Climate on the Ballot: Interview With John Podesta

Transcript

Mark Hertsgaard (00:00): I want to welcome everybody here. I’m Mark Hertsgaard to this final day of Climate on the Ballot. That’s the three-day summit that Covering Climate Now has organized this week, bringing together hundreds of journalists from across the country and around the world to talk about how we can do more and better coverage of the defining story of our time. I’m Mark Hertsgaard, I’m the executive director of Covering Climate Now and the environment correspondent for The Nation Magazine. Special thanks by the way, up top here to Pattrn. They are our streaming partner today via The Weather Channel, so thank you for doing that. And hello to everybody who’s watching this via streaming. For those of you who may not know, Covering Climate Now is a global collaboration of more than 500 news outlets that reach a total audience of billions of people. We’re organized by journalists for journalists to help all of us do a better job of covering this incredibly important story.

(00:54): Go to our website, coveringclimatenow.org and you can find out all about the services we offer to journalists, all of which are free of charge, including newsroom trainings. Today we present a Covering Climate Now newsmaker interview with John Podesta. Mr. Podesta is currently President Biden’s senior advisor for international climate policy. He brings decades of experience at the highest levels of the U.S. government to that post. He was the White House chief of staff under President Bill Clinton. He was a senior climate advisor to President Barack Obama. His current portfolio under President Biden includes both domestic and international climate policy. So, we look forward over the next 45 minutes to a wide-ranging discussion. Here are the ground rules. In the first part of the interview, Mr. Podesta will be questioned directly by Chase Cain, a national climate correspondent at NBC News and Joan Meiners, a climate news and storytelling reporter at the Arizona Republic.

(01:51): In the second part of the interview, Chase and Joan will pass along your questions from the other journalists watching. If you want to pose a question, go to the bottom of your Zoom window, find the Q&A button and submit your question there. Please include both your name and your news outlet. We’ll get to as many of those as we can. Finally, this interview is entirely on the record and we encourage you to file stories about it if you so choose. Without further ado, I turn it over to Chase and Joan. Thanks very much. Take it away.

Chase Cain (02:25): Thank you, Mark. And good morning Mr. Podesta. Really appreciate you taking time to talk with Joan and me and then all of the other hardworking journalists here watching on the livestream. Before we dig into some of the tougher questions, I wonder if you could give us just a bit of context about your decision to be in this role at this moment, because you’ve been in Washington and politics for a couple of years, so I just wonder about what motivated you to want to say yes to this job right now. And I’m also just curious how much maybe your family or grandkids played a factor in that.

John Podesta (02:56): Chase, I devoted the kind of back end of my career, I’m one of the older guys around here. As Mark noted, I worked for President Clinton starting from day one. And when I left the administration, I started a think tank called the Center for American Progress. But my passion and my interest has really revolved around what is often said, but I think really true, the existential crisis of dealing with a rapidly warming planet. And so, I’ve spent a good deal of time, in advance of the 2020 election, I chaired Hillary’s campaign in 2016, watched as President Trump, tried to reverse most of what President Obama had accomplished, and then in the run-up to the 2020 election, put forward through the think tank a set of ideas that we thought would be workable.

(04:00): Then Vice President Biden, I guess candidate Biden, ran on a very aggressive program of investing in clean energy and then came into office by taking executive action and working on the Inflation Reduction Act. In the background, I was working to try to make sure that that bill passed. And then when it did pass in 2022, the president asked me to come back because the job of implementing a bill that is truly the largest investment in clean energy and climate change, not that it has only occurred in the United States, but has occurred around the world, is multifaceted. It includes programs that are grant oriented, loan oriented. The guts of it are really developing and building out the guidance on the tax support that was included in the Inflation Reduction Act.

(05:02): I often say this is government enabled but private sector led. We’ve seen a tremendous response from the private sector, more than $400 billion of announced investments in clean energy since the president and vice president came into office. I was on my way to ride off into the sunset, but he pushed my button and I was glad to do it. As you noted, I have a couple of almost grown grandchildren. They’re in college in California, not too far from where you are. But my whole family encouraged me to do one last round here and see what I could do to make this legislation work. I’m sure we’ll get into that in this interview.

