Will Trump Dismantle Biden’s Clean Energy Initiatives?

U.S. President-elect Donald Trump has made clear that he will favor the oil and gas industry and “terminate the Green New Deal”—a reference to the strangely named Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which the Biden administration designed to spur investments in clean energy. But will it be easier said than done?

On this week’s FP Live, I spoke with John Podesta, President Joe Biden’s senior advisor for international climate policy. Podesta is also a former White House chief of staff, under President Bill Clinton. Subscribers can watch the full interview on the video box atop this page. What follows is a lightly edited and condensed transcript.

Ravi Agrawal: Trump is a climate skeptic. He likes to say “drill, baby, drill.” If he tries to undo the IRA, what happens to the advances your administration has made on prioritizing clean energy?

John Podesta: I think the investments being made in the United States are very firm. They’re happening all across the country: north, south, east, west. They were spurred on by the Inflation Reduction Act, which was the largest investment in climate change and clean energy not just in the history of the United States but in the history of the world. That’s resulted in announced investments of nearly $500 billion across the country. More than 330,000 jobs have been created already in these industries. I think trying to walk away from that would not only be a mistake from a climate change perspective but also economic policy. You’ve seen clean energy gain bipartisan support over the last couple of years as those industries have spread to investments in batteries and electric vehicles from Georgia to Tennessee to Ohio and Michigan. You’ve seen deployment of new renewable power all across the country, with solar power now being the largest amount of new generation being installed in the United States. We’ve seen the solar supply chain return to the United States. So, to say “forget it” and turn your back on that would be difficult to do because we’ve now seen a number of Republican members of Congress support keeping the Inflation Reduction Act and the businesses and innovations that it spurred. Getting the votes in a very narrowly divided Congress would be difficult to begin with.

There’s no question that President-elect Donald Trump has said climate change is a hoax. He doesn’t take the problem seriously. I think he’s an outlier in the world with respect to that. We’re feeling the effects of climate change-induced extreme weather all across the world. So, I think there are things that he will do that will either attempt to reverse or reverse policies that we put in place. But with respect to the basic investments that have been accelerated by the Inflation Reduction Act, I think those are here to stay.

RA: Beyond the current role you have, you are one of the Democratic Party’s premier strategists. I’m curious whether, in the implementation of the IRA, the Biden administration focused on so-called red states as areas in which to deploy a lot of the subsidies and the job creation you’re describing?

JP: One policy baked into the president’s formulation of the Inflation Reduction Act was investment in places that have been left out and left behind: traditional energy communities, places that supported coal-fired power in the past, the disadvantaged communities, etc. A lot of those investments were directed by a desire to give bonuses to places that felt abandoned in the modern economy. That wasn’t the political strategy—that was a strategy President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris undertook because they wanted to see the fruits of this energy transition and the power of investment going to places that needed the support. The manufacturing renaissance that we’ve seen going in the Midwest and the Mid-South is really just astonishing. It was conscious and strategic to really make sure that those investments were reaching people who powered our economy for decades. They needed a place in this new economy. And I think we’ve delivered on that.

RA: Let’s say we buy everything you just said. Could the case be made then that you and the Biden administration have formulated smart energy policies but failed to market it well enough?

JP: It takes a while after you pass the legislation for average citizens to feel the effects of it. And they did feel the effects of it. There are literally tens of thousands of people who are, for example, getting a $7,500 credit when they purchase an electric vehicle. That’s spurred new vehicle sales of both hybrids and fully electric vehicles. But it takes a while for the impact and the effect to be felt by citizens at the street level. We tried to do everything we could to make sure that people understood the benefits that were flowing to the United States from new economic activity, but I think it will have a long tail. People will feel the effects for years to come, not instantly. Other economic issues tended to overwhelm it. The effects of COVID and inflation were probably the dominant economic question on people’s minds. Even though inflation had come down substantially as a result of hard work by the administration and the Federal Reserve, people were still feeling the effect of high prices, and that’s tended to dominate the economic discussion. But if you look at the underlying data, there’s still very strong support for clean energy, for these clean energy policies, for deployment of renewables, and for the movement toward cleaner forms of transportation.

