying: you need to do this; let us pay for it. Some states have resisted Medicaid expansion, but none who have accepted it have reversed it. Once you're getting it, you don't want to stop getting it.Sen. Tina Smith:That's right. To further that analogy: We could conceivably have designed a plan that would have been state-based rather than power generator-based, and I think that your point is one of the reasons why it's good that this is power generator-based. They're going to be making investment decisions and economic decisions that will support advancing this. David Roberts:Right, and it’ll be hard to unwind those. On a broader level, some people in the Senate have raised worries about spending too much money and running up the deficit and exacerbating inflation. One, do you worry about that at all? What's your take on the worry about deficit spending? And two, if the overall spending number gets haggled down, how safe do you feel that the energy money is in those negotiations? Is it going to be on the chopping block if there are cuts to be made? Sen. Tina Smith:Well, not if I can help it. Broadly speaking, when we are looking at the overall size of the Build Back Better budget, I don't hear people in Minnesota saying, “Oh, Tina, this amount of money is too much, $3.5 trillion is too much, but $3.1 trillion would be OK.” I don't think that that's how people are thinking about it. They're thinking about, how is this going to affect me and my family? That's sort of the cliche of talking about legislative policy, but I actually think that it's real. Certainly, as we go through this negotiation, and we have to come up with a plan that is agreeable to all 50 Democratic senators, there's going to be some haggling and some back-and-forth. To me, the most important thing is that we don't give really strong policy and budget proposals like this a haircut so that they don't work anymore. We’ve got to make sure we don't do that. But the other question you asked is an interesting one too, about budgets and deficit spending and so forth. I would just point out that when we write this bill, at whatever size it is, it's going to be paid for. So that's a good thing. In fact, when you look at how Americans feel about the Democrats’ budget bill, one of the things that they like the most is that it is paid for by asking the wealthiest Americans and big corporations to pay their fair share. That seems fair to them, and it seems right. It generates resources in order to do these things that are going to build up our economy and lift up our communities in powerful ways.David Roberts:I have been somewhat confused that the deficit concern seems to come up again and again, even in the context of a bill that is explicitly paid for. It seems like something people say almost by instinct now in DC.Sen. Tina Smith: That's right. In Washington, David, maybe you've noticed, there is sometimes a disconnect between rhetoric and reality. David Roberts:What?! Yes, I'm skeptical that there is any human being that has genuine concern about the deficit as a primary motive in their heart. That always sounds like an excuse to get at something else.Sen. Tina Smith: Right. The bipartisan infrastructure bill that is moving through Congress, that passed the Senate with 69 votes, is about investing in infrastructure, including some important strategies for advancing this clean energy transition with electric vehicles and charging stations — that was bipartisan, and probably not completely paid for. I would say, shoot, you're investing in roads and bridges and broadband infrastructure that's going to be around for 60 or 70 years; that's what states do all the time, is borrow to pay for long-term assets. So to me, that's not a big deal.David Roberts: Right, and putting in place long-term assets drives economic growth, which is the best thing for wiping out a deficit. OK, we won’t get stuck ranting about deficits, I could do this all day. Also on the broader politics of this: energy and climate people are watching this unfold from the outside with white knuckles. There's this two-track strategy: you’ve got the bipartisan infrastructure bill, and then you’ve got the reconciliation bill, which together are supposed to be the full agenda, the full package. But there's been a lot of fights and strains lately about whether to keep those two bills linked; there was a fight in the House about it just last week. Do you think that linking those two bills is the right way to go, and do you think that you're going to be able to keep them linked?Sen. Tina Smith: It is absolutely right to link these two bills. To me, they're rafted together. My support for the infrastructure bill, which I think is a good bill, is contingent on understanding that we have all agreed that we're going to move forward the reconciliation bill together. The two-track process divided up a broad agenda into two chunks, but we still need to pass that broad agenda for the good of the American people and for the good of people in my state. One of the things that I've learned about legislating in the relatively short time that I've been in the Senate is that you have to have a clear idea of where you're heading. In this case, the Democrats are heading towards passing these two big bills. Then you have to be flexible and incremental about how that happens as you move through the process. And then there's just a pileup at the end, and then you get it done. I'm not looking forward to the pileup, but I expect that it’ll happen. That is the reality of working in a democratic process, where there's 100 people in the Senate and 435 people in the House that all have very clear ideas about how they want to get things done.David Roberts: In my political lifetime, I’ve never seen a situation quite