Robinson Meyer

Let's talk about some specific industries. I want to go back to this question in the context of the Trump administration, but for now, let's talk about some specific challenges we're facing in decarbonization. So more than half of LPO's deals since 2021 have gone toward EV or battery companies.

And just last month, you announced a conditional loan to Rivian to build their giant mega factory in Georgia. What's the state of the EV market in America broadly?

The EV supply chain is so different from the conventional internal combustion vehicle supply chain, and I think LPO has invested in nearly every part of it. So can you talk me through just the different parts of that supply chain? The battery section, the car, the charging network, where do we stand on each of those sections?

There was a Bloomberg report earlier this month that China has gotten its EV battery costs below $100 per kilowatt hour. And that in climate tech and in the clean energy world, we've been talking about this $100 per kilowatt hour benchmark for a long time as the place where EVs and electric vehicles will out-compete internal combustion cars on price.

Like, this is the mythical benchmark that we need to hit. It seems that China has now hit that mark. And if you look at their EV adoption figures... Nearly half, more than half of vehicles sold every month now are either plug-in hybrids or battery electric vehicles. Under Biden, the administration has made a lot of efforts to onshore the supply chain.

But how are we going to compete with the Chinese EV manufacturing complex that seems to have achieved all these cost reductions that we're not close to yet?

What would happen to the investments that the Biden administration has made in battery chemistry and battery manufacturing and EVs themselves, like the big Rivian project in Georgia, if some of these policy supports, either on the manufacturing side or on the consumer side, the $7,500 EV tax credit were to drop out?

Something that the Biden administration and the Trump administration seem to completely agree on is that what we absolutely should not do is import a lot of cheap Chinese EVs, which, by the way, would reduce oil demand, would help our decarbonization goals. Why should the U.S. not do that?

In some ways, that feels like the most classic I think throughout this conversation, you've rejected that some of these tradeoffs exist, but this seems like the most classic tradeoff that there is, right? In your argument, we should be favoring domestic deployment of these technologies over the emissions reductions of them, especially if they're coming from China.

It just seems like you're taking a real hard stand on this particular tradeoff.

One of the big stories of the past few years in the American energy economy writ large is that Americans and the economy broadly is using more electricity again. That is often talked about as a phenomenon of AI, that it is purely a result of AI. What do you think is driving that rise in electricity demand and how big a deal is it for clean energy?

So as Americans have used more and more electricity, suddenly electricity prices have gone up. Companies think they're going to go up further. Microsoft and Constellation are reopening the Three Mile Island nuclear plant to meet the demands, in their case, specifically of the AI industry. How is nuclear doing in America right now and how do you see AI playing into it?

Do you see the politics around nuclear changing right now? I think historically, this is something that Democrats have been more skeptical of and Republicans have been an enthusiastic support of. This year, that changed somewhat. You saw a lot of battleground Senate candidates from the Democratic Party supporting nuclear enthusiastically.

And it's actually from folks like RFK Jr., who are now the bigger skeptics of nuclear issues. Do you see there being a broad shift in how people are thinking about the politics of nuclear energy on the grid in the United States?

Trump is going to take office next year, and he's indicated, and Project 2025 indicates they want to undo a lot of Biden's policies around decarbonization and clean energy. What do you think is going to happen to LPO and to this current set of projects?

Is that what you hear from the entrepreneurs and business leaders that you talk to? How are they feeling about the Trump administration?

There's another scenario in the future Trump administration, which is that Vivek Ramaswamy, the seeming co-lead for the incoming Department of Government Efficiency, to the degree that such department will actually exist, has been really critical of LPO and has said that some of the money going out the door should be clawed back. Can they do that? And what do you make of that?

I guess I agree with the Americans love bragging about this, but I'm not sure that their love of doing big things comes through the political system. For instance, Biden has tried to do a lot of big things and Biden's party just lost the presidential election. And you really think that the presidential election was all about energy?

I don't think it was all about energy, but I don't think it was about this stuff at all. I think Biden made a pitch to voters that he was going to bring back a certain type of American dynamism. We saw a lot of that in the economy, and then it wound up not mattering.

It seems to me these trade-offs are pretty important, and it also seems to me that the way that political parties are set up right now, the set of incentives that they're acting under, are we really set up as a country to be able to do the big things that we want, and are we going to be able to get there?