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Josh Freed
94 Plays2 years ago
Third Way’s Senior Vice President for Climate and Energy on the enormity of the opportunity in decarbonization, reimagining the “virtuous cycle” of international cooperation, hype versus reality in nuclear and the crystallization of historic US legislation in the run-up to 2024
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Transcript
Third Way's Influence on Policy
00:00:05
Speaker
Third Way is a Washington think tank that champions center left positions and policies running the spectrum of critical issues in American society and the body politic. Since its founding in 2005, the organization has been credited with shaping major policy decisions and legislation impacting marriage equality to health care.
Advocacy for Advanced Nuclear Energy
00:00:20
Speaker
Among its forward-looking stances was early advocacy of advanced nuclear in the decarbonization blueprint. Josh Fried is Third Way's Senior Vice President of Climate and Energy. Before dropping into the Labour and Tory conferences in the UK in September, Josh and team spearheaded a seminal report co-authored by consultancy BCG that pinpoints areas of strategic investment for the US as the country pushes toward a clean energy economy.
Midterms and American Democracy
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Speaker
Off the back of his trip, a razor's edge midterm, and a period of historic transformation and setback in the energy landscape, we sit with Josh as he catches his breath.
00:00:53
Speaker
Let's start with perhaps the obvious question. How are you feeling about the midterms? The midterms were surprisingly good. It really reaffirms Americans' commitments to democracy and the fact that they really want mainstream solutions to solve problems rather than extremism,
00:01:14
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and over the top outrageous candidates. And from the climate and energy perspective, how might the changes in the House in particular dent any hopes for new legislation?
Climate and Clean Energy Legislation
00:01:27
Speaker
I mean, that's I'm glad to hear their hopefulness. The great news is Congress passed historic climate and clean energy legislation as part of the Inflation Reduction Act and bipartisan infrastructure law this year. What 2023 and 2024 really hold
00:01:44
Speaker
is how does the government effectively spend the money, partner with companies, partner with communities to turn available government investment into new projects, new factories, and a lot more clean energy and emission reductions. And do you think that the results down ballot will affect the rollout of the agenda in the next two years? They will in a positive way.
00:02:12
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in that the 2024 election was also on the ballot. You had Secretary of State candidate in many of the key states, Arizona, Nevada, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, on the Republican side who were election deniers. If they had gotten elected, the results of the 2024 election would have been cast into doubt. The knock-on effect of that would have been enormous.
00:02:41
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You've got secretaries of state who are going to adhere to the law. You've got governors in Michigan, in Wisconsin, in Arizona, Pennsylvania, and on and on who are going to use the money that's available to them to really rebuild. And even in red states, because there's a lot of money that's available for building projects on the sites of retired coal plants or manufacturing facilities, they're going to take that investment and build clean.
UK Trip and Transatlantic Collaboration
00:03:11
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You touch on something that we'll circle back on a little bit later in this conversation. It's actually a neat segue into your UK trip. You were in the United Kingdom recently for the Labour and Tory Conferences. If you could shed a little bit of light, ask your agenda there. Our goal is to work across the Atlantic to encourage the accelerated development and adoption of clean energy technologies, including inventing new ones so that they can be made cheap
00:03:40
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secure, reliable, then provided to the rest of the world. The U.S. and the United Kingdom in particular have a long history of working together. And so we were over there speaking at both conferences to encourage continued and even expanded collaboration. There's a lot of interest in that. It's funny. Right now, the biggest export from the United Kingdom is Premier League soccer.
00:04:09
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I mean, it's the worldwide brand. The country has a really rich tradition of manufacturing, of innovation, of energy that's been in decline because it's been reliant on coal. It was reliant on natural gas and oil in the North Sea. But you can see that starting to really change. The British government and British companies are thinking about how do we become a leader in offshore wind, floating offshore wind, nuclear, hydrogen, but it's still at an early stage.
