Joe Biden’s climate legacy is already complicated. His administration helped pass two laws that put unprecedented funding toward clean energy, electric vehicles, and climate technology—the most consequential climate legislation ever passed in the US. Since the start of his presidential race, the Biden administration has tried to frame climate change as an economic opportunity—a kind of climate nationalism that attempts to use clean reindustrialization as a bridge across ideological divides.
Yet the administration has not left behind the old way of doing things. Oil and gas production has never been higher. Biden’s approval of the controversial Willow oil drilling project in Alaska draws into question the country’s commitment to a transition to clean energy while there is still money to be made in fossil fuels.
His biggest failure may be passing on the White House to a president who has promised to roll back climate policies and withdraw the US from the Paris Agreement, and who has selected for his closest advisers people with close links to the fossil fuel industry and in some cases outright climate denialists.
As President Biden’s national climate adviser, Ali Zaidi helped shape much of the administration’s climate policy. A long-term adviser to the president, Zaidi leads the White House Climate Policy Office, which was established by Biden in one of his first executive orders as president.
Zaidi sat down with WIRED to discuss Biden’s climate legacy. The interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
WIRED: Let’s start by jumping way forward in time to 2050—the deadline the US has set itself for reaching net-zero emissions. How do you think we’ll perceive the Biden administration’s role in that long journey?
Ali Zaidi: What we’ll see is that in a number of sectors across our economy, this administration was the moment when we achieved escape velocity on a shift from polluting products to cleaner ones. You think about the transition that’s taking place in vehicles, from internal combustion engines to strong hybrids, fully electric, hydrogen, fully sustainable aviation fuels. That is now on a secular trajectory. The destination is clear.
When history looks back at this moment, it’ll look at areas like that. Or the electricity sector when in 2024, 96 percent of the new electricity we put onto the system was clean electricity, and we put more power on than we have in two decades. In other sectors it will reflect that we built the launchpad. Maybe we didn’t get to escape velocity, but in areas like industrial decarbonization—things like steel, cement, and aluminum—we put together the tools that enabled that transformation to take place over the next several decades.
Historically—and some of this still lingers—some people view climate policies as asking them to give things up. It’s why electric vehicle mandates and something like New York’s ban on natural gas stoves are still divisive.
This administration has made a big effort to reframe green policies in terms of reshoring, reindustrialization, and so on. Is that narrative getting through to people?
The fundamental change was from a narrative of sacrifice, about gloom and doom, to one that embraces hope and possibilities. I worked for President Biden when he was running; weaving this into the economic construct was something we did in Google Docs in the summer of 2020. I was writing this up as just a hope and prayer back then.
We went from not only trying to execute a paradigm shift from doom and gloom to hope and possibilities but also from focusing on a global problem decades in the making to one that was principally about benefits that work close to people in time and place. I think that’s paying off, to use a George H.W. Bush phrase, in the “thousand points of light” across the country. The 900 factories and counting to manufacture clean electricity, goods and materials—these folks feel uplift. They feel part of a project of economic revival.
And this project retains the durability, because if Washington decides to deprioritize it, now you’ve got these factories on the ground. You can taste the economic opportunity, and I think folks are going to keep chasing that and capital is going to keep chasing that.
That’s true for some parts of the climate economy, but others still need a bunch of government support before they get that traction. One area is direct air capture, which the Biden administration has supported with funding and tax credits. A lot of people in that space think this support, with the incoming administration, is vulnerable.
Direct air capture is at an inflection point that could break a number of different ways. There is nothing self-evident about the US leading. It will require sustained effort. But something we’ve been very purposeful about is building a lot of interconnectedness in every part of the deep decarbonization puzzle. So when you think about batteries, we’re pitching batteries into the grid, into the transport sector. We’re trying to do the materials science that feeds into the supply chain in a way that will also support advances in electrolyzer technology and the hydrogen market.
