We’re back with another episode of our WITHpod 2024: The Stakes series, in which we choose specific areas of policy and talk to an expert about Trump and Biden’s records on the topic. This week, we’re discussing what’s at stake for an area of top salience: climate and energy. There’s a lot to unpack. David Roberts is the founder of the Volts podcast, newsletter and community. He joins WITHpod to discuss the Biden administration’s record action on climate, rollbacks that would be likely during a second Trump term, why this moment is such an inflection point and more.
Note: This is a rough transcript — please excuse any typos.
David Roberts: The importance of a second Biden term is just there are lots of things that have been put in motion this term that will not reach full flower. Like most of the money in IRA hasn’t gone out. Most of the rules are not in place. Most of the stuff is still nascent.
Four more years to really get this stuff put in place, get these trends going in a way that they can’t be reversed is incredibly important. Even if Biden doesn’t do anything additional in the next four years, just having Dems in place to let what we’ve already done flower is hugely important.
Chris Hayes: Hello and welcome to “Why Is This Happening?” with me, your host, Chris Hayes. Well, we’ve got another edition of the Why Is This Happening 2024 campaign series. WITHpod 2024: The Stakes. This year, we have been focusing on this campaign on this special series on the podcast in which we take a look at the two major party presidential nominees, Joe Biden and Donald Trump, who for the first time since 1892 have both already served as president.
Hasn’t happened in a very long time. It’s not speculative. You don’t have to imagine what each of these men would do as president. They have both been president. They both have records. And so what we do on this WITHpod 2024: The Stakes series is we take a single issue and we look at just what the records of the two men was in office legislatively, administratively, in terms of executive orders and the like.
We’ve done episodes on abortion rights, on taxes, on immigration. Today, arguably, I think in a civilizational sense, not even really arguably the most important issue we will face, and that is climate, climate and energy. And so I thought the best person to talk about this with is someone who I’ve relied on for climate coverage and smart, in-depth, granular climate coverage for literally decades at this point. David Roberts is the founder of The Volt’s Newsletter and podcast, one of the best things you can read to follow all of the climate and green transition news. David, great to have you in the program.
David Roberts: Great to be here, Chris.
Chris Hayes: So this is a fun one. I mean, fun one. None of them are fun, but you know, for the WITHpod Stakes, I’ve sort of tried to start with stuff where there’s just real big, meaty, substantive policy records of both men.
David Roberts: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: And where they are, I think it’s fair to say, quite different. Let’s take it in order and start with Donald Trump. I should just say up front, it’s going to be a little different because in the case of Joe Biden, there’s a lot of proactive things he’s done and there’s huge legislation. You know, there’s not going to be any climate legislation that we’re going to evaluate from Donald Trump, but we can talk about both what he did internationally and domestically.
So let’s start with first with the Paris Climate Agreement, which was a campaign pledge, which he kind of made a lot of noise that he was getting out of Paris. And then there was like a lot of weird dithering. And then later in the administration had an announcement we were pulling out of Paris, although it’s unclear the degree to which that was effectuated, but that was at least symbolically that was one of the big first things he did.
David Roberts: Yeah, it was a little bit like Michael Scott declaring bankruptcy on the office. You know, you can’t just pull out of the Paris Agreement by stating you’re going to, by saying so.
Chris Hayes: Right.
David Roberts: But he said so early on. But you know, the process, the formal process of withdrawing takes a while and it never really completed. So, I don’t think like formally, legally speaking, we were ever actually out. We just sort of had stated our intentions and then Biden got us back in.
But you know, when it comes to these sort of like voluntary international agreements, your intention is as good as, you know what I mean? Like the fact that you’re not participating is tantamount to pulling out regardless.
Chris Hayes: Well, that’s why I think it’s important. So, yeah, I don’t think we ever formally left and we were reinstated before we formally left. But the Paris Climate Agreement is I mean, maybe you could explain what it is. It’s basically a bunch of countries saying we’re going to try our best to meet these targets.
David Roberts: Yeah, it’s just basically asking all countries to list what they’re willing to do, just to sort of give us a target, tell us what you’re willing to do. And then every few years we’ll come and check in and see how you’re doing. So it’s all based on sort of peer pressure, basically. It’s all based on countries not wanting to look bad. So, I mean, this is something Trump used to say about the Paris Agreement all the time, that they’re trying to force us to do this and they’re going to force us to do that.
And it was all hallucinatory. It doesn’t force you to do anything. Like you don’t have to pull out, like you know what I mean? It doesn’t make you do anything. So there’s literally no reason to pull out. He just hates the very idea of international non-zero sum cooperation. Like that whole thing is offensive to him.
Chris Hayes: Right. And one of the reasons that I think it’s significant to start with the Paris Agreement, which is sort of symbolic and rhetorical at one level, is that the symbolism and rhetoric matter in so much as what the U.S. does sends signals to other countries about what they’re going to do. And that even if you’re just saying we’re getting out of Paris —
David Roberts: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — that does actually have an effect. It’s more than just words. It’s going to tangibly affect the calculations of other countries.
David Roberts: Yes, and maybe we’ll touch on this later, conversely, a big part of the effect of IRA of Biden doing something big is not just on domestic policy. It’s also on international. It’s also other countries seeing that and following suit.
Chris Hayes: I mean, all I remember from this is he loved oil and gas. He appointed Scott Pruitt to head the EPA, who was sort of this kind of almost like pro fossil fuel culture warrior from Oklahoma, who also was fantastically corrupt and got all kinds of scandals and trouble.
David Roberts: Yeah. This is, I think, really interesting. I mean, it’s funny, you know, previous episodes of this series are, I think, much more clear like on immigration, really clear. And, you know, it’s really clear what he’s going to do. Reproductive policy, really clear. Energy and climate, it’s a little bit more mixed, a little bit more vague. So what he did, you know, I think what we remember about the first term is there are certain things he cares about and is engaged in. He hates international agreements, so Paris bugged him.
But mostly he was focused on immigration and stuff like that. He didn’t particularly care about climate like it was not a personal thing for him, which meant like the things he didn’t care about, he just farmed out basically to the right wing apparatus that existed —
Chris Hayes: Right.
