Another is whether we continue to involve more and more people in the transformation. We have more than 100,000 farmers and ranchers who are now applying climate-smart agricultural practices. Will that climate action, that distributed climate action, continue to spread?
The last thing is how good we are at building the things we need to build. Steel in the country. One of the things we’ve been trying to develop as a discipline is really professionalizing the development of a social license around these new technologies so that they can scale. Can we build at the speed we need by making sure that when the tower goes up, the community feels like they’ve built a barn together, not like they’ve been deprived?
We have discussed economic and industrial leadership, but political leadership is also important. Trump has signaled that he will withdraw the US from the Paris Agreement, for the second time in five years. Wouldn’t that make it much harder to hit the trajectory you just described?
Does this one action spell the end of US climate leadership or hold us back from the progress we need to make? Not. But it carries with it symbolism and probably a lot of second-order implications.
Since the beginning of this administration, we have had a climate headquarters in the west wing. New team. Gina McCarthy led, now me. In my team, we have senior directors who are focused on every sector of the economy, with experience in science, business, engineering, politics.
What happens when you don’t have that level of focus at the highest level with significant commitment from very talented people driving it? What happens when the US shows up at multilateral forums or bilateral talks and doesn’t prioritize setting the rules of the road for a clean energy economy?
I think what’s happening is that the US is pushing American workers into the race for clean energy jobs, and we’re diminishing our influence globally. Not only will the climate not be on hiatus for the next four years, our competitors are not slowing down – to take advantage of clean energy technologies, but also for global impact.
Four years is not a long time. You must have gone into this thinking about a second term. Do you think about the things you wanted to do but couldn’t?
The big things are, number one, the sectors where we haven’t hit escape velocity. We have to keep pushing for the good of our economy. It is a work in progress that needs to be continued by state and local governments, the private sector, and hopefully the federal government.
Another thing is to make sure we invest enough in talent and workforce. We have a bad habit in this country of searching for talent from the top and not investing in institutions that attract more people to the workforce. Unions are at the forefront of this; Biden has spent a lot of time developing apprenticeships.