Have we run out of big ideas to fix the grid?

From Latitude Media, this is Open Circuit. America's grid problems are framed around constraints. Equipment shortages, backlogs for connecting power plants, limited powered land, and that's all true of course, but our biggest constraint is something far bigger.

An inability to plan, coordinate, and build at scale. And right now you can see that weakness playing out in very different ways. On the left, there's a growing focus on limiting demand, data center moratoriums, concerns about affordability, a sense that the system can't absorb.

what's coming. On the right, the response looks almost inverted. A push for massive new generation, often without clear offtake, paired with policies like a ratepayer protection pledge that don't really resolve who pays or how the system holds together. Two very different Different approaches, but they're both reacting to the same underlying problem.

We don't have a system that can plan and build at the speed this moment requires. So what would real coordination look like? This week we're gonna unpack one big idea to align private capital, public planning, and long-term infrastructure needs. Can we turn this moment into a coordinated push to build the system we actually need? We'll get into it right after this.

And because FlexGen solutions integrate with a variety of hardware, teams can adapt as technology and energy strategies evolve. Discover how FlexGen is powering more strategic energy systems at Flexgen.com.

Before we get into the idea, like what did you think people were getting wrong in the current conversation about load growth in and the grid? Like what gap were you trying to fill?

Electrification was always going to require modernization and significant build out of our grid and our energy infrastructure. And I kind of feel like we have been wasting this opportunity. Um, we have a situation where every hyperscaler is like desperate for power on a timeline that the existing grid simply cannot deliver. So, in a way, that in and of itself is revealing problems with our existing approach to

the grid, um, which, you know, as much as I might find that a sexy topic is not always top of mind for governors and and advocates. Um, so that that in and of itself is is um exciting. But more importantly, their desperation for speed to power is leverage. So the question that I was trying to get at here was just like, How do you reframe the conversation about like will they or won't they data centers to how we can use this moment to extract?

real commitments from these hyperscalers on everything from cost allocation to clean firm power to grid investment that will benefit the broader public. Or whether we just let like utilities and the hyperscalers negotiate in the dark and socialize the costs onto ratepayers. And so like That's why I wrote this paper. I was just kind of searching for like what would it look like to reframe the conversation about data centers and power in a way that like reoriented the conversation to around like.

How do we get the public grid we need, not just for climate, but for economic and national security? And what can we do today to take advantage of the hyperscalers' willingness to pay for speed to power to make that happen?

uh team of people like Avi Zevin and, you know, others who were just like had read every single white paper known to man before he came into office. And I think he tried to fix things. Like through the front door with FERC and trying to figure out how to get, you know, the RTOs and the ISOs to do better planning.

And in the end, I think what they decided was that you needed a strong federal government that actually sort of forced people to do things. And I think what the paper hints at but doesn't really address. accurately, in my opinion, is that ultimately the reason why this option is not available to us in this moment is that the federal government, this federal government, doesn't want to push it. Right? Like that like advocates can't like step in for the federal government.

This is not like the notion of a fund is a little bit of a misnomer because this is not a capital problem, right? Like I'm trying to use the idea of a fund to address coordination and incentive problems. And I think like What is really needed candidly is like some mechanism for much better organizing um the capital interests of the hyperscalers and also other sort of folks in the policy ecosystem.

to focus on the policy reforms at the federal level that are most needed to address these structural issues. And so like there's kind of a political economy argument here, which is like,

I even put in the paper, I think, could you make participation in the fund contingent on advocacy obligations on everything from permitting and planning to to um And and I'll just say, like when I worked at Frontier, which was the world's first advanced market commitment for permanent carbon removal, I was responsible for market development and policy. And

You know, I think going into launching Frontier, the idea was like, okay, we'll actually make the early market for carbon removal. But one of the things that I found most catalytic about that was We got the we got the tech companies together and they started to quickly understand that the primary barriers to scaling carbon removal are policy barriers. And so like they launched the carbon removal alliance and started to focus more on like, Can we fix forty five Q, et cetera, et cetera. So like

That's kind of one idea that's happening in the background here. And then I guess on your point, Jigger, which I totally take as like, would this government ever do the right thing here? I don't actually know the answer to that. And I guess there's two pieces. One is like, What would they just what would they do administratively? And I think like

You know, for a long time we've tried, as you've noted, to like fix these transmission planning and permitting problems. And like utilities in states have really been a problem. Like repeatedly, repeatedly, repeatedly killed this. And so like Now, what's different is we have a counterweight in the form of the hyperscalers and related interests. And so, like that does, I think, change the political calculus a little bit. And then on the legislative side.