like this, where there are 50 Democrats and every single one of them has to agree.Sen. Tina SmithI know. It's kind of terrifying.David Roberts:It gives every single one of them the ability to blow the whole thing up. People are focusing on Manchin and Sinema, but really, every senator could blow it up. But at the same time, if they blow it up, they all go down together. There's going to be a game theory study about this some day. Sen. Tina Smith:That’s right. But at the end of the day, this broad agenda is broadly popular. It is what Joe Biden ran on; it’s not like it got pulled out of thin air. It's what he talks about, and what so many of us talked about during our campaigns in 2020. So you're right: the price of taking this down because you didn't get absolutely everything you wanted, because it's a little bit more money than you wanted to spend, that seems to me to be a heavy price.David Roberts:There's no half failure here. It's all success or all failure.Sen. Tina Smith: One for all and all for one.David Roberts:Along the lines of unity, and the question of how to legislate in today's politically dysfunctional atmosphere: What is your take on the filibuster? This is not directly related to the reconciliation bill, but in a sense, Democrats are forced now to basically run the vast majority of their agenda through the reconciliation process because of the filibuster. That shapes what policies they're capable of doing and excludes some policies that people would like to see, like voting reform, potentially immigration reform, etc. So what's your take on the filibuster personally, and the attitude of the Democratic caucus about the filibuster? Do you see that changing at all or shifting?Sen. Tina Smith:Personally, I believe that the filibuster rule ought to be thrown out, and I didn't come to that easily. I believed for a long time that it was important that hard-won rights couldn't be taken away by a simple majority in the Senate. I cared about that one, because I spent a lot of my life working on women's reproductive rights, and I imagined a world where a majority of the Senate could strip away those incredibly precious rights. But my perspective on this has really changed. I came to understand how fundamentally undemocratic it is to require a supermajority to get anything done. I also came to see that the filibuster, which is the right, basically, to debate or to talk as long as you want to — that that isn't really happening in the Senate these days. It's not as if Mr. Smith is going to Washington and making impassioned speeches on the floor of the Senate. Mr. Smith is sending his staff member down to say, “I’m putting a hold on that piece of legislation.”David Roberts:  Right. It's a memo.Sen. Tina Smith:Exactly. Truth be told, the Senate already structurally leans towards giving strong power to less than a majority of the voices, because the 50 Republicans in the United States Senate represent only about 43 percent of the American public. So what do we do because of the unwillingness of some to change these rules that also have an ignominious history? We develop workarounds like the reconciliation package, that allows us to pass significant and important legislation with a simple majority at the end of the day. It doesn't make any sense.David Roberts:It's not what you would write out if you were sitting down to write out a coherent legislative process. How common do you think that opinion is in your caucus? It’s either got to be done in the next two years or not at all. Do you think there's any chance of opinion thawing or shifting within that timeframe? Or is this just something people should write off?Sen. Tina Smith:It’s hard for me to see a world where people just change their minds on the filibuster. However, I would look for other ways that Senate rules could be reformed so that they make more sense, so that the Senate can function better, and maybe, possibly, changing the rules around ending debate for particular pieces of policy — though that's maybe more my wishful thinking than anything else. We have to seize this moment that we have to take action on climate, a moment that I don't think will be replicated for many years. We don't have time to waste. There is an urgency of seizing this moment, and that's what a lot of us are working really hard to do.David Roberts: Well, on that note, thank you for your work. Thank you for pushing so hard for this, and thank you for taking the time today. Sen. Tina Smith:It's great to talk with you. Thanks a lot. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.volts.wtf/subscribe

As we speak, Democrats in Congress are hashing out the details of the budget reconciliation bill that will contain the vast bulk of President Joe Biden’s domestic agenda. It is meant to be passed alongside the recent bipartisan infrastructure package that came out of the Senate. One of the unique features of this political moment is that virtually every individual Democrat has the power to sink the whole enterprise — there are zero Dem votes to spare in the Senate and only a handful in the House — but if any of them sink it, it all goes down. If progressive Dems kill the bipartisan infrastructure bill, conservative Dems will kill the reconciliation bill, and vice versa. (House Speaker Nancy Pelosi recently agreed to hold a vote on the bipartisan bill on Sep. 27, but progressives have pledged not to vote for it unless reconciliation also gets a vote.)They either all succeed together or all fail together. And if they fail, the party will get crushed in 2022 and 2024. None of them will escape unscathed. They’ve got to make it work.For obvious reasons, there’s an enormous amount of speculation about how various Democrats will play their hands in these negotiations. I can’t claim to understand the motivations of everyone involved. The recalcitrant House “moderates” are some mix of irrational and malicious. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema is utterly opaque.But Sen. Joe Manchin makes sense to me, for the simple reason that I believe he has West Virginia’s best interests at heart. And that’s why I’m confident he’s going to find his way to supporting an ambitious reconciliation bill. He knows West Virginia needs it.The simple fact is, West Virginia’s energy economy is not on a sustainable course. US coal is on the way out.This is true across the country and it’s true in West Virginia. One of the state’s two big utilities, American Electric Power (AEP), will shut down 5,574 megawatts of WV coal generation by 2030, and the rest of it by 2040. The other, First Energy, has pledged carbon neutrality by 2050. The number of US coal mines continues to fall.Many of the states biggest private sector employers, like Walmart, Kroger, Lowe’s, and Proctor & Gamble, have set aggressive emission-reduction goals and are looking for clean electricity (which they must currently purchase out of state). The people of West Virginia largely understand that an inexorable energy transition is underway. They are scared it will leave them and their communities behind. West Virginia needs new investment and new jobs. They need leadership. Passing some version of Joe Biden’s American Jobs Plan (AJP) would be an enormous boon to the state and a political win for Joe Manchin.The American Jobs Plan would invest in West VirginiaLast week, the Center for Energy and Sustainable Development at the WVU law school released a new analysis showing what a few key provisions of AJP would do for West Virginia’s economy. (It builds on a previous analysis demonstrating the feasibility of rapid decarbonization in the state.) Specifically, it models a “Clean Innovation Pathway” that would reduce carbon emissions from the state’s electricity system roughly 80 percent by 2030, taking into account two key policies from the AJP: extension/expansion of the clean-energy tax credits and the 48C Advanced Manufacturing Tax Credit, which invests in clean-energy manufacturing projects. Through 2040, the Clean Innovation Pathway reduces the cost of electricity by $855 million and increases employment by the equivalent of 3,500 full-time jobs, while pulling in $20.9 billion in investment in new solar, wind, energy storage, and other clean-energy projects. If Manchin’s American Jobs in Energy Manufacturing Act (which would expand 48C) were passed as part of the AJP, it would draw an additional $1.7 billion in manufacturing investments and create an additional 3,250-4,350 manufacturing jobs (plus 9,300-12,400 jobs created indirectly). Importantly, these numbers capture only a fraction of the AJP’s benefits to West Virginia. There are other investments in Biden’s plan that would land in the state.Carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS) would get money for demonstration projects; money for a series of “pioneer projects” applying CCUS to steel, cement, and other heavy industrial plants; and a tax credit for carbon capture and storage.There’s money for economic development in coal country, reclamation of mines and wells, weatherization of buildings, regional innovation hubs, and much else that would channel investment into the WV energy sector. Perhaps most importantly: the analysis, done back in April, does not take into account the effects of a Clean Energy Payment Program (CEPP), which would offer federal payments to utilities that increase their deployment of clean energy — whether it’s solar, wind, geothermal, hydrogen fuels, or natural gas with carbon capture — and levy fines on those that fell short. In effect, federal revenue would pay for West Virginia’s transition to clean energy, rather than the bill falling on state ratepayers. By doing so, it would generate vast in-state benefits — in air quality and other health improvements, in jobs, in innovation and entrepreneurship — that would dwarf those of the other policies, at little cost to the state. (Precisely quantifying the benefits will have to wait on analysis of the final proposal, which I’m told is forthcoming.) If you add it all up, the AJP offers West Virginia tens of billions of dollars in federal investment to help kickstart an energy transition in the state. It’s an opportunity that won’t come along again any time soon. Manchin knows an energy transition is necessary, and that it’s underway elsewhere. He doesn’t want his state to get left behind.That’s what his constituents fear: being left behind. If they’re going to embrace an energy transition, they need to hear from leaders they trust, like Manchin, that it’s possible.West Virginians are nervous about the energy transitionIn national political circles, West Virginia is thought of as a red fossil-fuel state, which everyone takes to mean that the WV public supports fossil fuels and will fight any policy that hurts them.Polling shows things are not that simple. Recently the Nature Conservancy and the West Virginia Chamber of Commerce sponsored some detailed polling of West Virginians’ views on their energy future. (The polling, conducted by Research America, deliberately oversampled voters in coal country.) The results are fascinating. WV voters know that the state currently depends on coal and that it is being hurt by a broader national shift to clean energy. Quoting from the local Weirton Daily Times:When asked if respondents agree with the statement that coal is the backbone of the state and that renewable energy is hurting mining jobs, 59% of statewide respondents and 59% of coal country respondents agreed. But when asked whether they agree that the economy is