David Roberts: — the sort of right wing quasi permanent government. And that’s what Scott Pruitt was. Scott Pruitt was not particularly an ideologue. He’s just like an old school corrupt tool of the oil and gas industry. So to me the interesting question about term two for Trump is I still don’t think he cares about this particularly. I still think he’s going to farm it out. But who gets farmed out to in the second term, right? Is it going to be the sort of like corrupt old school apparatus or is it going to be the ideologues of Project 25, right?
Chris Hayes: Right.
David Roberts: Like who gets handed this portfolio? If it just goes back to another Scott Pruitt type, you know, things go one way. If it goes to a like a glassy eyed heritage, you know, Project 25 ideologue, it goes a different way.
Chris Hayes: Okay, well, I want to talk about that in a second. But before we come to that, I mean, and there’s some indication we can talk about his dinner at Mar-a-Lago, which was just reported in which he effectively solicited a billion dollar bribe from the fossil fuel industry. I guess tell me a little more. Fill in a little bit of what does Scott Pruitt, like the kind of, you know, replacement level oil and gas friendly —
David Roberts: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — Republican EPA person, climate energy policy. What did it look like in that first term?
David Roberts: Right. It’s just trying to free the oil and gas industry from any restrictions. That’s the root of it. Trying to free the oil and gas industry from any sort of regulatory barriers or constraints of any kind so you can maximize their production and their profits, right? It’s not really ideological. It’s very much transactional on this side of things. It’s just the oil and gas industry, you know, cozy, gave them a lot of money. And so they respond with regulatory largesse, basically.
And so that’s what Scott Pruitt spent his time at EPA doing, trying to repeal regulations that constrain the oil and gas industry and working through existing mechanisms and institutions and laws, right? Sort of like, in a sense, playing the same game just on the other side.
Chris Hayes: Right. So when you want to take back regulations, when you want to roll back things, when you want to initiate new rules to make it, say, easier to frack, there was a lot of LNG, liquid national gas —
David Roberts: Oh, yeah.
Chris Hayes: — exporting focus, which, by the way —
David Roberts: Is back.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, that’s back. And there’s continuity there. So we can talk about that. But I think what you’re saying, which gets to a deeper point rather than climate is the functioning of the administrative state is that there’s a bunch of internal processes. There’s rules. There’s a comment that you have to go through.
David Roberts: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: And in some places, they would just cut through that, like when they wanted to put an immigration question on the census. And it was so blatant what they did to the Supreme Court basically was like, this is actually too blatant. We have to stop you. What you’re saying is Scott Pruitt went about the kind of rollback of oil and gas fossil fuel regulation in the quote, unquote “normal way” through the administrative procedures.
David Roberts: Right. He initiated rulemakings, right. That’s what you have to do at EPA. If you want a new rule to replace the old rule, you have to do a rulemaking. And there’s somewhat of a process. You have to explain why you’re doing it and your explanation of why you’re doing it has to pass legal muster. And in many cases, in a lot of cases, actually, the courts stopped what Scott Pruitt was trying to do.
And Scott Pruitt, you know, accepted the court’s rulings. You know what I mean? There’s a very low bar we’re describing here. But like he was acting within the lawful sort of institutional structure of the United States. And I just don’t think we can take that for granted next time around.
Chris Hayes: Like, is there an example of a Scott Pruitt regulatory rollback that sort of stands in for the portfolio?
David Roberts: Well, there’s a whole saga of the regulation of greenhouse gases from power plants, right? And so Obama tried to do one thing. It got crushed by the Supreme Court. Pruitt, I think, tried to replace that with basically nothing. Basically, they tried to replace it with a plan that would, according to several analyses, result in a net increase in emissions from power plants. Like their power plant emission reduction plan would have increased emissions from power plants. I’m not even making that up.
And the court said, you know, guys, come on. Come on. So that got crushed. So that’s why there’s been basically no rules on these power plants, because Obama’s got shut down and then Pruitt’s got shut down. And now, you know, Biden’s going at it for a third time, probably going to get shut down also.
Chris Hayes: Right. So this is actually a key area, right? So the Obama administration in its second term, under the authority of the Clean Air Act, they said, look, the Clean Air Act gives us the authority to regulate air pollution. Carbon pollution is a form of air pollution, ergo, we have statutory authority to set basically goals and then limits, right?
David Roberts: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: I mean, actually hard limits for utility carbon pollution.
David Roberts: Yeah, for power plants.
Chris Hayes: For power plants, right. So that’s the, you know —
David Roberts: Cars and power plants and they’re separate rules. But yeah, they do it for carbon for mobile sources and for stationary sources for cars and power plants, basically.
Chris Hayes: And the Supreme Court said, no, you don’t have that authority.
David Roberts: Well, this is a long story, which I’ll try to make short. In 2005, Massachusetts sued the EPA. Massachusetts said, hey, EPA says to regulate air pollution. This CO2 looks a lot like air pollution to us. You ought to be regulating it. That went all the way to the Supreme Court. And that Supreme Court said, yes, if EPA deems this dangerous, it does qualify as an air pollutant under the Clean Air Act, remember?
Chris Hayes: I forgot that. Right. That’s right.
David Roberts: Mass v. EPA way back in the mists of time. This was a pre-Trump Supreme Court.
Chris Hayes: Right.
David Roberts: And in IRA, in the Inflation Reduction Act, Democrats actually made that explicit. They said the Clean Air Act does cover carbon dioxide just to prevent —
Chris Hayes: Oh, so it’s written in the Supreme Court.
David Roberts: — the Trump law. Yeah.
Chris Hayes: You can’t say it’s like a statutory interpretation.
David Roberts: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: It actually part of the law, right.
David Roberts: Yeah. So the Supreme Court cannot now basically undo Mass v. EPA, which means —
Chris Hayes: Oh, I would just try to get it, right (ph).
David Roberts: Right. Which means the EPA is obliged by law to regulate greenhouse gases from power plants. They got to do something, right.
Chris Hayes: Right.