00:04:39
Speaker
One of the things I was doing was encouraging think more bold. Here's some models and plans to do it. Let's get going. And how is that message received? How do you find the consensus between the two factions on staying the United Kingdom's course with respect to climate action and clean tech investment?
UK Climate Consensus and Political Divergence
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And how do the viewpoints materially diverge? A lot of agreement on the need to act on climate change and the need to invest a lot more in clean energy.
00:05:06
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where there's divergence is on the willingness to invest government dollars and how ambitious the Labour Party and the Conservative Party view the United Kingdom should be. I was over there in the midst of the trust government's collapse, and you could just see that Conservative government is deflated and feels like, at least particularly at that time, they were out of ideas and exhausted.
00:05:34
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The Sunak government may be changing that, but it's a really difficult situation after more than 12 years of governing and in the teeth of an economic crisis that's been made worse by Brexit. Labor has a really ambitious plan. And unlike the Labor Party of three or four or five years ago, the Labor Party now really wants to work with the private sector, be bold.
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create new partnerships. And it's really exciting to see them thinking in a different way. Did it alter your perspective on the midterms?
Global Democratic Alliances
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Leaving the Labour Party conference and seeing how a center-left, pragmatic and bold political party can be energized and can excite people did give me more hope and also more of an understanding of what the stakes are. If you look across Europe, you look at the United States,
00:06:35
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we are in a global struggle against authoritarianism. You're seeing at the political level, more understanding of that and more of a recognition of both what the stakes are and how democracies need to work more closely together. We've also seen that an acknowledgement that the US and Europe's relationship, for example, with Saudi Arabia and with other countries,
00:07:04
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that are authoritarian, but outside of the China and Russia realm.
00:07:10
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also are really problematic. And we need to rethink those relationships as well, both on the energy level, but also more broadly. Sure. Well, just before you departed for the UK, you, along with BCG, Boston Consulting Group, co-authored and forgive the characterization to do this, skip that analysis and roadmap for U.S. clean tech investment tailored to its areas of greatest competitive advantage. What, if anything, about the report's conclusions took you by surprise?
00:07:36
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Yeah, I also love the TLDR description of it is do this skip that I'm actually gonna steal that from you. Go right ahead. What really took me by surprise was just how enormous the opportunity is not just for the US but for any country or set of countries that puts their mind and policy towards investing in clean energy.
00:07:59
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we've always talked about it at a market in the one two or three trillion dollar range. That everyone needs to compete for between the six technologies we originally looked at. And an additional four we're studying now it's in the ten plus trillion dollar range there's an enormous amount of. Economic opportunity job growth and benefit. In addition to the climate and environmental benefits that are coming from
00:08:29
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this massive transition in how we develop and consume energy.
00:08:34
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Well, a few things stood out about the report. The first, the battery electric vehicle focus, the BEV focus, which of course stands to reason, even if we'll be playing catch up to some degree to the Chinese. In terms of global market share, at Climate Week, I heard time and again about hydrogen as the transformative tech lying in wait, and that includes the transportation sector. What is the verdict here? Is hydrogen a game changer for the energy picture wholesale? And if so, is there a risk of over-indexing on battery tech in the short term?
00:09:03
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especially when you think about the environmental and safety considerations, it could be that hydrogen fuel cells are the future. What I've learned in working in the clean energy and climate space for 13 years is the danger is in over-indexing in any one technology taking over. The market, technology development, other exogenous events are going to determine that. And investing in everything,
00:09:29
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and allowing, whether it's batteries, whether it's hydrogen, whether it's advanced nuclear renewables, all of them to really grow and proliferate as much as the market is going to take them up and use them is great. There are a lot of potential opportunities for hydrogen, for transportation, as a feedstock for petrochemicals, for heating and on and on. But there are also challenges, challenges in how the hydrogen is created.
00:09:58
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It is not a primary energy source. It has to have some sort of input to create it. And also transmission. Hydrogen is a lot more difficult to transport over long distances than natural gas, than electricity. We still have to see exactly where it's going to be used, but it's enormously promising.