Part of what I want to do here is t get people to really pay attention to the conversation about a permitting bill, which is not just about, you know, NEPA and the Clean Water Act, although that stuff is also important, but about can you get reforms to the Federal Power Act? in a way that help address some of these challenges. And I will continue to be delusionally optimistic about getting a federal bill passed, in part again, because of this political economy analysis.

framework and coordinate for coordination. And so I just want to talk about what that coordination is. Like just give us the idea. How would you how would you describe what the fund does?

What's happening now is these like bilateral negotiations that take forever and often happen in the dark between an individual load and a utility or a commission and like It's just we're seeing all this creative stuff happening bottom up on tariff design and whatever, but like

It's not transparent, it's too slow. It's like every every um company has an incentive to to pursue whatever is best for their personal private interests. And so like The idea here was just like take a step back and can we kind of standardize at some level the terms that we would like to see on

cost causation requirements, which I think FERC is actually intervening much more aggressively on some of that basic architecture. But like can we just get really clear about what we expect in terms of large loads paying for costs?

I think there is one of the ideas in the fund is um And I don't, you know, this is like I kind of threw this out here just to start a conversation, but kind of um uh payment into an insurance pool by the hyperscalers because one of the issues that we're continuing to address is this anxiety about

overbuilding for data centers that don't materialize. Um, so like if you could kind of use the fund to help take that risk off the table, it might make it easier for us to build the um the grid that we need. Um I think, you know, I also at the end of the day, we're retiring a lot of firm capacity and not building a pace to keep up with that. So I think

If you could use some amount of resources from the fund to aggregate clean firm power commitments, I think that could be really interesting. Again, like lots of these individual companies are doing cool stuff. Like Google is doing off takes with fervo and like really interesting demand flexibility things. But

I feel like the companies that are doing the good things are not getting the credit they deserve publicly because it's all these like ad hoc in the weeds negotiations. So if you could find some way to coordinate across the hyperscalers and elevate what we actually think it means to be like a good gridus grid citizen right now. That's sort of the the primary thing. Um and again like the financing piece of it.

is like an interesting carrot potentially. And I do think if you could get LPO financing, which I'm sure Jigger has thoughts on, or some other federal financing to help. To help lower the cost of capital associated with building some of this stuff, that might be an an interesting carrot, but it's really not about the capital. It's much more about the coordination and like regulatory design questions.

There's a couple of big things here. One is I think the avenue by which it gets approved is completely divorced from the big game groups, right? So like they're not involved at all. Right. So so when you think about like When we were serving the Biden administration, I remember talking to SPP and they had, I think it was like thirty billion dollars worth of

transmission grid upgrades that we were super excited about. And all of them were in the money and Rob Gramlik was involved and this guy was involved and that guy's involved. And then magically in the end, the announcement was like$11.6 million for their projects, right? And you're like, what happened? Right?

And basically like there's this whole like architecture of how these projects get approved. And part of it is science, right? Like the projects should pay for themselves and should unlock value, right? Which we thought all 30 billion did. And then part of it is actually this like secret cabal of like consumer advocates and others who are saying.

Once this gets approved, right, then it goes to the states to rate base those particular costs. And everyone was like, That number is too big. We'd like that number to be smaller, right? And so So part of my challenge, I think, in this moment when everyone is talking about affordability, right? And everybody wants lower numbers, right? Affordability is by definition

Numerator gets smaller, denominator gets bigger, right? And so this transmission thing that everyone's trying to rate base is in the numerator. So part of I think Where the conversation has gone on Twitter and other places is not just around LPO, which you know can provide this sort of 80% financing and a lot lower interest rates, et cetera.

But also, it has gone the way of the highway trust fund, where the federal government just pays 90% of the costs of all these highways. Right. And as a result, like there's just a lot less burden on states. But in exchange, They're able to do this mega planning that you're talking about, right? Because I totally agree with you, right? I mean, left to its own devices.