David Roberts: But then, you know, you get the Trump Supreme Court. Obama tried to do something. And John Roberts said we were major questions doctrine. I know you’ve covered this and other. This was the origin. I think the first sort of appearance, formal appearance of major questions doctrine.
Chris Hayes: Well, it actually I should say it’s a Sandra Day O’Connor invention, I think, of the 1980s. But in its recent vintage —
David Roberts: Right.
Chris Hayes: — it’s got its sort of real coming out party here.
David Roberts: Right. Basically, he said Obama’s plan to reduce power plant emissions is just too major. It’s just too big, you know. And of course, like everybody’s like, well, what does that mean, John? What is major? What does major mean, John? Can you tell us what qualifies as major and what doesn’t? No, of course not. So that got shut down. So the question is whether Biden’s second attempt is also going to get shut down as quote, unquote “major.” We’ll find that out.
Chris Hayes: Right. So it’s not a question of statutory interpretation of the Clean Air Act. It’s this constitutional delegation of powers question, which the court has now invented. The conservatives on the court —
David Roberts: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — invented a doctrine called the major questions doctrine, which says this stuff, it’s just too big for administrative agencies to do. Even if Congress has explicitly delegated them the authority, they can’t under the separation of powers delegate that authority because we said so.
David Roberts: Yes. What we’re going to end up with is basically a legal doctrine that says the EPA is obliged by law to regulate these emissions. But none of the ways that it could do so are legal, right? Like that’s where we’ve ended up. Like you have to do it. Not that way. Not that way. Not that way either. And there’s nothing left if they shoot this one down, there’s really nothing left that could reduce emissions. So EPA will be under a lawful obligation to do something —
Chris Hayes: That it can’t do.
David Roberts: — that it can’t do. That’s basically where we’re ended up with the Supreme Court.
Chris Hayes: I want to pull back for a second just to signpost where we are and why we are where we are, because there was no major climate legislation passed under Barack Obama.
David Roberts: Right.
Chris Hayes: There was no major climate legislation passed under Donald Trump, which means everything that was either done to lower emissions or to undo the lowering of emissions was done administratively.
David Roberts: Yeah, correct.
Chris Hayes: The agencies and specifically through the EPA. When you’re talking about what agencies can do, you are in the world of administrative law and that administrative law, just what they can and can’t do, what they’re obligated to do and what doing would be too much of is a question that has repeatedly come before the Supreme Court.
David Roberts: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: In a directional sense, just to be clear, in a directional sense, Barack Obama came up with a plan for the EPA to cap emissions and to limit the amount of carbon pollution being produced by both transportation and stationary power plants. The court said this is unconstitutionally broad. Come back with something else, right?
David Roberts: Yes.
Chris Hayes: We won’t tell you what.
David Roberts: Yes.
Chris Hayes: Then Donald Trump takes over and Scott Pruitt and the Scott Pruitt plan was here’s a thing that will make emissions go up and lower court said, no. Wait a second. You have an obligation to actually make them go down. This doesn’t work either.
David Roberts: Yes. So this is wrong on a basic sign level.
Chris Hayes: Right.
David Roberts: We said down, not up.
Chris Hayes: Okay, right. But have I tracked that correctly?
David Roberts: Yes, that is correct. And so the thrust of the Supreme Court, what we’re going to hear when or if the Supreme Court shoots down Biden’s latest effort is, oh, this is so big that we need to do it through legislation. We need to do it through Congress, through the people’s representatives, which, of course, as you know, Republicans won’t let them do that either, right. So, I mean, it’s just such a bad faith game. They just go from you can’t do it this way. You can’t do it that way. You can’t do it that way. You just can’t do it. That’s what they want is just not to do it.
Chris Hayes: And again, the reason that we’re talking about Donald Trump’s first term climate record in terms of the administrative procedures and the courts is because that’s where all the action is, right.
David Roberts: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Because there just is no legislation that’s happening. Even I think rollbacks, right. Like, did they roll back a bunch of tax credits that green energy tax like (ph)?
David Roberts: No.
Chris Hayes: That sort of stuck around, right.
David Roberts: No. I mean —
Chris Hayes: That was on autopilot.
David Roberts: Well, one of the big interesting questions is because we do have legislation on the table now. And so will a Republican Congress, if Republicans take Congress, want to undo that legislation? And I don’t think they will. Certainly not wholesale. I mean, sort of the dirty secret here is that Republicans like a lot of what’s in IRA. I mean, like 75 percent of the tens of billions of dollars of investment that have resulted from IRA are in red states.
They’re flooding red states with factories and manufacturing facilities and like money. So, despite what they say, they like a lot of that stuff. So there’s just individual bits of it they don’t like or the EV stuff for instance, I think Donald Trump personally hates. The Republican Congress hates it. So they might undo those tax credits. But the larger superstructure of IRA, I think most of it probably will survive.
Chris Hayes: All right. So that’s sort of looking forward to a second Trump term. But I just want to stay in the first, right?
David Roberts: Okay.
Chris Hayes: So, directionally, I think the main things of takeaway are they came up with a plan to regulate carbon emissions, which they were sort of obliged to do under that Massachusetts ruling that made carbon emissions go up and was so bad the court tossed it. He announced he was pulling out of Paris and they did zero, nothing affirmatively, right, of their own volition to bring carbon pollution down, correct?
David Roberts: Well, even that is a little bit interesting because there was —
Chris Hayes: Good. Yeah.
David Roberts: And there was actually an energy bill passed toward the very end of Trump’s term.
Chris Hayes: Oh, that’s right.
David Roberts: Remember, this is the whole secret Congress thing that —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
David Roberts: — that people talk about. Sort of quietly —
Chris Hayes: This is important. This is good. Trouble my dichotomy here.
David Roberts: Quietly under the radar, there was an energy bill passed toward the very end of Trump’s term, which actually had a lot of pretty good stuff in it.
Chris Hayes: Meaning what? What does that mean?
David Roberts: Well, there’s some bipartisan consensus on nuclear. So there was some pro- nuclear stuff in there. There was some stuff about, you know, rules and regulations. Republicans will agree to the parts of the clean energy transition that have to do with shoveling money at new industries, basically. They just won’t agree to any of the parts that put any constraints or limits on existing oil and gas. This idea is it’s all going to be additive. If you look at —
Chris Hayes: All carrots, no sticks.
