With less than four months left in office, President Biden has green-lit another divisive climate-related policy.

On October 2, Biden signed the Building Chips in America Act into law. The bill allows the manufacture of microchips — like the ones in smartphones, medical devices, cars and more — to bypass federal environmental review. 

The bill’s supporters hope it will drive domestic production and maximize the potential of Biden’s 2022 CHIPS and Science Act. But a solid chunk of congressional Democrats oppose the bill, citing the health and environmental risks that chips production facilities pose.

In today’s episode, the hosts unpack the nuanced political dynamics behind the bill and debate the impacts it could have on November’s elections.

Also in the show — the hosts take a deep dive on the climate rhetoric in the recent vice presidential debate and offer an insider perspective on New York Climate Week.

The episode wraps up with the lightning round segment, the Markup.

Political Climate is co-produced by Boundary Stone Partners, a leading bipartisan climate change strategic advisory and government affairs firm. Their mission-driven approach combines innovative solutions with expertise in technology, finance, policy, federal funding, and advocacy. Learn more and get in touch today at BoundaryStone.com.

Concerned about how the 2024 election might impact the programs, policies, and incentives that matter most to you? Let Boundary Stone Partners' Climate24 service help you navigate the political landscape with their policy navigator tool, resources, and bespoke services. Learn more at BoundaryStone.com/Climate24.

Transcript

Julia Pyper: Did either of you have a VP debate drinking game?

Emily Domenech: I didn't, but I have done them before and they are a dangerous game.

Julia Pyper: You get very drunk.

Emily Domenech: I was going to say my very favorite is you do the bingo card, right? So you can have a nice little competition on who gets bingo first.

Brandon Hurlbut: We live in California. You know people don't drink here anymore.

Julia Pyper: That's true.

Brandon Hurlbut: Maybe with my mocktail.

Julia Pyper: Right, it's all the adaptogens, something about mushrooms. I'm not on board. Welcome to Political Climate. I'm Julia Pyper. With only four months left in office, President Biden has green-lit another divisive climate related policy. On October 2nd, Biden signed a bipartisan bill that allows the manufacture of microchips, like the ones used in smartphones, medical devices, cars, and more, to bypass environmental review. The bill supporters hope it will drive domestic production and maximize the potential of Biden's 2022 CHIPS and Science Act, but some Congressional Democrats oppose the bill citing the health and environmental risks the production facilities pose. In today's episode, does the value of onshoring microchip production outweigh the potential risks? What were the political dynamics driving this bill and can the bill move the election needle at all? Also in the show, we'll weigh in on the striking climate rhetoric in the recent vice presidential debate and get our hosts' insider perspectives on New York Climate Week. Then we'll wrap up with our lightning round segment, The Mark-Up. 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. Brandon, it's been a minute since I've seen you and I heard you guys have new offices. That's very exciting.

Brandon Hurlbut: Yeah, we're having an office opening party. We outgrew our other office which was amazing. It was right by the Venice sign above Great White. So we've traded some expensive avocado toast for being right above Tacos Por Favor.

Julia Pyper: Ooh, ooh, glow up. That's exciting. Well, congrats on the firm's evolution there. Working hard from Venice Beach all the way to DC.

Brandon Hurlbut: Are you going to come out for the party?

Julia Pyper: I hope so. I'm traveling that day. If I can make it in time, I surely will. Emily over there in DC really doing the hard work for the firm in the swamp, if you will. No, I'm kidding. She's holding it down in the DC area. How you doing, Emily?

Emily Domenech: I'm doing well. How are you?

Julia Pyper: I'm good, I'm good. On the road from the Bay Area today, but it's good. This fall stretch is always super busy and then we get into the holiday season, so I'm looking forward to that. But for those who don't know, 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.

All right, with that, let's start digging into last week's vice presidential debate. We'd be remiss if we didn't do a little look back at some of how that went down. Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and Ohio Senator JD Vance faced off in their sole debate of the 2024 campaign. The moderators asked the two candidates about climate change, framing their question in the context of September's devastating Hurricane Helene. In response, Vance emphasized reshoring clean energy manufacturing, although he didn't acknowledge the IRA, the Inflation Reduction Act's ability to help meet that goal. Vance also dodged a question on whether climate change is a hoax and described carbon emissions as, quote, "weird science." He said he supported clean air and clean water however. Walz for his part acknowledged the climate crisis explicitly. He also touted the Biden-Harris administration's record-breaking oil and gas extraction, but made a point to criticize former president Trump's decision to invite oil and gas executives to Mar-a-Lago in May.

I was actually personally pleasantly surprised at the fact that they got into more of the meat and potatoes of policy issues in this debate. VPs have a little more latitude I think to do that, but I'd love to hear what you guys think. Brandon, over to you first.

