Will the US finally become a climate leader? with Leah Stokes

twenty seventeen, Trump withdrew. Then in twenty twenty one, Biden brought the US back, and it seemed for a while that was as far as the US would go in meeting science based climate targets. But then the Inflation Reduction Act past in August, and it has the potential to bring the US closer to meeting its climate targets than any other policy has done so far. There's also a chance that the domestic policies under the IRA may even cut emissions around the world by lowering the cost of

green technologies. It's significant to note that the Act was not supported in any shape or formed by Biden's opposition. The Republican Party. I remember every single Republican and Congress voted against this bill, every single one voting against tackling the climate crisis, against lowering our energy cast, against creating good paying jobs. On past episodes, I've spoken with Bill Gates and investor Gabriel kra about the IRA's effect on

business and technology. For this episode, I wanted to talk to someone with a hand in shaping the act, the politics behind it, and why it might survive whatever comes in the United States. What political research shows is that when you pass a law, it becomes pretty sticky. So once we have companies building heat pumps in the United States and solar panels and electric vehicles, including in Republican districts, they're going to say, what do you mean you're going

to get rid of this policy. We need this policy. We're making a lot of money and employing people. My guest today is doctor Leah Stokes, Professor of politics and political science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She also hosts a climate podcast called A Matter of Degrees with doctor Catherine Wilkinson. I talked to Leah about her

contributions to drafting the IRA. How next week's midterm elections could affect its success and if it will help the United States return or maybe arrive at a place of prominence in climate diplomacy. Leah, welcome to the show. Oh, thank you so much for having me on. Now I'm going to ask you like a really big, broad scene

setting question. Joe Biden and the Democrats were elected two years ago partly because Americans did not want a Trump presidency again, but also partly because many progressives wanted to see climate legislation, and in Joe Biden they saw somebody who could push for it. Two years on, there's a mitem election coming. How would you rate the Biden administration's work on climate from zero to ten? I think I

give them a nine. I think that we've seen more progress under the Biden administration than any other presidency in American history. So, you know, it's absolutely been transformative. But of course we're also comparing it to a lot of failure overall. Right, the Obama administration made great efforts. They passed the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act, which was basically the stimulus Bill during the financial crisis way back in two thousand and nine. That law had about ninety billion

dollars for climate. Fast forward to this year, twenty twenty two, and the Biden administration managed to pass the Inflation Reduction Act, which has something like three hundred and seventy billion dollars for climate, so a lot more money, you know, four times more, But that's actually an underestimation of how much money will be spent because a lot of it is in tax credits, and those tax credits can be spent

in unlimited amounts. So basically, when we say it's three hundred and seventy billion, that comes from an estimate from these bodies called the Congressional Budget Office and the Joint Committee on Taxation. Basically, they're these bodies that make a guess for how much money can be spent, but they're not going to guess right. We're going to spend way more money in these long term tax credits. So we could be seeing you know, five one hundred billion dollars.

Maybe if we're lucky, we could get close to a trillion dollars on climate spending. Nine out of ten. Now that's a high ranking, you think, So very few politicians get to be able to pull that off where they promised something and then an analytical take on their work gives them a nine. Well, you know, I think the Biden administration made a couple of really good decisions. They created a Climate Office in the White House for the

first time. There are a lot of executive orders that maybe have flown under the radar with folks, but that are really mainstreaming climate action throughout the government. You know, maybe I should take it down to an eight or something like that, because one area where the Biden administration has been slower than we would have hoped is implementing regulations.

The reason why I am sympathetic to that delay is because I think strategically they were waiting for the big climate legislation to make its way through Congress to get senators vote. This is a senator from a coal state who did not really want to act on climate, and when they got his vote, I think that will allow them to really push much farther and faster on getting those regulations going. If you could sum up the IRA almost like a movie pitch, how would you do it?

