Robinson Meyer

From New York Times Opinion, this is the Ezra Klein Show.

Two years ago, Joe Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act, the biggest climate law in U.S. history. Its goal was to revitalize manufacturing jobs and make U.S. industry competitive with China. And by one measure, there's been nearly half a trillion dollars in investment in green energy and manufacturing since the law was passed.

But then Democrats lost the election, and the future of decarbonization is far more uncertain. So where does the clean energy industry go from here? Jigar Shah is one of the best people positioned to answer that question. He spent years working in the private sector, leading companies that invented new ways of financing green infrastructure.

And he's now the director of the Loan Programs Office at the Department of Energy. You're going to be hearing a lot about the Loan Programs Office, or LPO, in this episode. The LPO is supposed to help fund renewable energy projects that private sector lenders find too risky or meager to invest in.

Its experts are supposed to identify promising new clean tech and turn it into something that can scale up, something you can actually buy and use every day. And because of the Inflation Reduction Act, its lending authority grew from $40 billion a few years ago to over $400 billion today.

Ezra has talked a lot on this show about what it takes for the government to help America build abundance, to build new power plants, new power lines, new housing. And I think the Biden administration got closest to that aspiration through the team Jigar Shah leads. So I wanted to talk to Jigar about what lessons he's learned from the Biden administration's economic experiment. What worked?

What are the trade-offs the LPO made? How does Jigar think about turning policy into products? And since this experiment is not over, where does clean energy go in a second Trump era? As always, you can email the show at EzraKleinShow at NYTimes.com. Jigar Shah, welcome to the show. Oh my goodness. It's so great to be here. So I want to start here.

Before we get into policy, Donald Trump has won the election. How screwed is the clean energy industry?

I think that gets at one of these core tensions in the Biden administration policy. So when people hear about what the Biden administration has tried to do around clean energy deployment, clean technology deployment, there's an assumption that it's part of their climate and environmental goals, which it is. But you often, as you just did, frame things differently.

So what do you see as the main drivers of decarbonization or of clean energy deployment?

How large a role do you think climate and the global effort to bring down greenhouse gas emissions plays in to the ongoing global deployment of these clean technologies? Like, are the clean technologies going to deploy kind of anyway because they're superior, as you were saying?

Or is this something where people want to solve climate change and they want to develop and so they're going to uptake these green technologies?

I want to follow like three different threads there, but I think at this point, let's introduce people to what your job is. So you run the loan programs office at the Department of Energy. What does that office do?

The IRA expanded LPO's authority by 10 times from, I think, $40 billion before the IRA passed to now more than $400 billion. How has that changed the way you do your job? And also, how does LPO fit into the Biden administration's decarbonization policy writ large?

What kind of companies are applying for loans from LPL? You mentioned that car companies have these giant factories that will eventually be profitable, but it takes a very long time for them to turn a profit. I think lots of manufacturing companies find themselves in that position.

But like what other companies, what other kinds of startups or long lasting industrial companies are applying to you for loans?

You can talk about who has been approved for loans or who's gotten a conditional, yeah.

And so that's mines and like industrial mineral refining facilities, in other words. Totally.

Can you just lay out where you see LPO fitting into the bigger scheme of things in terms of the politics of Biden's agenda and where that intersects with private industry?

Can we get more specific with this? Like, what can LPO do that others in the industry or others in the private sector cannot?