David Roberts: Yes, all carrots, no sticks.
Chris Hayes: And Donald Trump signed that, right? Because there were green energy tax credits in that. And there was, you know, a bunch of stuff got renewed, right? Existing stuff that was running out got renewed —
David Roberts: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — which meant —
David Roberts: That’s right.
Chris Hayes: — because there was a real fear that all kinds of solar wind and green energy —
David Roberts: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — were going to basically have these tax credits expire. And the secret Congress, which is a sort of term people coined of congressional legislating when it’s out of the spotlight, came up with an energy bill that Donald Trump signed that basically extended the status quo. And some of that status quo was pretty good.
David Roberts: Yeah, I mean, it’s sort of an untold story, but the basic core clean energy tax credits have survived lots of swings this way and that in politics for decades now. I mean, they’ve been sort of the workhorses of this clean energy revolution. And despite all the hue and cry, Republicans have had several chances where they could have repealed them and they didn’t and they renewed them. And I think, yeah, Trump signed this just because he didn’t care. Probably didn’t pay much attention to it. Probably didn’t know what was in it. Just didn’t care much.
Chris Hayes: This is actually a really important texture here, because I really am trying to do this in good faith where it’s not just this, like, polemical thing, right? That your point up front, which is he really cares about immigration and sees it as central to his political identity. He doesn’t really about climate and that makes something of a difference in terms of how in the weeds he gets.
David Roberts: Yeah. And well, it’s not just him. I think the Republican Party generally it’s more mixed. The opinion is more mixed generally in the Republican Party about energy and climate stuff.
Chris Hayes: Really? You think that?
David Roberts: Yeah. I mean, like I said, they like money. They like new industries —
Chris Hayes: Right.
David Roberts: You know, like Oklahoma and Iowa, like they have tons of wind power in there. They quietly defend those wind power subsidies. Texas has the most installed wind power and the most installed solar power now, I think, like almost despite itself. Like, George W. Bush signed in 1999 a law that put Texas on that track.
Chris Hayes: He signed —
David Roberts: He’s a wind power hero.
Chris Hayes: — a renewable portfolio standard that was like basically the best in the country.
David Roberts: Yeah. One of the nation’s first.
Chris Hayes: One of the nation’s first. A renewable portfolio standard means utilities have to diversify their energy away from fossil fuel and have a certain amount of renewable energy. That has led to Texas being surprisingly a leader in this stuff.
David Roberts: Yeah, well, not just that. It’s like Texas’s electricity market is one of the sort of most markety markets, like one of the most open sort of competitive energy markets in that, you know, if you have an open competitive energy market these days, wind and solar are going to win.
Chris Hayes: Right.
David Roberts: You have to take affirmative steps to prevent them from winning these days.
Chris Hayes: Wow. Because the price has come down so much.
David Roberts: Yeah. Yeah. They’re just cheap. They’ve gotten cheap as hell. I was just reading a story last week about a German company that’s using solar panels now to make garden fences. And they were asked, like, is that really generating a lot of power? They’re like, no, not really, but it’s just a nice rigid material and it’s cheap as hell so we’re using it to build fences.
Chris Hayes: So here’s my question to you in terms of assessing that first four years. My sense is we need to move much faster than we’re moving.
David Roberts: Yes.
Chris Hayes: Right? So anything that isn’t full speed ahead is catastrophic delay.
David Roberts: Yes.
Chris Hayes: So, Donald Trump represents that in the context of how quickly the climate emergency is upon us and how quickly we need to cut. That said, what I’m hearing from you is it could have been worse. His administration could have been more single mindedly, proactively destructive on this front —
David Roberts: Yes.
Chris Hayes: –and weren’t as bad as they could be, but that you foresee a possibility of a second term being like that.
David Roberts: Well, you know, it’s just so hard to predict.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
David Roberts: All of this is extremely hard. Like the tail risks, you know, with Trump or like it could be a third world war and that would —
Chris Hayes: Right. Yeah, right. Yeah.
David Roberts: — probably affect energy —
Chris Hayes: They’re probably bad for the climate. Yeah.
David Roberts: That would affect energy policy quite substantially. So it’s really hard to say. Like I said, like it’s a heritage. If the Heritage Foundation zealots are given free reign, they will take affirmative action to crush renewable energy like they will do what he didn’t do in the first. But I just don’t think there’s a lot of appetite for that among the Republican base or among Republican politicians.
So it’s just like how off the leash are these Project 25 people? You know, that’s the real question. Like how restrained will they be by the rest of the Republican Party?
Chris Hayes: More of our conversation after this quick break.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
Chris Hayes: In talking about a second term, we should talk about this dinner that was just reported in Mar-a-Lago, which is almost cartoonish. This was a scoop by “The Washington Post” and then matched by “The New York Times.” And we’re doing it on my show tonight. He gets the top oil executives to come to Mar-a-Lago and the representative of the oil industry group, the American Petroleum Institute.
And basically, not in legal terms, I want to be clear, like you couldn’t be prosecuted for this, but in the standard colloquial understanding of the term solicits a $1 billion bribe in which he says, if I’m elected, I’m going to roll back all this Biden stuff. It will be a boon to you. So you should raise a billion dollars to elect me.
David Roberts: I mean, not euphemistically, though, Chris, not effectively. He really did say that out loud.
Chris Hayes: No, he said exactly that, yes. Yes.
David Roberts: So he said, give me a billion dollars and you can have whatever you want.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
David Roberts: Like explicitly said that. So, much more than anti-renewable energy. That’s where the passion is on the right, is freeing the oil and gas guys from these, you know, restraints, these mild restraints that Biden has put on him. I mean, the U.S. oil and gas guys, I mean, don’t get me started. Like they are complaining and moaning about Biden being the worst energy president ever. He’s attacking our energy, wants us to go away. He’s trying to kill the industry entirely.