A trailer? I actually, rather than watch whole movies. This is maybe why I'm so productive. I watched movie trailers. I watch a lot of movie trailers because you can basically get the whole movie in like two and a half minutes, right, I mean, that's most movie trailers. So that's my secret to productivity. So you should you should be able to come with the perfect trailer for the IRA. Yes, hopefully. If I fail, if people will be like terrible, don't

give this woman a job writing movie trailers. The Inflation Reduction Act is about three hundred and seventy billion dollars in transformative investments to build the twenty first century clean energy industries here in the United States, to help people manufacture and get good paying jobs and the manufacturing of everything from electric vehicles to heat pumps to solar panels. The list goes on. It's really a lot of industrial

policy all throughout the bill. There are incentives that if you build it here, you build it with good paying jobs, you get extra incentive to do that. There's also enormous amounts of money to deploy clean energy technologies, whether at the household level through incentives for electric vehicles, heat pumps, even induction stoves to make it cheaper for everyday Americans to get clean energy technologies and reduce their energy bills.

And also for companies to deploy these technologies through these long term tax credits to build wind and solar and batteries, no lightsabers that would destroy fossil fuel burning equipment. Well, there's also money to help retire dirty coal plants. There's probably about fifteen billion dollars in this bill to transition from dirty power plants to clean Energy's something that's kind of been under the radar, but money for rural coops to get off of coal, to retire their debt, and

to move to clean energy. And I would be remissed if I didn't talk about that this policy is more equitable than climate policy has really ever been, maybe even across other countries. That there is an enormous amount of money not just through tax credits to help rich people get these technologies, but through programs and grants to help

low moderate income folks get these technologies. And you know, the Biden administration has made a commitment to Justice forty, which is that forty percent of the benefits of this program need to go to disadvantaged communities, including low income communities and communities of color. So there's for example, three billion dollars for environmental justice grants to help communities engage in the process and invest in decarbonization projects that they

want to do. There's another three billion dollars to clean up ports. If the IRA was a movie, it'd be hard to do a movie trailer because there's so many moving parts. We have even talked about agriculture. There's also like twenty billion dollars for agriculture, climate spar agriculture, so big bill. It's very complicated. There's probably like I don't know, fifty plus programs, but I also still want to take one step back on a philosophical level and discuss climate

policy writ large. There are many ways to do it. There are many pieces that need to go in the right place for it to work. But if we look at climate policy outside of the United States, there is typically a stick involved, which is there's a carbon price. Canada has one, there's cabin trade emissions Europe and the UK has one. Alongside all these incentives given to people

to build clean technologies. There may be tax credits, there may be actual direct money given in the form of subsidy to be able to build an offshore wind power plant, But it's the kerat and stick play that really makes it work. You know, most people think of stick in regulation, bomb, here's a mandate you have to build this much. There's some of that in the US, But when it comes to this new climate bill, it's all carrots. How do you feel about that as a route to doing climate policy?

Will it work in the long term? Well, a few things. There are sticks in the bill. There's a methane fee, for example, which you can think of as a carbon price specifically on methane. Some folks wanted to put a carbon price in it as well. I think if we look at American politics, the price of oil, the price of gasoline at the pump is very important to how the Democrats do, and just raising the price of energy is not really a very politically smart thing to do.

So personally, I don't think that a stick forward approach is actually the smartest thing to do, particularly in the United States, but really in most countries. There's something like twenty to twenty five percent, if I'm correct, of global carbon pollution that's priced right now, And yet are we dramatically reducing our carbon pollution globally? No, we are not. The thing is that the carbon price that you can pass politically is usually very low. It does not change behavior.

People's choice to fill up their car or not is not going to be changed really by increasing the price of oil slightly. Instead, what's going to change is that they're going to get mad at you because now it's slightly more expensive to fill up their car. And opponents to carbon pricing, right wing parties generally globally, will weaponize it. They'll say, oh, my gosh, all the increase in the price of oil was because of the carbon price, whether

or not that's true. So I don't think that it's a very effective policy at actually changing people's behaviors because basically, using fossil fuels is what we would call inelastic, meaning very hard to change. I think that if we want to break our dependence on fossil fuels, what we have

to do is get people clean electric machines. This is the theory of change of Rewiring America, an organization I work with, and basically they've shown that a billion machines in the United States run and fossil fuels, everything from a furnace to a car, to a leaf blower, you name it, and we need to swap out those machines for electric machines, and then a household will not care

