Can Congress pull off a NEPA overhaul?

The team returns back from a mid-season break rested and ready to dig into a new Congressional attempt to fast-track clean energy projects. 

Earlier this month, GOP Rep. Bruce Westerman of Arkansas introduced draft legislation to overhaul the long-standing National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). The plan could provide critical momentum to get clean energy (and fossil fuel) projects built faster. Yet it has also caught flak from some Democrats who describe it as extreme, and tie it to the controversial Project 2025.

In today’s episode, the hosts consider the obstacles surrounding existing NEPA policy, as well as the impacts of Westerman’s plan and the criticisms surrounding it.

Also in this episode: Brandon, Emily, and Julia discuss the energy and climate rhetoric in this month’s presidential debate, as well as a proposal from Harris campaign adviser Brian Deese to loan other countries billions of dollars to buy American clean energy tech. 

The episode wraps up with the rapid-fire segment, the Mark-Up.

Transcript

Julia Pyper: Welcome to Political Climate. I'm Julia Pyper. We're back from our mid-season break and ready to dig into another congressional attempt to fast-track new energy projects. Earlier this month, GOP rep Bruce Westerman of Arkansas proposed overhauling America's environmental review process. The plan could provide critical momentum to get clean energy projects built faster, but it has also caught flack from some Democrats who describe it as extreme and want to tie it to the controversial Project 2025. In today's episode, what kind of impact could this reform have on the clean energy sector, how can its champions build support to get it over the finish line and does it warrant the criticism?

We'll also take stock of the energy and climate rhetoric in this month's presidential debate. Were the candidates effective in explaining their respective visions? Later in the show, we'll take a quick look at a proposal from Harris campaign advisor Brian Deese to loan billions of dollars to other nations to help them purchase clean energy technology. Should the US embrace what he calls the Clean Energy Marshall Plan?

And we'll wrap things up with our rapid-fire segment, The Markup. That's all coming up on Political Climate.

As always, I'm joined by my co-hosts, Brandon Hurlbut and Emily Domenech. Brandon served as chief of staff in President Obama's energy department and went on to found Boundary Stone Partners and Overture VC. Good morning, Brandon.

Brandon Hurlbut: Hey, Julia.

Julia Pyper: Emily served as Senior Energy Advisor to Speakers of the House Kevin McCarthy and Mike Johnson and is now a senior Vice President at Boundary Stone. Hey, Emily.

Emily Domenech: Hey, Julia.

Julia Pyper: All right, well we're going to skip our typical banter and get right into some feedback on the presidential debate. We took a little break here as the debate took place, but I got to get your guys' thoughts. Although both candidates spoke as directly about climate and energy as they have at pretty much any other point during the campaign, neither one really addressed the particulars of their plans.

Harris sought to rep her clean energy and fossil fuel record. For instance, she hyped jobs created by the Inflation Reduction Act and record high oil and gas extraction. She also reversed course on fracking saying she would not ban it.

Trump meanwhile largely represented the fossil fuel industry, although he said at one point he was, "A big fan of solar." At another point though, he did not refute Harris's accusation that he's called climate change a hoax.

I thought it was actually interesting that Harris pointed to the fossil fuel enabling elements of the Inflation Reduction Act. You don't hear about those too often, but that was one of the key points that she made. But I want to go to you first, Brandon, what did you make of Harris's strategy there, really tacking to the middle? She didn't go all in on clean. What does that say about her campaign, what she expects from Democrats to think about that?

Brandon Hurlbut: Well Julia, Kamala Harris is all-in on clean energy. I mean, she cast the tie-breaking vote for the Inflation Reduction Act. And on strategy, she did highlight the trillion-dollar investment that they made through the Inflation Reduction Act. And also I really liked the strategy of highlighting the cost that people are experiencing from climate change on current extreme weather events and the inability to get insurance. I think that brings it home for people and helps them understand why we have to be dealing with this now. This is not a future issue. This is a today issue. And she highlighted a balanced approach to meet our current energy needs while rapidly transitioning to the clean energy economy that we want, so I thought it was an effective strategy.

