Senator Brian Schatz on Permitting Reform, IRA 2.0, and Why He Doesn’t Trust Happiness

Senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii is one of the Senate’s climate hawks. Or — really — if you listen to his colleague, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, he’s one of the Senate’s “three climateers,” a group of relatively young (he’s 51) and relatively progressive Democratic senators from solidly blue states.

He’s also no fan of Republicans. You can check his account on the social network X (née Twitter), where he has written tens of thousands of posts, for confirmation of that.

But speaking with me in New York earlier this week, Schatz argued that the next stage of progress on climate change will require compromising with the opposing party. Democrats can make it easier to build and run nuclear power plants, enhanced geothermal wells, and long-distance transmission, he said, and those goals will be easiest to accomplish if they do it with Republicans.

“Until and unless we both have a trifecta and eliminate the filibuster, we are going to have to have a negotiation with people with whom we have pretty serious disagreements,” he told me.

Not that he’s endorsing a permitting reform bill. (He hasn’t yet gotten behind a compromise proposal from Senator Joe Manchin, an independent of West Virginia, and Senator John Barrasso, a Republican of Wyoming, although he called it a “serious effort.”) But he does want progressives — and especially old-school environmentalists — to understand that fighting climate change will mean building a new economy. “I just want to be clear that building the clean energy future that we want and need is not a rhetorical flourish,” he told me. “It means actual construction.”

Schatz is also co-chair of the Senate Climate Change Task Force and the Democratic caucus’s deputy whip. We recently sat down on the sidelines of New York Climate Week, where he met with climate investors, the UN Secretary General, and diplomats from small Pacific island nations. We discussed permitting reform, the 2024 election, and the next major Democratic climate bill — a so-called “Inflation Reduction Act 2.0” — might look like. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

When I see the phrase “IRA 2.0,” I think, wow, they’d be really lucky to get an IRA 2.0.

But we were really lucky to get a 1.0.

That’s right. So what would go into an IRA 2.0 as you’re thinking about it — under a presumed Harris administration here, right?

I have a bit of caution here, only because I think we did it so carefully last time, both on the policy side, but also in terms of building a coalition for the bill. As much as we think we know what the next step is, we still have to start over and do listening to Native communities, to labor, to environmental justice communities, to the traditional environmental organizations, to finance, to critical minerals. We have to go and canvass the universe of stakeholders, and start by listening rather than dropping a bill as a fait accompli.

So we’re in the beginning stages of that process. The only thing I’m attached to is [that] it should be as big as the first bill, and that we need to remain focused on emissions reductions as the first, second, and third priority.

Are there particular aspects of the first bill that now, several years later, you think, if we had another knock, we’d do it a little differently?

No, because I think that presumes that I had the pen. Nobody exactly had the pen. The pen was passed around, so it was all about the art of the possible. It was this very well constructed but — by necessity — heterogeneous thing, and I imagine it would be the same way again because we’re gonna have to get to 51 in the Senate and a majority in the House, as well. I do think there is a ton of progress to be made on nuclear. I think there’s a ton of progress to be made in enhanced geothermal. And obviously everybody’s well aware of what we need to do, um, in terms of [the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s] authority and transmission.

My own instinct is that the transmission stuff and the permitting reform stuff is not an IRA 2.0 play. I think we have at least a punter’s chance of getting it done this year, so I would not punt that to ‘only if we win the trifecta.’

How are you thinking about the Manchin-Barrasso permitting reform proposal? Senator Heinrich has endorsed it. There’s some trepidation among the traditional greens that it’s going to get worse via the House before passage, but it does tackle, in a bipartisan way, a lot of the stuff you were just citing — nuclear, geothermal, advanced geothermal. How are you weighing these different forces?

I think it’s a serious effort. And I think that on the transmission side, it would accomplish a lot. I think a lot of the folks who are opposed to this just don’t like the idea of compromising with John Barrasso.

And fair enough. John and I do not have a ton of common ground as it relates to energy policy, but until and unless we both have a trifecta and eliminate the filibuster, we are going to have to have a negotiation with people with whom we have pretty serious disagreements.

The way I always analyze these bills — from the ITC and PTC extension that was paired with the lifting of the oil export ban [in 2015], to the IRA, to the [Bipartisan Infrastructure Law] — is I let the science and the analysis tell me whether it’s a net positive. And it is preliminary data now from these modeling shops, but it’s encouraging.

Look, it’s a planetary emergency, and we are in the business of trying to build the clean energy future that we want and need. I just want to be clear that building the clean energy future that we want and need is not a rhetorical flourish — it means actual construction. And for someone who got his start in the environmental world, trying to prevent things from being built because I care about the planet, there has to be a shift in mindset towards building big things at scale. Otherwise, we’re going to fry our planet.

Now, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t certain places that are ecologically or culturally so significant that they should be left alone. But the problem is that a lot of the laws that we have, don’t simply protect our sacred places. They prevent wind farms from being built in parking lots. So I just think the environmental movement has to understand and internalize: Oh my goodness, this is an emergency. How fast can we go?

When I’ve talked to traditional greens about this, they don’t disagree that these laws are blocking stuff that we want to get built. They say, sure, but that the result of any negotiation with Republicans will produce a law that will result in worse outcomes.

Well, then I guess we’ll just twiddle our thumbs until the revolution comes. I’m serious. What are we gonna do?

There are some people who don’t want to enact anything because it’s within a capitalist model. Well, it seems to me that that conversation can be a very brief one, because we are in a capitalist model and we’re not going to allow the planet to burn while we wait for a different economic system.

And there are those who are imagining that at some point we’re gonna have 60 unreconstructed progressives [in the Senate] and a Democratic president, and boy, that sounds great. But my job is to make sure we enact laws to keep us on track towards avoiding climate catastrophe, and that means we have to make deals now.

How are you feeling about the 2024 election?

I don’t trust happiness, so I don’t know how I feel. But obviously our Senate candidates are holding up reasonably well. There are some tough ones — we have some really viable challengers now in Florida and Texas. I’m feeling optimistic, but not overly so.

Do you think the IRA survives a Republican trifecta?

I do. I do. I think there’s just too much money at stake, in too many red and blue states, that I would have a hard time seeing them repealing the thing. I think they might try to take a pound of flesh that is mostly symbolic in nature. But I think the foundation of the technology-neutral tax credits is not just unlikely to be repealed, but unlikely to be modified.