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Matthew Yglesias on Abundance and the Politics of Energy · Columbia Energy Exchange

• 0:00
  Matthew Yglesias:
• 0:01
  It was always the case that the cost of energy was a big deal. And I think for a long time, people in the green world had sort of convinced themselves that this wasn't really true, that they looked at this kind of very abstract polling that people don't like oil companies or people are very worried about climate and they were like, "Ah." So they want more aggressive climate action. And people sort of do want that, but they care a lot about the price of things.
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  Jason Bordoff:
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  Abundance and affordability have become buzzwords among policymakers these days, often triggering sharply different interpretations of how to attain them. To some, an energy abundance agenda means fewer regulatory barriers to produce more clean, cheap power. Others, however, question whether the narrative glosses over the hard trade-offs around land use, community concerns, or environmental impacts. Yet even as data centers surging power demand and rising electricity costs dominate public discourse around energy today, the way we talk about decarbonization in mainstream politics has changed radically. So what have we learned from major climate policies like the Inflation Reduction Act? And what does the trajectory of these policies say about the durability of climate politics today? My guest today argues that energy policy can't be siloed off as merely a climate issue, contending that clean energy progress is far more politically and economically durable when it's tied directly to economic growth, industrial capacity, grid infrastructure, and affordability — rather than a narrative of consumer sacrifice.
• 0:04
  This is Columbia Energy Exchange, a weekly podcast from the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University. I'm Jason Bordoff. Today on the show, Matthew Yglesias. Matt writes the Slow Boring newsletter about US politics and policy on his Substack, and he co-hosts The Argument Podcast. His most recent book, "The Rent Is Too Damn High," is about the policy origins of the middle-class housing affordability crisis in America. Matt joined me to discuss political lessons from the Inflation Reduction Act and how progressive Democrats are responding to surging demands for energy infrastructure. We dive into what a pragmatic abundance agenda looks like in practice and how to handle the massive power demands of AI without burdening consumers and where climate and energy policy is trending in today's politics. I hope you enjoy our conversation. Matthew Yglesias, thanks for making time in August holiday season to join us on Columbia Energy Exchange for the first time. Great to talk with you.
• 0:05
  Matthew Yglesias :
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  Really glad to be here.
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  Jason Bordoff (00:02:49):
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  I think a lot of people, but maybe not everyone listening will know of you and your writing, but just help people understand what you do. Is it punditry, journalism, all of the above, and the scope of how you spend your time?
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  Matthew Yglesias (00:03:05):
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  I mean, I've been a journalist for most of my career, but kind of opiniony journalist doing magazine stuff, columnist stuff. For the past five and a half years or so, I've been writing a newsletter called Slow Boring. Also, they've been telling me I need to tout my new podcast, The Argument with Jerusalem Demsas. Everyone should check it out, going on other podcasts.
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  Jason Bordoff (00:03:27):
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  Good promotional plug.
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  Matthew Yglesias (00:03:28):
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  I'm trying. I'm trying to get better. I'm better at promotion. So doing opinion writing mostly. I mean, I'm very interested in a wide range of things. And something that strikes me about the energy space is that at least on the Democratic Party side, there's tended to be a kind of a siloing of economic policies sort of handled by one set of people and energy has been handed off to a different set of people who are like the climate people. And energy is just too important I think to silo off like that. This is not like a small niche like how are we going to handle endangered woodlands where you can just say, okay, we'll kind of cordon that off. Because energy is the fundamental building block of everything that happens in the economy, which then also means that the politics of everything you do are going to get noticed.
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  It's not going to fly below the radar if you're hoping to have an actual impact. And so part of what I've been trying to do as a generalist is get people to integrate across foreign policy and national security, across economics, across politics, and really think about what are we trying to do here as we have a set of people who want to make big changes to address climate change. But I think we need to do that in a way that doesn't break the politics of Western democracies in a way that doesn't wreck the economy that we are trying to preserve and that hopefully actually makes a constructive positive impact on the climate issue rather than banging our heads against the wall with stuff that doesn't work.
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  Jason Bordoff (00:05:13):
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  Well, if Slow Boring doesn't work out, you should come lead our development and fundraising team because that was a perfect explanation. I mean, I'm saying it in jest, but 13 years ago when I started the Center on Global Energy Policy coming out of the National Security Council, what you just said was and remains the rationale, which is the only way to understand energy is to connect the dots across economics and economic development and national security and geopolitics and climate and sustainability. And if you only think about energy through one of those lenses, you kind of inevitably fail because energy has to be about all of those things simultaneously. I remember Meghan O'Sullivan, who you know who I do a lot of my writing with, something like five years ago wrote in the New York Times, if energy reliability, affordability, security suffers in the course of the transition, the first thing that's going to evaporate is support for a transition.
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  Absolutely. And we have seen some of that. And then you're laying on an additional element of politically what works. What did you think of the political strategy since you brought up the topic of politics of the Inflation Reduction Act? Any economist can tell you we should have a carbon price and correct an externality, but the idea is carrots are more durable than sticks and a meaningful amount of it is still in place even after the big beautiful bill. But what were the political economy lessons from that experience?
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  Matthew Yglesias (00:06:32):
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  Sure. I mean, I think if you have reasonable expectations, the political strategy behind IRA worked pretty well. There was not massive backlash to it. If you look at major pieces of legislation, they often generate really substantial countermobilization and IRA didn't. And that's impressive. I mean, if you had tried to directly raise the cost of dirty energy, you would've had massive countermobilization. And we saw that with Yellowjackets in France, you've seen it in the United States with cap and trade bills. So the Biden administration ended up with many different kinds of political problems, but you can easily imagine a world in which they pass IRA exactly as written and Kamala Harris wins the election. She lost. There was a lot that sort of went into that. I will say though that there was a choice made at a certain point to say, okay, affordability is what voters care about.
