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The second is if we continue to treat more and more people in the transformation. We have over 100,000 farmers and ranchers who are now using climate smart farming practices. Will this climate action, that distributed climate action, continue to expand?
The last thing is how good we are at building the things we need to build. The steel in the ground. One of the things that we have tried to develop as a discipline is really a professionalization in the development of social licenses around these new technologies to be able to scale. Can we build at the speed we need, ensuring that when a tower goes up, the community feels like they built the barn together, not like they were shortchanged?
We talked about economic and industrial leadership, but political leadership is also important. Trump has signaled that he will withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement, for the second time in five years. Won’t it be much more difficult to hit that trajectory you just described?
Does this action mean the end of US climate leadership or does it set us back on the progress we need to make? No. But it carries with it symbolism and probably a lot of implications of the second order.
Since the beginning of this administration we have had a climate headquarters in the West Wing. A new team. Gina McCarthy led, now I have. We have senior directors in my team who focus on every sector of the economy, with backgrounds in science, business, engineering, politics.
What happens when you don’t have that level of focus at the highest level with the substantial commitment of very talented people leading it? What happens when the United States shows up at multilateral or bilateral talks and does not prioritize setting the rules of the road for the clean energy economy?
I think what’s happening is that the United States is marginalizing American workers in the race for clean energy jobs, and diminishing our influence in the world. Not only will the climate not pause in the next four years, our competitors will not slow down – to take the lead on clean energy technologies, but also for global influence.
Four years is not a long time. You must have entered this thought at a second term. Do you think about the things you want to do, but can’t?
The big things are, number one, the sectors where we haven’t reached escape velocity. We must continue to push for the good of our economy. It is unfinished business that must be carried forward by state and local governments, by the private sector, and hopefully by the federal government.
The second thing is to make sure that we invest enough in the talent and the workforce. We have a bad habit in this country of skimming talent from the top and not investing in the institutions that draw more people into the workforce. The unions are at the front; Biden has spent a lot of time on increasing apprenticeships.