if the price of oil goes up. When you break the political relationship between getting to work and heating your home and the costs of fossil fuels, that really helps not only with your democracy, quite frankly, but also with decarbonization. Now, you said one way to do it would be to give Americans clean electricity powered appliances. Now, let's take an example. Your favorite example, heat pumps. Yes, there's a heat pump tax credit that is about two thousand dollars for a

product that can cost ten thousand dollars. Now, for a median income of an American of about sixty thousand dollars, that's still a steep upfront price even after getting a two thousand dollars tax credit. Is that the way you think more homeowners will be able to get heat pumps? Well, a couple things. So tax credits are usually used by wealthier Americans. So we shouldn't assume that somebody who's going to use that tax credit is only going to make

sixty thousand dollars a year. They're probably going to make more. That has led to, for example, wealthier people having more solar panels on their roof, more evs in their driveway. It's not the best way to go about it. But keep in mind that when a wealthy person adopts a new technology, they actually bring down the cost for everybody else.

This is called learning by doing its innovation. Why do solar panels cost less today because a lot of people install them in Germany and the United States and China. And China also got better at manufacturing them. So that's what we have to do with heat pumps. And when a wealthy person decide to do it, that will bring down the cost for other people too. So that's an important thing to note. Keep in mind that we did not just work very hard to get that two thousand

dollars tax credit. We also got four and a half billion dollars for a program that Senator Heinrich led on with Rewiring America that will help low and moderate income folks get electric appliances. If you're a low income person, you can get up to fourteen thousand dollars to electrify your house. And you know, when we go back to that two thousand dollars, let's say you're a wealthy person, it's not a question of you know, oh my gosh, this machine cost ten thousand dollars and I'm only getting

two thousand dollars back. It's actually a question of I could get a gas furnace and it'll cost me I don't know, eight thousand dollars, or I could get a heat pump and it will cost me ten thousand dollars. Which one should I get. We need to get that marginal cost covered so that people realize that, oh wow, if I pay a little bit more upfront, I get that heat pump. That heat pump heats and cools my home, so it also replaces my air conditioner or gets me

air conditioning for the first time. So you know, this shift is about covering that marginal cost. I hate to say it, but it's what Bill Gates calls the green premium. I don't love that, but that's what he calls it. Right, There's a little bit more to pay up front, and then you get to save money every single month, right, every single year, and that thing will pay itself back really quickly. I ushed to take a moment to tell

me why exactly you hate green premiums. No, it's I just think that actually, the clean technology is often the cheaper technology, and constantly saying that it's more expensive isn't quite true that sometimes it's cheaper to do the clean thing. From my perspective, we want to get the message out there that clean energy is cheap energy, and so I don't necessarily think it is a premium to get the

clean item go right. From a math perspective, you know, Bill Gates talks about green premiums being negative, and that'd be great, but because of the word premium, having a negative premium feels wrong, and that's why you're getting at Okay, yes, exactly so. And I also think it doesn't all come down to the marginal cost of things, right. This is why I'm criticizing carbon pricing. Carbon pricing makes something slightly

more expensive. You might think that that shrinks the gap for the green premium, but it also really pisses people off when they have to pay more, and opponents weaponize that difference and say that it's because of government policy. Let's vote those people out of office. And so I think it's not only about changing the prices of things. It's also about how we change the prices of things and how we sell them. Making clean stuff cheap is

very different from political perspective. Than making dirty stuff that everybody uses right now expensive. Yeah, now you were involved in writing some of the IRA. What's the process like. Is it just like a lot of PhDs like you who sit down in a Google doc and write like thousands and thousands of words that end up in an eight hundred page document or whatever it is. No, there's very few PhDs involved. I would say. You know, me and Jesse Jenkins, who I did my PhD with at MIT,

we were both involved. You know, initially I helped set up to working groups coalitions. You can think of one with advocates for clean electricity and one for electrification, and I think if you go even farther back, that was at the beginning of twenty one those coalitions. You know, the Insley campaign for president was really important too, because they wrote president. He ran as a presidential candidate, but he is the governor of the state of Washington. Yeah.

His campaign basically involved writing hundreds of pages of ideas for climate policy, and I got involved with them, and we continue to write these policies. So there's a lot of people involved different groups. You know, There's then the staffers who work on specific committees, who work for specific members their staff, working for the White House for agencies. It takes like hundreds of people to get a bill written.