Chase Cain (05:56): Excellent. Thank you.

Joan Meiners (05:58): Thank you. You bring up the Inflation Reduction Act, which you’ve been put in charge of implementation of. We’ve seen that it has definitely enabled a domestic clean energy boom. We’re seeing in Arizona […]. But I want to ask you about the fact that in many cases it has done so by funding private companies that are also furthering oil and gas interest or unproven technologies like direct air carbon capture. If you knew right now that you had another four years work on this, in what ways do you think you might pivot to make sure that the taxpayer dollars are going toward addressing the climate problem in the most direct, fair and scientifically backed way? And I’d also love to hear you comment on how the White House might improve public tracking of IRA investment data.

John Podesta (06:56): We have a good deal of that up on investment.gov right now. You can go and see monies being dispersed and announcements being made. MIT has a tracker as well that’s closely tracking announcements of private sector companies as they become publicly announced. On the question of where and who is taking advantage of these investments that are coming through the tax code, I think one of the real advantages of the Inflation Reduction Act, and now particularly because I took on these additional duties after Secretary Kerry left, I spent a lot of time running around the world talking to other diplomats who were involved in climate diplomacy. I talk to a lot of businesspeople in foreign countries. I think the advantage of the Inflation Reduction Act is it’s clear, it’s direct. We’re issuing that guidance that I mentioned that’s coming from the Treasury department.

(08:03): People know if they make investments, they have the advantage of being able to plan long-term projects. Most of the credits last up to 10 years, and I think that’s why the U.S. program has been so attractive and you’ve seen it being replicated in countries from Japan to the European Union with this new focus on an investment-led strategy to create this virtuous cycle of innovation. You noted the investments, including investments by some traditional fossil fuel players, particularly in the carbon capture world. Oxy has made big investments in direct air capture. Exxon is building out a large facility to create blue hydrogen and sequester the CO2 in Texas. But we need solutions that are going to include removing carbon from the atmosphere or sequestering carbon that’s been produced through industrial processes. While I wish they would change their strategy on the way they’re investing their capital more to the green and less in fossil, I think that as long as they’re complying with the rules that are established in the tax code, if they’re actually streaming off the CO2, permanently sequestering it, then they’re eligible for the favorable tax treatment.

(09:50): Doing that, I think, is both necessary because there’s evidence that even if we get to 100% clean power, we’re in the throes of transforming our transportation system to one that’s electric running on clean power. There’s still going to be sources of emissions well into the middle of the decade when we need to be taking as much carbon out of the atmosphere as we’re putting into it. So, we need the expertise and the innovation that’s coming from a whole suite of technologies, from geothermal to carbon capture to hydrogen to small modular reactors if we’re going to get to that goal of taking as much carbon out of the atmosphere as we’re putting into it.

Chase Cain (10:43): Staying with the Inflation Reduction Act for a moment, if we think about this in the context of the election, if former President Trump wins a second administration a second term, there’s certainly concern that some of the progress of the Inflation Reduction Act might be reversed or undone. So, if you think about that, in a way, you’re on the clock. So, what can you do in just the next few months to ensure the durability of this legislation?

John Podesta (11:11): I think that what we’re seeing around the country is as these investments are actually happening as steel’s going into the ground, as jobs are being created, one of the outside groups as estimated, there are already 330,000 good paying jobs since the IRA passed in 2022 that have been created as a result of these tax investments that I mentioned. What that’s done is I think it’s changed the dialogue a little bit. You saw just maybe about a month ago now, 18 House Republicans write a letter to their speaker saying, “Don’t throw the baby out with bath water. Don’t reverse course. These are investments that we’re counting on.” 58% of the investments that we’ve seen are in districts that are in red districts. You see Republican governors competing to make those investments happen in their states and being strongly in favor of the kind of things that we’re trying to achieve, whether that’s in creating this manufacturing renaissance in green technology in the solar area, $175 billion in the electric vehicle space and battery space.

