As White House National Climate Advisor, Ali Zaidi has seen the results of the Inflation Reduction Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (IRA) in different parts of his home state of Pennsylvania. He recalled meeting in Philadelphia with pipefitters and steamfitters who are replacing leaking methane pipes, speaking with people on the frontier of climate-smart agriculture in central Pennsylvania, and talking to mine workers in southwestern Pennsylvania who are helping produce the active material that goes into cathodes, electrodes in batteries.
At a recent event at the University of Pennsylvania that focused on climate policy as a throughline to securing global competitiveness and domestic prosperity, Zaidi talked about the Biden Administration’s climate accomplishments and why he is hopeful for some continuity into the Trump Administration.
Justin Worland, a senior correspondent at Time magazine covering climate change, moderated the discussion with Zaidi. Perry World House, the Environmental Innovations Initiative, and the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy hosted the hybrid event.
Speaking three weeks after the end of the 2024 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP29) in Azerbaijan, Zaidi touched on the agricultural sector, solid-state technologies, cleaner steel production, super pollutants like nitrous oxide, fuel supply for nuclear reactors, and more.
“Over the last four years, we’ve come together and proven that climate action is the new foundry for economic opportunity and growth in the United States, the figurative factory floor where we are forging a stronger American middle class and mounting the comeback of American manufacturing,” Zaidi said. Noting that companies have created 330,000 new clean energy jobs since Biden signed the IRA two years ago, Zaidi said that “policy that once felt pie-in-the-sky is now steel in the ground as a trillion dollars of private capital has moved off the sidelines and onto the field.”
Zaidi posed several questions that will determine success going forward. He questioned how attentive the United States will be to the grid, transportation, and other critical infrastructure. He questioned whether the U.S. would go the distance to build out the technologies where manufacturing is nascent, noting that “we’ve been really good at inventing the thing in the laboratory but struggling to take it to the factory floor.” He questioned whether the U.S. could put the efficiencies into place to deploy these technologies, stressing that efficiencies are not only about permitting but also about reconducting power lines and building out the workforce.
“I have incredible hopefulness about the bipartisan nature of this, the intergovernmental durability of it, the combination of the public and private sector pulling in the right direction,” Zaidi said. “We have unleashed a truly powerful playbook, a new boundary for economic growth and opportunity. The implications aren’t just domestic; they reach abroad.”
In response to a question from Worland about elements of the IRA he is most worried will be rolled back and how to protect against challenges, Zaidi gave two reasons for hope. One, he said, is that he thinks “the politics of climate inaction are deteriorating.” He pointed to 14 House Republicans writing a letter to Speaker Mike Johnson in August urging against the repeal of parts or all of the IRA.
Zaidi also cited the grants that have already gone out and the work that is underway. “We can’t claw back what’s already in the hands of the recipients. We’re not a banana republic,” he said.
Zaidi cited a remark Johnson made in September about the IRA, “You’ve got to use a scalpel and not a sledgehammer,” but said this is hard to do because of the interconnectivity of different incentives. For example, Zaidi said the Trump Administration isn’t enthusiastic about offshore wind but loves shipbuilding, which is being spurred by the offshore wind industry. “How do you cut with a scalpel and then not lose the thing you want?” Zaidi asked.
He said the IRA has served as a template for pandemic recovery programs in other countries and thinks that when global institutions gather in Brazil for COP30 next year they “will come together to fashion, essentially, the IRA for the world.”
Zaidi sounded a less positive note when asked about the CHIPS and Science Act, noting that a lot of what is in the legislation is not funded. “I don’t take it as granted that we’re actually going to be on an appropriately upward trajectory on basic science, and I’m actually quite alarmed about that,” he said.
But he ended on a positive note.
“For the first time, in a determined and unwavering way, we fashioned a climate program that eschewed the doom and gloom and embraced the hope and possibilities that took on a global problem and delivered locally,” Zaidi said. “And I think that is the most powerful way forward on a problem that has so many facets, that impacts our public health, impacts our national security, impacts so many, so many things that you can get distracted in the story telling of it.”