This bill is like seven hundred pages long, and yet and still at the end of the day, the very end of the process was a secret process involving two senators and their staff, Senator Schumer, who's the majority leader of the Democrats in the Senate, and Senator Mansion, that cole baron, who didn't really want to do things, and

the whole thing fell apart. We were all devastated, and secretly, the staff, probably a dozen people went into the basement of the Capitol and negotiated this and didn't tell anybody what they were doing. And they were doing a lot of cutting and pasting, right. The negotiations are just like here's a bit of text, I can take it. Yes.

So all the work that the advocacy groups did in advance, and the staff and the White House and the agencies and all these different people, you know, they that got the bill to a certain stage, and then at the end of the day it was really Schumer and Mansion making decisions. As far as I understand, the people who were in that basement weren't even allowed to tell their spouses.

It was very secret, right, and what was in the final bill text was some stuff that nobody agreed to or wanted, things like saying, in order to build clean energy on government owned land what's called public lands, you also have to lease put an auction out to give the opportunity for companies to build dirty energy on public lands. This was really upsetting to a lot of groups who are trying to stop let's say, offshore development of oil in the Gulf of Mexico and in Alaska, trying to

stop development of fossil fuels on public lands. Myself and other groups were thrilled that so much of the work of the community was still in the bill, but other groups were really upset because Mansion had put some poison pills in there, and you know, different groups kind of came to conclusions about whether or not they supported the

bill at the end of the day. I look two groups like Energy Innovation, which did an analysis that said the good parts of the bill in terms of reducing pollution, including in communities of color, including global pollution for the whole planet, there were twenty four times bigger and better than the bad parts of the bill. In terms of adding pollution. So, you know, all of us had to say,

was this good enough? Was this better than living in the world with no climate action from the federal government? And I personally felt that it was better than the status quo. After the break, I talked to Leah about international negotiations, how the midterm elections might change things, and

how to build coalitions. Now. You recently interviewed Vice President Kamala Harris about the climate credentials of the Biden Harris administration, and at the end of it you mentioned a recent success in climate diplomacy that was nothing to do with the cop meetings that happened annually. It was the Kigali Amendment, where the US stratified an amendment to the Montreal Protocol that is going to address greenhouse gases used in refrigeration and help cool the planet as much as point five

degrees celsius. How did we miss that? Yeah, it was great to talk with the Vice President and if folks want to listen to it, it's on our podcast. A matter of degrees. You know, she brought this up. When we think about what did the Biden administration get done on climate change, you know, we can think about the inflation Reduction Act, and she pointed out that they also got through the Senate the Kigali Amendment, which is an

amendment to the Montreal Protocol. For those who remember, the Montreal Protocol is an agreement to deal with the ozone problem. This was a really big problem where we were emitting chemicals that we're creating a hole in the ozone and countries around the world got together and they pass this important agreement, which has been wildly successful in terms of reducing ozone depleting substances and is often pointed to as

the most successful international environmental agreement. Right because the ozone hole is healing, this is kind of a model we could think of for climate change. And what people may not know is that some of the chemicals that are terrible for the ozone layer are also terrible for our climate because they don't only create a hole in the

ozone layer, they also warm the planet. And so the Kigali Amendment is basically targeting specific chemicals that have high global warming potential, very very high global warming potential, and

they also go after the ozone layer. And because we can go after these super pollutes as a global community, that means that we can actually limit warming by an enormous amount half the degree centigrade because each time you release one of these chemicals sometimes it's something like twenty three thousand times more potent than a single molecule of carbon dioxide. So this is something that was done in a bipartisan way in the United States. It's a really

big win, and it's also a really big win internationally. Yeah. In that climate wind though, we have to acknowledge how the US has been quite an unreliable climate ally because the US signing up to the Kigali Amendment took a while. There were many countries that it's signed onto it five years ago more than that, right, Yeah, And we can go through the history of the US not playing ball

with international agreements. It did not do so, going back all the way to the Kyoto Agreement in nineteen ninety seven. You know, it did not really play ball at the Copenhagen summit in two thousand and nine that could really have been the Paris Agreement. It did come through on Paris in twenty fifteen while Obama was president, but then it pulled out, and so the US credibility on climate

has been very shaky. Yeah, I think looking at the United States as a monolith is part of the challenge, because the reason why the United States has been terrible on some of these international agreements is because they have to be ratified by the Senate. The Senate is an institution with one hundred people, two from each of the fifty states, and it's not actually very representative of the