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  So we are going to reboot our signature legislative agenda and we are going to call this the Inflation Reduction Act. And I believe it did score in the Congressional Budget Office as very, very slightly disinflationary pulse. But there are a lot of ways you could have chosen at the margin to lean more into addressing the thing that the public wanted to address. So if you look at the specific climate-related provisions of IRA, the cost-benefit profile of those provisions varies wildly. And I don't have the numbers off the top of my head, but it's like some stuff packed a lot of punch emissions-wise, per dollar spent. Others was much less efficacious. And then if you think about climate seriously as a global endeavor, things like incentivizing slightly faster adoption of electric home appliances probably is not a big lever unlike global emissions. Because that technology, it exists or it doesn't, it'll improve or it won't, people will adopt it or then it won't. Versus things like clean energy production tax credits where you're hoping to bring to scale whole new technologies, that could be a really big lever and the jury's still out.
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  Jason Bordoff (00:08:50):
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  Although presumably could subsidize a lot of stuff that would've happened anyway, as you might argue we see in renewable energy, solar and wind.
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  Matthew Yglesias (00:08:57):
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  Right. So then I think you also could say that the solar and wind stuff is largely very infomarginal. And so if that bill -
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  Jason Bordoff (00:09:07):
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  You're using technical economist speak for things that would've happened anyway, but we're using taxpayer dollars for.
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  Matthew Yglesias (00:09:13):
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  That's right. Versus if you go back earlier, Germany had a very costly solar subsidy system, which I think some people feel had a big impact on the price of the underlying technology. By the time IRA happens, solar panels are cheap. The mere fact that solar panels are cheap doesn't mean we get 100% renewable energy, but the further subsidization didn't tackle any of those issues. And so that's a big problem. I mean, the White House would point people to this modeling that the Princeton guys did about the emissions impact. And then in the footnotes of that, they're saying like, "Well, and this is assuming that we're going to fix all kinds of transmission problems." But then they didn't fix the problems with interconnection, with transmission, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So I think going forward, it sort of remains the case that that unfinished business is actually the most important thing.
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  And then the parts of IRA that have survived that relate to nuclear, to other stuff like that, we don't know. The payoff from something like that could be nothing because we can't know what technologies will work out or it could be very high. Because ultimately your listeners don't need to hear this, but I mean the point I'm always trying to make to funders and activists and politicians in this space is that this really is a global problem. So you have to think about what can we do that will plausibly impact the decision-making in India, in Nigeria, in Indonesia and stuff like that. If we invent something new that has really desirable characteristics, then other people will use it. And whatever costs we incurred to bring that to market will redown to a sort of a global benefit.
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  Whether we build one more onshore wind turbine or not in Northern Maine where I am right now, it's good if it's good, but it has limited sort of global implications. So taking things that are expensive and just subsidizing them down on a per unit basis is very beloved of people who like to show their short-term localized impacts, but has a weak profile. So I think there's a lot that could have been done to be more disciplined around IRA and more in particular that could have been done by advocates to acknowledge that they got the whole Democratic Party Coalition to put their thing first. And so I think that some of the demands around greenhouse gas reduction fund and these kind of green pork type stuff, at least rubs me the wrong way. It's a big political party. There's a lot of different things a lot of different people have access in.
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  If you get to be the number one priority and a big piece of partisan legislation, you got to think seriously about what you're doing. And some of the stuff was really good and some of it I think is kind of sloppy.
• 0:39
  Jason Bordoff (00:12:15):
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  You mentioned a couple of things there that resonated, and particularly why we focus where we do at the Center on Global Energy Policy on 88, 89% of global emissions coming outside the United States. That is not an argument to do nothing in terms of domestic climate policy, but I do wonder sometimes if there's a disproportionate lack of focus on what US federal policy can do to change the trajectory for emissions overseas beyond coming together once a year for UN climate meetings, which people can debate the effectiveness of. But I think that is an area where a lot of innovative thinking is actually needed about what an administration should focus on that could make a bigger difference in the rest of the world than we have in the past.
• 0:41
  Matthew Yglesias (00:13:05):
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  Yeah. And I mean the first wave of climate journalism that I ever did was in 2008, 2009, there was a lot of optimism as the Obama administration was coming in, that there was going to be some kind of a binding international agreement. And I wrote pieces back then, I think everybody did, about why this was important and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it didn't work out. And I think to an extent, the advocacy landscape in the West has sort of underreacted to the fact that that didn't work out. People don't want to say, "Shit, we didn't get the thing we really needed to do to make our preferred vision of this come through." because they kind of had this idea that we were going to have a binding global agreement with differentiated responsibilities and then our advocacy was going to focus on achieving our domestic responsibilities.
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  But in a world where we don't have that agreement and we don't have that kind of division of labor, it's like that's a hard problem objectively. And it warrants a lot of thinking about what we're really trying to do. The United States at least is a very large country. But you have active climate policy efforts in Denmark, in the Netherlands and countries that are tiny. And the question of what can a small but affluent country whose voters and elected officials sincerely want to make a meaningful impact on climate, how can they do that?
• 0:45
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  What's smart? What is actually efficacious? It's a genuinely hard problem. I don't want to be too down on anyone for not having solved it, but it warrants more consideration because the global and global warming is really important. It's not the same as a localized conservation effort.
• 0:47
  Jason Bordoff (00:15:01):
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  This is an energy podcast, not a political podcast, but I'm interested in starting with one or two questions about where we are in this political moment because it might inform how we think about building both the political economy question and the policy design questions around energy and climate policy. So like you mentioned affordability before, as much as the IRA may have tried to engage with that issue, tell me if you agree. It seems like Trump and Mamdani have spoken about affordability as much as anyone. You're a fellow New Yorker, although for some reason you left. I don't know why you left.
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  Matthew Yglesias (00:15:36):
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  Affordability.
• 0:51
  Jason Bordoff (00:15:38):
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  Yeah, that's probably right. So when you look at Mamdani, AOC, the energy in a lot of the left is from this place where you grew up and I live, and then everyone's looking at the El Sayed results this week. Talk a little bit about where you see this trend going for some officially or unofficially related to democratic socialist trends. And what do you think that means both for where you see the left going, the Democratic Party going, but what it might mean for how people think about this issue of energy and climate that is so connected now to issues of affordability, abundance, industrial policy?