Meanwhile, as you know, and have said repeatedly, U.S. oil and gas production is at record highs. We’re the biggest producers in the world. We’re producing more oil and gas than any country ever has in all of history. These guys are swimming in money. And the FTC just dinged them for colluding to keep prices high so they made even more money. And in that circumstance, it’s like when Obama tried to like mildly raise taxes on rich people. And then they went out on TV and compared themselves to Jews during the Holocaust. Do you remember that?
Chris Hayes: Yes, I do remember that.
David Roberts: It’s the same dynamic, like just the mildest restraints on these guys and their outraged. So that’s what Trump would definitely do is like, you know, I think probably remove rules on Mercury, you know, like Biden has put the Alaskan oil reserve off limits for 15 years. He would undo that. He would undo any restraints on new permits in the Gulf of Mexico. He would just undo any restraints on oil and gas expansion.
Chris Hayes: Well, so this is a good segue to Biden, I think, which is a much longer discussion because there’s a lot more activity, I think.
David Roberts: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: And let’s start where we are, because one of the great paradoxes of Biden is that he is overseen, as you said, the biggest oil boom, the biggest fossil fuel boom in American history and more fossil fuels being pumped than in any nation in any time. Again, this is really important. Like pick Saudi Arabia in its best year.
David Roberts: We’re doing more.
Chris Hayes: Okay.
David Roberts: We are the Saudi Arabia of oil.
Chris Hayes: Exactly. That’s a great point. That’s very funny because David Roberts is playing on a phrase used by the natural gas industry for a while, which used to say that the U.S. was the Saudi Arabia of gas. Before that, we were the Saudi Arabia of coal. But now we are the Saudi Arabia of oil is the —
David Roberts: We’re the Saudi Arabia of all fossil fuels, basically, at this point.
Chris Hayes: So at the same time, he’s done more for climate than any president ever. We also are pumping more fossil fuels. So let’s start on that first part of the record. Why is it the case that we are pumping more fossil fuels? And if you’re concerned about the climate, isn’t that bad?
David Roberts: Well, that’s a real complicated question.
Chris Hayes: I know it is. That’s why I teed it up.
David Roberts: Part of why we’re pumping more ever in history than you know, I think people are familiar with the sort of extraordinary revolution in fracking in the sort of 2000s and 2010s. You know, the technological developments where we did this hydraulic fracturing. We learned how to do it really well. We learned how to do lateral wells. Basically, we just opened up enormous new swaths of territory. And you know, oil exploration is still going full bore and the market, you know, the market is hot.
And just almost all of these restraints or regulations that they’re complaining about are really not going to make a substantial difference in those numbers. None of those restraints are going to substantially dent those numbers. Most of them are just kind of political sops to the greens, basically. You know what I mean? I’m doing something about this.
Chris Hayes: Well, let me stop you there. So what you’re saying is, I just want to be clear, because there’s different things. I mean, energy policy is a potent mix of markets, technology and government, right.
David Roberts: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: And what I’m hearing from you is the thing that’s driving the boom now under Biden is mostly markets and technology, which have come together.
David Roberts: Yes. Although government policy, like any technology, you know, this any technological revolution, follow the string, trace it back far enough and you find government policy that helped it happen, right. So it’s not like government wasn’t involved in the —
Chris Hayes: Totally.
David Roberts: — revolution.
Chris Hayes: I just mean now —
David Roberts: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — to the extent that there are light brakes being applied by Joe Biden. And yet the train is speeding ahead because of other stuff.
David Roberts: Yes. It’s not like he’s done a ton of stuff affirmatively to make that happen. It just was going to happen absent him stopping it. And I don’t think he really even had the power to stop it. I mean, he’s not been able to do hardly anything. I mean, sort of the political path of least resistance is say yes to oil and gas and say yes to clean energy, say yes to everybody, throw out carrots to everybody, right? Like that’s the political path —
Chris Hayes: That’s really —
David Roberts: — the easy path forward.
And this is true, not just for the U.S., but almost, I mean, I think you can say without exception, every major fossil fuel producing country is playing this same game. They’re all helping clean energy, but none of them are substantially restraining their production. None of them.
Chris Hayes: And this is I think a key thing because you and I have been, I mean, you more than me, but we have covered climate policy now.
David Roberts: We’re old is the word you’re looking for?
Chris Hayes: Yeah. We’re middle aged, but we’ve been doing it for years. I mean, you and I have been talking about this, literally, we know each other probably 20 years and we’ve talked and we’ve followed it. And, you know, for so long, the emphasis was on stopping production, curtailing production, increasing the cost of oil, all of that stuff.
David Roberts: Yes.
Chris Hayes: And there was a great reason for that. But it basically has politically failed more or less everywhere.
David Roberts: Not everywhere, everywhere, but, yes. I mean, and it sounds almost silly to say, but, yes, increasing prices for everyone has not proven politically popular.
Chris Hayes: This is really a good thing, yes.
David Roberts: You know.
Chris Hayes: The way to square the circle, because we’re talking about oil and gas production under Joe Biden, who’s also been the best climate president. Part of the reason Americans don’t know that we’re producing more fossil fuels than any nation ever on history is because Biden doesn’t want to crow about it.
David Roberts: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Because he doesn’t want to piss off, you know, the many people who are really concerned about the climate.
David Roberts: Yes.
Chris Hayes: And Republicans don’t want to give him credit. So, it’s a huge secret, even though I think Americans would like it as a sheer political matter.
David Roberts: Yeah. I mean, if you look at energy polling about this stuff, and this has been consistent for decades, Americans like more good things.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
David Roberts: They don’t want less of anything, right? That’s what the polls show. So anything that smacks of a restriction on gas cars, for instance, polls terribly. Anything that’s pro-EV polls great, right? They just more better carrots —
Chris Hayes: Carrots.
David Roberts: Carrots poll well. Sticks don’t poll well. That’s just the basic fact.
Chris Hayes: So oil and gas production has been very high. There have been a series of regulatory steps, including taking that Alaska preserve offline, stopping permits in the Gulf of Mexico, stricter mercury standards.
David Roberts: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: And also their version of the power plant rule, right?
David Roberts: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Like they’re trying to do a redo on Barack Obama’s that will pass muster.