People do what's in their private best interest. So you can imagine if highways were done in the private best interest and Amazon was negotiating on a highway and Walmart was negotiating a highway, right? Well then you would have these like minor Connections, right? You wouldn't have something that went from New York City all the way to San Francisco. And so the question becomes like,

Like what's really wrong with the process? And I think what's wrong with the process is we've given it to the ISOs and RTOs, and that's just not gonna work. So then I think it needs to have this huge federal government in some ways like overreach. It needs to be like the federal highway system where you're just like telling them what to do. And in the last year of the Biden administration, we finally unlocked some of those rights in the 2005, 2007

Energy Policy Act around national interest corridors and this ability for DOE to tell everybody what to do, but we were just too chicken to do that, I think, in the Obama administration. And so now we have these tools, but I don't think this administration wants to use eminent domain powers and all these other things to actually unlock all of this opportunity.

I'm not a hyperscaler. I wish them all of the success in the world. And I think we should make it easier to build them here. I am have devoted my career to climate change. And I think there's a way in which like we didn't totally take our own load forecast projections seriously for electrification and like the scale of infrastructure.

Planning and financing that it was gonna require to elect fully electrify the economy. So there's kind of like a rude awakening happening now, I think, where everyone's like. We're we're sort sort of like, what was our plan actually to build to do the kind of like mega project scale planning and building that we are gonna have to do to electrify the economy anyway? So I do think like

Like it is a good thing. It's good ultimately for electrification. It's also good for the economy. Like leaving aside, you know, people who want to have debates about the social value of AI, like we never want to be in a situation again where we cannot quickly meet. Economic growth that depends on our electricity system because we're so bogged down in these like arcane processes and like.

Underbuilding and underinvesting in our grid. So, like, we really do need to address this, is the issue. And like, if we can't do it this year, I think like What I would like to see, Jigger, is like a federal conversation that has much greater ambition on the federal transmission stuff. So that post 2028 potentially there's like real frameworks that have been socialized a bit about like what what the most ambitious version of this could look like.

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Um, I absolutely see that. And that's one of the reasons why I really liked this paper. You know, someone from the climate world coming in and establishing a real clear set of ideas to um to to make use of the moment. It has landed i in tw in Twitter and on the internet in uh ways that like r reflect our tribalism. Um what is the debate that you have seen emerge around this idea?

ill-founded because what we should actually be asking for as climate and environmental champions who acknowledge that data centers use a lot of energy is to like not use that energy, right? Like, um, and so The a the actual answer to this is like oppose the build out of data centers. Um I think that's

A bad idea. But I also do think it's worth noting that like the fact that There's a real threat around whether these companies are going to get state tax abatements, what the federal government might do, social pushback to build out.

Is part of what creates the leverage. So like I don't want to be totally dismissive of like some of that pressure. I still think it's the wrong policy answer, but like there may be some constructive implications of of having that posture out there. The second one I think is like You know, whatever. The within the Democratic Party, we love to yell at each other right now about like abundance versus like anti-monopoly or, you know, and I just feel like that is like.

I get frustrated because I feel like the conversation about grid build out for data centers is in some ways just evolving into a version of that, which is like, um, and it's related to Jigger's point about the affordability stuff, which I take really seriously. Like, It is true, and it would always be true for climate, by the way. And you're kind of seeing this in New York state right now with Hokal stuff that like.

You can't, you are not going to get voters to sacrifice near-term affordability for climate goals. Like that is just like not gonna happen. So it is imperative upon all of us to like constrain costs. As we electrify. And but my concern, I guess, and this is where some of the fights have been happening, Stephen, is like. the a a narrow focus on near term affordability alone is gonna bias us toward demand side interventions, which is in a way

Fine, like demand side interventions in theory are cheaper and faster to deploy. Although I will continue to say that like as a social scientist, the so the non-technology barriers, as Digger knows well, Are really hard and sticky. And so, like, it is, it does require fixing a bunch of stuff to have some of these demand-side interventions. Um

produced at scale, which is a worthy cause and something we should continue to pursue. But it we are as I have said before, like, and I think everyone agrees with this, like it's a both and, right? Like my concern is that if we're overly focused on just that piece of it. We will miss the opportunity to do what we will have to do, even if you maximized demand side interventions, which is like we're still gonna have to build out a lot of infrastructure to electrify the economy.

the innovative grid piece of it, like m you know, advanced conductors and grid enhancing technologies and all that stuff. So like so I don't think that like I'm on any opposite sides of anything. My bigger problem is is that I'm not in that job anymore. Right. And so the notion that I can fix Westinghouse and figure out how to build AP one thousands right now, I can't, right? Not from this role. Right. Like I don't have the power to do that. I can't even fix Fervo.

