‘Leadership Matters’: Why the Climate Stakes of 2024 Couldn’t Be Higher

There are few contrasts more striking between Donald Trump and Joe Biden than on addressing climate change. 

As president, Biden has made confronting the threat of rising greenhouse emissions and global temperatures a central project of his administration. In 2022, Biden secured passage of the historic Inflation Reduction Act, which invests hundreds of billions in building a green manufacturing base in America while also offering cash incentives for Americans to buy electric cars and make energy upgrades in their homes.

Trump — who squandered American leadership on climate during his four years in Washington, including by pulling out of the Paris climate accord — is campaigning again as a champion of the fossil fuel industry, claiming that his ambition to be a dictator “for a day” is driven by a desire to get America “drilling, drilling, drilling.” Trump has reportedly sought $1 billion in 2024 campaign support from the fossil fuel industry, promising to greenlight new oil and gas leases; hit the brakes on federal incentives for electric cars; and combat green power, telling oil executives he gathered at his resort in Mar-a-Lago: “I hate wind.”

Ali Zaidi is the National Climate Advisor in the Joe Biden White House. Rolling Stone recently spoke to Zaidi about the significant progress that’s been made in combating climate change in the first three-plus years of the administration — and why the 2024 election represents a consequential “inflection point” in the ability of the nation to rise to the scientific imperative, and the economic opportunity, of curbing global emissions.

Take folks back for a second. What did Biden inherit on the climate front when he took over from Trump in 2021?

The previous administration had left the Paris Climate Agreement. And not just exited the chat from a global dialogue, but ceded American leadership on an issue critical to national and economic security. They had executed almost 200 regulatory rollbacks and reversals. That means U-turns on reducing emissions from tailpipes, U-turns on reducing emissions from smokestacks. We had agencies that were hollowed out. The EPA had lost hundreds of staff and had literally stopped collecting data on things like methane pollution.

The result on the private-sector side was leaving the U.S. with curtailed capacity to produce any of the solutions that climate change demands. Take battery technology — which had been invented in our labs, the Nobel Prize going to a professor here in the United States. We were producing next to none of that here in the United States. On solar, fully ceding, again, a technology pioneered in our labs; our capability to produce that was very curtailed. You see that story again, and again — stuff pioneered in America being manufactured somewhere else, and propelling somebody else’s economy, while hollowing out America’s capability to source the solutions, or to take advantage of the economic upside. 

That’s what the President walked into: diminished standing in the world. Diminished competitiveness and economic capacity on the private sector side. And a hollowed-out federal capability to be able to mount the response.

The Biden administration has since passed the Inflation Reduction Act — a massive, close to $400 billion investment in green technology and emissions reductions. But polls show the legislation is poorly understood. What has the IRA put in place that Americans who care about combating climate change can hang their hats on?

The most visible transformation is what’s happening in our economy right now. And that is to source those solar panels and those batteries and those wind turbines here in America. You look at places like Weirton, West Virginia, where there used to be a steel factory. Now it’s been reopened to make batteries that help the grid more effectively harness power from the sun in the wind. Or in Dalton, Georgia, which used to be the sofa factory capital of the world. Those factories went away, but Dalton is now manufacturing solar panels and supplying them all across the country

Another big block is an investment in agriculture: 80,000 farms — 75 million acres of agriculture — have signed up to get an incentive to grab the carbon out of the sky and put it into the soil: with cover cropping, low-till agriculture, precision agriculture. 75 million acres. No joke.

The change in the transportation sector is nothing short of transformational. Since the president’s taken office, we’ve almost doubled the number of charging stations that line our roads and highways — now approaching nearly 200,000. We quadrupled the deployment of electric vehicles last year, easily reaching beyond a million EVs sold. This year, it’s projected at 1.5 million.

The IRA’s electric vehicle credits are very concrete — actual money in people’s pockets to buy these cars.

Joe Biden, knowing how the real economy works, knew that we needed to put cash on the hood of the car. So we now have over 11,000 dealerships around the country who have opted in to the Treasury Department’s program so that when you go to the dealership, and you buy this American made vehicle, you will get that $7,500 [for a new car] or the $4,000 [for a used vehicle] right off the top. 

You go to a place like Colorado, you can buy a new Chevy Bolt for $15,000 when you take the federal credit, and add on the credit that the local electric utility is putting forward and a state credit. That’s a game changer for middle- and lower- income Americans to be able to get from point A to point B without being forced to go to the pump.

Where else can consumers see the IRA in action?

We’re capitalizing the first-ever national network of green banks to finance the home improvements that folks can make that save them tons of money. So if you’re used to going to a community bank, or a credit union, we’re helping capitalize those entities to give folks loans, essentially at zero interest, to install more efficient windows or to go from a clunky HVAC unit to a heat pump. That’s below the radar. But it’s a really big deal.

Tell me about the Civilian Climate Corps — which seems like an interesting opportunity for young people to engage on the issue and get job training.

We’ll have 20,000 in the first class, with boots on the ground this summer and fall. So no background necessary, no experience necessary — in jobs, like solar installer roles in Philadelphia, the entry point that then ladders them into, hopefully, a career with the IBEW installing those panels, and having a middle class job. Roles like learning how to use LIDAR that allows you to see methane leaks in the Southwest; they’re recruiting to help people become part of the workforce that chases after super polluters. Or roles like mangrove restoration in Puerto Rico, bolstering our resilience to sea level rise. Or signing up with the corps to fight wildfire risk in Colorado, learning how to better manage the forest and maybe graduating into a role with the Forest Service itself.

Where does the administration’s progress put us on Biden’s target of cutting America’s peak climate emissions in half by 2030?

We’re now on a trajectory of north of 40 percent, some estimates at 45 to 47. Which means we’ve got a little bit of a gap to go relative to the incredibly ambitious goal the president set. But we will absolutely achieve it.

Does that success depend on a second term?

The pace of our decarbonisation and our ability to lead the clean energy future as the United States of America — that is in an incredibly fragile inflection point. The only way we do that is if we sustain policy focus. We’ve gone head-to-head with House MAGA Republicans on this topic for the last year. And their prescription is to rollback the Inflation Reduction Act, to claw back money from the infrastructure law, to hamper our regulatory agencies from taking action to reduce pollution and improve competitiveness. If we were to go down that path, versus the one that the president continues to drive us on, the delta on emissions is not marginal — it’s the size of the emissions from Europe and Japan. That’s the external analysis. 

So leadership matters. And how we come out on the other side will depend on the choices we make as a country.