Brandon Hurlbut: Well, I agree with you. It was nice to see a pretty civil debate, and the fact that climate came up in like the second question was really a pleasant surprise to see.

Julia Pyper: I thought it was fascinating how the debate tool that Vance used of saying, "I don't believe in this weird science, if you will, but if you did, here is what I would do," and then laid out a at least somewhat reasonable or a piece of the puzzle strategy. It was a pretty fantastic and incredible way of just using the debate structure to actually say something while completely mitigating everything you're saying.

Emily Domenech: I would say it's more a bit of a “I need to say this kind of thing for my base,” but here's the policies that I want to put in place when I'm vice president, and I think we joke a little bit about how it's refreshing to hear a real policy discussion. That's kind of what we care about, right? We want to get down into the real meat of what kinds of policies they want to put in place when they're in office, and I really appreciated that from both candidates, particularly when we live in this world where we've got our presidential candidates going on Joe Rogan and “Call Her Daddy” all the time.

Julia Pyper: Well, yeah, I mean, people did call out Kamala Harris for not doing any media. She at least took that and turned around.

Emily Domenech: I take it more as like we see a lot from our presidential candidates in using unserious platforms, so it was really refreshing to see some of that serious discussion from both sides.

Brandon Hurlbut: But it was, for Vance to call it “weird science;” It's crazy to me that right now Hurricane Milton is bearing down on Florida and people are listening to the science there about when the hurricane's going to hit, how bad it's going to be, whether they should evacuate. We listen to scientists when they say there's going to be a lunar eclipse and you should go out at this precise second and you can see this amazing thing. But when they talk about carbon emissions, those same scientists are somehow it's weird. I don't understand that.

Emily Domenech: I think, again, I say this a lot, I like separating rhetoric from policy and I appreciated that he gave a policy answer. I think we could have very easily seen another debate where we just got platitudes, and I'm glad we didn't get that. I would say the same thing for... there's plenty of other points throughout this debate where we saw Tim Waltz sort of answer with a talking point rather than a policy, and JD Vance did it too. In this case, I actually think we got what we were looking for.

Julia Pyper: How do you take that at face value when he had all the mitigating language, like, "I don't trust that there's anything happening here, but if you did"? So he had all these... I understand that he's got to say that, and again, I do praise him for actually saying something substantial while undermining his own comment in a way. But how do you trust that that's a policy you can plan around if you're a business when you have all these hedging statements, right? You just come out and say what you would do.

Emily Domenech: We talked about this earlier on the podcast during our RNC wrap up. He talked about these same policies in the context of his speech at the RNC, totally divorced from the climate issue. I think the unique opportunity here for people who care about this with somebody like JD Vance is something I talk about all the time which is don't discount a partner in policy just because they don't use the same framing languages as you or they don't have the same top priority as you. It doesn't really matter if his top priority is dealing with climate if the outcome is a policy that reduces global emissions. So I sort of look at this as a let's figure out how we can move the needle as opposed to saying, "Well, you didn't say this was about climate change so I don't want to work with you on reshoring American manufacturing."

Brandon Hurlbut: Yeah, it's interesting that he said we should be investing in manufacturing and it's like have you read the Inflation Reduction Act? I mean that's what the whole thing is about.

Emily Domenech: Well, and I would argue, we've talked about this before, Brandon, off this podcast, I actually think 45X is a case study for a broader approach on reshoring American manufacturing outside of even the clean energy space is something that probably appeals to JD Vance and his team because they look at it from a slightly different perspective. If the end result is reducing emissions and bringing more manufacturing here to the United States, that's a win.

Brandon Hurlbut: Ooh, Emily, you don't know it, but you're teeing up my Mark-Up.

Emily Domenech: Yeah, let's go.

Julia Pyper: Ooh. Brandon, what about you on the Tim Walz side? Is there anything that he didn't say that you wish that he did?

Brandon Hurlbut: I thought he did a great job of highlighting the job creation that's happened as a result of these clean energy policies, and the impacts on farmers was really a nice thing to hear that we don't hear enough about. I wish sometimes that they would just make this more simple and exciting, like when you talk about solar panels, you can frame it in a way of the fuel is free, it cannot get any cheaper, and the hardware is like a flat-screen TV, every year they get cheaper and better. Remember when we used to buy flat-screen TVs that were like 50 inches and they were like $5,000 and now that same TV is like $200? That's the same thing with solar panels. And batteries, why does your computer get stronger, your battery get better on your phone? It's lithium ion. It's the same thing. That technology's getting cheaper and better every year which can enable storing that solar energy and driving your electric vehicle.

