Even Trump can’t stop America’s green transition, says Biden’s top climate adviser
The second question is whether we continue to involve more and more people in the transformation. We have over 100,000 farmers and ranchers now adopting climate-smart agricultural practices. Will this climate protection, this distributed climate protection, continue to increase?
The final point is how good we are at building the things we need to build. The steel in the ground. One of the things we have tried to develop as a discipline is to professionalize the development of social freedoms around these new technologies so that they are scalable. Can we build at the speed we need by ensuring that when the community builds a tower, it feels like they built the barn together, rather than like they fell short?
We’ve talked about economic and industrial leadership, but political leadership is also really important. Trump has signaled he will withdraw the US from the Paris Agreement for the second time in five years. Doesn’t that make it much more difficult to take the path you just described?
Does this one action spell the end of U.S. climate leadership or does it sideline us from the progress we need to make? No. But it brings with it symbolism and probably a lot of second-order implications.
Since the beginning of this government, we have had a climate control center in the West Wing. A new team. Gina McCarthy led it, now it’s me. We have senior directors on my team who focus on all sectors of the economy and have backgrounds in science, business, technology and policy.
What happens if you don’t have that focus at the highest levels and drive it forward with the significant commitment of very talented people? What happens when the United States appears in multilateral forums or bilateral discussions and does not prioritize setting the rules of the road for a clean energy economy?
I think what’s happening is that the U.S. is sidelining American workers in the race for clean energy jobs and we’re diminishing our influence globally. Not only will the climate not pause for the next four years, our competitors won’t slow down either – to take advantage in clean energy technologies, but also to gain global influence.
Four years isn’t a lot of time. You must have been thinking about a second term. Think about the things you wanted to do but can’t?
The big things are, firstly, the sectors where we have not yet reached escape velocity. We have to keep pushing for the sake of our economy. This is unfinished business that needs to be moved forward by state and local governments, the private sector and hopefully the federal government.
Second, we need to ensure we invest adequately in talent and workforce. We have a bad habit in this country of skimming talent from the top and not investing in the institutions that attract more people into the workforce. The unions are at the forefront of this; Biden invested a lot of time in training development.