Julia Pyper: Emily, what do you think Trump's most significant comment was on our issues on climate and energy during that debate?

Emily Domenech: I'll say I don't think that energy or climate were really highlighted in this debate. I was a little disappointed. I would've loved a few more questions on this topic from the moderators.

Brandon Hurlbut: Agree there.

Emily Domenech: But I also, I was trying to think through what was the most interesting part, and all I could think about was Kamala Harris talking repeatedly about how much she loves fracking, so really welcome to the party. We're excited to have somebody who wants to talk about American natural gas on both sides of the aisle. But I will be honest, I did enjoy reading Twitter, and progressive Twitter particularly losing their minds about those comments.

Brandon Hurlbut: I actually am surprised that there hasn't been more pushback on that.

Emily Domenech: Me too.

Brandon Hurlbut: And I think it's evidence that the Democratic Party for once understands that; I'll quote Joe Biden, he said, "Don't compare me to the Almighty. Compare me to the alternative." And in the past you would see all these letters calling on the candidate to issue this statement and blah, blah, blah, and we're just not really seeing that. We're seeing people understand maybe I disagree with her on fracking, but that doesn't mean I'm less enthusiastic about her. I'm a thousand percent enthusiastic about her, so we're going to have some disagreements. That's okay, but we have to support her all-in to win because she is obviously so much better than the alternative.

Julia Pyper: I thought it was interesting that Matthew Yglesias, progressive writer, commentator was tweeting Biden's not anti oil and gas. He hasn't been. His policies haven't been. Harris hasn't actually been. Despite a push toward clean energy, it's a bit of a misnomer to say that the Democrats have an anti-fossil fuel given their actual record on this. So it creates an interesting tension there. Either that's just a political stance and they're just quiet about it, even though that is true, or Emily might say it's happened through forces outside of their control. I'm curious, Brandon, what you make of that.

Brandon Hurlbut: Yeah, I mean this is an issue where there's not total unanimity in the Democratic Party. I mean, Senator Hickenlooper from Colorado supports fracking. Barack Obama supported fracking, but we all support getting to a clean energy economy as fast as possible. Some of us have different ideas of how quickly we can get there, but yeah, I'm glad to see that people aren't making too much of this.

Julia Pyper:

And maybe that's where the permitting discussions come back in, where environmentalists are like, all right, we'll take our fight there another day. Let's not hash it out on the campaign trail. Let's figure out down the line how we can maybe stymie or think about ways to reduce fracking and fossil fuel development. I wonder if that's the kind of exchange that's being thought of here. What do you think, Emily?

Emily Domenech: I mean, my take here is I genuinely don't know what Vice President Harris thinks about this issue because I think she took a really strong stand four years ago. It feels like she's taking a really strong stand today. I don't like being in a position where I have to wonder what my potential future president might do before they get in office, but in this case, I hope that she takes a more all of the above, let's look at the cleanest alternative for the moment with the resources we have as opposed to this let's turn out the lights approach we've heard from some other folks on the left. So if this is a real moderating moment for her, to me that's good news, but I really don't know. I couldn't tell you today what I think her presidency will be like on this particular issue just because I think the jury's still out here a little bit.

And that I think is one of those things that comes into the discussion, not just on this issue, but on plenty of other issues on the presidential campaign trail where we hear lots and lots of promises or commitments or walk backs from things people have said that are convenient in the moment and it's hard to tell what it's going to look like when you govern. Governing is harder than running for Congress or running for president.

Julia Pyper: Brandon, close us out on the debate. Bring us back to the campaign here for a moment. I know I think a lot of the feedback was maybe substance was perhaps missing from some portions of the debate, but it was really a character test. What's your feeling here where the candidates sit toward the end of September with the election around the corner? What's that temperature read you're getting coming out of the debate and into this last push here?

Brandon Hurlbut: I think this is the one thing we can all agree on. It's a close race, and it's going to go down to the wire. She's gotten a little bit of a bounce out of that debate. People thought she did really well, but we've got seven states where the candidate who will win will have to win about half of those states, three to four of them, and that's where we are.