• 0:53
  Matthew Yglesias (00:16:19):
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  Affordability has become this kind of buzzword, but it was always the case that the cost of energy was a big deal. And I think for a long time, people in the green world had sort of convinced themselves that this wasn't really true, that they looked at this kind of very abstract polling that people don't like oil companies or people are very worried about climate. And they were like, "Ah." So they want more aggressive climate action. And people sort of do want that, but they care a lot about the price of things. And energy is both a cost that consumers directly bear, that is very salient to lower income people who don't have their utilities on auto pay and whatever else, but it's also a direct input into the cost of literally everything. So it's quite important driver of economic growth to be creating energy if you want to do things.
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  The United States, as I'm sure you know, had this long plateau in energy demand, some of which was driven by efficiency gains, but a lot of which was driven by these de-industrialization trends that everybody deploys. And so everybody in politics was saying, "We're going to bring back the factories, we're going to bring back the jobs." And now we're talking about data centers more instead of factories, but these are all things that use a lot of electricity. There's no re-industrialization of the country without growing electricity demand. And then particularly from a climate perspective, you want people to switch to electrified technologies for vehicle transportation, for home heating, et cetera. That again, requires more electricity. The way the utility system works, it's very difficult to get more electricity without somebody has to pay for it. The way we do it, the rate base pays for it, which is very regressive actually.
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  I mean, the rate base is more economically regressive incidents than a general sales tax. So one can question whether that's actually the right paradigm for thinking about generational infrastructure investments, but it is the way that it works. Even though we have very, very differentiated regulatory systems, they sort of all do have that in common. And so there's a short-term pain point around prices, and there is a lot of impulse to address that by either through price controls or through trying to discourage new infrastructure.
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  And the problem with those kinds of things is that of course it's going to have a long-term detriment on growth and in particular a long-term detriment on the ability to have any kind of change in how our energy infrastructure works. So I'm concerned that there may be a little bit of a trap for progressives where they've found this kind of local maximum where they're like, "Well, we're going to cap rate increases or maybe not allow data centers or something, and that's going to deliver the lower prices that people want." But that then is going to make it impossible to do any of the things.
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  Jason Bordoff (00:19:38):
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  This is the argument that a rent freeze is satisfying in the moment, but discourages new investment in housing is sort of the energy analogy of that, or price controls under Nixon for oil prices, which actually discourage domestic production investment. That's what you're getting at.
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  Matthew Yglesias (00:19:55):
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  Exactly, exactly. And so if we want a future in which there's actually more electricity around, we've got to be thoughtful about how we are doing that because the consumer price is how we pay for infrastructure investment. And I see people reading that exact same analogy through the other direction and saying, "Well, we need to cut the unregulated rate of return that utilities get that they're overbuilding, et cetera, et cetera." But if you look at the ambitions that progressive minded people have set out for the country, there's just no way to achieve any of that without significant investments in big hard infrastructure. And I don't want to get too disparaging about the virtual power plants and the DERs and the get more out of the grid, et cetera. I mean, I think that's all great. People are working on it. It's like it's good to be efficient, et cetera, et cetera.
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  Jason Bordoff (00:20:49):
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  Your writing has seemed to me to throw a little cold water on the demand side and the virtual power plants and that sort of stuff. Why is that?
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  Matthew Yglesias (00:20:58):
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  Well, I think it is being marketed in some quarters as saying we're not going to need new infrastructure. And that's just wrong. The math doesn't work. So I don't want to counterreact too far in the other direction. I mean, if people are going to have home-based level two fast EV chargers, then their car's going to be parked overnight for hours and hours and hours. It only needs to charge for 90 minutes. And so of course you should stagger the charging in a way that makes sense rather than having everybody's car charge at exactly 6:00 PM. That's correct and we should do that stuff. That being said, you don't become a wealthy society by metering out your energy usage in this kind of micromanaging way. That's what you do when you have shortages. And you're not going to go from a country where fewer than 10% of people are driving electric cars to everybody is and relying on electricity for home heat in cold weather states.
• 1:08
  Jason Bordoff (00:22:07):
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  I mean, this is a little like the argument that with critical minerals, people say recycling. And you're like, yes, of course we should do recycling. And even if we do a really good job at it and you want to electrify and decarbonize, you're going to need a lot more critical minerals. Maybe you don't need as much as you otherwise would, but it's not a substitute for the supply side, you're saying.
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  Matthew Yglesias (00:22:23):
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  Well, even things where steel recycling has become really big over the past 30, 40, 50 years is a major part of how the steel industry works. But the world still produces primary steel. And increasingly that means China produces primary steel and the geopolitics of that are relevant. We need to think about it. And I have enough confidence that people will try to make use of resources efficiently in the face of scarcity. Where I'm never totally confident is are we going to overcome those forces of scarcity in a way that makes these things appealing? I'm in Maine right now where people mostly use oil for home heat, which is quite expensive. It is quite dirty. The natural gas infrastructure does not exist up here to power homes that way. It would be great for people to rely on heat pumps for their winter heat. But if your winter heat goes out, people will die.
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  You would have a mass casualty event if everybody here. It was bad in Texas when the power went out in the winter and people rely on electric baseboard heating, but it gets way colder here in New England and it is not sunny in the winter. They've got short days, snow covers everything. It's a hard problem. It's going to require a lot of infrastructure to have clean energy providing home heating in the Northern United States in a way that's reliable because 95% reliability is not nearly good enough for winter heat. You need really, really, really robust reliability. And that's hard to get at. And saying that we're going to achieve it with this just-in-time demand management and switching, that doesn't make a ton of sense to me. Now, maybe people will have home generators, which will be powered by fossil fuels ultimately, but will let the infrastructure function.
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  I mean, there's lots of different ways you could think about this stuff, but we're a wealthy society with a high standard of living, and I don't think people want to give that up for the sake of an energy transition, which means we're going to need to do transitions in a way that carries forward low cost, high reliability, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. The voters care a lot about short-term prices and do not want to learn the details of how utility regulation work, and God bless them. I also have not wanted to learn this, but have had to for professional purposes. But the expert community needs to try to get this stuff right and not just solve for the short term. And then when our promises don't come true, say, "Well, you wanted the rate cap at the time."