If an incoming administration wants to reverse policy, it will have quite a substantial challenge because I think people want cleaner air and water. They understand that climate change is happening, and they want the federal government to take action. I think the investments we’ve been making have been the envy of the world and have spurred other countries to get into the international side of this to take similar actions.

RA: I want to talk about the Paris climate accords. And I should point out the White House has been signaling that it will submit a new nationally determined contribution to the United Nations, as required under the Paris Agreement. There have been hopes that the Biden administration will signal much deeper cuts to future emissions. I understand that you and your team might have been waiting for the election results to make a formal submission. Why the delay now?

JP: We need to be realistic in terms of what we think we can accomplish. Not overpromise and underdeliver, but put forward what the president believes is an ambitious but realistic goal. If I could go back to 2021, when the president came into office, on the first day he signaled that he would rejoin the Paris Agreement and establish U.S. leadership in the climate space—he made a commitment in 2021 to reduce emissions in the United States by 50 to 52 percent, against a baseline of what our emissions were in 2005. That needs to be updated in accordance with the Paris regime by February, but we have the ability to do that now.

RA: When you travel around the world and you speak to counterparts in other countries, what credibility does the United States have, given that it has pulled out of the Paris climate accords once and it will likely pull out again in January?

JP: Even during the first Trump term, you saw cities, states, and the private sector step up to create the “We’re Still In” movement committed to reducing their own emissions. Particularly at that subnational level, you saw leadership coming from governors and mayors across the country. Just this morning [Dec. 18], the Environmental Protection Agency granted a waiver for California to proceed with its regulations. A number of other states followed to reduce emissions in their transportation sectors.

We’ve been working on this for a long time, led by our climate policy office at the White House, but working in an all-of-government fashion to decide what we could reasonably predict and produce if we were going to be ambitious. Even with four more years of Trump sitting in the Oval Office, the president wants to tell the world what the United States can still credibly do. As I’ve traveled around the world, I’ve told people that our direction is firm. Power that’s going to be produced in this country is going to be clean. The automakers are still going to invest in hybridization and electrification. There’s no turning back on this. The question is the pace.

I think that Trump’s election, as opposed to Vice President Harris, will definitely impact that. What we need to do is to be able to analyze and be credible about what can happen if you have an administration at the federal level that’s resistant to moving away from fossil fuels and toward clean energy. But he can’t simply reverse it. There is economic support for development, from cheaper solar energy to the development of offshore wind industry to even geothermal and nuclear power. I think people understand that and they understand that the United States is going to keep reducing its emissions, although the pace and scale are in question. But I think I was credibly able to reassure people that the United States would continue to decarbonize even in the face of an administration whose favorite slogan is “drill, baby, drill.”

RA: John, in much of this conversation, I have portrayed the Biden administration as progressive on clean energy. This is in part because we are looking ahead to a different administration. But there are many contradictions here. One, of course, is that over time, the United States has become the world’s biggest producer of oil and gas. But another big contradiction has been furthered by your administration. China has the world’s biggest market for electric vehicles. And unlike in the United States, there is also massive demand for these cars, partly because they’re cheaper and partly because their mid- and low-range cars are of high quality. If the Biden administration cares so much about unleashing market forces to accelerate green technology, why did the administration put tariffs on Chinese EVs? Why make it so much harder to go global and transform the market?

JP: The basic reality is that we have an economic security interest in ensuring that our industrial base remains strong. And that’s why the president’s industrial strategy has been to bring the full supply chain of industrial production in these new clean technologies back to the United States. He is also trying to counter China’s use of non-market practices to corner the market. They’ve done it by requiring technology transfer. They’ve done it by taking IP from individual companies. They’ve done it by subsidies on a size and scale that are unmatched around the world. They’ve done it by selling below market in order to undermine competition. And therefore, they have a very strong hold on the production and supply of critical minerals, of batteries, of offshore wind, and of solar.

