What 2024 Will Mean for Clean Energy — in Megatons

You don’t need us to say it: The 2024 election will have enormous stakes for America’s climate policy and the planet’s climate. But how well can we quantify those stakes? What would a Trump presidency — or a Harris presidency, for that matter — really mean for the country’s emissions trajectory?

On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Jesse and Rob speak with Sonia Aggarwal, the chief executive officer of Energy Innovation, a climate policy think tank that operates across North America, Europe, and Asia. She was previously special assistant to the president for climate policy, innovation, and deployment under President Joe Biden, and she co-chaired the Biden administration’s Climate Innovation Working Group. She and Jesse — another top-notch modeler — dive into what the data can and can’t tell us about the election and how to think about energy system models in the first place. 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.

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Here is an excerpt from our conversation:

Sonia Aggarwal: It is very clear in the modeling that there are certain policies that take us in the direction of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and other policies that take us in the direction of increasing greenhouse gas emissions compared to where we would be going otherwise.
 
Now, as Jesse said, there can be all kinds of things that happen that might change the specific numbers, but we certainly can tell in the models that if you look at a policy — that is, for example, a clean electricity standard — you’re going to see a reduction of greenhouse gas emissions when you adopt that standard. And that will happen against the background of lots of other things in the economy, but we know that the effect of that particular policy is to bring emissions down, and that’s very clear. So that’s one thing that we can definitely tell with the models.
 
Jesse Jenkins: Yeah. Maybe just one other point on this is that, what we had in our mind when we started the REPEAT Project was a role similar to what the Congressional Budget Office does to try to estimate the financial and budgetary impacts of congressional decisions, right? You know, Congress is making decisions all the time that affect revenues. They’re going to spend more money. They’re going to raise more money here and there. They’re going to lower taxes. They’re going to raise taxes. They’re going to expand this program. And Congress legitimately wants to have a sense of whether that’s going to increase or decrease the deficit and, you know, whether that’s going to raise more money than it spends or vice versa, and which programs have the biggest budgetary cost.

And so every bill is scored on this budgetary front, over a 10-year period in particular. And then, because they know it’s less certain beyond that, they put less weight on the period beyond 10 years. And I would bet every single one of those numbers is wrong, right? The Congressional Budget Office probably misses every single one of those numbers. But, they’re directionally correct, and they’re not wrong by orders of magnitude.
 
What they give Congress is the best information they have at the time — during the fog of war and enactment — to make a more informed decision about the financial implications of their policies. And I think that’s how we should think about the aggregate ensemble of models that have emerged to help us understand the climate implications of these decisions, as well.

Aggarwal: Be careful when you ask modelers questions about models, because you will …

Robinson Meyer: No, but this is, I think, the key question. Because I think there’s some degree to which these models kind of do act in a way that’s very authoritative and very useful to policymakers, right? I think that understanding them — just to be clear, in line with how you presented them, but I think still really important — as tools for decision-making under uncertainty and authoritative, you know, biblical accounts of exactly what a policy will do is the right way to understand, right?
 
This is a tool for thinking. It is a tool to bring into the rest of the thinking that you would do about, in this case, what the climate impacts of the 2024 election are. But it doesn’t mean that you should use it to throw out every other tool you have and every other piece of evidence we have, however, given that all the pieces of evidence are pointing in the right direction. I think it’s useful, in that regard, to get a sense of just how catastrophic for the climate a Project 2025 could be.

This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by …

Watershed’s climate data engine helps companies measure and reduce their emissions, turning the data they already have into an audit-ready carbon footprint backed by the latest climate science. Get the sustainability data you need in weeks, not months. Learn more at watershed.com.

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Antenna Group helps you connect with customers, policymakers, investors, and strategic partners to influence markets and accelerate adoption. Visit antennagroup.com to learn more.

Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.