Nuclear Energy Acceptance
00:10:20
Speaker
The report makes very clear America's advantages in nuclear. But from the standpoint of public affairs, of public sentiment, have we hit a tipping point for the acceptance of nuclear as a linchpin for decarbonization? We're nearing it. It really is country and then regional specific within countries. For example, there is widespread support in the United Kingdom for the use of nuclear because it's such a present and significant source of electricity now. People are comfortable with it.
00:10:51
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in parts of the United States, you've got a similar, not just acceptance of nuclear, but enthusiasm for it. Other parts of the United States, other parts of Europe, there's more convincing that needs to be done. The big thing though is advanced nuclear reactors need to be built and we need to see what the price of them is. And until then, it runs the risk of having more hype about a product that hasn't been launched yet
00:11:21
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then reality that's what we're trying to balance because you need to keep the momentum and interest going but not get too far ahead of
00:11:33
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what the product can deliver. If we could level set for just one second, there's a growing chorus of voices across sectors that would be very happy to see fossil fuels just vanish tomorrow. Can you speak to why that's neither realistic nor progressive thinking in the context of an energy transition, much less just one? Look, fossil fuels have contributed an enormous amount to the world over the last hundred plus years. They've fueled
00:12:01
Speaker
the rise of the middle class. They've helped reduce the burden on women and children in terms of what they have to do for families economies and given them the ability to go to school and learn and become a different part of the family structure and communities economies. The challenge really is the environmental impacts on climate and more broadly have reached that tipping point.
00:12:30
Speaker
But we don't have replacements that are widely available and at the same price for the amount of energy in particular that fossil fuels produce to make that transition over the next five years, fully over the next 10 years, let alone immediately. And if we stop producing any fossil fuels today or tomorrow or next year, we would see
00:12:59
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just horrific economic impact and impacts on societies. So we need to think about how do we continue to accelerate making clean energy extremely cheap and very widely available. The market's going to move with some nudging from governments to then also move away from fossil fuels.
Balancing Fossil Fuels and Environment
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We also need to keep in mind as we're doing that the implications of the reliance that the United States, European countries and others have had
00:13:29
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on authoritarian states like Saudi Arabia, like Iran, Venezuela now, where petrodictatorships have not only been horrifically repressive against their own publics, but also have been able to really shape policy more broadly in ways that have been detrimental to religious liberties, gender equality,
00:13:55
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human rights, and on and on. Well, I'm glad you bring up the dynamics of globalization and interdependency, because my next question is about Jeffrey Sachs, the economist, who at the latest B20 was railing about US protectionism. And we've already seen blowback by some countries and blocs, France and Germany, for instance, to America-centric provisions of the IRA.
00:14:16
Speaker
In your opinion, is the protectionism claim overblown? Is this really just part of a necessary strategic reset? I think it's a reflection of a new era we're entering, where the net positive impacts of globalization may have hit their limit. We all need to rethink how our supply chains developed, what needs to be developed and made domestically
00:14:44
Speaker
for a broader set of benefits, both economic, but also security for community development and on and on, and define differently how countries interact with each other so that it's not a competition as much as it is a shared race to the top. We're not there yet. The question now is,
00:15:09
Speaker
What does passage of the IRA, the focus on developing on, for example, a domestic battery industry in the United States do to help also encourage Europe to think similarly? What are the ways that we can partner together that we can look for other countries to create economic opportunity so that there's more of a broader virtuous
00:15:34
Speaker
cycle of development and value chains were not there yet it's just at the start of that conversation but it is a different era.
Voice of Poorer Nations in Climate Talks
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From the era of globalization from say nineteen ninety until the last year or two.
00:15:50
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And in that new era, touching on COP, are you hopeful that poorer nations are less at risk of being left behind? I think we still have to see what happens. It's really important that poorer nations are getting a bigger voice and platform, whether it's at COP or in the daily media coverage in countries like the United States.