David Roberts: And they did cars. They did light vehicles. And I think they did medium and heavy vehicles also, although I forget where those stand. But they’re working on all that stuff. Yeah. I mean, the EPA is working on all that stuff. But the question you asked earlier, which I didn’t really address is, is that good or bad for climate, that we’re allowing production to go unrestrained even as we push on the clean energy, which is, again, the strategy every major oil producing country is taking. Is that good for climate?
This is the key argument, because the fact that oil and gas are at historic peaks has not escaped the attention of climate campaigners, despite Biden being quiet about it.
Chris Hayes: Not talking about it, yes. Somehow. Yes, they found new charts. Yeah, right.
David Roberts: They found out and they’re upset about it. So I think the sort of savvy theory here, the politically sort of capital S savvy theory is if you start restricting production, you raise prices. And if you raise prices, you get political blowback. And if you get political blowback, you’re not going to be able to pull this off. You’re not going to be able to pull off the clean energy transition.
So, the only way to victory, this is, I think, sort of the elite consensus. The only way to do this is just to continue shoveling money at clean energy until it gets so cheap and so obvious that the market chooses it on its own and oil and gas decline on their own, basically, without any government ever having to step in and do it.
Chris Hayes: Yes. And this theory, I want to say something slightly controversial here, though, I believe it very strongly, which is it’s a real middle aged take, but there’s three things that I’ve kind of come around on. One is it’s actually really important to keep crime low because when it goes high, the politics it produces are —
David Roberts: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — horrifying and authoritarian and reactionary. It’s really important to have very good intelligence agencies that prevent terrorist attacks because if they don’t do it, you end up with horrible politics that create backlash, reactionary and unfathomable violence and misery. And a third version of this is like when energy prices spike, you produce politics that are incredibly inhospitable to any kind of enlightened vision of climate.
And I think I’ve come around to thinking that, like, yeah, when gas prices go up, that’s all people care about when energy prices go up. And we’ve seen this not just in the U.S., like other places, when energy prices go up, it’s bad for the politics of climate.
David Roberts: No, it’s absolutely true. And, you know, we shouldn’t forget there are two billion or so people out there with no access to modern energy. There’s still a lot of people in poverty in the world. And energy is poverty reduction. Poverty reduction is energy. You know what I mean? And you raise prices for energy and it hurts those, you know. So it’s a real delicate dance. I mean, I deride that as the savvy theory, but it’s not crazy. I’m very ambivalent about it myself.
I think there are things you could do to restrain supply that wouldn’t necessarily have huge effects on prices. But, you know, as people who advance this theory are fond of saying, if you’re not making the prices go up, then you’re not really restraining production. You know what I mean? If you really restrain production —
Chris Hayes: It’s almost definitional, yeah.
David Roberts: Yeah. It’s sort of an economic cause and effect. If you really do restrain production in a substantial way, you will raise prices.
Chris Hayes: And I will say, because I can hear climate hawks, a term that you may have coined. Did you coin the term?
David Roberts: Yeah, yeah, way back when.
Chris Hayes: A term you coined, I could hear climate hawks and climate folks screaming at me through their headphones. But we’re not doing this fast enough and I totally agree.
David Roberts: No, it’s totally true.
Chris Hayes: The sticks approach is better as policy. I think probably we need to go faster than we’re going. It’s bad that we’re behind. It would probably, like if you took the politics out of it and gas went to $7 a gallon or $8 a gallon or $10 a gallon, it would produce changes that would be pretty fast and probably be good for emissions and all that stuff. You can’t take the politics out of it, which is not to say they’re not changeable.
David Roberts: Yes.
Chris Hayes: They’re not immutable. Like they can change over time.
David Roberts: No, I think the good theory here is you make clean energy cheap, push clean energy, make the alternatives ready at hand enough that gives you some room for sticks. That increases the political appetite for sticks.
Chris Hayes: And that is the theory of the Inflation Reduction Act, which brings us to the signature piece of climate legislation, which is the first real huge piece of climate legislation ever passed and also passed in the wake of an unsuccessful, largely stick based or, you know, cap and trade system that failed to pass. It passed the House and didn’t pass the Senate under Barack Obama. It took whatever, 10, 11 years between the two. We got the Inflation Reduction Act. Give me a quick what’s in it and then how’s it doing?
David Roberts: Well, you can think of IRA as a giant basket of carrots, basically. I mean, that’s what it is. Very varied. And there’s lots of different carrots of different sizes.
Chris Hayes: Meaning financial incentives and tax credits.
David Roberts: Financial incentives, yes.
Chris Hayes: For various deployments of carbon free energy.
David Roberts: So like the biggest thing, the main thing is that the sort of core tax credits for solar and wind energy were expanded to a much wider array of energy sources and made quasi-permanent. Like they go out like 10 or 20 years now.
Chris Hayes: They used to be up every few years and —
David Roberts: Yes. They used to go up and down, up and down.
Chris Hayes: — that was terrible for markets. Yeah.
David Roberts: You got a lot of predictability here, a lot of runway for a lot of different sources of clean energy. And this is true now. There are tax credits for hydrogen, heat pumps, I mean, name it. Like so just like who gets tax credits got big expanded and the length and steadiness of the tax credits got very extended. So there’s just a lot of money going out the door to clean energy.
Now, there are also a bunch of, you know, like the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund just was announced how that was going to be spent a couple of weeks ago. That’s $20 billion basically going to state and local programs that are designed to reduce emissions, especially in disadvantaged counties or disadvantaged communities. So there’s a bunch of other stuff like that around the margins. But the tax credits basically subsidizing clean energy is the core of the thing here to drive down the prices.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, subsidizing it. And we should just say like when we say tax credits, it’s just a subsidy. I mean, it works through the tax cut.
David Roberts: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: It’s a subsidy. So, heat pumps, for instance, weatherization is another place where —
David Roberts: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — there’s federal tax credits that you can now get. There’s state and local ones. So, if you put solar on your roof, if you buy an electric vehicle, if you put in geothermal, all these things I did before the IRA, but it’s fine. It’s cool. I’m fine with it.
David Roberts: You’re an early adopter, Chris. We need people like you.