When you think about just like how many of the most important locations they've secured in Utah and they're building one, right? They should be building.

I need the private sector companies to do 90% of the work and then I can do 10% of the work. And like these people don't want to do 90% of the work. So whether it's like TS Conductor or CTC Global or you know, like all the folks who are building large transmission lines. They want me to carry them on my back. And my back is super strong, but it's not that strong.

To make sure that the attorney general and the governor of Missouri never get elected to office again? No. So then what consequences did the people of Missouri actually get? for holding up the Green Belt Express line. None. And so like do you you think they're gonna do it again in Wyoming when, you know, Trans West now wants to get built? Do you think they're gonna do it in Montana when that line wants to get built? Of course. So like

I just think that there are rules of the game, right? Which is if you want to build these lines. And like some random landowner calls up Josh Hawley, who doesn't even live in the state of Missouri, and like actually like calls up the president to kill a line, that person should never get elected to office again. But there are no consequences. And so, like, am I supposed to exact those consequences on Josh Holly? No.

They built a bipartisan pack and like had a lot of influence and very quickly. And we have been, I think, overly reliant on like environmental NGO. and their political infrastructure to do our the advocacy work for the industry, which is just insane. Like no no one would do that. That's an insane thing to do. And so like we we need a lot more innovation, I think, to

to address the political constraints that Jigger's pointing at. I still don't really understand why that means investing in clean firm is somehow less worthy than doing the VPP stuff. Like today, whether you're like a nuclear obsessive or like a VPP enthusiast, like

Neither one of us have totally demonstrated that this stuff can like, you know, solve problems at the scale that we claim that they can. So like I'm sort of a risk management suggests we should like try to do it all to for sure. But uh Jigger, don't you think that like Isn't one of the arguments about the utility business model and like intransigence here that it's actually really harmful for the demand side stuff?

Right. But I'm just saying, like, they got to rate base it. And so they were like, okay, that sounds great to me. And so, you know, like done. Right. So like, I mean, you know, like I think that there are ways in which you get utilities to do things, right? We passed a law in Virginia around grid utilization, right?

And then there are ways um to pressure utilities to do things. So like I've talked to a lot of utility stock analysts, but like utility stock analysts do not like nuclear power, right? They do not want utilities to rate base nuclear power. So like

You know, so then I have to figure that out from the federal government side. And we were doing it. We were trying to figure out insurance and all the other pieces, right? But like that's now passed on to another administration who I think wants the press release more than I think they want to do the actual work.

So now, you know, we can turn our attention to, you know, advanced conductors. Like when you think about how much transmission uh capacity gets replaced just'cause a lot of the wire is fifty years old. Right. And only about 20% of those miles are using advanced conductors. Right. And then Google just announced that they wanted to subsidize those advanced conductors, and the utilities are like,

over my dead body, are you gonna provide me any cash because I wanna like rape base it? But then they didn't use advanced conductors. And so like, I mean, like, but my problem is is that At least the VPP industry is willing to stand up for itself and put cash to work and actually hire lobbyists and do stuff. The advanced conductors people are not doing that work.

Right. And so, and you know, certainly the NEI and the nuclear industry is not doing anything to the point where all the senators on the Hill are so pissed off with the nuclear industry that they're like, We're not giving you anything more because we've done everything you've asked us to do for last five years and you haven't announced a new nuclear plant.

They want speed to power. It's just really hard to do that. It's just really hard to do that. Like if you want them to stay on the grid. It's just really hard. And so I understand why they're looking to build behind the meter. I understand why everyone's frustrated. Um, but I think and and you know, to Jigger's point, you can have like you have like the vague, you know, rate payer protection pledge, but it's all voluntary and there's no teeth and it's just like

Kind of ridiculous, candidly. So the question for me is like, how do you create some incentive structure that has both like carrots and teeth? um to try to get folks to do the right thing. I think you could imagine a world where a state like Virginia, which is offering some of these individual facilities hundreds of millions of dollars in tax breaks, essentially, to build there. Um

could say, we are going to make this tax abatement conditional on you being a good grid grid citizen. And you could do that legislatively, like upstream of in any individual rate case. Um, and I haven't seen a lot of that conversation. You see like

you know, don't do the tax abatements or whatever. But like I I don't know. So I kind of think that's one place where there could be a lot more conversation about um about leverage specifically. And then again, like I Share Jigger's frustration about the insufficient political giving and advocacy on the things that matter most for.

decarbonization today, including a federal permitting bill, which like absolutely needs to get done. Like it must get done. And I do not believe that we can just continue to kick the can and wait until we have like some imagined perfect Um democratic trifect.