I mean, I would say on the debate the only thing I would've wished that she would've expressed that she didn't is that in Pennsylvania, 51% of the energy jobs there are clean energy, and clean energy employs eight times as many Pennsylvania workers as gas, and 78% of Pennsylvania residents want more clean energy. So this whole idea that the whole thing turns on fracking in Pennsylvania, clean energy's very popular and has a lot of workers there, so I wish we could have highlighted that.

But other than that, it was a tremendous performance. I think Democrats are really motivated and enthusiastic. I know many of my old friends from the Obama '08 campaign are taking vacation time for the next couple of weeks and they're going out to Pennsylvania. They're bringing in the cavalry, the all-star, hall of fame team and makes me feel even more confident about our chances to win.

Julia Pyper: All right, last polling I saw she was up slightly in Pennsylvania. Of course, you take that with a big grain of salt, but we'll see how this goes.

Emily Domenech: Yeah, I mean I think the one thing we know about this election cycle is that it seems to change every week and there's some big new pop every week. We should put a pin in this one, but I'd love to talk a little bit more about the union vote here because it's another fun one that's different than it's been in past elections.

Julia Pyper: Indeed. Well, more election discussions to come. We still have October ahead, that October surprise potential, so surely we will be back to talk about that.

All right, let's switch gears and talk about the wide-ranging potential NEPA reform bill brought by Representative Westerman this month. NEPA being the National Environmental Policy Act that requires federal agencies to consider environmental factors alongside technical and economic ones. As we mentioned at the top of the show, the bill has the potential to fast-track both clean energy and fossil fuel infrastructure projects. Similar to the Manchin, Barrasso proposal we discussed earlier this summer, Westerman's bill would address permitting reform, but it covers a different part of the law.

For one, it reduces the environmental review process. It also caps the window to mount legal challenges to NEPA decisions at 120 days and ups the number of projects that qualify for categorical exclusion thus bypassing review. Westerman, who worked as a forester and engineer before entering Congress, said, "My friends across the aisle have approved a lot of money for renewable energy projects. There are more of those held up by permitting than traditional energy projects."

While some Democrats, like recent guest of the show, Representative Scott Peters, have acknowledged they have only "technical issues" with the bill, others have fiercely criticized it. During the hearing, Representatives Jared Huffman and Ocasio-Cortez sought to lump the bill in with the often demonized Project 2025. "Team Extreme is back," Huffman said. "We don't need an even uglier stepchild of this Manchin-Barrasso bill."

Okay, Emily, you are our permitting expert on this show. It's hard to get away from this topic, also because it's one of the bigger bills in our space that seems to be getting traction and moving and stimulating a lot of debate right now. So set the scene for us. What do you make of this bill? Does introducing it make it more or less likely that the US passes some kind of permitting reform—let's say this year, in 2024—coming out of the election and the lame duck?

Emily Domenech: So I think the answer to that is yes, and I'll tell you why. The way that this lame duck process works to come up with whatever your year-end package Congress will vote on is that we have the four, we call them the four corners. So it's your majority and minority leadership in both the House and the Senate. They sit down and they decide what's the universe we're going to negotiate on and what are the big issues that we're going to talk about and try to agree on before the end of the year?

In order to get an issue brought up in that environment, you need one of those four leaders to say, "I want to put this topic on the table." What I've seen in the past is that when there have been permitting proposals in the Senate, Senate Democratic leadership hasn't been inclined to bring it up in that four corners discussion. So while it might be supported by a bipartisan coalition, it doesn't necessarily come up to rise up to the level of leadership.

By Bruce Westerman bringing forward something on the House Republican side that is supported by a lot of House Republicans, that gives some motivation for Speaker Mike Johnson to bring up this topic in the four corners discussion. So I actually think we're much more likely to get a negotiation at the end of the year because Westerman's putting forward a house, I would call it not an alternative, but a companion to the Manchin-Barrasso effort.

Julia Pyper: What does Westerman and folks who support his bill have in mind for the net result? What are the projects that they really care about? We talk a lot about clean here, but just paint the picture for me. What are they trying to accomplish?