(12:48): These are real companies, real projects, real jobs, and I think the politics of that argue for continuation. So, we’re seeing that effect. I can’t talk about the campaign in my current role, but I would say that there are other things that are vulnerable. The vice president has a record, the former president has a record. The kinds of other actions we’ve taken on the regulatory side, the leadership that President Biden has shown in the international sphere, the fact that the former president pulled the United States out of the Paris Agreement, President Biden returned us to the Paris Agreement, the appointment of Secretary Kerry, the leadership we’ve shown at the international level the ability to get all the countries involved in the Conference of Parties last year in Dubai to pledge to transition away from fossil fuels. That’s the kind of leadership that is at stake, I think, in the election.

(14:04): Ultimately the investments in the Inflation Reduction Act, I describe them as sticky. Once their communities are counting on those businesses being developed, the jobs being created… Joan mentioned what’s going on in the Phoenix area and in the rest of Arizona, we just issued under authorities of the USDA a major package to one of the rural electrical cooperatives in Arizona to provide a clean solar power. The Gila nation is covering the waterways with solar panels. There’s other, the Hopi nation just received a major Solar for All grant, which will provide needed electricity to people that lack access to good clean power, those kinds of things, the investments that are taking place in manufacturing in the Phoenix area, it’s going to be very hard for people to turn their backs on that. And I don’t think they will, by the way.

Joan Meiners (15:22): Thank you very much. I’m glad you brought up solar in Arizona because we have seen expansions in that certainly, but some of my reporting has also touched on new gas plants going into rural areas of Arizona that would be perfect for solar and that also… I wanted to also ask about, you’ve called climate change and existential crisis. Your office represents a commitment to addressing it. Scientists say the way to do that is to urgently move away from fossil fuels, but last week Kamala Harris bragged about increased gas production as part of her answer to the debate’s only climate question. So, I’m curious to hear your response to how do you reconcile this mixed messaging on clean energy priorities and what impact do you think that might have on climate voters?

John Podesta (16:18): A couple of things. On the substance of it, we are now the largest exporter of natural gas. We’re the largest producer of oil. In the near term that’s been good for the American consumers and good for our national security. We’ve been able to supply Europe, for example, with gas they needed when supplies were reduced or cut off as a result of Russia’s illegal war in Ukraine. We were able to backstop that and fulfill the needs that Europe had to have its natural gas needs supplied with U.S.-based gas. In the oil sphere, we’ve been able to see inflation come down, the presidents can speak to this today, with gas prices 20% lower than they were a year ago. The transition needs to happen. The crisis is real. The pace and scale need to increase. And we’re doing a number of things to help in that regard.

(17:31): Not just these investments, but the regulations that EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency, issued this spring on cars and light-duty trucks, on heavy-duty trucks, on the power sector, will all have the effect of reducing emissions very substantially from those sectors. In the end of the day, we need to do this in a way that is going to move us in that direction of net-zero, try to create a power system that is 100% clean by the middle of the next decade. Those regulations combined with the investments help push us down that track. But in the short term, we’re going to still need to rely on the fossil fuels in the near term, particularly in the transportation sector.

(18:37): But to just give you an example, I ran the Obama transition when President Obama came into office in 2009, 52% of the American power generation was coming from coal. That’s down to 16% today. This year alone, given all the announcements of what utilities are installing, 96% of that is clean. That includes the Vogtle plants in Georgia, the nuclear plants. We’ve made a tremendous transition from dirty fossil fuels to clean, and we just need to stay on track and keep that momentum going. But it’s going to take years to get to the job of, as I said, what the scientists are telling us is we got to be net-zero by the middle of the century.

Joan Meiners (19:42): Thank you.

John Podesta (19:42): And we’ve set a target of 2050.

Joan Meiners (19:46): Thank you. As a quick follow up, you also mentioned Phoenix manufacturing, which has included giant new semiconductor plans and data centers, which require huge amounts of energy, which is part of why we’re expanding gas at the same time that we’re expanding solar, which isn’t really getting us to a solution. So, how do you think about regulating that?