• 1:16
  Jason Bordoff (00:25:14):
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  So we got on this because I asked you about affordability, and then your response was, "We need a lot of investment because electricity needs are rising, and so we need to invest in the grid." And I think the suggestion being investment means someone's got to spend the money and there's a cost. Part of the way the political coalition for something like the Inflation Reduction Act was put together was a sense of win-win-win. It's low carbon, and if we move to clean energy and electrification, which is also a more efficient way to use energy, it creates jobs, it lowers energy prices. Do you think that's substantively wrong or is it a timing question because these are capital costs rather than OpEx over time?
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  Matthew Yglesias (00:25:53):
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  Well, I mean, I think that if you could go back in time to the economic conditions of the first six years of the Obama administration when you had very low interest rates and fairly high unemployment, I think we have not so much at the time, but now a really great political economy idea for how to address that with this investment-led strategy. It's going to be win-win-win. It'll drive down long-term costs by creating this better infrastructure. And in the short term, we'll create jobs, we'll mobilize resources, et cetera. Given the way COVID impacted the American economy, I think it was reasonable that people in the Biden transition believed that they were going to be coming into that same kind of moment that called for this FDR-like, new deal-like approach. But as it turns out, that wasn't correct. The employment rebounded quite rapidly from the COVID disruption, and we ended up in this inflationary paradigm.
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  And unfortunately, that means that this idea of spend now, create jobs, win-win-win, it doesn't work on the macroeconomics. There isn't some large group of unemployed people who can simply be mobilized to be the construction workforce. I mean, you can talk about crowding out in a macro chart, or you can think about the literal human beings. If we're creating these jobs, what jobs are they quitting? What is going to happen? So it calls on the merits, I would say, less for a Green New Deal than for a green austerity program, which of course is a tough sell. Now would be the time really for carbon pricing for stuff that they were trying to do in 2009 when interest rates were so low that you could just say, "Forget it. Let's just spend the money and let's subsidize our way to heaven." Now we've, I think, finally figured out the right political answer for that period.
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  But the economic situation has completely changed, and it is just an objectively hard problem for everyone who's involved. I mean, Donald Trump clearly thought that he could run around the country telling people he was going to make groceries cheaper, win an election, which he did. And now everybody's mad at him because groceries are not cheaper. And it would be quite challenging to make the nominal price level full, which seems like it's what voters at least think that they want. And I think you and I and most informed people believe that if the circumstances in which that was occurring happened, people wouldn't like it. So I feel bad for incumbent politicians all around the world, but these crowding out the low unemployment, the interest rate pressure, the fiscal pressures of retirement and all this other stuff, pension programs, make it a really challenging time, I think, for a state-led investment program.
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  It's why I'm interested, and I think there is a lot of interest in this question of can we somehow get the AI hyperscalers to pay for other stuff? Because they want to make large investments. They want to spend a lot of money. They're very impatient. They care a lot about the timeframe on which they do things. So it seems like in principle, if you can clear the decks for them to spend their own money faster in exchange for them doing something, that they might be willing to do the something. And so if we can get smart about what the something is, we might be able to achieve a new win-win.
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  Jason Bordoff (00:29:46):
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  Yeah, that's what I was going to ask what the something is. Because you mentioned utilities are the ones that pay and then it goes into the rate base. That can be a regressive way to allocate costs, but there are a bunch of proposals in Congress now to put different forms of taxation on On these tech companies, is that the way to do this or is it just permitting reform, whatever that means? It's sort of a magic buzzword that seems to assume you can suddenly build things sensibly wherever we need to. Is that the pathway forward, the overcoming the barriers to building?
• 1:28
  Matthew Yglesias (00:30:17):
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  We do need to think about. I mean, permitting is a very vague term, but I do think that we need to think about being able to create projects of national significance in a faster way. And I think from a green perspective, that primarily means long distance electricity transmission. From a politics perspective, it also means gas pipelines and perhaps LNG export infrastructure. And from an economics, national security standpoint, there's no tension between those goals. In the interest group politics in Congress, there is a lot of tension between those goals. And it's why I want to bring other voices into the picture because I know that the greens don't like to have fossil fuel infrastructure. They are very against that. From a global perspective, trying to prevent American natural gas exports is an incredibly weak lever for influencing the global use of fossil fuels. I don't want to say it's no impact on global use, but it's very, very weak.
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  It's possibly counterproductive in terms of encouraging more coal consumption. I would say big uncertainty bars as to whether it makes global emissions go up or down. And so that is not where I would put my energy because the economic and national security benefits to the United States of other people using our energy resources are clear and unambiguous. The climate cost of this is fuzzy, and they do a lot of interesting math around discount windows and time horizons to try to make this seem clearer than it is. So I think that a political deal around electricity infrastructure, natural gas infrastructure, and then the sighting of utility scale renewables could be a big win. In terms of cost allocation -
• 1:32
  Jason Bordoff (00:32:14):
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  I mean, you're describing, that was true with the oil export issue as well. Absolutely. With extension of the renewable tax credits and lifting the oil export ban. And I testified, I actually think that was a win-win policy compromise. It sounds like you're describing what you think this would look like in a similar way as a matter of politics, but also policy.
• 1:34
  Matthew Yglesias (00:32:33):
• 1:35
  Exactly. I mean, I think that that deal that was, what was that? 2014, 2013?
• 1:36
  Jason Bordoff (00:32:37):
• 1:37
  Yes. 14, I think.
• 1:38
  Matthew Yglesias (00:32:39):
• 1:39
  Yeah, I mean that was a tremendous win. And for whatever reason, I felt like the architects of it did not celebrate themselves adequately. But again, I mean, what is the. Every barrel of oil that the United States exports adds some but less than one barrel to global oil consumption. It does a lot of crowd out of Russian or whatever else kind of oil. And it's the same with gas, except gas has a more favorable pollution profile than oil does. And if you can get things like renewable production tax credits or, now, infrastructure built, that's just good policy. It's also good politics because it is doable in a way that green only stuff isn't, but it's good policy as long as you don't look at it with tunnel vision. If you consider all the relevant equities at stake in this kind of thing, I think that's great.