Emily Domenech: I think it's funny because I always think there's this idea that Republicans only care about fossil projects and Democrats only care about clean energy. When it comes to NEPA, this impacts more than just energy projects. It impacts building roads, it impacts bridges, it impacts ports, it impacts agriculture projects, wildfire fighting, forest management. Any kind of linear infrastructure that gets money from the federal government automatically triggers that NEPA process.

So if you ask a Republican, Bruce Westerman or Garret Graves, who we've had on this program who has worked a lot in the NEPA space, what's your goal in reforming this law, it's to build more things in America more quickly without the federal government getting in the way. That means clean energy, it means linear infrastructure like pipelines and transmission, and it means your major infrastructure projects that are funded by the federal government.

I give Westerman a lot of credit for focusing in on two major areas in NEPA reform that I think are really critical, both for clean energy and for some of these other significant investments where we're trying to compete with China.

The first area is what's called major federal action reform, which is the section of NEPA that triggers whether or not you automatically have to go through a NEPA review. Right now, it's a giant list of stuff. So if you took a loan guarantee from the federal government or a grant or you crossed a corner of federal land with your linear infrastructure project or you crossed between two states, it's a huge long list, and this effort would be to narrow that list. Not to say that those projects never go through NEPA, but that this can't be the only reason they go through NEPA. There has to be some kind of real need for an environmental review beyond that, oh, you took a couple dollars from the government.

This is most relevant for people who took grants from the federal government and have never experienced NEPA before. So when you look at the major investments that were made in the Chips and Science Act, a lot of those folks are saying, "Is it really worth it for me to take these billions of dollars from the federal government to build fabs in the United States if I'm then stuck in a lengthy environmental review process that might mean I lose my private sector investment?" Same is true for particularly innovative companies who've never experienced this regulatory burden before. Really a big thing. And I think that's a unifying issue, and I give Westerman a lot of credit for picking it as something he wanted to focus on.

The second thing would be limiting the time we can have lawsuits. So that's a question of how do we stop ourselves from getting stuck in an endless loop of litigation to stop projects? Because what we see, and the Breakthrough Institute, of all places, did a report on this recently. The federal government wins most of these lawsuits. About 70% of the time the actual original project permit stands up in court, but that lengthy process of suing and settling and moving through the legal system often delays things by years and then projects lose their private financing and just fail.

So those are the two problems he's trying to solve, and I think both of those are really relevant, not just to clean energy, but to a big broad range of projects.

Julia Pyper: Brandon, give us your insights here. I mentioned a moment ago that you saw Representatives Huffman and Ocasio-Cortez talking about how this is actually too extreme of a proposal and it would really undermine environmental reviews that I think a lot of folks on the left think are necessary for not just decarbonization but broader environmental priorities. What is your take on the bill?

Brandon Hurlbut: Well, you know I love AOC and it's hard for me to disagree with her, but on this one I do. I don't agree with what she said there. And my experience with government is sometimes we start these policies with good intentions and they later have some unintended consequences. And I think NEPA is a good example of that. There are good intentions at the heart of this, but it's not working.

I was in DC two weeks ago and I went to the DOE Forrestal Building for the first time in a long time and was there to talk about many of the projects that we're trying to get done are being held up by NEPA. And the DOE folks were like, they started talking about the Manchin, Barrasso bill, and I was like, "No, no, no, you have lawyers in this building right now that interpret NEPA. You don't even need the Congress to do this. These are projects that are being held up by NEPA lawyers internally."

And what happens is when the standard becomes the lawyers think their job is I have to do everything I can to not get sued, well, that's an impossible standard to meet and it just jams up the system. So I am for timelines. It only makes sense to have that. These things can't go on forever. And my friends in the administration in lots of these press releases they put out, they like to say we want to leverage private capital. And I'm not sure many of them know what that totally means. I know a lot more about it now that I'm an investor, and I can tell you if you want to leverage private sector capital, you have to have some certainty in the process. People are not going to invest money into things that they don't know if it can get built or they're uncertain about the timeline.

And so this is one where I'm in much more agreement with Emily, and I don't know all the nuances of the differences between the two bills, but I'm anxious for something like this to happen.

