Even Trump Can’t Stop America’s Green Transition, Says Biden’s Top Climate Adviser

The second is whether we’re continuing to deal more and more people into the transformation. We’ve got over 100,000 farmers and ranchers that are now taking on climate-smart agricultural practices. Will that climate action, that distributed climate action, continue to expand?

The last thing is how good are we at building the stuff we need to build. The steel in the ground. One of the things we’ve been trying to develop as a discipline is really a professionalization in the development of social license around these new technologies so they can scale. Can we build at the speed we need to by making sure that when a tower goes up, the community feels like they built the barn together, not like they were shortchanged?

We’ve talked about economic and industrial leadership, but political leadership really matters too. Trump has signaled he will withdraw the US from the Paris Agreement, for the second time in five years. Won’t that make it much harder to hit that trajectory you were just describing?

Does that one action spell the end of US climate leadership or sideline us in the progress we need to make? No. But it carries with it symbolism and probably a lot of second-order implications.

Since the beginning of this administration we have had in the West Wing a climate headquarters. A new team. Gina McCarthy led it, now I do. We’ve got senior directors on my team that focus on every sector of the economy, with backgrounds in science, business, engineering, policy.

What happens when you don’t have that level of focus at the highest level with the substantial commitment of very talented people driving it? What happens when the US shows up to multilateral fora or bilateral conversations and does not prioritize setting the rules of the road for the clean energy economy?

I think what happens is the US sidelines American workers in the race for clean energy jobs, and we diminish our influence globally. Not only is the climate not going to be on pause over the next four years, our competitors are not slowing down—to seize the advantage on clean energy technologies, but also for global influence.

Four years is not a lot of time. You must have come into this thinking about a second term. Are you thinking about the things you wanted to get done but can’t?

The big things are, number one, the sectors where we haven’t reached escape velocity. We’ve got to keep pushing for the sake of our economy. That’s unfinished business that needs to be carried forward by state and local governments, by the private sector, and hopefully by the federal government.

The second thing is making sure we are investing enough in talent and the workforce. We have a bad habit in this country of skimming talent off the top and not investing in the institutions that pull more people into the workforce. Unions are at the front of that; Biden spent a lot of time on apprenticeship growth.