What’s next for the Biden administration — and for climate policy in the United States? Should Democrats negotiate with Republicans over permitting reform, even if it means making concessions to fossil fuel interests? And how should the country’s trade policy handle the problem of carbon pollution?
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob speaks with
Ali Zaidi, the national climate advisor to President Joe Biden. Zaidi leads the White House Climate Policy Office, which coordinates domestic climate policy across federal agencies. Before joining the White House in 2021, Zaidi was the state of New York’s deputy secretary for energy and environment. This interview was recorded live on October 10 in New Haven, Connecticut, at the Yale Clean Energy Conference.
Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap, and Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University. Jesse is out this week.
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Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Ali Zaidi: The conversation in Congress right now makes it seem like transmission is a Democratic policy priority when it boosts reliability and lowers rates. I thought Republicans and Democrats both agreed we need to boost reliability and lower rates. So I don’t know why that needs to be offset by any measure.
That’s thing number one. Thing number two is …
Robinson Meyer: This is the challenge of talking about things, is that if Democrats say, oh, we really value this, then suddenly it’s a Democratic priority.
Zaidi: Yeah. And then the second is, how do we accelerate the siting and permitting of things and then there is a how do we shift more power to the oil and gas industry. The conversation around leasing, happening against a backdrop where the industry itself is moving away from long-cycle investment to short-cycle investment, it’s tough. So I would hope that more of the permitting conversation were a permitting conversation.
Meyer: Well, one way this sometimes gets reflected is that you’ll hear environmentalists say, any policy that makes the oil and gas industry happy or bigger, we should not take. And that makes making a compromise …
Zaidi: And I reject that. Yeah, look, if ExxonMobil wants to pay for a pipeline that will help us deliver what was once solar and wind, as a fuel, to help us decarbonize a steel plant, they can be for it and I can be for it. If there is a — Blackstone, for example, has a Project Tallgrass that has converted a pipeline that used to pull hydrocarbons out of the ground. It’s now flipped the pipeline around, and is putting CO2 into the ground.
They can be for that. I can be for that — not speaking to the specific project, but conceptually. So I don’t think … It’s not the actor. It’s the question of whether this is directionally consistent with trying to chase down a 1.5 degree future or not.
We are behind as a world, and we need to run faster in that direction. If it’s not directionally consistent, that’s a problem.
This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by …
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Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
The Mochovce nuclear plant. Janos Kummer/Getty Images