Julia Pyper: Emily, do you have a sense of what representative Scott Peters on the Democratic side might be thinking, someone who's willing to engage in debate but referenced he wanted technical fixes? Where do you think the actual room for negotiation is on this bill?

Emily Domenech: So I've talked a little bit with Congressman Peters' staff and with the Congressman himself. I think he's really motivated to find common ground here with Bruce Westerman, but I do think the challenge is that oftentimes we have this legacy environmental movement that reacts negatively anytime they hear the word NEPA. They think, oh, this is going to be something that's damaging for our environmental justice communities, or that's just like a reflexive position. And so he's got to figure out some ways to balance that.

I know I've talked a little bit about how do we make the permitting process more accessible to communities who are impacted by these projects? How do we make it easier to submit comments or to be a part of the comment process? I know those are things that he's talked about in the past. But I also know that Chairman Westerman really wants to get to a good place here, and he and Peters have worked together really successfully on a number of other issues in the forestry space that are often intertwined with this permitting issue. So I think there's definitely an opportunity, but we need to see what time the members can spend together in the next two weeks. I know they were planning to sit down in the next few days, so I'm hopeful that we'll see some progress there.

Julia Pyper: It was interesting to read in E&E News that this bill is already on the radars of Barrasso and Manchin. It sounds like they are sitting together to figure out how maybe these two bills could align. Manchin referenced vaguely let's not upset the apple cart, but it sounds like they are taking the meetings, having the dialogue. Barrasso was pretty bold in thinking that this, to your point, Emily, it adds more momentum here, and he thought there's likely going to be a bill in the lame duck. He told E&E News, "There's a commitment from the four of us to get permitting signed into law," referring to various House and Senate leadership there. So it's interesting to see, yeah, maybe this adds a little more juice into this lame duck session where maybe regardless of the election outcome, we get something, although the election will play a role.

Emily Domenech: I would say I think there's a little bit of a misnomer in the big press that these are competing proposals, that there's a House proposal and a Senate proposal and they're doing different things. What they're actually doing is covering different parts of the permitting discussion. So Manchin-Barrasso covers a lot of that federal lands and waters and leasing and the things that fall under the jurisdiction of their committee. Westerman is focused on NEPA. That's a different part of the permitting process. So these are really additive proposals, and I think they complement each other very well and so there's room for us to maybe move both of them at the same time. They're not in competition with each other.

Julia Pyper: Brandon, you talked there about speeding up this review process. It has a real impact on projects that you're seeing trying to get deployed in the field. Do you have a sense of how you can both have these timelines but then make sure that climate considerations are still included? Have you heard anyone talk about a framework for that? Is it just a set of parameters we need to make sure that climate impacts are also considered? Because that is one of the critiques of this Westerman bill is that in speeding things up too much it could overlook climate considerations that we need to factor in over longer timelines, things of that nature. Do you have thoughts on how we can maintain that rigor while speeding things up?

Brandon Hurlbut: It doesn't mean we're still not doing the environmental impact assessments and the reviews. They still have to produce the analysis that shows what are the trade-offs here, what are the impacts. It just means that they have to do it on a timeline.

Julia Pyper: Right.

Brandon Hurlbut: And then I think with some of these categorical exclusions, I support those, and being able to lessen the ability to get sued because this stuff just keeps getting dragged out in the courts. And the biggest climate impact it will have is if we can build the clean energy generation and transmission that we need to solve this crisis. We will not solve it if we're litigating projects over and over again in the courts for many years, and that will freeze up the capital because who's going to invest in that?

Emily Domenech: I just want to add here that Brandon's perspective on this issue is exactly why we have an opportunity to do something on it. This is something that just simply, we didn't have folks in the investment world or in the developer world really engaged on NEPA until honestly post-IRA to a significant extent because that's when a lot of that grant money really pushed into the market and sucked all these projects into NEPA. So it's like a real interesting nexus point between people who care about climate and people who care about building things in America, and we can come together and try to solve this problem, and it's part of why Boundary Stone launched a coalition specifically for this purpose.

Brandon Hurlbut: America Builds, right?

