Is Decarbonization Dead?
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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For a long time in climate politics. The question has been What path do we need to be on? To avert absolute catastrophi. And are we on it, or do we have any chance of being on it? And the big win here in the past couple of years in America was the Inflation Reduction Act. $370 billion of the largest renewable energy investment ever, to build the infrastructure of decarbonization, to build solar panels, wind turbines, electric vehicles, and so much more. Was it as much as climate advocates hoped? No. Was it more than we've ever done before? Yeah, by a lot. Was it working to pull investment forward? Yet absolutely was. And now it's been gutted in the big beautiful bill. Президен Трам вon the election.
And he has slashed into the wind credits, the solar credits, the EV credits. To the winner go the spoils. So what path are we on now? And what does climate politics need to learn from this loss? Are we just sort of courting catastrophe? Or do we actually still have a shot? Trying to help me answer these questions, I want to have on two people who were involved, not just in the Inflation Reduction Act, not just in the lobbying effort against the big beautiful bill, but who are doing really important work on both the modeling and the politics side to try to figure out where the climate movement goes from here. Jesse Jenkins is a professor at Princeton. He leads the Zero Lab on campus. And with his teams, he's been one of the leading climate modelers.
Trying to figure out how much these policies will actually do. Jane Flagle is the executive director of the Blue Horizons Foundation, and she was a member of the Biden administration's climate policy team. As always, my email as recline show at nytimes dot com.
Jane Flagle, Jesse Jenkins, welcome to the show. Thanks. It's good to be back.
Thanks for having us.
So, Jane, you worked on the Inflation Reduction Acts, clean energy investments, incentives as part of the Biden administration.
What is the Inflation Reduction Act and why was it called the “big beautiful bill”?
So I I think the place to begin is what were the most important parts of that bill from your perspective?
Yeah. So as far as climate is concerned, I think there are two broad buckets of interventions that the Inflation Reduction Act made. One was the tax policy of that bill. There was a technology neutral clean electricity tax credit, both for production and investment in clean energy technologies, that was extended basically into perpetuity, like until well, for for a long time. But what was Unique about that was historically we had had these sort of fits and starts of very short-term tax credit incentives for solar and wind that kept expiring and then coming back up for renewal, and we'd have a legislative fight of should they be extended or not, which is that kind of uncertainty is not an environment in which private capital can make smart decisions about investing in energy technologies.
So the IRA really rationalized the clean energy. Energy tax credit scheme by making it technology neutral. So it's not just solar and wind. It's any zero emissions technology from solar to wind to geothermal to nuclear, could qualify. There was also tax subsidies for purchase of electric vehicles, which accounted for a very significant chunk of emissions reductions for advanced manufacturing. So building factories in the United States states to build the component parts that make up these clean energy technologies. Technologies, so a series of subsidies essentially for investment and production in clean energy technologies.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–3:16
2
What is the Inflation Reduction Act and why was it called the “big beautiful bill”?
3:16–6:30
3
How did the Inflation Reduction Act’s tax credits and grant programs aim to boost clean energy?
6:30–10:31
4
What did the modeling show about the U.S. emissions trajectory before and after the “big beautiful bill”?
10:31–14:16
5
How did the Trump administration’s “big beautiful bill” roll back solar, wind, and EV incentives?
14:16–25:01
6
What are the projected impacts of the bill on electricity rates and household energy bills?
25:01–35:07
7
How is AI‑driven electricity demand reshaping the U.S. power‑grid planning challenge?
35:07–58:25
8
Why is affordability becoming the next big battleground for climate politics?
58:25–1:19:00