John Podesta (20:11): This is a challenge for us. We just convened a group of the leading companies that are planning the build out of artificial intelligence here at the White House just this week. I think they came away pledging that they want to see the power that’s going to be utilized, be clean, and a number of them are putting their money where their mouth is in terms of doing advanced commitments. But it’s a challenge because what we’ve seen in the last 20 years or so is that even as the needs and demand for electricity has increased, the efficiencies in the system have meant that generation capacity has been essentially flat for almost a generation. Now we’re seeing a major increase in the need for generation that’s coming from data centers and from the attendant needs, AI’s putting even more pressure on that, probably triple demand for data centers over the course of between now and 2030.

(21:38): But it’s also coming from more electrification of the built sector, the use of heat pumps as opposed to natural gas boilers. It’s coming from electrification of transportation. So, there’s a massive need to both build new clean generation and get that generation to market. I was out at the groundbreaking of a major project in Eastern New Mexico called SunZia a little bit ago last summer. That is going to be the largest wind project in North America. To give you some sense of the scale, it’s twice the size of the Hoover Dam, but we need to build a transmission to get that power from Eastern New Mexico to Phoenix and Los Angeles. And we finally issued the permits for that, it’s being built. There are a lot of moving parts, but I think we’re on track to get the job done.

Chase Cain (22:42): Mr. Podesta, I wanted to pivot, zoom out a bit to international context of your work. I had a couple of things I wanted to ask you about, and also Oliver Milman from the Guardian and Jen Dlouhy from Bloomberg were also curious about the international dynamics here. I wonder what’s the tenor of global climate conversations with your counterparts and what are they saying to you about their concern about what a second Trump administration might mean? Are we going to pull out of the Paris Agreement? Are we going to completely backtrack on everything from the last four years?

John Podesta (23:12): I think that people are quite focused on that. I just came back from China. That was a question I was being asked, and I was in India a couple of weeks before that, and I’ve been to Europe and to Asia as well. I think probably people follow our election in foreign countries more than we follow their elections, I think that’s probably a safe thing to say, because it affects their lives so much. The most vulnerable people in the world contribute the least to the problem of climate change but get clobbered by the extreme weather the hardest. So, they’re certainly focused on this. I think they welcomed President Biden’s leadership. I think they’re looking for the United States to make good on its commitments, both domestically to cut its emissions in half by 2030, and also to provide the kind of support for climate finance that helps the developing countries build clean rather than dirty.

(24:17): So, the topic of the next Conference of Parties, the next COP, in Baku, one of the central issues is a discussion of what kind of support there will be for climate finance going forward, particularly for these least developed countries economies. I think that is something we’re in deep discussion with. I noted that I was just in China. One of the things that was, I think, a pivotal moment in the run-up to the positive conclusion of the Paris Agreement was a year earlier, President Obama and President Xi jointly announcing their nationally determined commitments jointly in Beijing. So, I think the world looks to us to try to, even though we’re in a place where there’s a lot of friction in our relationship, both from a security and an economic perspective, we’re trying to find places where we at least understand each other and have cooperative conversations to both take action that will improve our own domestic performance. But I think that’s an important signal to the world as well.

Chase Cain (25:53): You mentioned the United States as a global climate leader. I wonder though if you could talk a bit about how Europe may be leading us in some areas, specifically a carbon tax that they’re going to start phasing in over the next couple of years. What your perspective is on if the United States should actually implement a true carbon tax?

John Podesta (26:15): Europe has a system, a so-called ETS. They’re about to implement a carbon border adjustment to account for the embedded carbon or the embodied carbon that’s coming in tradable goods into their jurisdiction. Earlier this spring, I announced that we’ve created a task force at the White House and with our federal agencies to consider how we think about and how we manage the ability to not let people dump carbon through tradable goods into our own system. As we’re trying to invest and create standards to reduce our carbon emissions, we need to ensure that those aren’t undermined by highly embodied carbon coming in from things like steel, cement, glass, other products. And we’re in conversation with the Europeans about their system and how those things might link up. We have some places where carbon pricing exists. We just are in the throes of implementing a federal fee on excess methane emission. That was a feature of the Inflation Reduction Act.