Emily Domenech: America Builds, baby, let's go. So our goal here is to bring in people from all across the spectrum, from renewable developers to pipelines to heavy manufacturing, all of that work. And the reason we're doing it now is because we actually agree on the goal.

Julia Pyper: So Brandon mentioned there the plan to have projects qualify for categorical exclusion. My understanding is that's when one federal agency can use an existing exclusion from another federal agency to speed things up. Tell us more about that, Emily. What does that get us?

Emily Domenech: It's an existing environmental review. If you did an environmental review on a similar project or a similar area where you can say we already checked the box on this impact and this impact and this impact, instead of doing it all over again from scratch, you can take that existing study and apply it to a new project. It saves you a ton of time, a ton of money in terms of federal resources to do those evaluations, and you're building off work that you already paid for. We do that kind of stuff in the private sector all the time and states do it a lot. So it's a good opportunity to leverage the investments we already made to ensure that a project is safe and environmentally friendly.

Julia Pyper: Does it just rubber stamp that new project which may have a slightly different set of considerations even while being categorically the same, or do you still have to redo some elements of that review?

Emily Domenech: They have to be very fundamentally similar, and the review area has to be very similar. There's a lot of rules for it. I would actually note that the categorical exclusion sharing piece is something that we enacted in the debt limit deal in the FRA, and it's probably been the most impactful piece of that law for clean energy development.

Julia Pyper: Well, let's leave it there on Permitting Pod, I mean this segment of Political Climate. And let's move to our third topic of the show. Brian Deese, an economic advisor to the Harris campaign, published an essay in the new issue of Foreign Affairs magazine. It centers on a pitch to loan climate-vulnerable countries billions of dollars to buy American clean energy technology. He calls it the “Clean Energy Marshall Plan” in reference to America's economic support for Europe after World War II. Does the plan sound feasible to you? What do you think?

Brandon Hurlbut: Julia, I have so many thoughts on this, and I actually think we should do, instead of us being Permitting Pod, we should do a series on this because there is so much we could talk about. I'll say a few things. One, we have talked about on this podcast that America is 18% of the global greenhouse gas emissions. This is a global problem, even if we solve it here. Two, going back to my time at the DOE, we were talking about this. We could make these products here and sell them to the world. And that is a win-win because other countries would get this technology, they'd reduce their costs, it'd be cleaner, it'd help solve this crisis, and we could build out the middle class in America by increasing manufacturing jobs here. Because we know from these World War II analogies we've used in the past that once that American industrial base comes together, that we can out-compete anybody. That's how we won World War II.

As far as Brian's piece goes, Brian is a good friend. He's one of the most thoughtful public servants and policy experts I've ever met in my life. That's why he was running the National Economic Council for the President, and he's a young guy. I worked with him closely in the Obama Administration. He's had an amazing career. He's one of the people I respect most. His piece is really thought-provoking. He sets up several ideas like establishing this clean energy financing authority as a mechanism to finance deployment of these technologies and products across the world that are made here. It's a really interesting idea. We could get into the details about should it be within Treasury, should it be an independent agency? I would love to get Emily's thoughts on how Republicans are thinking about this.

Also, there is another well-regarded expert. His name is Adam Tooze, and he wrote a counterpoint to this and basically said that Brian's thesis of the Marshall Plan is not accurate. That it was really about establishing the US dollar as a global currency. And I would love to get deep on this show about maybe we bring Brian on.

Emily Domenech: Totally support it.

Brandon Hurlbut: Maybe we bring Adam Tooze on and we could really get into this because what's great is that there's a discussion about this. There's talk of maybe establishing an American sovereign wealth fund like many countries have. So there's different tools that you could use to do this. This is the conversation we need to be having that we're just. This is not part of the debate.

Julia Pyper: Doesn't America already invest abroad? I mean, we've got development finance institutions that do this. I think maybe they're working more on a project basis, maybe thinking less strategically. Explain to me, this is not my area, what do we do today already and why is this so different?

Emily Domenech: So I would just note that I think that's the question that you need to answer when you say what we need is an all new agency instead of to really effectively direct the agencies we already have. I think from reading this article, I think Brian would probably say, "Well, those other investment, the EXIM Bank or investments in the World Bank are more diverse than just clean energy and we need something that's focused only on this issue.