And lobby for passage of this bill. Like that is, that would that would unstick a lot of the anxiety and a lot of the issues around. transmission planning and permitting, among other things. Um, and you know, I think there's this view on the democratic side that like we can't negotiate with terrorists basically, and that like as long as the Trump administration is continuing to like weaponize the permitting system around solar and wind, we like

can't come to the table. I don't really understand the logic of that candidly. Like the only way to actually constrain them is to do permitting reform. So like So I think um I I actually think it makes the case for coming to the table and doing a a serious deal um more important. So anyway, I think like federal permitting reform and state tax abatement stuff are two very near term opportunities for for leverage.

A magic fund, right? Which is what Chamath has suggested on Twitter, which is like, hey, how how about all the hyperskillers put money into a magic fund? Which then does solar and battery storage. A la the Rewiring America report. Right. And then he talked about it on the all in podcast. Right. So like you could imagine all sorts of things happening and speed to power, I think.

Like think people think it means electricity. No, it means speed to Mar a Lago to like pay two hundred fifty thousand dollars to like actually get something done. And so like so like part of my challenge here is like I think you're just being entirely too logical and like your ideas just make so much sense. And the people who are reading it on the other side

are just not wanting to do it. Right. And I just think that in general, like I don't think the state of Virginia can solve it on their own. There may be at the corners. Like it could be that they could go into PJM in the process and say, this upgrade of this transmission line that didn't make the last basket of transmission projects. We think that we could submit some money from Virginia to make that clear. Like you could imagine something like that from your say tax.

Idea, but there's not a lot of precedent to doing that. Like what people generally do is they say, this is the basket of transmission projects, and everyone's going to rape base it. via the formula, right? It's not like one state says, here's my con extra contribution and I want these projects done. Yeah.

Yeah, I think there's a question of who's the audience for this paper that I wrote and like There are a couple of different audiences. I I would say like the Trump administration is one, but maybe not even the primary one. I think like part of my frustration as someone who's been a climate um uh a climate donor advisor for uh many for many years is like

These are, you know, we need new big ideas on this kind of stuff. And like we cannot simply continue to just have a defensive posture of like bring back the IRA tax credits for solar and wind. Like we need new big ideas. on like the kinds of policy interventions that are gonna be most catalytic and have some plausible path to enactment in a world of fiscal constraints. And I'm just not seeing enough of that. So I'm basically just trying

big ideas on how to shape the moment. So maybe we can step back for a second and just talk about where things stand right now. You know, you've spent your career inside climate philanthropy and policy. How are a lot of these groups And I'm sure it's, you know, not the same within each group, uh, but how are they generally reacting to this moment of pressure?

We should just not work in the US, basically. Like like that we should just not even focus here. We should be focusing um internationally. We should do do we be doing more work in China and India and in non-OECD economies. So that's one dimension, is I do think like

the a lot of the existing climate infrastructure in the US is taking a hit on funding because donors are just like, this is not, this is a mess. Um, I think that's ill advised for reasons we can talk about, but that's that's kind of one thing. The other is just like I think you can argue about whether it was the right analogy, but for a long time climate groups were climate advocacy came out of environmental groups whose focus was on

conventional pollution control. And climate is just not a conventional pollution problem. It's like an invisible gas with bad impacts, generally like in the future. Greenhouse gas emissions are like a side effect of basically all of our economic activity. It's not like HFCs, you know? And for a long time we haven't had. cheap substitutes for the use of of fossil fuels. That is now changing. And I think the question is like, how does the strategy and how does the infrastructure we have in place

to advance decarbonization and climate action need to change. And that's a hard, that's a really hard conversation for lots of reasons, like culturally and in terms of relationship dynamics and whatever. Like Um, we now have an industry that to Jigger's point needs to like step up to the plate in a much more serious way. You cannot rely on

conventional environmental nonprofits to do your policy development and advocacy. That just like is not which is not to say those groups don't have a role. They do. They have a different perspective than industry groups. Like There's a lot that they can and should be doing, but we're just in a totally different moment. I'm curious, Jigger, what you think about this though.