When you frame it like that, I think people get it. They understand, yeah, those TVs have gotten better and cheaper every single year. My phone and laptop, it's the same technologies. And also I think talking about it in a way that we can have abundance and on the cost coming down, I wish we would highlight a little bit more. Also, maybe catching Vance on some of these things. He was like, "We shouldn't basically do solar because some of the components are made in China," and it's like, well, we also import some of our oil from Saudi Arabia and Venezuela. Does that mean that we should not use oil? The hypocrisy in some of those statements I think are worth calling out.

Emily Domenech: I think you have to be careful because that's a slippery slope, right? So I love hearing you being excited about solar energy and the price coming down and how it's going to be a huge part of our energy mix. I agree with you, but I think you just made a great argument for phasing out the tax credits because if it's getting cheaper then why do we need to keep having three or four layers of subsidies here.

Brandon Hurlbut: Because we still have all these subsidies for fossil fuels for a hundred years.

Emily Domenech: Let's talk about expensing, my friend. I would love to do that because it is different than a direct production tax credit. So I actually think if we want to move in a direction where we're giving businesses the ability to creatively expense their investments in infrastructure, that's a really good movement in the right direction for all kinds of investment, not just in clean energy.

Julia Pyper: Well, the production tax credits and the investment tax credits do serve a role in now hopefully helping accelerate the deployment of American made products. So there's a whole strategy happening there. Exactly when and how those phase out will be in Congress's hands at the end of the decade when a lot of them are destined to phase out.

Emily Domenech: As someone who has seen us renew and renew and renew, I don't ever believe phase out.

Julia Pyper: Yeah, we'll have that conversation in a few years surely. Actually, we'll have it next year.

Emily Domenech: Yeah, give me a couple of years.

Julia Pyper: We'll have it next year as Congress surely grapples with some aspects of the IRA. But to this point, it was interesting to see JD Vance endorse elements of the Inflation Reduction Act, coming back to our favorite question of what's the future of it look like. It gives you maybe a little assurance in some of the words that he said that at least some of the domestic manufacturing pieces would be safer, but again, the deployment policies, who knows there, still TBD. Same question for you, Emily. Is there anything that you felt was missing from Vance's comments, something that you wish he could have hit on a little bit better?

Emily Domenech: I mean, I would've liked, of course I would've liked to see him frame a little bit better the United States does it better argument which is investments in the United States almost always drive reductions in global emissions. I would've liked that to be framed out better because that's obviously an issue I care about. But I understand that he's trying to reach a broader spectrum of folks who don't always put that issue at the top of the list and care most about US jobs or keeping prices down or other things, and if those are the things that bring people to the table on some of these policies I think it's a positive thing. I will say I did get a kick out of the fact that we're still in a position where we're talking about... we've got the Democrats talking about how much they love oil and gas production. I did not think I would see that in this election cycle. It's been really entertaining.

Julia Pyper: Well, one thing I wanted to add also is Brandon talked about the sort of voter perspective on the energy transition and climate, and that was made real for me in the wake of some of these storms, Hurricane Helene specifically where there's these stories of people who have F-150 Lightning trucks who are powering their fridges and other critical energy supplies and then throwing out extension cords to their neighbors to be able to have their phones charged and contact loved ones.

In the wake of a storm that killed hundreds of people, it just really drives home for me that these solutions are now resilient solutions. You don't just have a car that sits in your driveway, it's kind of a one-and-done. This can be a real asset for you in the case an electric vehicle that can provide essential power, and I think that connects some of the dots again in a real way. This isn't just like some high-minded clean tech that's going to save future generations alone. It can just help your family in a crisis sometimes, not all the time, maybe not every single situation, but I thought that was a really amazing way that that technology is kind of proving value in new ways in parts of the country that maybe we could see a lot more EV adoption, take up as a result.

All right, let's turn to our main story for this episode. On October 2nd, President Biden signed the Building Chips in America Act into law. The bipartisan bill allows semiconductor chip manufacturers, known as microchips, to bypass the federal environmental review process required by NEPA. The new bill enhances Biden's 2022 CHIPS and Science Act which allocated $53 billion to bolster the domestic semiconductor industry. The new bill seeks to ensure those projects get built. Furthermore, its proponents hope it will lower America's reliance on other nations and most prominently Taiwan for these chips.

The Senate passed the bill unanimously, but more than half of House Democrats as well as a few House Republicans voted against it. Some of its proponents believe it could have unintended consequences. For instance, representative Lofgren of California, a top Democrat on the House Science Committee called the bill a, quote, "mistake." In a recent letter, Lofgren and two other House Democrats cited the semiconductor industry's history of harming the environment as well as its use of chemicals that may lead to higher risks of miscarriages among workers. "History does not indicate that semiconductor manufacturing should be completely absolved of any NEPA reviews," the letter reads. We're going to dig into this, but first, Emily, I know you worked yourself on the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act. Just to set the context for us here, tell us more about that bill and what exactly it intended to do before we turned to the NEPA revisions for chip manufacturing.