I think Republicans would probably push back on that mostly just from a growth of government perspective. Do we really need a whole other agency to be doing this kind of work when we struggle to really effectively direct the ones we have? But I get the idea of wanting to have a theme around where you make your investments.

One of the things I appreciated reading this piece is that he did actively mention nuclear, which is an area where Republicans have frankly argued with some of the other places we invest. The World Bank hasn't invested in a nuclear project in over 60 years, and we've seen legislation in Congress to limit their funding if they don't start doing that. You can't say you care about reducing emissions globally if that's something that's not on your docket.

So I think there's some things here to work with, but I do always, as a good Republican, I eyebrow raise anytime someone says, "What we need is a whole new agency."

Brandon Hurlbut: So the way this works currently, we have segments of this. You have the Development Finance Corporation, you have the Export-Import Bank. The Loan Guarantee Program is an excellent example as we've talked about how we do this domestically where we can provide financing for these projects and the taxpayer gets paid back.

Julia Pyper: Well, to your point about US domestic investments, the Department of Energy today just announced $3 billion for projects to bolster EV and grid batteries, so we're seeing the investment here.

Brandon Hurlbut: So it's been very successful in catalyzing these industries and leveraging private sector capital. And also to Emily's point, I mean the Loan Program Office isn't costing the American taxpayers money. They're making money off of the interest of those loans. So there are creative tools that we can use where it's not a burden necessarily on the American taxpayer.

So we have segments of this already. We have the Development Finance Corporation, which used to be parts of the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, called OPEC. So they rolled that up into this DFC, and the Export-Import Bank does pieces of this. So I think the idea is to do this on such a larger scale. We could take some of the things that those existing institutions have done, see what's worked, what hasn't, what should we be doing differently.

But one of the things that I really like about this that I think Emily might also agree on is that China's doing this. I mean, that is a big part of the piece, is they have their Belt and Road Initiative, and they're exerting all this global influence, particularly in Africa. And so we have not really responded to that in the way that we need to. And so there is such a piece of this that is about not only climate change, but how do we exert America's global power? And to me, I would rather invest in this and develop these economies across the world and supercharge our economy at home by making these products good middle-class manufacturing jobs than spending all this on weapons. Obviously, we need to have a robust defense, but we could have a different kind of power and maybe even a greater power and solve climate change at the same time.

Emily Domenech:

The one counterpoint I'll make is that I read through this article and he talks a little bit about a strategic critical mineral reserve, and these are some ideas that have been bipartisan that are interesting. I didn't see any mention of domestic mining, and I think that's something that it's really going to be hard to get Republicans to come to the table on saying the US needs to be a leader here if we don't talk about using our resources that are part of this discussion. So that would be something if we can get Brian to come and talk to us about it, I'd love to talk to him a little bit about his thoughts on that because I certainly did when he was at the NEC and I was working in Congress.

Brandon Hurlbut: I'll text him.

Emily Domenech: Please do.

Julia Pyper: We're going to wrap up with our rapid-fire segment, The Mark-up. For anyone tuning in for the first time at the end of our show, Emily, Brandon, and I each bring a story, anecdote, or observation to discuss and debate. Let's see what we've got this time. Emily, let's go to you first.

Brandon Hurlbut: Emily always gets to go first.

Julia Pyper: Oh, sorry. Brandon.

Brandon Hurlbut: No, I'm-

Julia Pyper: I don't want to hurt your feelings.

Emily Domenech: I like closing it out. Brandon can go first.

Brandon Hurlbut: All right, I'll go first. So the article that I'm highlighting is from The Economist. It's called, "Geothermal Energy Could Outperform Nuclear Power: Tricks from the Oil Industry have produced a Hot-Rocks Breakthrough." So traditional geothermal, there are just limited spots that you can do it. And this breakthrough, led by Boundary Stone client Fervo, is along the lines of what happened with fracking back in the eighties where there was a drilling breakthrough that unlocked all of this natural gas that people thought wasn't accessible. So if that is happening with geothermal, we could see this huge unlock of more renewable power and using these techniques from the oil and gas industry and those workers, this is pretty exciting.