shifting away from coal and fossil fuels towards clean and renewable energy sources, 69% of statewide respondents and 73% of coal country respondents agreed.They know (67 percent) that coal is not clean. And they are not wedded to it: 90 percent see benefits in shifting the state’s energy system toward clean energy like renewables and carbon capture, 68 percent support federal investments in clean energy jobs, and 68 percent support federal investment in clean manufacturing. What WV voters are wedded to is jobs. The poll asked about the most important thing politicians could do to help WV communities. Only 12 percent urged support of clean energy and only 14 percent urged support of coal. The overwhelmingly favorite answer, with 70 percent, was to bring more jobs. It’s not difficult to pull a coherent narrative out of these results. The people of West Virginia know their state relies on coal, they know the nation in trending away from coal and toward clean energy, and they want to be a part of the transition, but they fear losing more jobs and economic development.They need a trusted leader — Joe Manchin, for instance — to show them that the energy transition can bring them those jobs.Data for Progress has also done polling in West Virginia which backs up these findings. While the answers reflect a predictable partisan split, clear majorities of WV voters support transitioning to a decarbonized energy grid, offering incentives for the purchase of low-pollution technologies, supporting displaced fossil fuel workers, and leading in a clean energy economy. The latter two of these even draw support from a majority of Republicans. And even where there’s more opposition from Republicans, they are fairly evenly split.The political term for this is “wedge issue” — Manchin has the support of virtually all of his party on an issue that splits the opposition party. The AJP is his chance to take advantage.Manchin’s overwhelming interest, and West Virginia’s, lies in bringing federal investment to the stateManchin has been using his position in the majority to do right by West Virginia. In the bipartisan infrastructure bill, he steered money toward big investments that will benefit his state, in clean manufacturing and industrial decarbonization, the Appalachian Regional Commission, broadband expansion, and more. He has focused federal attention on WV coal communities, drawing state visits from Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm and Labor Secretary Marty Walsh. He was instrumental in Biden creating a new White House Interagency Working Group on Coal and Power Plant Communities and Economic Revitalization and appointing West Virginia native Brian Anderson, director of the National Energy Technology Laboratory, to run it (and direct an initial $109.5 million in new investments). But now, as I have written before, the national Democrats have reached what is likely their last chance to do anything big for a decade or more, and it is far and away the biggest thing they will do. Manchin has it within his reach to sign a bill that will draw tens of billion of dollars to his state, to help it kickstart an energy transition that both he and a majority of his voters recognize is necessary. The alternative is … nothing. Republicans will never pass a bill like this. A Republican president might do more of what Trump did — rig the rules to allow fossil fuel companies to pollute a little more and draw a few more subsidies before they go under — but no Republican Congress is going to spend billions of dollars on West Virginia’s energy transition. It’s now or never.Manchin can be a hero to his state or he can allow the work of his political career to flame out in a burst of recrimination and failure. I am confident he’ll make the right decision, for himself and for West Virginia. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.volts.wtf/subscribe

A trickle of transcripts!First up, an administrative note: many, many people have requested written transcripts of the Volts podcasts. And I want to provide them. But it’s going to take a while.I could produce the transcripts in a few hours if I were willing to simply send the sound files through a robot transcriber like Otter and accept the somewhat choppy results (which are generally around 85 percent accurate).However, I’m way too anal retentive to do that. And Volts readers deserve better! I want to clean the transcripts up — remove all the “sort of’s” and “kind of’s,” delete aborted or repeated sentences, polish up the grammar — so that they are as pleasant to read as they are to hear. (I’m not that precious about preserving the exact original words; I’m more interested in clearly capturing meaning in readable form.)That means closely copyediting these files, some of which are more than 10,000 words. So far, with a little help, I’ve gotten through … one. And it took about 10 people-hours of work. Sigh.Here’s the full transcript of my podcast with Rep. Sean Casten on “Hot FERC Summer” (and here’s a PDF version). For those who’d like a more compact version, here’s a highlight reel running on Canary.Hopefully these will get somewhat faster and easier going forward. I will let you know as they come out. Now, on to the main event.Pulling tipping points into climate economicsJust about everyone familiar with climate change has heard about “tipping points.” Famed climate scientist Wallace Broecker first raised the possibility way back in 1987, and ever since then, they’ve loomed large in the climate discussion.The idea behind tipping points is fairly simple and familiar: as heat accumulates in the atmosphere, Earth’s geophysical systems may not simply adjust in linear fashion, alongside the incrementally rising temperature; in some cases, they may “tip over” some