(27:46): California, where you are, has a cap-and-trade system. RGGI in the Northeast has a cap-and-trade system. But what the administration chose to do was to use a different basket of policy levers, these investments combined with strong standards, to get us on track. And I think that’s a judgment that has proven to be achievable first of all. The attempt at carbon pricing that occurred in the beginning of the Obama administration, the so-called cap-and-trade system that passed the house but failed in the Senate proved to be impossible to legislate, so we picked a different mix. In essence, we have an implicit price on carbon in those goods because we’ve done that through a series of policy steps, including the Department of Energy’s Efficiency Standards, the EPA’s standards about how goods and the power that’s producing those goods are produced.

(29:05): So, I think what we need to do is have a discussion and we’re involved in, at a technical level, in discussing how do you link those systems that are built on somewhat different architectures of policy and integrate them, so we have a virtuous race to the top to decarbonize, and particularly in these heavy industrial sectors, rather than a race to the bottom where people are free riding by using cheap sources of fossil fuels to produce goods that can then be traded. There’s a separate issue and separate conversations going on on the fuels that are used to move those goods, both in air transport and marine shipping conversations that the International Maritime Organization and ICAO to try to reduce the carbon footprint, create innovation there, create sustainable aviation fuels and marine fuels. But it’s the goods themselves that account for about 25% of the carbon that’s emitted in the world. Just to give some point of comparison, that if tradeable goods were its own country, they’re second only to China in terms of their emissions profile.

Joan Meiners (30:35): Thank you so much. I want to take a little bit of a last turn for my last question, and then I think Chase has one more for you. A lot of our listeners today are journalists who have watched Trump and other former presidents attack the media. Last month, I went to a Trump rally in Arizona where senate candidate and election denier, Kari Lake, told attendees to cancel their subscriptions to the Arizona Republic, my newspaper, which covered her refusal to accept the result of her race for governor. I’m wondering if there’s anything you think you could do or should do to restore trust in the media, reverse the decline of local news, which many people feel will be essential to getting Americans on board with climate action. And I wonder also if you can comment on what position the Harris administration might take on current wiretapping or journalism competition legislation.

John Podesta (31:34): Let me start with the former, and I don’t think I’m competent to answer the latter because I used to do that, but I don’t do it right now, so I just-

Joan Meiners (31:51): Sure, that’s fair.

John Podesta (31:51): … defer to other sources in the White House to get an answer to the last part of the question. I think that local journalism is the linchpin of democracy, of informing the public. It’s under huge pressure economically, that’s been going on for decades. I think that the efforts, both philanthropic and new business model efforts are essential. You don’t hear us reacting in kind to delegitimizing the sources of media that we think probably in our heart of hearts are biased that come at us every day that are more aligned with what’s going on. But if you step back and think about Kari Lake or what the former president does, and you look at the history and there’s been a lot of academic work, a lot of journalism work done on this, of the way authoritarian movements develop.

(33:06): One of the things I think that is almost universal is to undermine the ability of people to get truth and reliable information. To make everything relative is to make everything meaningless. I think social media has exacerbated this problem, and we’re seeing that again occur globally but it’s definitely a phenomena in the United States that I think you play the most important role in pushing back on that and standing up for journalistic integrity and strong principles. But I think that the things that we can do is to speak truthfully and take seriously the protections of the First Amendment. In the earlier part of my career, I spent a lot of time both on the questions around trying to deal with the mounds of secrecy that occur, particularly in the federal government, and reverse that trend and stand up for First Amendment protection and media rights. But I’m not tracking the legislation, so Joan, I’m sorry, I can’t comment on the last part of the question you asked me.