• 1:40
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  I do think that some kind of tax or something on new large users of electricity, which would primarily be AI data centers, does make sense. You always got to think about the calibration. Something I've wondered about is economists all like carbon pricing. We know that voters hate carbon pricing. Voters also seem to hate data centers. So if we make the data centers pay the carbon tax, is that like two wrongs make a right in the kind of thing? Because I think we would like to nudge these infrastructure investments in a cleaner direction to the extent that we can without making them infeasible to make. And when it comes to electricity reliability, et cetera, there's a big difference between powering a data center entirely with natural gas using low efficiency turbines because that happens to be what's available and doing one that's like 40% clean energy.
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  (00:34:51):
• 1:43
  It sounds, I think, disappointed to the real eco-fanatics, but all these things matter at the margin. And that has always been the beauty of pricing as a tool, is that it gets people to move along all the relevant margins, not just these kind of stepwise, can I be completely clean or completely unclean to care about the efficiency of your turbines, to care about what's the ratio of clean to dirty fuels that you're using, to care about gas versus coal, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I mean, I know carbon pricing and consumers is a non-starter. They've abandoned it in Canada, et cetera. But in Canada, they did maintain industrial carbon pricing. I think something like that might work in the United States. Particularly if the alternative is just everything gets loaded into the brake base, which nobody wants that.
• 1:44
  Jason Bordoff (00:35:47):
• 1:45
  You used the label, or dare one say pejorative eco-fanatics a moment ago, and you've been critical of some parts. I don't want to paint with a broad brush of the climate movement. And so just help me understand. And now the conversation very much is about pragmatism and realism and the art of what is politically possible. And I want to understand what you think those words mean. And for someone who might consider themselves deeply part of the climate movement and says, Matt, everything you're saying might be right, but the world's 120 degrees in Europe and there are wildfires everywhere and we can't take barges down the rine because of low water levels. We're on a clock and it's fine to say this is what's pragmatic and politically possible, but that's just inconsistent with what the science tells us we need to do. That's the reality. Someone else will say that's what realism means, being pragmatic about those impacts. Tell me how you think about that tension.
• 1:46
  Matthew Yglesias (00:36:44):
• 1:47
  I mean, I guess the main thing that I say is that pounding the table harder does not change what is and isn't possible. Now, if you can persuade somebody to care more about this than they currently do, that's great. If you could convince Donald Trump that he should worry about coastal flooding in Florida, that would be a game changer for the possibility space on climate policy would be wildly more open. But just like yelling at me doesn't change that. And I think that the past 25 years of we're going to go to the IPCC and we're going to have this temperature target, and then we're going to reason backwards from the temperature target to an emissions target, and then we're going to parcel out the emissions targets to each country. And then we're going to say, okay, we have to hit this by this deadline.
• 1:48
  (00:37:41):
• 1:49
  That doesn't do that much. A lot of progress has actually been made toward averting worst case scenario climate outcomes. That progress has been made primarily because the actual technology of electric cars has gotten better. The technology of natural gas production has gotten better and it's cleaner than coal. The technology of solar panel manufacturing has gotten better, so people use it. So that's great. And we need to keep. My newsletter's called Slow Boring. This is a reference to a Max ber essay. He says that politics is the strong and slow boring of hard boards. And it's like, I think if you take this landscape of climate problems and you try to chunk it down into individual bits and say, "What can we work on here?" You can make progress. We have made a lot of progress. And I think relatively little of that progress has come from this kind of waterfall cascade reading backwards from the targets.
• 1:50
  (00:38:49):
• 1:51
  We're not going to hit the 1.5 degree warming target. We're probably not going to hit a two degree warming target. Every degree has an impact. Every 10th of a degree has an impact. We should do what we can do. And I agree with that. On that point that climate change is real, that it causes harm, that it would be a good idea to avert those harms. I'm a hundred percent aligned. If we had a binding legal global treaty that to impose a social cost of carbon on all users of energy all around the world and we put that to a referendum, I would vote yes on it. Unfortunately, it would lose, but it's not my fault. If we put it down, I will tell people to vote for it. But it's the complicated international interconnections, the future-looking aspects of it, it's tough. And I try to work across issue areas. And so one set of topics that I'm very interested in is malaria in Africa. Kills tons of kids every year.
• 1:52
  (00:39:58):
• 1:53
  And there are people who work away at giving families these bed nets that are pretty effective in reducing its incidents. There are people working on vaccines that if they succeed and roll out will save an incredible number of lives. Unfortunately, there is not that much policy interest in malaria in the West because it doesn't impact people in rich countries.
• 1:54
  (00:40:24):
• 1:55
  The people who do work on these global public health causes, I think mostly have really good manners about the fact that this is a niche policy concern that mainstream politicians and mainstream voters are not that interested in, but they're trying to do what they can. They're trying to be cost-effective. And I often feel like the climate movement, and this is my hottest take on it, but that it has too much cultural clout and has come to have an unreasonable expectation about how much is going to be done for the sake of averting coastal flooding in the future in Bangladesh. Because when you break it down like that, that doesn't actually sound like something that would be highly motivating to voters. I wish it would. But I also wish that people would care more about lead battery recycling in Bangladesh, which is a huge environmental hazard.
• 1:56
  (00:41:17):
• 1:57
  I wish people would care more about economic development as a general issue. Just people being poor is really, really bad. All across the developing world, people are burning biomass for home cooking and it's a terrible indoor air pollution problem. And I wish people cared more about that. There's so many things that it would be good for people to care more about. And climate is one of those things, but frankly, it's the one that has far and away the most clout. I mean, if I ask a senator, what are you doing about lead acid battery recycling and the harm that that does to our planet's future? What the fuck are you talking about, Matt? They never heard of that topic. So on the one hand, congratulations to the climate movement for being top of mind for everybody all the time. But also it's just a hard problem.