00:16:13
Speaker
a broader part of the conversation in the halls of Congress and government. There's a huge obligation from countries like the United States to make financing more available, to create more opportunities for investment, and also to ensure that the technologies that the countries want and need are realistic and affordable for them. At your event for the release of the BCG report, Energy Secretary Granholm
00:16:41
Speaker
hailed the IRA, BIL, and CHIP's acts as nothing short of the seeds of an industrial and competitive renaissance. And you were touching on this earlier in the conversation. Even Republican red state lawmakers are rallying around its provisions because of their economic ramifications. Why isn't this one of the only things Americans are talking about? As we go into the next election cycle, how salient should it be? It's not salient.
00:17:08
Speaker
because people aren't seeing the results yet, which makes a lot of sense until there's an investment in the community and people see their neighbors or their family members going to jobs at a new factory or driving an all American made Ford F-150 Lightning. It's just numbers coming out of Washington. The most important thing I think right now is
00:17:35
Speaker
When you've seen big policy change coming out of Washington in the past, the Affordable Care Act is a great example. There was a big backlash. Voters looked at the scope and scale of change and said, whoa, this is too much slowdown. They did not do that with the Inflation Reduction Act, bipartisan infrastructure law, any of that. Instead, they reacted with kind of a yawn
00:18:04
Speaker
and then looked at the other policies and other ways that the candidates were talking about things and chose who they were going to vote for based on that. I think that's actually a big victory. Well, that's an important point. And how will Third Way be reaching out to Republican lawmakers to help get some of these things over the finish line? The good news right now is money and the policies are in the bloodstream of the government. So it's really up to
00:18:34
Speaker
Agencies like the Department of Energy, companies, communities to all get together and say, here's the opportunity. Let's start building it and make sure it gets done really effectively and efficiently. What we hope to see from Republicans, and we work with other groups that engage directly with Republican office holders, is for them to recognize that if, for example, a hydrogen production facility is
00:19:02
Speaker
developed and built in Southeastern Ohio, it gets praise from Republicans and Democrats. And hopefully Republicans start moving into a direction where they say, oh yeah, industrial strategy, manufacturing in the United States, embracing what a modern United States economy looks like is really good. The real risk right now that I worry about is the Republican party,
00:19:30
Speaker
because of Trump's dominance of it over the last six years now is built on spectacle rather than policy. And it's a horribly partisan thing to have to say, but that's the reality. It's why
00:19:44
Speaker
They did not win control of the Senate in a year that they should have. It's why they barely won control of the House. I mean, the election results we just saw were the most significant victory for an incumbent president in a midterm election since 1934, almost 90 years. And it was as much a rejection of
00:20:11
Speaker
a Republican Party that's unfortunately built on spectacle and extremism as it was an embrace of a Democratic Party that ran a lot of mainstream candidates. Well, that's a good note to almost end on. You mentioned earlier the premiership as an export, and I wanted to talk a bit about your trip to London and in particular, your experience at Crystal Palace Chelsea. I wondered if you might give us a little bit of color around that experience as if it was your first time at Selhurst.
00:20:40
Speaker
So I've been now to three very old grounds in the old White Heart Lane and Craven Cottage in Fulham before they renovated it, and now Sellers Park. It's a really different experience to go into a stadium that doesn't feel like it's been renovated for at least 30, 40, 50 years. You can see what English soccer was like
00:21:08
Speaker
before big television contracts, before they had a lot of people like me flying in from the United States who said, I have to go see a soccer match. It really reinforces that the game that's played on the pitch is the most important part of the whole experience. You walk in, the seat is as thin plastic as you could get, and you're just standing the whole time and the crowd at Crystal Palace
00:21:34
Speaker
was more engaged than almost any other crowd I've experienced. I think that's a really nice note on which to finish this. So with that, yeah, I just want to thank you again for your time. This was really enlightening, Josh. And so thank you so much and best of luck to you. Hey, thank you so much. This was a lot of fun and hope we can do it again. Many thanks to our guest, Josh Fried. Till next time, I'm Eben Howell for Studio Santiago and Kitten Magazine.
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Speaker
you