Andrew Revkin

We, I don't like the word we.

I use it too much.

We all do.

We society, we government, yeah.

There has to be some thought and attention put to where you put these incentives so that you get the best use of this technology for the carbon benefit, for the conventional sooty pollution benefit, for the transportation benefit.

Well, models, we could spend a whole day on models.

There are economic models.

There's this thing called optimization models.

There were two big ones used to assess the U.S.

plan, this new big IRA, inflation reduction package.

And they're fine.

They're a starting point for understanding

what's possible, but as this gets to the journalism part or the public part, you have to look at the caveats.

You have to look at what model, economists expressly exclude things that are not modelable.

And if you look in the fine print on the repeat project, the Princeton version of the assessment of the recent giant legislation, the fine print is the front page.

for me, as a deep diving journalist, because it says we didn't include any sources of friction, meaning resistance to putting new transmission lines through your community, or people who don't want mining in America, because we've exported all of our mining.

We mine our cobalt in Congo, and trying to get a new mine in Nevada,

was a fraught fight that took more than 10 years for lithium.

So if you're excluding those elements from your model, which on the surface makes this $370 billion package have an emissions reduction trajectory, that's really pretty good.

And you're not saying in your first line, by the way, these are the things we're not considering.