Chris Hayes: But the stability of it, both the largest stability means that it is designed to drive the price of these technologies down. And in so doing, attract investment capital into expanding their commercialization.
David Roberts: Yes.
Chris Hayes: There’s also stuff Jigar Shah is doing and others in the Department of Energy.
David Roberts: Yes.
Chris Hayes: You and I have both spoken to him. So there’s a lot of stuff like cooking up, research —
David Roberts: Innovation, tons of innovation, tons of like early stage development stuff, tons of first projects, demonstration projects, like basically, you know, where the tax credits just sort of subsidize deployment of wind and solar. That’s basically what they’re doing. There’s a lot more attention in IRA now to the full sort of life cycle of the technology. So beginning with the lab, you know, then you have the first project, then the Valley of Death, you know, that people are familiar with.
So you have the LPO now, the Loan Programs Office, shoveling money into those early stage technologies and moving them along in that process. It’s awesome what the LPO is doing. It’s one of the best things. And that’s one of the things that the heritage guys want to kill. They want to kill the Loan Programs Office entirely.
Chris Hayes: Oh, that’s good to know. So, one of the things when people talk about the tax, the green energy, you know, price tag in IRA, they’ll say $350 billion. But one of the things that’s important to understand about the $350 billion is that it wasn’t that $350 billion got appropriated, and that’s a hard limit.
David Roberts: Right.
Chris Hayes: It’s an estimate of the utilization of the tax credits.
David Roberts: Correct.
Chris Hayes: The tax credits are not capped, which means, and it looks like it’s actually going to be a lot more than that, right?
David Roberts: Yeah, this is really interesting. They’re uncapped tax credits, which means the government will spend as much money on them as people come to the government and ask, right? It’s like they’ll spend as much as there is demand for it. So, from a clean energy advocates point of view, the fact that, you know, sort of like estimates of the total cost are now like up above a trillion is good news. That just means there’s going to be a ton of demand. There’s going to be a ton of clean energy built.
But of course, this gives the right wingers a nice little tagline, right? Like, oh, this bill was much more expensive than they told us. And like, you know, you’re going to hear a lot of that in the in the coming year, I think. But I think the fact that like over a trillion dollars is going to go out the door to clean energy. I mean, at a stroke, this made the U.S. the best market in the world for clean energy. And really, predictably enough, hundreds of billions of dollars are investments are flooding in response.
Like it is it is working. You know, I just did a pod on this a couple of weeks ago. So EVs are on track, basically, from what they were expected to do based on IRA. You know, people did all this modeling of IRA when it came out. Like, what’s it going to do? We’re a little short —
Chris Hayes: For emissions, you mean?
David Roberts: Yeah, and for emissions and for investment in clean energy, where and how much. Where we’re falling a little short is on clean electricity, even though that gets all the good press. We’re falling a little short because of frictions that have nothing to do with price, right? Like permitting, interconnection —
Chris Hayes: Transmission.
David Roberts: — utilities, transmission, all this kind of stuff, which is, you know, if we’re going to talk about a Biden term, too, that’s the stuff where Biden two needs to focus, is those non-financial barriers to deployment of clean energy, because otherwise we’re not going to spend over a trillion. We’re going to spend much less if we can’t build the stuff right. There’s no place to build the stuff.
Chris Hayes: We’ll be right back after we take this quick break.
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Chris Hayes: So in a broad sense, and I’ve seen some modeling of this, I mean, the idea was we’ve got these Paris targets and we know what they are. We’ve got this piece of legislation that has a bunch of incentives that are designed to spur an explosion of green tech and green energy deployment, carbon free energy deployment, and we’re going to model it. It should hit the Paris target, right? I mean, that was the idea.
David Roberts: Well, even the models show that it wasn’t quite.
Chris Hayes: It wasn’t.
David Roberts: Again, this has to do with Biden term two, like even if things go well, we’re probably not going to get to the Paris targets based on what we’ve done so far.
Chris Hayes: The Paris targets, which, again, I don’t want to be a doomer because my whole thing about this is the Paris targets, which are themselves are probably insufficient to keeping, you know.
David Roberts: Well, yes, correct. Like we should do more. But I mean, I think a lot of, you know, I don’t think a lot of people talk about this, but sort of one of the theories behind Paris is like at a certain point, these things are going to get so cheap that it’s not going to be like pushing a rock up a hill anymore.
Chris Hayes: Right.
David Roberts: Do you know what I mean? Like you’re going to take on a momentum of its own and then people are going to be shooting past their targets just because of markets. So it’s just like we got to get the rock over the top of the hill.
Chris Hayes: Yes, until it’s rolling down. And that’s a great point.
David Roberts: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: And the comparison I always hear, which I think is really useful, is the is cell phones in parts of the global south, sub-Saharan Africa, parts of Asia, where cell phones just got there before landlines. Like you went from not having telephony reliably or having it, you know, maybe close by that you could access, to having a cell phone without ever stopping at the landline step.
David Roberts: Yes.
Chris Hayes: And there’s a green energy version of that if things become, you know, cheap enough and deployable enough that it’s just what makes most sense to do in places.
David Roberts: Yes. And I think the sort of conventional wisdom here is like the U.S.’s own emissions, and this is true for any sort of individual jurisdiction. Like the emissions from that jurisdiction are not going to make the difference. Even the U.S.’s emissions are not going to make the difference. The biggest difference that the U.S. could make is to use its immense wealth and its immense capacity for innovation and market development —
Chris Hayes: Right. Right.
David Roberts: — to make these things cheap so that other countries —
Chris Hayes: Everyone can.
David Roberts: — when they develop, use these instead of the dirty stuff. That’s the theory of the case.
Chris Hayes: Okay, let’s just do, I mean, sum it up like you’re like, I mean, if you really care about the feelings of oil and gas executives, cheap energy, and you really think that you want to stick it to the libs or you think climate is ridiculous, maybe Donald Trump’s your candidate. I mean, if you care about the trajectory of carbon emissions in this country and globally, do you think it’s a close call between these two candidates?