When you look at something like direct air capture and the fundamental technology that’s going into that, which is not entirely dissimilar from other capture-related technologies, then frankly a lot of the technical complexity is not just in the capture, it’s in the midstream and storage and sequestration, by building a carbon management demand signal and muscle memory in agriculture and fuels in heavy industry. I think we’ve made it so there’s a lot more resilience and momentum behind it.
We’re talking right now as wildfires rage across Los Angeles. A lot of Americans will be worried about climate policy over the next four years. As someone who has been in this space for a long time, what metrics will you be looking at over the next four years to figure out if the country is backsliding on its climate commitments?
Number one is the factory floor. I’m a big believer in “show me where your country is devoting its factory floor and I’ll tell you whether that country can lead in the economy of the future.” I hope smart investors and thoughtful policy makers are facilitating the growth of manufacturing capacity—whether that’s for next generation nuclear or battery deployment.
The second is whether we’re continuing to deal more and more people into the transformation. We’ve got over 100,000 farmers and ranchers that are now taking on climate-smart agricultural practices. Will that climate action, that distributed climate action, continue to expand?
The last thing is how good are we at building the stuff we need to build. The steel in the ground. One of the things we’ve been trying to develop as a discipline is really a professionalization in the development of social license around these new technologies so they can scale. Can we build at the speed we need to by making sure that when a tower goes up, the community feels like they built the barn together, not like they were shortchanged?
We’ve talked about economic and industrial leadership, but political leadership really matters too. Trump has signaled he will withdraw the US from the Paris Agreement, for the second time in five years. Won’t that make it much harder to hit that trajectory you were just describing?
Does that one action spell the end of US climate leadership or sideline us in the progress we need to make? No. But it carries with it symbolism and probably a lot of second-order implications.
Since the beginning of this administration we have had in the West Wing a climate headquarters. A new team. Gina McCarthy led it, now I do. We’ve got senior directors on my team that focus on every sector of the economy, with backgrounds in science, business, engineering, policy.
What happens when you don’t have that level of focus at the highest level with the substantial commitment of very talented people driving it? What happens when the US shows up to multilateral fora or bilateral conversations and does not prioritize setting the rules of the road for the clean energy economy?
I think what happens is the US sidelines American workers in the race for clean energy jobs, and we diminish our influence globally. Not only is the climate not going to be on pause over the next four years, our competitors are not slowing down—to seize the advantage on clean energy technologies, but also for global influence.
Four years is not a lot of time. You must have come into this thinking about a second term. Are you thinking about the things you wanted to get done but can’t?
The big things are, number one, the sectors where we haven’t reached escape velocity. We’ve got to keep pushing for the sake of our economy. That’s unfinished business that needs to be carried forward by state and local governments, by the private sector, and hopefully by the federal government.
The second thing is making sure we are investing enough in talent and the workforce. We have a bad habit in this country of skimming talent off the top and not investing in the institutions that pull more people into the workforce. Unions are at the front of that; Biden spent a lot of time on apprenticeship growth.
And then there’s a lot of work to be done to take on the climate crisis in a way that works really well for US economic interests and our national security, but in a way that positions us as a strong ally and partner to all the nations that seek a more stable and secure future. If you deny climate change, it makes it hard to be a global leader. Folks don’t follow the ostrich with its head in the sand.
Right.
We’ve got to have the vision and the tools to be able to help the most vulnerable populations around the world and also equip them for this challenge and tap into the economic opportunity for themselves. That will ultimately be good for US industry, US innovators, US workers.
I just came from Jimmy Carter’s funeral service, so I’ll leave you with a thought from a sermon. My favorite sermon from Dr. King is the one where he talks about Schubert’s unfinished symphony. He talks about how when you work on building temples of justice, temples of hope, you work on it knowing that you are building a temple that is not going to be finished and certainly not going to be finished during your time.
What we’re doing with climate in this administration is not just an exercise in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. It’s been the more powerful work of being engaged in uplift, in revival, and giving people a sense of hope and purpose. At the end of the day that’s a fundamentally unfinished exercise, but it’s a beautiful one. It belongs in the category of symphony and temple.
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