Emily Domenech: Yeah, I love the geothermal-gas relationship because if you actually go back and look at the origins of where horizontal drilling came into the natural gas production discussion, it was because a DOE National Lab was doing research on geothermal energy using horizontal drilling, and it got adopted by the oil and gas industry. So these shared R&D projects are always what's exciting in the energy space.

Julia Pyper: Great. I'll go next and then I'll give Emily the closing opportunity here. I'm going to highlight an article about virtual power plants. So a little bit self-serving here, but GoodLeap, the company I work for in my day job, did announce that we are now active in the VPP space, and this comes at a time when you're seeing a lot more activity in virtual power plants at large.

And for anyone who doesn't know because I always hear people don't really understand what VPPs are, it's aggregating a bunch of distributed energy solutions in a home, or even businesses, think solar, batteries, it could be heat pumps, leveraging smart thermostats, et cetera, to aggregate them to effectively create one centralized big power plant worth of megawatts and capacity that you can use flexibly to meet grid needs.

This is particularly important as we're seeing strains on the grid like here in California. We pay, as taxpayers and then ratepayers here in the state, roughly $1.2 billion we are paying just between 2024 and 2026 to keep natural gas peaker plants on standby in the event we need to call on them. That's a lot of real money. Meanwhile, we could be aggregating the solutions that are already in people's homes, like the solar and storage that's already on the grid, like leveraging smart thermostats just to tweak things here and there so the grid has a little less pressure at these peak times.

So the article is from Business Insider. They talk about how homeowners are getting paid up to $10,000 a year to create virtual power plants to help out stressed grids. I think it's a really new revolution in this space. It's not actually new, but we're seeing it scale, and it's really exciting, and I think I look forward to working with utilities and other stakeholders to make these programs a real success so we don't leave out these valuable assets that are already on the grid today that could really benefit and meet some of our grid needs and reduce costs, frankly, for everybody too.

Emily Domenech: We love a “work smarter not harder” story, right?

Brandon Hurlbut: If you're a VPP innovator out there, call us because we have capital to deploy and I love this space.

Julia Pyper: Let's do an episode on VPPs. Separate episode on VPPs, VPP Pod. Okay.

Emily Domenech: Oh, god.

Julia Pyper: Emily, over to you to close it out.

Emily Domenech: All right. I'm going to take us back to our election year politics where everybody decides suddenly they're a moderate, sort of like a group of 12 Democrats in the House of Representatives who wrote a letter to President Biden asking him to lift the pause on LNG exports and make sure that we can get US LNG overseas to our allies. I found this interesting because I think this is a group of members who oftentimes don't vote as though they represent oil and gas communities, but in an election year we tend to see a few more folks come out and be a little bit more vocal on this space. So they said, "Hey, look, we've got some of the cleanest natural gas in the world and we think we should export more of it to help support our allies in Ukraine," so I thought that was a fun story.

Brandon Hurlbut: Well, it's interesting in these general elections, is your point Emily, people become a little bit more open to some bipartisan consensus and compromise, and I'm wondering if this Kamala campaign is showing that do we need a two-year primary where we have all these white papers, we have to say all this stuff. I kind of like this. Maybe we do a primary in August or July that's over four weeks, regional primaries, and we have our candidate for Labor Day and we go.

Emily Domenech: As a good House girl, I love a two-year cycle.

Julia Pyper: Election starts Day One in office.

Emily Domenech: Let's go.

Julia Pyper: We'll leave it there for this episode. Political Climate is a co-production of Latitude Media and Boundary Stone Partners. Max Savage Levenson is our producer. Sean Marquand is our technical director. Stephen Lacey is our executive editor. You can get all of our show notes and transcripts at latitudemedia.com, and if you want us to talk about a specific topic, please email us at politicalclimatepodcast@gmail.com. And please feel free to help spread the word about Political Climate on LinkedIn, X, and beyond. We're on Apple, Spotify and everywhere else you'd like to listen. I'm Julia Pyper. Catch you again in two weeks.