Emily Domenech: Yeah, so the goal of that bill, which I would say was lightly bipartisan in that it had been worked on in a really bipartisan context and then frankly the IRA got rolled out about a week before we voted on it and that really changed the politics, but the intention there was to bring this manufacturing capacity back to the United States. It's the first time we've ever substantively subsidized chips manufacturing. We did it through both grants and loans to bring folks back here in the United States, and one of the discussions that came up in the drafting of that bill was whether or not we needed to address the federal permitting structure that was going to suck in these projects for the first time when they took that federal money. It's very similar to what we see in the clean energy space where we have developers who have worked without federal investment suddenly get derailed because they're not used to having to go through these federal permitting processes because they don't apply to you if you're not operating on federal land or doing an interstate project or taking federal dollars.

So for the first time, and it's important to think about it this way, by providing federal grants and loans to the semiconductor industry, we put them in a position where not only the projects that were getting funded but their entire manufacturing infrastructure fell under NEPA. As we've discussed in this podcast, that is a very long and arduous permitting process that can really derail things, and what we saw almost immediately after the law was signed was the industry folks coming back to the table saying, "Wait a second, this NEPA process is really going to slow us down." I actually think a much better policy would've been incorporating this bill in the original 2022 CHIPS and Science Act, but unfortunately we couldn't convince enough people that NEPA was a problem a couple of years ago.

So this is really I think a great example of this shift in perspective, but it shows the vote that we saw on the floor before we went into recess really shows that we have a long way to go in explaining to folks how this regulatory process can slow us down. But before we sort of get into the bigger discussion, I do want to give a credit to Senator Ted Cruz who really did push this bill across the finish line. It had a lot of opponents both from people on the right who cared about sort of more holistic reform, so helping more than just the chips manufacturers, helping people like clean energy producers or people who took loan guarantees from DOE or elsewhere. It had opponents on the sort of progressive left side who are concerned about removing, sort of clearing the way for projects that get federal funding. So he really was directly involved in the lobbying and I was personally at the other end of it when I was in the speaker's office. So credit to him and to Senator Mark Kelly for getting this across the finish line.

Julia Pyper: I wonder if also, Brandon, a scene-setting question for you a little, putting you on the spot, can you frame maybe from the investor perspective why microchips are so important? Why is this critical going to the 20,000, 30,000 foot level that the United States builds more of this onshore, full stop?

Brandon Hurlbut: At the highest level, these chips are really critical for both our national security and our energy security because they are part of almost every device, like electric vehicles. They're ingrained in the system, and the US used to be the leader. Intel was the market leader for a long time. We used to manufacture like 37% of all chips in the world were manufactured in the US and the government played a large role in standing up the industry. It's a great example of how the US government can catalyze a technology that the world will want and become a market leader, and we've lost that edge. We've lost it to Asia, and you have companies like TSMC and others that have been out-innovating us, and there's been a lot of public discussion about what's been happening at Intel, but NVIDIA produces a chip that is more related to AI use. It's a GPU. This gets really in the weeds, but this is what will be used in data centers that will power AI technologies.

And so when you think about it from a national security perspective, there's a race right now to win AI, and whoever wins it, it's going to be really important for their economy and their national security. We're in that race with China and those chips are the core of it, and if we don't have that supply chain, if we're not innovating on it and we lose to China, that will have massive consequences for our country.

Julia Pyper: Okay, that's helpful context. So let's turn back to this Building Chips in America Act. We have heard, we've seen the pushback on it referring back to Representative Lofgren's comments there. Yes, sounds like endorses building more of these microchips in America, but at what cost and is there a health and human costs associated with that? So I guess, Brandon, maybe to you again first, what do you think of the environmental aspects here and could things get overlooked or swept under the rug if we don't have that full-throated NEPA-style environmental review?

Brandon Hurlbut: Well, even though the NEPA process is excluded now for these type of facilities, you still have to comply with state and local environmental regulations. You still have to comply with the Clean Air and Clean Water Act. So in my view, those protections are sufficient and I'm supportive of the bill, and I can't wait to talk about some of the politics with Emily about it because it really is interesting how it unfolded, and I think it's a harbinger of sort of the future of some politics on environmental regulation versus how the industry is approaching these things.

Emily Domenech: Brandon makes a great point here which is that the important note here is that there's plenty of environmental laws on the books that apply to privately funded projects. In the past, any of these fabs would've fallen under those exact same laws. The only difference is that when you take that federal money, you automatically trigger something called, quote, "major federal action" under NEPA, which says, "Hey, everything, regardless of what we think of the environmental impact, everything that takes a dollar of federal money has to go through this process." I think personally that's an area where we could find some bipartisan reform because it shouldn't just... we should be evaluating whether or not projects need environmental review based on their impact, not based on just some arbitrary factor like a you got $1 from the government.