Six maybe to like 2010, 2011. And um, I mean, my critique has largely been the same since then, right? Which is that My problem with the environment goes broadly, and they're all good friends of mine, and so they've all heard me say this at dinner parties, which is that like Um, is that when we passed the nine the Clean Air Act amendments in the nineteen nineties, there was an explicit desire by the environmental groups to be lazy.

And they all basically said, We are gonna hire a hundred percent of all of our incremental employees in Washington DC and no longer do the work in the field. Like so like'cause you can kill any one of these projects in district, right, by denying them a water permit or denying them an air permit. But it was always easier just to get Carol Browner to kill it out of EPS.

Right. And I think that entire theory of change has now come crashing down to zero. Right. Like that, like, like we're never gonna have an activist EPA ever again. Like that, that is gone, right? So they might be activists on pollution, right? Like which they should be, right? But not on CO two, right? Not on coal plants, not on that kind of stuff, right? And so so I think that, you know, part of

the way that I'm colored by all of this is that like even on the permitting reform piece, right? Like I would like to get the federal government out of the business of any of this value stuff. Like whether it's the XL pipeline or whether it's like offshore wind, I think the federal government should just do their job in eight months, do a proper NEPA. and just like publish stuff, right? If you want to kill something, you kill it in Nebraska or South Dakota or in these pla places, right? You

You go to local communities and say, you don't want this in your community. And and you do it that way. And that's how environmentalism has worked for years and years and years. Right. And so I'd like for them to go back to that. way of doing things. And I think that that would connect environmental groups to voters in ways that are just more tangible than where we are now, where I think there's a lot of backroom deals happening in DC, which I don't love.

Um, and some of that I think has been really effective. I think the other thing about the federal piece though is that to your point, Jigger, so much of the um so much of the movement has been focused on EPA as the primary place where climate action happens and not the Department of Energy or even the Department of Interior, right? And so like

I think that or FERC and like that, that I think is one of the things that also is changing and needs to change. I think the other thing that I would say, which I have found frustrating, is like a version of the really stupid innovation versus deployment debates where it's like

Where it's like people have, you know, everyone went to like the McKinsey abatement curve and they were like, oh, all this low-hanging fruit, like cheap tons. That's what we should focus on. And so it is just like very hard to get. climate donors and groups to care about innovation, which I think is like particularly if you're thinking about, okay, we now have solar, wind and batteries at

um, you know, at commercial scale and at cost competitive uh situation with fossils, how do we replicate that for industry and agriculture and transportation? Like We um, who's gonna do that work? You know, like we do need, we do need to focus there. Um, and so much of our frameworks for understanding what we should do on climate and policy is focused on like,

quantifying near term tons. And the stuff that doesn't easily fit in that frame is just often much harder to make a case for. But I think especially if your view is that our global frameworks for climate action have been overly focused on

understanding it as like a collective action problem where we need to like depend on the altruism of every country to like constrain its own blah, blah, blah. And instead see it as like most of the emissions growth, and Jigger, you have said this many times, is gonna come from non-OECD economies. So the question I think is like, what is the role of the US in that context? Like how what can we do here to make these to make it economically and geopolitically rational?

for those countries to like use cleaner fuels because the notion that we're gonna ask them to sacrifice is like totally crazy and unethical in my view. And so like And in the and in that version of the world, like you want all the deployment stuff, you want international financing to deploy commercial technologies, like all of the stuff that you know very well, Jigger. And you also want to think about like

um security realm and then the national and then the economic security realm, right? So clearly in focus right now because of the Straits of Hormuz, right, you've got all of these countries around the world who are going to be rationed, right? And denied access to fuels.

And people can't get LPG, people can't get all these things. And we have solutions for all that stuff on, you know, like solar and battery storage, like Pakistan has done stuff. And so then the question becomes like, how do you provide technical assistance to all of these countries?

around doing this because in Pakistan it was done in some people's minds badly, right? Because the electric utilities really got socked financially while they did it. Right. So like if you're gonna have Indonesia do it, where six percent of their federal budget is electricity subsidies. Is there a way to do it where the the utility doesn't go bankrupt?

And so there are like things that could do that, but it's not clear to me that you would put that money through the big five green groups to do that. You might put that money through CSIS or you might put that money through the console and foreign relations.

