A New Era of Energy Politics

This is Bright Ideas, a weekly newsletter about how clean energy is taking on the world and winning. I’m Julian Spector—I live in L.A. and report on clean energy news for Greentech Media. I write this newsletter for fun. What do you do on Monday nights?

If this is your first time here, please subscribe to keep in touch. If you have questions or comments, I’d love to hear them. Reply to the email, or send your thoughts to brightideas@substack.com. My goal is to shed some light on the surprisingly rapid uptake of clean energy; I want to hear what works or doesn’t about how I tell the story.

Once Joe Biden clinched the Democratic presidential primary, he did something new and inventive: give his most successful vanquished primary competitor a say in his policy platform.

The Biden-Sanders “Unity Task Force” pulled together major surrogates from both campaigns to hash out agreements on all the leading issues, including climate change. The results came out last week, and they offer the most aggressive climate policy of any general election candidacy so far (see my reporting on it here).

Progressives on the task force, like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Sunrise Movement co-founder Varshini Prakash, pulled the Biden folks in a more ambitious direction on several key points.

Biden campaigned on clean energy by 2050, but the task force bumped that deadline to 2035—a deadline that, we saw previously on Bright Ideas, is far more achievable than most people realize.

This week, I’ll break down the most significant elements of the unity task force climate plan, and call out a few missing items.

From technocratic to populist

Previously, when Democrats took a shot at federal climate policy, it was wonky, complicated stuff.

The Waxman-Markey cap and trade bill would have limited carbon emissions so polluters could trade them, plus a bunch of other measures, but the bill failed to clear the Senate. Later, when Congress flipped and legislative action became untenable, the Obama White House created the Clean Power Plan, a dense EPA regulatory tome that would have gradually forced coal plants to retire. 

Taxing carbon, hailed as a panacea in certain circles, has a similarly technocratic bent: by incrementally increasing the price of emissions-heavy goods and services, it should nudge consumers toward cleaner choices, and pay them back in a dividend. But that still puts the onus on everyone to make choices when the bulk of emissions are supplied by companies that profit from them. 

These policies all work at a conceptual level, but not at a visceral one. They’re not the kind of climate policy you’d want to grab a beer with. It’s hard for most people to imagine where they fit into the picture.

Campaign energy platforms only really matter if the campaign wins. To that end, the task force tells a story of how clean energy is good for The People. It’s an economic recovery strategy from this coronavirus mess. It’s a long-overdue antidote to racial inequities in pollution and the cost of energy. It’s a vehicle for resuscitating American manufacturing, as well as organized labor.

The implicit argument here is that good climate policy can be good politics. The explicit argument is that there’s something here for all kinds of people. It’s not just for economists any more:

“The clean energy economy must represent the diversity of America.”

Set goals, push hard

The task force’s style is to set goals that are a little more ambitious than people expect, and layer in supporting policies to help get there.

It’s a necessary one-two punch, because business as usual will not suffice.

For instance, they want to see 8 million rooftops go solar in five years. We currently have a bit over 2 million, and we’re currently on track to hit 4.6 million solar rooftops in 2025, the solar analysts tell me. Closing that gap requires additional help to streamline the process.

That logic reminds me of the Berkeley study I wrote about a few weeks back: it found that transitioning to 90 percent clean electricity by 2035 was feasible and actually more economical than today’s system. But the researchers also noted that barriers to competition and unpriced externalities mean things won’t get there on their own, even if “The Market” theoretically should push things in a cleaner and cheaper direction.

Setting goals is necessary, but not sufficient. Pushing the full weight of the federal government behind the goals opens up a whole new realm of possibilities.

VP Joe Biden visits a rooftop solar installation in Denver with President Barack Obama in 2009. (Photo credit: Obama White House)

What’s missing?

There’s plenty more in the platform to chew on. And Biden is scheduled to give a speech today about how he sees the clean energy platform as a means to reviving the overall economy from its current predicament. Bloomberg reported Monday night that he will adopt the “100 percent clean power by 2035” target.

In doing so, Biden could go beyond what the unity task force wrote and tell the American people where clean energy is today. The task force mentions “proven clean energy solutions,” and generally talks about this stuff as if it’s not crazy to think we could build a lot more of it. But why not give a full-throated account of the surging role of renewables in the U.S.?

Back in January, wind and solar were on track to supply 75 percent of new power plant capacity built this year. And while the coronavirus disruption has tanked some of the biggest and supposedly most successful fracking companies, and evaporated billions of dollars of assets from the big oil companies, clean energy companies have closed some of their biggest deals ever and generally plowed ahead unscathed.

Similarly, instead of just promising to switch the country to zero-emission school buses, Biden could explain that school buses are a fantastic candidate for switching to electric, because they have fixed routes that a battery can handle, and they sit idle for much of the day, which is great for recharging, and lifetime costs to own them can already be cheaper than diesel buses. When not poisoning your children costs less, why wouldn’t you choose it?

And let’s not forget that clean energy attracts a broad coalition in the field. Republican states are beating Democratic states in building the stuff, after all.

Biden has a bright new vision for the future. Understanding how far clean energy has already come makes that future all the more credible.

The Energy Stream, AKA stuff I’m doing in quarantine

If you liked the Terraforming Mars suggestion from a few weeks ago, check out Total Recall, which is back on Netflix.

It’s about a muscular, Austrian-accented guy who dreams of passing sweeping climate legislation in the Great State of California—oh wait, that’s real life! No, Total Recall features Arnold Schwarzenegger before all that, playing a construction worker who’s just tired of being married to Sharon Stone and wishes he could ship off to the arid, asphyxiating expanse of Mars instead. Just a totally relatable guy, right?

A virtual vacation doesn’t go quite as planned (choppy Zoom connection, maybe?) and pretty soon Arnold is running from agents with guns and getting embroiled in the autocratic social structures that emerge from the Martian resource extraction economy. As long as Earth keeps getting those good good minerals, it overlooks the colony’s human rights abuses. In a science fiction flourish that no longer feels far fetched, the leader of the operation rations air as a means of social control. 

Escape from your quarantine with this blast from 1990, when big budget blockbusters could still make you think.