Julia Pyper: And so this bill does nothing to change that. It's just focused on NEPA.

Emily Domenech: It simply says, "If you took this federal grant, you do not automatically trigger that NEPA process."

Julia Pyper: And just for everyone's identification, NEPA is, Emily?

Emily Domenech: National Environmental Policy Act. It applies a multi-agency regulatory process that often takes years to complete and in my opinion is the biggest hurdle to getting clean energy online, particularly those that took federal funding.

Julia Pyper: What was some of the behind-the-scenes debate around this bill? What was the chatter on Capitol Hill? Was it all excitement? It sounds like not entirely. Where were the areas of debate and areas of collaboration I guess from what you've obtained, from what you've learned?

Emily Domenech: Yeah. So I would say it's a very interesting case study for how this issue can divide up different groups. As I mentioned earlier, we had some folks on the right who didn't want to vote for this bill because they see it as a carve-out for a particular industry rather than solving a broad problem. I think most Republicans would prefer to solve major federal action as an entire operating principle that applies to all of these major projects as opposed to just doing it for chips. But at the end of the day, we saw this industry basically saying, "We're going to have to forfeit all of these federal dollars or get sued to death," and that's I think part of why, again, you saw Senator Ted Cruz really pushing this forward because Texas has some pretty significant investment from the CHIPS and Science Act.

On the left, and I would love to get more Brandon's thoughts on this too, we originally saw folks sort of like hold their nose and accept this bill was going to move forward because there was such a threat to this major investment that President Biden has touted over and over again. But when it got to the House floor, you get to learn that a House of Representatives can be a little messy. And the progressive folks, particularly led by I would say ranking member Raul Grijalva, who is a very much a legacy environmentalist, that is you never change these laws ever under any circumstances for anything, really did galvanize a lot of opposition to this bill as sort of a slippery slope item. It passed by the razor-thin margin under those suspension rules.

Julia Pyper: Brandon, do you have any comments to add on the sort of political dynamics here?

Brandon Hurlbut: Well, it passed unanimously in the Senate. So you have climate and environmental champions like Senator Heinrich, Senator Schatz, and others that supported this bill.

Julia Pyper: Bernie Sanders?

Brandon Hurlbut: ... Bernie Sanders.

Julia Pyper: Senator Markey. That's interesting because we talked about them on the nuclear issue.

Emily Domenech: So I would just add that unanimous consent in the Senate is one of those things that is a very inside baseball vote where you have to, as a senator, show up to object to that call for UC. Lots of times our senators don't show up to object. I'll give you a great example. The permanent daylight savings time bill passed last Congress because the person in the chair was Senator Sinema and she supported Marco Rubio's bill and nobody objected and she hit the gavel. So you see this kind of stuff happen all the time where senators will say, "Well, it passed by UC and the Senate, but I would've voted against an amendment or I oppose this on principle, but I was being gracious to my colleague." It's one of the interesting sort of collegial parts of the Senate that we don't see on display all the time.

Julia Pyper: But knowing full well that then that passes out of the Senate and can become law, right?

Emily Domenech: It certainly could, but I would say I wouldn't put my money on the House of Representatives passing anything out of the Senate, particularly a bill that has Mark Kelly on it or could potentially help someone in the long run. But that's, again, I keep saying this, but it's why I give so much credit to Ted Cruz because he really did go around and talk to every Republican who objected to it. It's part of why the Republican vote was much stronger on this than the Dem vote because I don't know that they had quite the same engagement on the Dem side with House members.

Julia Pyper: That's interesting. So maybe they thought it wouldn't pass in the House and then it surely did, and now it's actually signed into law.

Emily Domenech: I'll say from my conversations with the speaker's office, this was by no means a slam dunk, and I think the Democrat opposition was much stronger than people would've liked to see. I would love to ask them sort of what led to the thought process to vote against this bill. I know why a good chunk of them voted against it because they're just sort of whole cloth against changing permitting, but we have to change that if we want to be able to build things in America and actually meet any of these climate goals. It's just not possible. The math doesn't work. So I'm hopeful that maybe this will be, this is a small sliver of success that says, "Hey, look, even if it's a narrow coalition, we can get some bipartisan coalitions to address these substantive permitting problems."

Julia Pyper: Why were Republicans opposed to this bill, Emily? Why did Ted Cruz have to do so much advocacy on his side of the aisle? Is it because these chips support clean technologies or is it more just about other historical environmental rules in those Republican districts that they're thinking about? What was the tension there?

