This is an edited transcript of an episode of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the conversation by following or subscribing to the show on the NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.

Ezra Klein: Hey, it is Ezra. So I’m taking a bit of time off this month, and we’re going to have a few friends of the show on to host guest episodes. Today’s host is Robinson Meyer. Rob is a contributing writer for New York Times Opinion and the founding executive editor of Heatmap News, which is the go-to source for reporting on the decarbonization rollout.

I’ll let him take it from here.

Robinson Meyer: Two years ago, President Joe Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act, the biggest climate law in U.S. history. Its goal was to revitalize manufacturing jobs and make U.S. industry competitive with China. And by one measure, there’s been nearly half a trillion dollars in investment in green energy and manufacturing since the law was passed.

But then Democrats lost the election, and the future of decarbonization is far more uncertain. So where does the clean energy industry go from here?

Jigar Shah is one of the best people positioned to answer that question. He spent years working in the private sector leading companies that invented new ways of financing green infrastructure.

And he’s now the director of the Loan Programs Office at the Department of Energy. You’re going to be hearing a lot about the Loan Programs Office, or L.P.O., in this episode. The L.P.O. is supposed to help fund renewable energy projects that private-sector lenders find too risky or meager to invest in. Its experts are supposed to identify promising new clean tech and turn it into something that can scale up — something you can actually buy and use every day. And because of the Inflation Reduction Act, its lending authority grew from 40 billion a few years ago to over 400 billion today.