• 1:58
  (00:42:08):
• 1:59
  Totally reconfigure all the energy that everyone uses in all countries. That's a lot. That's hard to do. So we're making progress.
• 2:00
  Jason Bordoff (00:42:20):
• 2:01
  So your critique is not just realism in ambition. 1.5 is crazy talk, let's shoot for 2.2, whatever it is. But one of strategy and focus, I guess things like keep it in the ground and a focus on the supply side, it sounds like you would take issue with as being effective in the first place. Is that more your critique of the climate?
• 2:02
  Matthew Yglesias (00:42:42):
• 2:03
  Well, I mean the supply side stuff doesn't work. The math on it is terrible. And there was a great piece that was published in the argument by a former Grist editor, and he was writing about cost-benefit analysis and how he got frustrated with his colleagues' aversion to this. But it's really important to understand if the thing you're doing imposes a very small economic cost on people and has a big impact on emissions, that's great. Versus if you're proposing something that has large economic costs and tiny benefits, that's not so great. And supply side stuff, because of the international nature of markets, of energy markets, has a terrible cost-benefit profile. And it aligns with some of the just NIMBY structures and veto points that exist in the American political system, and it provides these sort of organizing opportunities, but you're not going to solve anything through that kind of route, absent a binding global agreement that we don't have.
• 2:04
  (00:43:56):
• 2:05
  Now you could imagine a supply side, like a global coal phase out, which would be a supply side measure, and that would work, but it would have to be global. So I mean, who's doing that? I don't see that happening. But if you can pull that rabbit out of the hat, that would be incredible. But just operating on domestic supply is not a realistic way to influence the global energy picture versus innovation, inventions, et cetera, et cetera. And the critique that you get of this is like, well, doing what I want isn't going to hit these targets, but doing what they want isn't going to hit the targets either. So what's the difference?
• 2:06
  Jason Bordoff (00:44:45):
• 2:07
  So when you look at what has prevented stronger climate policy from playing out, you've offered some critiques of the way the climate movement and the left have gone about this. How do you think about what responsibility should be on the doorstep of the oil and gas industry of the Republican Party? Or do you think climate advocates give the industry too much credit for the failure to do more?
• 2:08
  Matthew Yglesias (00:45:10):
• 2:09
  Well, I think the focus on the industry is a little bit myopic. It's as if the oil and gas industry tricked people into thinking that burning oil is a useful way to create energy. The Republican Party obviously is a big deal. I mean, the biggest reason that progress has not been made on climate change is that it looked briefly like there might be some bipartisan interest in this topic, and now there isn't. It's very hard to do things on a partisan basis in the United States of America, particularly to do things that are durable. Now, the good news is that there is some bipartisan interest in things that are helpful on climate change. There is bipartisan interest in advanced nuclear power. There is bipartisan interest in geothermal power. Obviously, Elon Musk is a prominent Republican. He's quite interested in electric cars. So it's not hopeless.
• 2:10
  (00:46:16):
• 2:11
  It would be helpful, I think, if Republicans would acknowledge that they have 90,000 critiques of the environmental movement, but that factually burning fossil fuels causes the greenhouse effect, which is on net harmful. Those things are true, and the truth of those propositions is independent of your assessment of the Sierra Club or anything else like that. And if Republicans would agree to stipulate those points, you could try to get to yes with them on more stuff and we could get more done. And their willingness to defect from those core facts is a really big problem. Now, you could also say the largest failure of the climate movement as a movement has been an inability to achieve any of that or to achieve any meaningful separation from this kind of larger construct of green politics or the left, whatever you may make of that. But it's interesting that there is this bipartisan interest in, sort of, pieces of it.
• 2:12
  (00:47:29):
• 2:13
  I mean, somebody was making a point to me that it's a little odd that Secretary Wright is so bullish on the American nuclear industry because if you believe what he claims to believe about climate change, then why does he care about nuclear energy? If climate change -
• 2:14
  Jason Bordoff (00:47:50):
• 2:15
  You mean because it's too expensive? I mean, he would want more energy that is reliable and not intermittent, and we need all the energy sources we can get, not the stuff that doesn't work half the time. I'm not saing that, but...
• 2:16
  Matthew Yglesias (00:48:01):
• 2:17
  Right. But I mean, if you genuinely just don't care about climate change, we're not running out of coal. We could just burn it all. So I suspect that at some level he is actually aware that climate is a big problem, that he really hates renewables and wants this nuclear utopia, which if he can create it, would be very clean. So that's good. I don't know exactly what's in his head. But there's something going on where Republicans who are so defensive about the fossil fuel industry and so critical of renewables are interested in clean firm power. That's a topic which only makes sense if you know that the fossil fuels are dirty, I think. I mean, I don't know. He can explain it to you.
• 2:18
  Jason Bordoff (00:48:53):
• 2:19
  They might say they're interested in firm power. And then the question is, is it a wildly expensive way to do that? And the only reason you'd ever think about it is climate or there are other examples in the world where it plays a meaningful role alongside other sources of electricity. But I take your point, the trajectory to getting nuclear to be cost-competitive, absent some policy support or carbon price with gas or coal is probably not around the corner.
• 2:20
  Matthew Yglesias (00:49:21):
• 2:21
  And even if you did it, it's like everybody, I mean, including just Secretary Wright is talking about we're going to do these things and they're supposedly going to get us over this learning curve point, which I mean, I hope that that's true. And we have seen that work with certain technologies. We have also seen it fail with other technologies. To me, it seems like a completely reasonable bet to make and a good thing to try. But a big part of the reason why it's a good thing to try is that climate change is real. So if we could develop a new source of zero emission, affordable emission-free energy, that would be a really big win. But I don't have a coal bumper sticker on my car. So I think we need alternatives. And the critiques of renewables I think carry some force. So it's good to look at other options.
• 2:22
  Jason Bordoff (00:50:14):
• 2:23
  We're well into the second Trump administration. How do you assess its energy agenda so far since you brought up Secretary Wright?