Emily Domenech: So not at all, and I think this is a great example of two different perspectives on how we solve the permitting problem. There is the piecemeal, we're going to do it for one industry at a time through categorical exclusions or through specific pieces of legislation like this where we say, "Hey, look, this law is a big problem, but we only really have the votes to fix it for this one industry." Republicans characteristically have said, "We want to fix permitting for everyone." That means roads and bridges, it means ports, it means oil and gas projects, it means renewable projects.

If you look at the legislation that Chairman Bruce Westerman recently did a legislative hearing on in house natural resources, it addressed this major federal action issue, but it did it for everyone. So it said, "You don't automatically trigger NEPA if you take federal loans and grants." If you cross federal land, if you cross an interstate spot, if you're impacted by the Clean Water Act, there's a whole list in that bill. So I think Republicans oppose it because they saw it as frankly narrowing the coalition of people who would support broader reform. That's a tactical difference, not necessarily a policy difference.

Julia Pyper: Very interesting. Could this bill open the door to more piecemeal deregulation? You alluded to there, Emily, the fact that Republicans actually wanted more to be addressed. So for example, instead of wide-reaching permitting reform, could we see separate bills to loosen restrictions around transmission lines say, or solar farms or maybe fossil fuel plants or maybe other manufacturing facilities, other things that are maybe on the Republican wish list? What do you think this bill opens the door for, if anything?

Emily Domenech: I think it's a narrow door opening because I do think there is still this idea that if we don't move everything all at once we'll never move any of it when it comes to the broader permitting discussion. But I think it could provide perhaps some strange bedfellow partnerships, I think of the folks in the pipeline community and the transmission developers because they share those sort of same linear infrastructure challenges. Maybe there's an opportunity for that community to work together to move something that's only focused on things that impact linear projects, or perhaps there's a marriage between the folks who do manufacturing or take loan guarantee money to deal with a carve-out for NEPA. So I think maybe it's less of a one-off. I think it's unlikely that we'll see more of these really single-issue things because we don't necessarily have single-issue bills like we did with the CHIPS and Science Act, but I do think there's perhaps opportunity for maybe like a middle ground between the big comprehensive bill and the piecemeal action.

Julia Pyper: Interesting. Brandon, what do you think, and do you think this could be more piecemeal deregulation in a good way or even in some ways that you think could be concerning when it comes to rolling back environmental protections?

Brandon Hurlbut: I don't know, I'd like to see more piecemeal instead of having to lump everything into one bill, taking some of these things in chunks. What I wonder is under certain Republican speakers, I often talk about on this show this tyranny of the minority which really sticks in my craw, like whoever gets them-

Julia Pyper: On both sides, we can both complain about that.

Brandon Hurlbut: Yeah. Whoever gets the most votes should win the election and we might not have that outcome this time.

Julia Pyper: Sticks in my craw, excellent phrase. You just had a birthday and it's showing.

Brandon Hurlbut: Oh man, yeah, some of my Midwest is coming up.

Julia Pyper: I love it.

Brandon Hurlbut: But one of these tyranny of the minority things was what they call the Hastert rule. It's this fake rule that Republicans invented where they would have to have a majority of the majority of their conference. So if more than 50%, even if you could get 50% of the House, they would require that 50% of the Republicans had to support it to bring the bill forward, and you saw under this scenario where you didn't have 50% of the Democrats support it. So under a Democratic speaker like Hakeem Jeffries that the Democrats take the House, would they bring this bill forward even though a majority of Democrats didn't support it? I like the concept of getting back to the days pre this Hastert rule where you could just have a majority of the House and you could put interesting coalitions together between Democrats and Republicans to make progress on something, and you didn't have this artificial rule that is self-imposed where you have to have a majority of your caucus.

Emily Domenech: I'm not sure Speaker Jeffries would've brought this bill to the floor. I think he would've been under a lot of pressure and certainly not to bring it under suspension where you need to be able to get a two-thirds majority of everyone voting for the bill to pass. I think there would've been a lot of political pressure for him to sit on it, and that's unfortunate, and it's something we need to work on.

Brandon Hurlbut: If you have to have a majority of your caucus every time to pass a bill, it gives more power to the minority than I think is deserved.

Emily Domenech: It's all wrapped up in that you need 218 votes to become the speaker of the house.

Julia Pyper: Last question on this. Is there any chance, I feel almost silly asking it because I have a point of view, but any chance that this bill moves the needle on the election? Do voters care? Will they feel this bill in any way? Well, I guess we're talking razor-thin margins, so perhaps there's some folks who are really dialed in on chips. But Brandon, what do you think?

Brandon Hurlbut: So obviously voters aren't going to be going to the polls with NEPA and permitting in mind for the most part, but Arizona is a swing-

Julia Pyper: They will when Emily runs for office. She's our permitting lady.

Emily Domenech: Yeah (laughs).