David Roberts: Oh, you’ve reduced me to harrumphing, Chris. No, it’s not comparable at all. Basically, if you care about it, you need Biden and Dems in because they’re going to be the ones who are going to do substantial things about it. But interestingly, again, and not like immigration, not like not like reproductive rights. It’s not like if you choose Republicans, everybody you’re choosing is against this. They just don’t care a lot. They just don’t care much. They’re just not going to do much to make it go very fast.
Chris Hayes: Unless you get the real zealots.
David Roberts: Yeah, unless you get the real zealots. But even then, I think they’ll get some pushback just for purely venal monetary reasons. Like a lot of Republicans like this money and like these industries. So I think the consensus on the right is they’re no longer sort of rejecting climate altogether. They’re not rejecting the clean energy altogether.
If you’re in ruse with oil and gas executives now, the sort of consensus is, yes, this needs to happen, but we have to go slow and we want oil and gas to be in the sort of driver’s seat as we do this. We’re not going to get rid of liquid fuels. We’re just going to clean them up. And like oil and gas is going to invest in hydrogen and carbon sequestration. And basically, like we’re willing to do this now, but on our terms, at our pace, without any restrictions or limits on our profits, which will just be a much slower and less rational version of this, right? Like we’re moving in this direction regardless of who wins.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, it’s interesting. I just want to I want to sort of maybe we’ll land it here. I mean, I think the differences are clear. And I think, you know, the second term could be either more time wasting and going slow or something even more destructive, Allah ideologues, deconstruct the administrative state so as to like utterly destroy America’s nascent green energy.
David Roberts: Or World War III. Don’t forget that —
Chris Hayes: Or World War III, which, as we said, bad for the climate, but maybe good for the climate. No, I haven’t modeled it, but I guess what I’m hearing from you, which I think is interesting and is actually, I think, distinct from, say, the abortion conversation we had and distinct in some ways from immigration. What I hear from you and I hear this more and more is that like we have still bought ourselves a huge amount of human suffering, misery and catastrophe. There’s no question. I don’t want anyone to be like blasé about it. But it’s also the case that there is a kind of inexorable movement that has started away from fossil fuels towards something past it —
David Roberts: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — that’s going to be hard to stop.
David Roberts: The way I would put it is at this point, you could create a bulletproof case for transitioning to clean energy that has nothing to do with climate, right? There are lots of other reasons now to do this financially. And also like electricity is just better. It’s just like electricity is efficient —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
David Roberts: More better, more precise, more efficient, more controllable source of energy than controlled explosions, which is basically what like —
Chris Hayes: What we’ve been doing, yeah.
David Roberts: — with oil and gas engines are, right? So, it’s just more precise. It’s just better and like better is going to win over time eventually, regardless. But time constraints, time, time, time, like every bit of delay is more suffering. And so if we do it on the oil and gas execs schedule, we’re probably going to hit, you know, 2.5 or 3 degrees. That’s where we’re kind of headed now. It’s what all the scientists say.
You know, an article just came out asking scientists to predict this. And they’re like, yeah, the models are still saying we’re headed for big trouble. You know, so if we want to avoid 2.5 or 3, which would just to be clear, be apocalyptically terrible, we have to do extraordinary things.
Chris Hayes: And the only chance we have of that is a Democratic administration.
David Roberts: Yes. We know Republicans won’t do extraordinary things.
Chris Hayes: Right.
David Roberts: There’s some chance that we can bully Democrats into doing extraordinary things or at least half extraordinary things, right? Like at least we’ll get something out of Democrats. You’ll get no acceleration at all out of Republicans.
Chris Hayes: I’m going to ask you two questions to finish and then we’ll wrap up. One, this is grading both on a curve. Grading on a curve, is Joe Biden the best president for the climate we’ve ever had?
David Roberts: Yes, absolutely. Incontrovertibly. No question at all. There is no other contender.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. There’s no one in the comparison set. Right.
David Roberts: Who else would you?
Chris Hayes: Number two, compared to other world leaders of developed economies, rich countries that do a fair amount of emitting and also, we’ll say, China and India, which do a huge amount of emitting, partly because their size and also because their economies are growing, where is the Biden administration comparatively among its global peers?
David Roberts: I’d say China’s moving fastest, E.U. next, America third still, even with Biden. A lot of this has to do with us being the world’s biggest oil and gas producer.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
David Roberts: It’s a little awkward situation to be in, you know.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
David Roberts: It’s remarkable that we’re moving as fast as we are given that. But I will say the importance of a second Biden term is just there are lots of things that have been put in motion this term that will not reach full flower. Like most of the money in IRA hasn’t gone out. Most of the rules are not in place. Most of the stuff is still nascent.
Four more years to really get this stuff put in place, get these trends going in a way that they can’t be reversed is incredibly important. Even if Biden doesn’t do anything additional in the next four years, just having Dems in place to let what we’ve already done —
Chris Hayes: Right.
David Roberts: — flower is hugely important.
Chris Hayes: David Roberts has been covering climate for decades now. He’s the founder of the Volts Newsletter and the “Volts” podcast, and you should check them out. David, always a pleasure. Thank you, man.
David Roberts: Thanks, Chris.
Chris Hayes: Once again, great. Thanks to the great David Roberts, founder of the Volts Newsletter and podcast, which you should definitely check out. You can e-mail us as always at withpod@gmail.com. We truly do love to read your e-mails. Send them along. Get in touch with us using #WITHpod. Follow us on TikTok searching for #WITHpod. I am on Threads, X and Bluesky all @chrislhayes.
“Why Is This Happening?” is presented by MSNBC and NBC News, produced by Doni Holloway and Brendan O’Melia, engineered by Bob Mallory and featuring music by Eddie Cooper. Aisha Turner is the executive producer of MSNBC Audio. You can see more of our work, including links to things we mentioned here by going to nbcnews.com/whyisthishappening.
“Why Is This Happening?” is presented by MSNBC and NBC News, produced by Doni Holloway and Brendan O’Melia, engineered by Bob Mallory and featuring music by Eddie Cooper. Aisha Turner is the executive producer of MSNBC Audio. You can see more of our work, including links to things we mentioned here by going to NBCNews.com/whyisthishappening?