Hillary Clinton was the like, you know, forcing function, right? Remember Hillary Clinton was like Council on Foreign Relations will talk about this, like Atlantic Council will talk about this, CF like CSIS will talk about this, right? All I heard about was fracking all day, every day for like three years, right? Every single person understood it, right? And then we were like training people and we were like, and then all USAID and

Um OPIC was doing at the time, if you remember, was trying to figure out how to help LNG import terminals get built around the world, right? We were like an entire government helping LNG import terminals, right? I have never felt that for clean energy. Like, like I have never had like a State Department person go, you know what would be great is if our embassy would actually like help.

like Nigeria or Mozambique or whatever else, like actually do this thing, right? Even though they have critical minerals and they have all these things. Like this whole friend shoring thing that we talked about never happened that I could tell, right? And so So part of like my concern in this moment is

I do think philanthropy has a role in thinking through these things like industrial strategy. Should we be doing it? Should we not be doing it? Like all of these things are things that philanthropy will fund. And I I I feel like like we're not actually there on the climate side.

Like now your staff is gonna come to you and say we should fund like CFR on like XM reauthorization or whatever. You're kind of like, What is this? This is this is a climate grant. What is this? Um, so I do think like That is part of the we sort of need everyone, including in the environmental movement, to be acknowledging like where we need new idea generation and who the most credible spokespeople are gonna be and just be honest about

where that is and isn't some of the existing like climate infrastructure that we that we have today.

And I think if you're from a part of the movement that is really uncomfortable with private capital as an actor, a big actor in the ecosystem, you're not gonna like this theory of change. But like

You need a really serious political theory for rolling them. And like that can't just be like, you know, a coalition of the marginalized, even if you uh you want it to be that way. That's just like not how political change happens. And so Um, so for me, durability is in part about um, you know. growing the concentrated economics economic interests of people who stand to benefit from more ambitious climate action over time. And

What it doesn't mean, again, like this focus on near term counting of tons is kind of a problem because you know what looks really great on paper? California banning ice vehicles and the EPA like dropping the hammer on all CO two emissions overnight. But like if the next election happens and everything gets undone, climate is a you know

very long term problem. So you've basically done nothing. And in fact you have in some cases poisoned the politics such that you've slowed things down. So like that I think is the big is actually the big issue for me about like the right way to think about durability.

that clean firm power generation is necessary to decarbonize the grid. Otherwise you'd have to build three times more transmission than you otherwise would need to, which we just talked earlier about how hard it is to even just build the stuff that we need to build, right? So like

So I I don't know. And so then I championed that when I was in the Biden administration and people looked at me squarely, go like trigger, why you keep pushing nuclear? Like, why you keep pushing nuclear? And like, you know, it's it's

It's it's one of those weird things where, like, you know, I think there's a lot of states that would love to build nuclear, right? And I think but the same thing's true on chemicals, right? I mean, look for better or for worse, right? A lot of people buy stuff on Amazon and a lot of that stuff comes from

plastics and it comes from petrochemicals, it comes from like disposable stuff. Like there's not a lot of people using rags to clean their kitchen. A lot of them are using Swiffer and like they're throwing stuff away. And so then the question becomes like who

So now it's like four or five percent of everything that's going in the landfill and I can't recycle it because like you've somehow like canceled me for like wanting to recycle plastic. And I, you know, and so part of the conversation needs to be more inclusive, right? And it needs to be saying

and a more durable political coalition by bringing them in. And yes, we will disagree with them on these other topics, but let us recognize that they're friends on this topic.

Like it this is not again, it's lit really is not rocket science. And the fact that we haven't done it, I think is like We've been so focused on pushing Democrats for greater and greater ambition and just like not engaging at all with Republicans. And I just think that we cannot continue to do that because it's pretty clear at this point that the theory of change on climate action that goes something like, democratic governance into perpetuity is like not a robust strategy.

the five big groups to change. It's about building other groups, like building other tools, building new political infrastructure for the industry. Like, you know what I mean? It's just not, it can't just be trying to get these groups to change. Maybe they shouldn't change. Like it's good to have environmental groups who care a lot about pollution. Like I wish that we had a more aggressive agenda on toxic.

And like it would be great if if we had, you know, we should have organizations working on that. It's just a necessary but insufficient part of the of the um infrastructure that we need to meet the moment on climate. Um but I think like they are, you know.

The er everyone is grappling with some really tough realities right now. And I think they're trying to do it in the best way they can. But these are big organizations with long legacies and lots of stakeholders. And it's just really, really hard.

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