American people. It overwhelmingly gives voice to more conservative areas, so that leads to bad outcomes on lots of things, including on ratifying global agreements, because in the United States

it's the Senate that has to do that. If we think about the Trump administration, obviously former President Trump was terrible on the climate, but at that same time there was also a co Michael Bloomberg actually was very involved in this right of getting states and cities who were committed to climate action to tell the international community they were still making progress. California could be seen as something

like the fifth largest economy globally. If I know that it's huge place, massive economy, and really one of the global leaders on decarbonization period. Right Like, this is a place that has gone big on solar panels, on electric vehicles, it's about to go big on heat pumps, it has a carbon price. If that's what you like. It has it all, you know, and that is within the United States. It's a really big part of the United States. Keep in mind, California just spent fifty four billion dollars this

summer on a climate bill. It's much bigger on a per capita basis than what just happened federally. Right, New York just banned gas in new construction in New York City, and they're trying to do that statewide. So everywhere people are trying to turn leavers. So let's stalk best CASEO worst case scenario. There is an election coming up in

the US. It's the midterms. Most of the time outside the US, they don't make that much noise because these are between the two presidential elections, but they can matter a lot because they can determine whether Democrats or Republicans control the House of Representatives or the Senate. And so let's guess that the Biden administration keeps both the House and the Senate, and maybe even wins more seats in the Senate, taking away the power that Senator Mansion holds

over the Senate. Today, what would be your wildest dreams to accomplish in climate policy over the next two years. Well that's an optimistic forecast, but sure, let's dream a little dream here. I would love to spend more money on electrifying schools in the United States. That's not something that we got a lot of money for, and it's really important. There's like ten thousand schools in California alone,

probably like one hundred thousand in America. I don't know the actual number, but there's a lot of these buildings. There are places where kids learn. We need to electrify them. That'll make it healthier to learn. It'll also give kids air conditioning, which is super important given heat waves because of climate change. So that's a dream. I'd love more money to help clean up affordable housing electrify it. I would want to put a lot more money into those

low and moderate income electrification rebates. We got four and a half billion dollars, but we're going to run through that money really quickly, so let's get more for that. I would love to fix some of the garbage that Mansion shoved into the bill. So, for example, that requirement that you have to auction offshore and onshore leases for oil and gas development. Let's not do that. That sounds terrible,

So I'd love to fix that. I'd love to do reform to make transmission easier to build, but without gutting environmental protections, which is another big debate that's going on right now. I don't know. We'd probably need sixty votes to do that, though, so that one might not be doable. Let's take the worst case scenario, then the Democrats lose

both the House and the Senate. How resilient do you think the IRA is in the face of such a challenge, and what, if anything can the Biden administration continue to do on climate policy. I think that the IRA is going to be very resilient. You know, the Republicans talked a big game when it came to repealing the Affordable Care Act. This is sometimes called Obamacare. It's a healthcare law that helped millions of Americans get access to healthcare.

They said, oh, we're going to repeal it. We're going to repeal it. They made it their life's mission, and guess what, they never repealed it. In the United States, What political science research shows is that when you pass a law, it becomes pretty sticky, and it's actually quite

hard to repeal it. So once we have companies, you know, building heat pumps in the United States and solar panels and electric vehicles, including in Republican districts, they're not going to say, what do you mean you're going to get rid of this policy. We need this policy. We're making a lot of money and employing people, and you know, this is great stuff. So I think it is actually going to be quite sticky in the first two years.