Brandon Hurlbut: Yeah, yeah. But Arizona is a swing state, and Mark Kelly, Senator Mark Kelly was the lead co-sponsor on this bill, and he will be running for reelection at some point, and we know that Arizona likes mavericks. John McCain was the ultimate maverick. And so anytime that somebody, like a Senator Mark Kelly for whenever he's on the ballot or Kamala Harris who's on the ballot right now and her administration is supporting this bill or signing it into law, anytime a Democrat can show a little bit of independence from their party, it goes over really well in Arizona.

Emily Domenech: Yeah, I would completely echo this. I think it doesn't move the needle on national elections certainly. People are not following one House vote at the end of a session, but I do think it matters in the states where they're building these projects. There is no question at all that the folks on the chips manufacturing side in Arizona, in Texas, they vote, they care, and they are going to look to their senators, both of whom were engaged in this process, and I think it does move the needle for those local elections.

Julia Pyper: Turning to our third segment here, a quick check-in on what happened at New York Climate Week. An estimated hundred thousand people participated in hundreds of events as part of New York Climate Week. The event came with no shortage of bombshells and big news. California Attorney General Rob Bonta announced that his office will sue ExxonMobil on the grounds that the oil giant lied about the environmental impacts of plastic production. The Department of Energy launched a $1.3 billion initiative to fund carbon capture projects. A new group of nearly two dozen governors shared a plan to train 1 million people for clean energy jobs by 2035. And the list goes on. According to Latitude Media's own reporting, AI and virtual power plants both featured prominently as well. Brandon and Emily, you both traveled to New York for the event. Brandon, what was your experience at New York Climate Week?

Brandon Hurlbut: Yeah, the way I attacked it was to try to go to bigger events where I could see a lot of people and catch up quickly, and then do some smaller one-on-ones that were really productive.

Julia Pyper: Emily, have you been to New York Climate Week before?

Emily Domenech: I haven't, and I will say it's usually held during a week where Congress is in session, and so that usually makes it hard for lawmakers to come and participate. There's actually a sort of corresponding National Clean Energy Week set of programming that happens in DC at the same time, and I this year did a double-header where I spoke on a panel for National Clean Energy Week in the morning and then went to New York and spoke on a panel for New York Climate Week in the afternoon. So it was nice to get to sort of see both sides of it for the first time.

Julia Pyper: What was the dialogue like between those two different settings and some of the issues that came up? Were they the same? Were they radically different?

Emily Domenech: Really similar questions about what is on the agenda for policymakers going into next Congress or next administration, but I will say our crowd in Washington was much more in tune to, well, what's going to happen in the lame duck, let's talk about the real nuts and bolts of it, and the folks in New York I think are much more big picture. It's much more like how do we fund the next generation of folks who want to engage with Capitol Hill on these issues.

Julia Pyper: Emily, you were on a panel called Securing Climate Action in Any Election Outcome, of course, a topic we talk about here a lot. What were some of the details you dug into there?

Emily Domenech: Yeah, so it was an interesting panel full of a whole range of organizations that are center right or right leaning who care about climate and energy policy. Folks from ClearPath, folks from ACC, folks from, again, a whole range of groups, R Street. But I would say the most interesting part there was we were having a discussion with folks who generally fund climate NGOs and essentially saying, "Hey, look, if we want to be able to move lasting bipartisan policy, we actually do have to engage with Republicans." And when you do that, you can't expect them to just suddenly sound like Democrats. They're going to come at it from a different perspective and have a different way of approaching this issue based on sort of their fundamental views on economic growth. So it was really an interesting discussion. We also sort of talked about how, again, you need a whole ecosystem of folks to be able to move the needle when it comes to moving major policies on the hill. It's not going to be just one think tank or just one consulting firm or just one company.

Julia Pyper: Let's wrap up with our rapid-fire segment, The Mark-Up. For anyone tuning in for the first time, this is where at the end of the 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. Brandon, let's go to you first.

Brandon Hurlbut: So my Mark-Up is an op-ed in the New York Times written by David Brooks who I don't read as much anymore. I find him to be a little bit sanctimonious at times. But he wrote this piece called “A Recipe for a Striving America,” and it's really fascinating because it talks about how he's traveled throughout the country and he really sees two Americas, one that is thriving, that's in like the services sector and information technology, and the other that is like these abandoned factory towns. He talks about how we had policies that sort of initiated that, that we wanted to sort of outsource manufacturing to the rest of the world, and we wanted high-level services jobs in this economy, and we promoted education policies to get there. But he finds that it has worked in some ways. The American economy is the strongest in the world, and you have other high manufacturing economies like Germany and Japan that aren't doing as well, but talks about how manufacturing can sort of bring these worlds back together and how there is now this focus on an industrial policy.