unpredictable threshold and enter a fundamentally new state, sometimes called a “phase shift.” Think of ice that has slowly cracked suddenly shattering, or “the straw that broke the camel’s back.” The commonly cited examples of potential tipping points are the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets. As warming has progressed, they have been shedding water and developing deep fissures. It is possible that at some (unpredictable) point, one or both will lose integrity and begin breaking apart altogether, irreversibly, raising global sea level dozens of feet in relatively short order.Because the consequences of some oft-discussed tipping points are rather apocalyptic, they have been used and misused for a long time in climate communications. It has somewhat annoyed climate scientists, because not only are these tipping points not a sure thing, each one is, in its own right, relatively unlikely.Civilization-ending changes are not likely, but they’re not zero probability either. Legendary Harvard economist Martin Weitzman called these low-probability, high-impact possibilities “tail risks” and was famous for warning that economists are not taking them into account — and are thus underestimating the need for rapid decarbonization. In his book Climate Shock, co-authored with his protégé, New York University’s Gernot Wagner, he argued that the right way to think about climate mitigation is not through a cost-benefit lens, as though particular levels of spending avoid specific levels of damages, but instead as a kind of insurance. We purchase insurance to cover against tail risks all the time, not because we think they’re likely to happen, but because the consequences would be so dire if they did. Weitzman has passed away, but Wagner and others have carried on this argument long enough that it has begun to break through in mainstream climate economics. However, it leaves a key question unanswered: yes, the risk of tipping points raises the value of mitigation, but how much? It has never been quantified.Into that breach comes a new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), from Wagner and a group of colleagues: Simon Dietz and Thomas Stoerk of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change, and James Rising of the University of Delaware. “Economic impacts of tipping points in the climate system” represents the first formal attempt to quantify the economic impacts of tipping point risks. The results are startling: the economic impact of carbon emissions is much higher than appreciated, as is the value of reducing emissions. Not that we needed much more evidence, but this study makes it clear that there is virtually no way we could overdo it on decarbonization. As Wagner told me when I called him to discuss the results, “I don't see a downside to doing too much too quickly.”The devilishly difficult task of quantifying risksThe PNAS authors adopt a common definition of tipping points: “subsystems of the Earth system that are at least subcontinental in scale and can be switched—under certain circumstances—into a qualitatively different state by small perturbations.” They included the eight that have been studied by the IPCC:Thawing of permafrost leading to carbon feedback resulting in additional carbon dioxide and methane emissions, which flow back into the carbon dioxide and methane cycles.Dissociation of ocean methane hydrates resulting in additional methane emissions, which flow back into the methane cycle.Arctic sea ice loss (also known as “the surface albedo feedback”) resulting in changes in radiative forcing, which directly affects warming.Dieback of the Amazon rainforest releasing carbon dioxide, which flows back into the carbon dioxide cycle.Disintegration of the Greenland Ice Sheet increasing sea-level rise.Disintegration of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet increasing sea-level rise.Slowdown of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation modulating the relationship between global mean surface temperature and national mean surface temperature.Variability of the Indian summer monsoon directly affecting GDP per capita in India.It’s important to note that these are not all possible tipping points, just the ones that have been studied, so the PNAS study’s results are, as the authors emphasize, a “probable underestimate, given the literature we synthesize has yet to cover some tipping points and misses possible impact channels and interactions even for those it does cover.”In their survey of existing literature, the authors found 52 papers that quantified the economic impacts of one or more tipping points, but over half of those were based, not on geophysical data or analysis, but on highly stylized adjustments to model parameters. The authors put those aside. In the end, they focused on 21 papers that actually linked the geophysical mechanisms of tipping points to economic damages.The whizbang procedural move of the paper is to pull these different studies — many using different models with different assumptions — into a single “meta-model,” with replicas of each studied tipping point combined in a single framework. (There is a great deal of discussion of this methodology in the paper, and more in an extended appendix, if you’re interested.)The result is an ability to directly compare, and to sum up, the possible economic damages of tipping points. From there, applying a few conventional assumptions about discount rates and risk aversion, a model can spit out a number for the present-day costs of those future risks.Obviously, any estimate like this going to be somewhat faux-precise, involving all kinds of assumptions and probability ranges piled atop one another, so it must be taken as provisional and tentative, subject to further research. But still, it’s better than having no estimate at all.We are underestimating climate risks and overestimating the costs of actionAs its principal metric, the study uses the “social cost of carbon” (SCC), meant to capture the total social and environmental damage done by the emission of a ton of carbon dioxide. For convenience, it uses the current US government SCC figure, which is about $51. There’s a history behind this: Obama originally convened the working group that put the figure at around $50 during his administration. Under Trump, it dropped to about $1. Biden has bumped it back up to $51.