Let's say the House and Senate went Republican, it would be bad, don't get me wrong, But we still have the Democratic president and therefore, you know, they couldn't really repeal the law because President Biden would just veto anything

that actually managed to pass. So I think that we have at least two years solid to really make progress on this, probably three or more, and that will create what we call policy feedback, which means that the policy itself will restructure the politics and make the policy stickier. So that's trying to protect what the ayer does and also putting it in action. But can Biden go further in the next two years even if he doesn't have the House or the Senate and its support. Absolutely, you know,

if the legislature is Republican. That doesn't really mean that Biden can't do lots of things. In fact, a lot of the executive action the regulations have been put on hold, like I talked about, because they've been trying to get the big prize of legislation. And so now in the second half of the Biden Harris administration, I expect to see a lot of focus on implementing, let's say, the

Clean Air Act. The Clean Air Act is a bedrock law that can regulate fossil fuel power plants, so they can say, hey, you want to build a new fossil fuel power plant, you need to pass this standard in order to do it. Hey, you got an existing fossil fuel power plant, you need to have it operate at this level. And actually, the Biden administration could even put

requirements in under the Clean Air Acts for appliances. So you're standing in your home, you're cooking something in your stove or in the oven using gas, and you're creating levels of indoor air pollution that are two, three four times higher than what is considered safe outdoors. So the Environmental Protection Agency could regulate that. They could say you can't sell people appliances, but that are poisoning them in

their homes. That's not okay. That's something that Evergreen Action, which I work with, has been advocating for in a recent paper where we outline actions that the Biden administration can take to electrify buildings, for example, to support building decarbonization. There's a lot they can do. One other place where the US continues to lack despite this progress on climate policy is how much money the US gives to the

rest of the world as part of climate financing. So the first fall is where the US makes very small contributions toward one hundred billion dollar fund that's supposed to fund cutting emissions or adapting to a warming planet activities in developing countries. The US contribution is closer to forty billion dollars if you do it on an economic strength basis. But the US contributes to three billion dollars a year at most. Biden wants to raise it all the way

to eleven billion dollars. He hasn't been able to get that approval from Congress. That's just step one. Step two, which is going to be the big battle that's going to happen at COP twenty seven in Egypt is around something called loss and damage, where developed countries agreed under the Paris Agreement to pay developing countries for the losses

and damages caused by climate impacts. You know, we still don't know how much money that would be, how it would be transferred, what the structure would be, and all of that is to be fought for at this cop summit. How do you think, given progress at a domestic level, will it affect international diplomacy when the US cannot put

forth the money it must. Well, it's sad to hear you say that, because I wrote a paper back in two thousand and nine which looked at this exact issue, and it was folks calling for one hundred billion dollars globally and folks paying like no billions of dollars globally. And to hear the update, it's basically the same. You know, we can fast forward what is that thirteen years and

we're in the same place. This is a big area where we could say G eight, G seven nations have talked a big game that they're going to support developing countries, they're going to give money, and they never do. I fear that the loss and damage conversation may be similar. It certainly has seen that way so far. That countries

talk a big game and they don't really deliver. That's very frustrating, I'm sure for developing countries, particularly for small island nations that are literally losing their entire you know, land livelihoods, communities, histories to the rising oceans. Yeah, it's very depressing. I think that the Biden administration has good intentions and wants to do more, but there are limits, right.

The executive has to get the legislature to actually appropriate funds to then put towards this, and that clearly has not been a big priority. And if the Republicans are in charge of the legislature, I mean that will not be happening. So it's a frustrating situation for sure. And

I do think that developing nations deserve more. But if we take your learning and your scholarship on the political science of how to build good climate policy domestically but also how to make climate policy be effective on a global stage, what is it do you think that's a missing to bring the politics domestically right so that you can fund what is us responsibility for global funding towards adaptation?

Towards mitigations toward damages and losses of climate impacts. I think that part of the issue here is also siloing, where this conversation often happens in the development community right through USA or through the United Nations, and that is somewhat separate from the domestic conversation through the Department of Energy or the Environmental Protection Agency, or even just the committees in Congress that are responsible for funding one part of it versus another part of it. I came across

this a bunch in California. I was advocating to try to get money to electrify schools, and the education people are different than the climate people, and so you know, in order to talk about school buildings, you have to talk to the education people. But the education people don't really know or care that much about climate, and so

you end up in a sort of siloed conversation. I think that's probably similar to what's going on in the United States, where the development people are trying to think about that conversation and moving forward funds to help developing countries. But that's quite separate from the climate community in the United States, which is focused on sort of decarbonization domestically, so that may be part of the reason why this wasn't a big focus of it. I think it is unfortunate,

