Who should lead Biden’s climate response?

Good morning friends, and welcome back to Bright Ideas, a weekly newsletter about clean energy. I’m your host, journalist Julian Spector, flush with victory in my effort to grill a turkey in the L.A. sunshine. Crispy, spice-rubbed skin, moist breast meat, and I got to spend the cooking time outside.

I also wanted to flag my latest Thanksgiving clean energy etiquette guide, which posted Wednesday at Greentech Media. This year’s installment dealt with the particular awkwardness of communicating when you’re not supposed to actually see your friends and loved ones. Let me know if you find it helpful.

After grilled turkey, there’s really no other way to do it.

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This week’s entry in my ongoing energy debate series reflects an argument unfolding in real time: what kind of experience is helpful or disqualifying for President-elect Joe Biden’s choices of clean energy and climate leaders. Biden assembled the most ambitious climate platform of any general election presidential contender. But now that he’s getting down to business and picking his team, a lot of familiar faces from the Obama years have emerged, and climate activists have started throwing red flags.

I’d recommend this piece from NPR on the rift over Ernie Moniz, who served as Energy Secretary for Obama’s second term and is well respected in clean energy circles. He lately drew criticism because of his advisory ties to companies that deal in fossil fuels.

Also check out Monday’s issue of climate newsletter Heated, in which author Emily Atkin rebuts an argument from Matthew Yglesias over whether the youth-led Sunrise Movement is hurting the climate cause by protesting Biden picks they find unacceptable.

Sunrise NYC @sunrisemvmtnyc

Join us, New York Communities for Change, and others! Some of the worst merchants of planetary destruction are in our backyard. It's our job to ensure they're kept way out of the Biden Administration. See you there!

Sunrise called for protest against Brian Deese, who went from advising Obama to leading sustainable investment at investment leviathan BlackRock. That callout prompted a rare split with environmental activist Bill McKibben, who wrote a lengthy Twitter thread praising Deese as someone who successfully works from within institutions to make them better on climate change.

Bill McKibben @billmckibben

So, every once in a while by pure chance, one knows something about something in the news. Today that's me--it's about a guy named Brian Deese who is up for an econ job in the Biden administration. But it's a longish story.

With that context in mind, here is my imagined point/counterpoint debate on who should run Biden’s climate response. And stay tuned after for a streaming recommendation that sends you back to the shambolic world of ‘90s independent filmmaking.

No ties to fossil fuels!

After four years of federal backsliding on climate change, it’s time to move as fast as possible to steer our economy away from planet-warming emissions. Given the enormity and seriousness of this task, it should be obvious that now is not the time to pick leaders who are literally on the payroll of fossil fuel interests.

Good people can work for fossil fuel companies; people need to feed their families. The question at hand is whether people who choose to take a paycheck from corporations with a vested interest in burning fossil fuels should then be given control of the Biden administration’s response to the crisis caused by burning those fuels. (There’s a separate concern about why so many Obama aides cashed in at lucrative private sector gigs and now expect to have seats waiting for them back in Washington, but we’ll leave that one for the ethicists.)

This is not a call to pretend that fossil fuels will simply vanish; they’re part of the energy landscape and will be for years. But we can steer a path away from fossil dependence that foregrounds the many Americans who have suffered from pollution, or we can foreground the comfort and profit of the companies doing the polluting. Somehow, that latter approach never achieves much change from the status quo.

There are enough talented leaders in the climate movement, academia, and state politics that have not found the need to take money from incumbent carbon emitters. We don’t need to act like fossil fuel affiliates are the only options.

Focus on results, not purity tests

After four years of federal backsliding on climate change, it’s time to move as fast as possible to steer our economy away from planet-warming emissions. The best way to do that is to pick leaders who are clean energy experts and know how to operate the machinery of government to achieve tangible progress on decarbonization.

As it turns out, some clean energy experts are also experts at energy more broadly, which means they have exposure to fossil fuels. Indeed, understanding the energy system writ large is a crucial asset for the work of systematically changing that system. A track record of moving emitters in the right direction should be lauded, not besmirched.

Ernie Moniz is a prime example of this. As DOE Secretary, he oversaw investments in solar and energy storage technologies that laid a foundation for the tremendous growth happening now. But he also dealt with the energy system that existed in 2013, exploring things like how to capture dangerous carbon emissions and prevent them from hitting the atmosphere.

A coalition of progressive groups criticized Moniz recently for joining the board of utility Southern Company after leaving the DOE. But that critique overlooks a crucial fact: Southern Company pledged this year to zero out carbon emissions. That’s exactly what people who care about the climate should want such companies to do! They may not be moving fast enough, and it’s fair to criticize them for making new fossil fuel investments while touting their environmental promises. But if Moniz helped steer a major emitter onto a strategy to cut emissions, isn’t that exactly what we need for the country as a whole?

Faced with catastrophic climate change, we need somebody who’s ready for the challenge. Like somebody who left the government to work on Wall Street. (Photo credit: NOAA)

Rebuttal: Prioritize the public good

Convincing energy giants to cut their emissions is good for the planet. But the time to ask politely passed years ago. The major emitters ignored or discredited climate science for decades. Now is not the time to let them and their allies set the pace of the agenda.

Put another way, utilities and oil companies have enjoyed outsize influence in the political process for ages. They’ve had their say time and time again, under Democrats and Republicans. It goes without saying that very little structural progress has occurred as a result. Now it’s time to try something new. The leadership at this moment needs to have shown they’ll fight tirelessly for the American people, who want clean, affordable energy, and job security in a time of great upheaval.

If you’re hiring a firefighter, and one candidate understands fires because she sets them for fun, and the other understands fires because he spent his career fighting fires, you know which one to pick.

Rebuttal: Don’t punish people for making change

There’s a lot of conflation going on here. It’s one thing to dedicate your life to burning fossil fuels for profit. It’s another to spend years supporting clean energy, and then take a little time to help energy companies embrace a clean energy transition.

Activists are free to advance whatever agenda they like. But as a matter of maximizing progress on climate, you’re not going to get ahead by banishing people with experience running the agencies in question, simply because they worked on energy policy at a time when fossil fuels were an essential component of it.

What matters now is not one’s past or present professional proximity to fossil fuels, it’s the knowledge and wherewithal to enact structural changes to how we consume energy as a country. Some of the sharpest clean energy industry leaders came out of Enron; tarring them by association would have merely slowed the growth of clean energy. We shouldn’t let the dopamine hit of moral elitism get in the way of the hard work of building a low-carbon world.

This Week in Quarantine: Watch Living in Oblivion

Since the stealthy and confusing rollout of HBO Max—it’s like the HBO streaming you already had, but more so—I’ve been searching for movies included in the service that are actually good. If you know of any, please email me.

But I stumbled on one this weekend: ‘90s-era Living in Oblivion. It’s a low-budget independent film starring Steve Buscemi as the embattled director of a low-budget independent film that just won’t be filmed according to plan. The catered milk goes sour, the hotshot actor wants to wear an eyepatch, the boom mic ends up in places it’s not supposed to be. It’s a mess. But it’s a mess that makes you feel like you’re sitting right there in the scuzzy warehouse with the threadbare crew, wondering what will go wrong next.

I love a movie about making movies, but I’d never seen one that tackles the unglamorous independent scene like this. If you need an escape from the headlines, here’s your ticket out.