• 2:24
  Matthew Yglesias (00:50:21):
• 2:25
  It's gone great. Everything is pertinent. No, I mean,
• 2:26
  (00:50:25):
• 2:27
  I feel like they keep equivocating between a intelligent critique of the 100% renewable agenda to a really demagogic and nonsensical critique of adding renewables at the margin. And we see whether it's the very market-based system that they have in Texas or whether it's the very state-led system that they have in China, that successful energy systems that are creating abundance and affordability these days are adding a lot of renewables. What they're not doing is banning fossil fuels. They are using both because these things work on different margins, because intermittency is real but surmountable. You can switch things on and off, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And the Wright stuff, Trump stuff, paying companies to not build offshore wind, stuff like that. It reeks a culture war opportunism rather than really thinking about energy. And they are putting this big conceptual bet on nuclear. And I cannot see the future.
• 2:28
  (00:51:43):
• 2:29
  I think a lot of people get really invested in cheerleading for different sorts of energy technologies. I sometimes like to troll my more progressive friends by saying it's possible Donald Trump is going to end up having solved a huge piece of the puzzle of climate change. It's also possible this will be a total bust. I don't know what to say.
• 2:30
  Jason Bordoff (00:52:09):
• 2:31
  I guess if you want to keep it in the ground, closing off 20% of the world's supply is a big keep it in the ground.
• 2:32
  Matthew Yglesias (00:52:14):
• 2:33
  What he's done in Iran has been more impactful than anything Bill McKibben's ever done just in terms of blocking global fossil fuel flows. And I mean, I think it's interesting. Every Democrat I think can understand that just having a war in the Middle East is not constructive climate policy. Even though it does increase the price of fossil fuels and speed up EV adoption, it's not sustainable or worthwhile or politically -
• 2:34
  Jason Bordoff (00:52:47):
• 2:35
  Or a like pandemic might reduce fossil fuel demand, but probably not effective climate policy.
• 2:36
  Matthew Yglesias (00:52:53):
• 2:37
  But they do often seem to want to do Strait of Hormuz ourselves. I'm in New England here now where we pay the global price of natural gas because it comes in on boats because we don't have pipelines. And that's -
• 2:38
  Jason Bordoff (00:53:11):
• 2:39
  And we have the Jones Act.
• 2:40
  Matthew Yglesias (00:53:12):
• 2:41
  Yeah, the Jones Act. Well, we've got some waivers, et cetera. But A, it really drives up the cost of living here. It's just bad for Pennsylvania, just nice American people down there. I mean, I don't approve of Philly sports fans, but it's still for the best. It's all one country. It's also not clear that this has any environmental benefit at all. Because if electricity were cheaper here, even if it was all gas, even if we had no renewables, then buying an electric car would look way more attractive than it currently does. Because with electrification, you save money in a lot of places and you don't save money in the places where electricity is the most expensive, but the places where electricity is the most expensive are ones where we've been blocking the fossil fuel infrastructure. So it's a little bit self-contradictory just as a policy aim.
• 2:42
  (00:54:12):
• 2:43
  And again, when we look at Donald Trump in effect doing this to the world with his Iran policy, nobody is. I joke about it, but you've never seen NRDC put on a press release being like, "We got to stay the course with Iran. We're really doing the right thing here." And I keep waiting for this kind of climate justice, APAC collab around how we've got to do this, but it's not happening. I guess we're going to have stronger sanctions on Russian oil exports. So that's the more Progressive-friendly win-win. But it's like as long as there's demand for fossil fuel energy, it's not that productive to try to randomly take out spot sources of supply.
• 2:44
  Jason Bordoff (00:54:59):
• 2:45
  We're just going to be out of time in a minute, but we talked a couple of times about abundance and permitting reform. I just want to know what all that means to you. When I think of phrases like abundance, let's make it easier to build, and there are a lot of examples. Of course we need to do that for sure. And then you say, again, you and I both grew up in New York and who was pretty good at abundance was Robert Moses, including tearing down half the Bronx to put a highway up. And I think if I remember correctly, what ultimately stopped him was putting a highway through the neighborhood you grew up in, which was Greenwich Village. More or less. And that probably, in retrospect, it's a good thing that community involvement and community consultation stopped Robert Moses from putting a highway through the neighborhood where you grew up.
• 2:46
  (00:55:46):
• 2:47
  So you need environmental review and protection and community engagement and indigenous communities to be engaged. So how do you think about what phrases like abundance actually mean in practice when all of that is important? And what does it actually look like to do this in a balanced way?
• 2:48
  Matthew Yglesias (00:56:04):
• 2:49
  I mean, we could do a whole Moses pot. But I think abundance in the energy space, for one thing, the abstract concept actually does matter because I think there is really some profound disagreement around this. I saw Bill McKibben on the Ezra Klein Show. They were talking about solar and how great it is and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then at one point, McKibben says, "But in a country like America, I don't think we actually need to have more energy unnet because all that we do with it is heat and cool these super giant houses that just make us feel really lonely." And I think that's wrong. I think there's a lot of very useful things that we could do with more abundant energy. Some of them are a little businessman and prosaic. Clearly people want to build these data centers. They think they're economic gains and they're going to need electricity.
• 2:50
  (00:57:05):
• 2:51
  Some of them are really galaxy brain though. But every 10 years or so, there's this fad around vertical farming because somebody will point out that if you do kind of indoor vertically stacked agriculture, you can use way less pesticides, way less water. You have all kinds of efficiencies and it's amazing. And people are like, "Oh, this is so great." And then you look at it and it's like, "Well, but sunshine is free versus indoor lighting costs money, and so it doesn't pencil out." If energy is more abundant, you can substitute energy for water, substitute energy for fertilizer, et cetera. You can address that kind of stuff. You can also just do freaky things. In Iceland, there's this famous place, the Blue Lagoon, where it's an outdoor swimming pool that's warm all year. It's amazing. You can go there, it's cold as hell outside, and we're just swimming around having fun.