Chase Cain (34:52): Mr. Podesta, I know we only have a few more minutes with you here, busy guy, but again, we appreciate the time. I want to just acknowledge one of our fellow journalists, Barbara Moran from WBUR was asking again about the stakes of what the consequences of this election will mean for climate policy. I wonder a little bit more specifically, if you can give us some insight. Give us a peek behind the curtain in terms of what your conversations are like with Vice President Harris specifically about climate policy.

John Podesta (35:20): I think the vice president has been a champion on this issue and on environmental protection more generally, environmental justice, going back all the way to her days as a local prosecutor where she created one of the first environmental protection units and to go after polluters when she was San Francisco DA. She carried that forward when she was the attorney general of California, was vigilant in enforcing the laws of California, particularly against oil companies, and received landmark fines from the oil companies in California. She’s been a champion for the approach that President Biden has taken here. She’s been a strong international voice. She led our delegation to COP28 in Dubai, where, as I noted, for the first time, the world’s consensus of all the parties stood for transitioning away from fossil fuels-

Chase Cain (36:29): And sorry to jump in Mr. Podesta. Just because time is tight. I wonder if you could tell us what is she saying with you? What are those conversations like about how she plans to further on that-

John Podesta (36:39): No, I’ve sat with her. I think that this is a passionate issue for her. I think she has been particularly interested and worked hard to make sure that… to see this through a lens of both climate equity and equity more generally, was a strong proponent of, for example, a probably weirdly named but important program, the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, which is a $27 billion loan program. 70% of the benefits of that are going to moderate and low-income households. She was helpful in architecting that program. It is the first big, if you will, green Bank that’s happened across the country through both state and local and community-based efforts. So, I think she gets both the problem, the fact that Phoenix, Joan, you correct me, I know it’s more than 100 days above 100 degrees. Last summer of 31 straight days above 110 degrees.

(38:03): She gets the problems of the fires raging in the West of the heat, in the Southwest of the intensive storms, in the Southeast of the coastal erosion in the Northeast. And she gets the solution set as an opportunity to make people’s lives better. I think she is deeply knowledgeable and deeply committed to making this work, to lower people’s costs, to provide the benefits of clean energy at the household level. I think she cares a lot about that and probes, not just what are we doing at the macro level, but what’s happening on cities and streets of towns and cities across America. She’s put, as you know in this campaign, a focus on making sure that the policies are reflecting the household budgets and the investments we’re making through rebate programs, through the direct tax benefits that are coming for building retrofits and for electric vehicles, in which 250,000 people just this year have already taken advantage of are shared and spreading and are particularly reaching moderate and low-income people.

Joan Meiners (39:33): We have one closing question from an audience member, Al Ortiz from CBS wants to know what’s your closing pitch to Americans in context of climate?

John Podesta (39:45): Well, the elevator pitch is this is a serious problem. We’re feeling it now. We can do something about it in a way that builds our economy, creates strong growth, creates good jobs. That’s what the President has pursued with the Inflation Reduction Act. That’s what we need to keep going.

Joan Meiners (40:10): Thank you very much for your time.

John Podesta (40:18): Okay.

Mark Hertsgaard (40:18): Thank you again, John Podesta, senior Advisor on Climate Change to the President. I’ll just note that Mr. Podesta is also an accomplished long distance runner, which may be fitting for someone who’s been pursuing climate policy for so many years. Our gratitude to you and to your team for being with us, also to Pattrn, who’s been our livestreaming partner today via The Weather Channel. Again, to my fellow journalists, all of this is on the record. We encourage you to file your stories on this. We’ll also have the transcript and the recording of this up on the Carbon Climate Now website as soon as possible. With all of that, I want to thank also Chase Cain of NBC News and Joan Meiners of the Arizona Republic. And to all of the journalists who called in with questions today, thank you for being part of this.

(41:13): This is a climate election, folks, and it’s our job as journalists, as we like to say, focus on the stakes, not the odds. Let’s make sure that we inform the public what those stakes are, and we hold all candidates accountable, not for whether they believe in climate change, but what are they going to do about it. With that, on behalf of Covering Climate Now, I’m Mark Hertsgaard, wishing you all a pleasant day.