As a result of the president’s focus on maintaining our own industrial capacity, we’ve seen a renaissance of manufacturing: $130 billion worth of investment in critical minerals, batteries, and EV production in the United States. This is not only from American companies but Korean manufacturers coming to the United States and Japanese manufacturers already manufacturing cars here doubling down on electric vehicle supply chains here. That’s producing jobs.

RA: But a lot of the criticisms you leveled, such as those about Chinese subsidies, were part of the Biden administration’s plan as well, through the IRA. And now, all of this domestic capacity and those local jobs you say it’s created are in jeopardy because the Biden administration is on its way out. Many climate activists would ask, if the climate crisis is so urgent and so global, why not let China apply its scale and power to solving the issue?

JP: Well, as Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has said many times, we cannot afford a second China shock. We can’t just cede industrial production to China across this whole range of technologies. And if we intend to maintain public support for clean energy policies, then this needs to be a worker-led transition. There’s strong support for that in communities that are feeling the effects of that change. And to abandon those communities to a market that itself has used unfair trade practices would be not only political malpractice, but I think it would weaken the economy overall in the long term.

What we need to do is to be able to create a mechanism to support innovation that the United States is best at producing, coupled with manufacturing prowess. For example, President Biden and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi signed an agreement on green supply chains when they met at the Quad earlier this fall. We signed an agreement with President William Ruto on green energy supply chains between the United States and Kenya to help create an industrial renaissance. We just signed an agreement with Brazil. Everyone has a stake in making sure that their own citizens are feeling the benefit of this massive opportunity in transitioning to a clean energy economy.

RA: One of the big debates in U.S.-China competition is how to isolate energy as an area for mutual cooperation. Given your focus in this area, what is your sense of how insulated that aspect of the partnership is from other tensions that exist and which may accelerate under the Trump administration?

JP: There’s no question that the relationship overall has more tension in it than when I had a similar role in the Obama administration, particularly in these matters of energy technology and trade. Nevertheless, the president has emphasized in his conversations with President Xi Jinping that we need to keep an open dialogue with respect to climate change.

John Kerry and I both spent a lot of time and effort engaging with China to get positive outcomes both in the bilateral track and in the multilateral track. I hosted my counterpart, Liu Zhenmin, in Washington this spring and went to Beijing in the fall. We co-hosted, along with Azerbaijan, a summit in Baku, Azerbaijan, this year on the non-carbon dioxide gases that account for half of global warming: methane, nitrous oxide, hydrofluorocarbons.

At every level, we also push China to be more ambitious. They’re now the largest emitter by far in the world. 30 percent of emissions are coming from China, which probably will be their peak. They’ve picked a target of trying to be net zero across all greenhouse gases by 2060 compared with our goal of 2050. But in order to be on track to that goal, they have to be showing real emissions reductions on the order of 30 percent by 2035. They need to be ambitious in upping their nationally determined commitment as well. The rest of the world is looking to them for that.

RA: John, you, of course, were White House chief of staff. You’ve run transitions. If you were to look at how the Trump transition team is doing so far, how would you rate their work?

JP: I commend Trump for appointing the first woman to be the White House chief of staff. That’s long overdue. Susie Wiles will be assembling a team. She has a reputation for being a strong manager. It will take a lot of strength to, I think, manage the president-elect.

But they’ve gone kind of slow in terms of getting into the agencies and signing the agreements to access the information necessary to run a professional transition. The president-elect was quick out of the gate in naming senior officials, but many of them are controversial in their own right. They’ve dispensed with vetting, so that’s proved to be something of a problem for them. You have a relatively unclear, or at least unconventional, pathway for a number of the cabinet positions going forward. Whether it will be successful or not, time will tell.

Back in 2016, the Trump team, under Gov. Chris Christie’s leadership, put together a more traditional, professionalized transition. And then on day two, he fired Christie and put Mike Pence in charge. So, maybe by those standards, this is a well-oiled machine.