• 2:52
  (00:58:00):
• 2:53
  And that's "waste heat" from geothermal plant. And it's just a cool feature. We could have warm outdoor swimming pools all the time, but it costs too much money. You don't have the energy. People in the developing world desperately need more energy. There's tons of people who have no electricity, people who don't have access to safe cooking inside their home, et cetera, et cetera. So that's my abundance anchor on energy. Into the specifics, permitting, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. The easy thing to say is, well, it's a balance, which of course it is. I think what really matters is to consider what is the balance of risks? I think that post 1970, we have become too loss averse, overly concerned that some bad highway will be built and not concerned enough that something good and useful won't be built.
• 2:54
  (00:58:59):
• 2:55
  I think it's just contrary to the American spirit to have our policy landscape totally dominated by terror of the LOMEX Freeway rather than celebration of the Transcontinental Railroad. And if you look at anything that progressive-minded people celebrate today, the public works of the FDR era, et cetera, it's not only that all those things had opponents at the time. They had real costs. A lot of trees were cut down to build those dams. Things were flooded to electrify the rural south, but it was good on balance. And building highways on net was good, even if some of the highways that got built maybe shouldn't have been built and some of the things that were blocked were good. I mean, I meet people, I know people. Again, I grew up in New York. I love my mass transit. I like to walk. I got a bicycle, the whole deal. And there are people who are like, "I wish we had just never invented this technology of the car, never built highways." But I think that's crazy.
• 2:56
  (01:00:08):
• 2:57
  And yes, when there was a highway building craze, some stuff got built that maybe shouldn't have, but if we had done that, if we'd applied the contemporary policy dynamic, A, we would have no highways, but B, the subway system that people imagine, we wouldn't have that either. Nothing would've been done and we wouldn't have electricity in our homes at all. And so I think there's something a little bit selfish about people in the present kicking the ladder of progress aside and saying that our kids or grandkids, our great grandkids aren't going to have the benefit of any new infrastructure because we're worried about short-term disruptions to the visual landscape and that it's over complacency and not ambitious enough and not equal to the scale of the possibilities that exist for the future of humanity.
• 2:58
  Jason Bordoff (01:01:04):
• 2:59
  Yeah, like a precautionary principle, make sure nothing bad happens and you miss out on a lot of good too that may even pencil out in a cost benefit analysis, I think is what you're saying. And your point on energy is prosperity, period. That is true. And I think it ties back to what you said in the beginning. Of course, we want to use energy efficiently and not be wasteful and pick up low-hanging fruit and maybe not air condition Gulf Arab states in the summertime, outdoors. So there are probably some things that you want to be sensible about, but particularly your point we can end on is thinking about the rest of the world too. We have a big effort. We've started here, a high level panel on universal energy abundance, the phrase we came up with to work with the Rockefeller Foundation to look beyond electricity access and the amount of energy that it actually takes for not just access to charge cell phones, but meaningful levels of prosperity for billions of people around the world and emerging and developing economies.
• 3:00
  (01:02:04):
• 3:01
  And the numbers are massive. And we've all seen those charts that if you take GDP and energy use per capita, it's a pretty straight line. You need more energy to deliver more prosperity to people.
• 3:02
  Matthew Yglesias (01:02:16):
• 3:03
  Yeah. And I mean, exactly what you were saying, there's this kind of mindset of like, well, can we define some minimum target that we would like people to have? Because we don't want to be totally indifferent to global development. And that's fine and people should have the minimum, but I would like people to have more than the minimum. I've been to Mexico, which is not one of the poorest countries on earth. People do have access to electricity there, but it's way poorer than the United States of America. I think people who live there would like to be as rich as we are. People in Nigeria, people in wherever it is, they deserve higher aspirations than what's the least that we can do for them. And that's a lot of energy. That's what we do. That's modernity. That's the whole arc of human history and civilization. And if we can do it clean, that's way better.
• 3:04
  (01:03:14):
• 3:05
  And we should do that. But it has to be built and nothing is truly pristine. If you see a utility scale solar project, you don't think to yourself like, "Aha, what an amazing pastoral landscape this is." It's good that it doesn't cause air pollution. It's good that it doesn't cause greenhouse gas emissions. But human impact on the biosphere is going to happen. Whatever it is that we do, right? If we are going to have human progress, we are going to keep impacting the earth and that's fine.
• 3:06
  Jason Bordoff (01:03:49):
• 3:07
  Matthew Iglesias, fascinating, though-provoking, occasionally provocative. As always, thank you for making time to be with me for this conversation. I'd love to have you back. We could talk for hours more, but enjoy a lovely Maine in August. I'm sure it's beautiful up there.
• 3:08
  Matthew Yglesias (01:04:03):
• 3:09
  Thank you so much.
• 3:10
  Jason Bordoff (01:04:09):
• 3:11
  Thank you again, Matt Yglesias, and thanks to all of you for listening to this week's episode of Columbia Energy Exchange. The show is brought to you by the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University. The show is hosted by me, Jason Bordoff, and by Bill Loveless. Gregory Vilfranc engineered the show. The show is produced by MC O'Connor and Kyu Lee and for the very last time by Caroline Pitman. So before we go, I just wanted to take a moment to say thank you to Caroline because this is her last week with us here at the Center on Global Energy Policy. For the past three years since joining us right out of college, Caroline has been my partner in preparing for these interviews, researching our guests and the issues we discuss, helping me develop questions, making me smarter, and making me much better prepared for every one of these conversations.
• 3:12
  (01:05:00):
• 3:13
  Caroline's headed off to law school in a few weeks, and having seen firsthand how smart, thoughtful, curious, and hardworking she is, I'm excited to see where she goes from here and the leadership roles I know she will play in the energy world in the years ahead. Caroline is a tremendous talent. So from all of us here at the Center on Global Energy Policy, Caroline, thanks for everything you've done for the podcast, for the Center, and for me. We're going to miss you and we wish you all the best in this new chapter. As always, for more information about the podcast or the Center on Global Energy Policy, please visit us online at energypolicy.columbia.edu or follow us on social media @columbiauenergy. And please, if you feel inclined, give us a rating on Apple or Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. It really helps us out.
• 3:14
  (01:05:49):
• 3:15
  Thanks again for listening. We'll see you next week.