“They undid the Trump damage and went back to decade-old assumptions,” says Wagner. Now, there is work underway to update the US government SCC with better numbers. “If you go to the most modern estimates and turn on the stuff that we think ought to be turned on — we know that there are tipping points, we need risk aversion, we need reasonable discount rates, and so on — you don't get to $50,” he says, “you get $250.” (For the true climate modeling nerds: that’s true even in DICE, William Nordhaus’s model.) I don’t know if the new number will be $250, but I’d be shocked if it were under $150. Anyway, that’s a subject for another post, because the PNAS study quantifies the relative increase in SCC when tipping points are incorporated rather than ignored. The headline result: “When modelled separately and then summed together, the individual tipping points increase the expected SCC by 24.5%.”The details:As you can see, the most costly tipping points are the release of ocean methane hydrates and permafrost carbon. A couple, like the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, average out to reduce the SCC. (A change in the AMOC might shelter some parts of Europe from the worst effects of climate for a while — though this effect might be overwhelmed as the damages are better understood.)The main thing to note is that 25 percent is not a small number. If we’re systematically underestimating the cost of carbon emissions by a quarter, we’re probably giving bad policy advice — badly underplaying the urgency of action.But another important note is that 25 percent is the median estimate of the effect of tipping points on SCC. Just as with estimates of the physical damages of climate change, estimates of the economic costs of tipping points have a long right tail.These are the tail risks Weitzman warned about, translated into economic terms. SCC could be higher if climate sensitivity is higher than estimated, if people are more risk averse, if discount rates are lower, if tipping points arrive sooner, or any number of other variables go the wrong way. What it means is, there’s a small-but-not-negligible chance that we are currently underestimating the cost of carbon emissions by as much as 250 percent or more. (Look at that “More” blob!) If that is true, we’re really giving bad policy advice, as in, “market mechanisms” vs. “wartime footing.”The policy implications of tipping pointsLet’s take a step back and review what we can learn from this study. First, economists have more or less been ignoring tipping points, which means they have systematically been underestimating the SCC. Best estimates put the amount of that underestimation around 25 percent. But that 25 percent is almost certainly a lower bound. The authors have built a framework that can plug in new data and analysis of tipping points as it comes along. It is almost certain that as more tipping points are studied and the interactions among them are better modeled, the estimate of their potential damages will rise. And again, remember that long tail. 25 percent is the median estimate, but the average estimate is 43 percent, and there’s at least a 10 percent chance of 100 percent — in other words, “there's a one in 10 chance that doing the calculation doubles the SCC,” says Wagner. “Holy s**t, right?”“So if you start with $150,” he says, “there's a 10 percent chance you'll end up with $300, just because of tipping points.”One in ten is not that small a chance. If the chances of a plane going down were one in ten, you probably wouldn’t board it. It probably wouldn’t be allowed to fly.This is the significance of tipping points: we are playing with fire, pushing Earth systems to the point that there is a small-but-real chance that some of them will break down entirely, entering phase shifts and becoming something permanently less stable and hospitable. If that happens, we will have consigned all future generations of human beings to inexorably and irreversibly deteriorating conditions. It is a crime worse than any genocide, worse than any atrocity conceived or conceivable, and even if there is only a small chance that we might stumble into committing it, we should be hyper-cautious. We should spend a lot of money to reduce that risk, to insure against it. You might notice that we are not, as a global community or within the US, expending $50/ton worth of effort to reduce emissions, much less $300/ton. In that sense, this study is just one more voice in the chorus urging policymakers to go bigger and faster on decarbonization. But it does put a fine point on the fact that there is effectively no way for policymakers anywhere to do too much, or to go too fast, on decarbonization. The risk of overdoing it is vanishingly small, all but impossible. We are currently underdoing it. We will be underdoing it even when we’re doing five times what we’re doing now. We will almost certainly be underdoing it for the rest of the lives of everyone reading this. That’s daunting, but it’s also clarifying. There’s only one direction to push: more and faster, forever and ever, amen. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.volts.wtf/subscribe