I do. I mean, I wish we had gotten more money period for all the things, including to help developing nations transition. We did as well as we could, given the math in the Senate and given that last vote with Senator Mansion, and I doubt very much that he was super interested in funding developing countries to transition. Unfortunately, what in the last two years of having elected Biden to be president and then got him to work on all these climate policies and get them through? Have you

learned about coalition building? You know? I started a lot of this advocacy work as a professor. I began to write reviews of candidates for presidents in the Democratic primary their plans on climate and I just used my expertise from working on climate change for seventeen plus years now. But I wasn't necessarily involved in the political system at the time. I wasn't even a US. I was just a person who knew a bunch about a topic. And

over time I got more involved with advocacy groups. I'd written this book called Short circuiting policy where I'd interviewed people who had passed really important clean energy and renewable energy laws at the state level, and kind of inspired by all these advocates I talked to, I started thought, well, maybe I could do that as well. So I kind of stumbled into becoming a very prominent advocate for this work.

In the early days when we were trying to figure out how to pass a clean electricity standard through reconciliation, which we figured out how to do, we just couldn't get mansed to agree to it. You know, we talked to a bunch of advocates, we talked to a bunch of experts. We sort of figured it out. And some people when we published that report, which was hugely successful, they were mad that we didn't talk to them before

we wrote it. But I was used to being a professor and writing an article and going through peer review, and why do I have to talk to every group in order to write a report? And so the advocacy community is different, right. You have to make sure that you're bringing lots of people to the table, that you're listening to folks. And one thing I learned from my book was that you needed networks of advocates working together

in order to pass a law. And so with Rewaring America, we set up an electrification coalition that still runs today has hundreds of groups operating. We set up with Evergreen Action and Electricity Clean Electricity Coalition, and that was really informed from my work. I thought, Okay, let's find everybody who wants to work on this together. Let's work together.

We're trying to make it diverse, especially having environmental justice groups and disadvantaged folks who represent disadvantaged communities at the table. There's always more work that can be done to make

sure that those groups have the resources to participate. That has not been perfect, but I have tried to use the bizarre platform that I have built, created, been gifted, i don't know, to lift up decarbonization, lift up pollution reduction for communities all across the United States and the you know, if you look at the parts of the bill that I really worked on, they're like helping low income folks get a heat pup, you know, or helping wealthy people get a heatpup, or you know, making it

easier to shut down coal plants. There are things that I'm really proud of and I think that the movement can be really proud of. That was a lot of fun. Thanks for coming on the show. Yeah, oh, thank you so much for having me on. If you're talking about bringing people to the table, it's a good thing that the US is back to participating in the challenge of cutting emissions. Yet it has a lot of work to

do to prove to be a reliable ally. The result of the midterm elections next week might make it harder for Biden to pursue his climate agenda, and then the twenty twenty four presidential election might put a climate denier back in the White House. But as Leah puts it, climate advocates are ready for the fight. The network, she describes, will keep some of the many parts of the US doing what needs doing. If you enjoyed listening to Leah, I want to recommend her podcast A Matter of Degrees.

Along with doctor Catherine Wilkinson, Leah talks about the forces behind climate change and the tools we have to fix it. They just put out a bunch of episodes about what individuals can do. I recommend part to the professional, where you can follow along as an oil worker tries to change jobs and go green. Thanks so much for listening to Zero. If you like the show, please rate, review, and subscribe, Tell a friend or tell the richest American

you know to get a heat pump. If you've got a suggestion for a guest or topic, or something you just want us to look into, get in touch at Zero Pod at Bloomberg dot Net. Zero's producer is Oscar Boyd and senior producer is Christine driscoll. Our team music is composed by Wonderlely. Many people help make the show a success. This week's special thanks to Stacy Woan. She's a producer on the Bloomberg Podcast team and a source

of renewable energy herself. I'm Ashatrati back next week from Charmel Shaik in Egypt, where I'll be covering COP twenty seven. We'll be putting out more episodes than usual as we bring you inside the tenth of the biggest climate meeting of the year.