He talks through a little bit about how there's different ways to get to this. The Trump team wants high tariffs which Brooks opposes. And then he talks about the way that the Democrats are approaching this which is basically the Inflation Reduction Act which is to incentivize through tax credits and other incentives to manufacture here. And then he walks through a little bit about how industrial policy has worked or not worked in the past, and he uses an example of how it has not worked in Africa, and we tried to industrialize there and many of those policies did not achieve what they intended to do. He sort of pontificates on whether this should be a bigger focus in the election, this debate about whether we should have industrial policy or not. Another disadvantage he names is that with industrial policy, the government puts conditions on the money and that leads to more regulation which can strangle growth. So it was a really thoughtful piece and really encourage others to read it. Would love to get Emily's reaction to it.

Emily Domenech: Yeah, I'll have to go and give it a read. I can't say I'm a huge regular reader of Brooks myself, but I do think it's interesting to sort of unpack the tension between trying to drive down emissions through regulatory policies and trying to incentivize bringing that manufacturing back home. Sometimes those things are at odds.

Julia Pyper: Emily, what's your Mark-Up?

Emily Domenech: So for my Mark-Up, I'm going to reference our friends at the Citizens for Responsible Energy Solutions. We had Heather Reams on the pod when we were at the RNC. They put out their slate of congressional endorsements for the 2024 election cycle, endorsing three Republicans running for Senate and 37 Republicans running for the US House, and this is relevant I think for our listeners because when people say, "There aren't any Republicans who care about clean energy or care about climate," this is a really good list of folks who have some real legislative efforts attached to their names, and that's why the folks over at CRES decided to endorse them. I think it's a great opportunity to look for partners.

Julia Pyper: We should also give a shout-out to Climate Cabinet, other organization identifying more at the local level, even down to school boards and local leaders who have various focuses on climate in their communities. That's another place to go look for slates of candidates in different kinds of races across the country. We're certainly in that mode now of figuring out what are organizations saying, what are the platforms out there, and it is important who's down ballots, so don't sleep on that.

My Mark-Up is sort of bringing us full circle here to that VP debate in the context of hurricanes and how the country's grappling with this reality of these incredibly damaging storms. I saw a stat that the IRA mobilized around $370 billion of investment, and just from Hurricane Helene, and this is even an old, week-old stat, the damage alone from that storm was $110 billion. So you have like a third of that entire bill to mitigate climate change and accelerate domestic manufacturing, and in one fell swoop one storm just knocked out over $100 billion in damages. So it's just a real focus for me that we have to both mitigate, mitigate, and talk about resilience and adaptation because the ticket is really expensive and it's going to cost us all a lot, not just in money, but in lives and livelihoods, and it's really a scary thing.

And so the reporting I wanted to point to, it was covered in NPR this morning, a new consortium of scientists sort of looked at Hurricane Helene and to what extent changes in the environment had accelerated that storm. So they talked about temperatures, water temperatures, the intensity of the storm, and one of the stats is that rainfall from Helene was about 10% heavier due to climate change because of those factors like higher sea levels, more heat within the water already which accelerates and makes these storms more damaging. So that's from research from the World Weather Attribution, that international network of scientists.

Another thing they pointed out was that a key factor in Helene's intensity was the extraordinarily high water temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico. The sea surface temperatures there have reached about 85 degrees Fahrenheit right as Helene was forming. Those temperatures are 200 to 500 times more likely because of climate change, the study found. So it just drives again home for me that we've got to grapple now with both two sides of this issue of the mitigation and adaptation at the same time, but don't let one cannibalize the other.

Brandon Hurlbut: It's going to be fascinating on whether there is an impact on the election with these two massive storms that have hit Western North Carolina, Florida is being essentially evacuated right now. So I'm really curious whether that will affect the turnout and for whom.

Emily Domenech: Yeah, I would agree on the turnout issue, and I'd also, frankly, I would love to have a broader conversation on sort of how we could better improve that feedback loop between our disaster relief and the mitigation efforts and building out resiliency. The way our federal government is structured today, FEMA and the US Army Corps exist in totally different agencies and they don't always work together as effectively as they could or should, and that's without even incorporating the sort of energy resilience we talk about here on the pod. So I think that's an interesting area of policy where we need to do better to make sure that we're responding better and rebuilding better and smarter.

Julia Pyper: That's it for the show. Political Climate is a co-production of Latitude Media and Boundary Stone Partners. Max Savage Levenson is our incredible producer. Sean Marquand is our technical director. Stephen Lacey is our executive editor. You can get all 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. Please also feel free to help spread the word about Political Climate on LinkedIn, X, and beyond. I'm Julia Pyper. We'll catch you in two weeks. One last note, we are moving our podcast release schedule to Mondays so you can catch us for your morning commute, help kick off your week with some new insights that hopefully help inform your day. So that means we'll catch you again on October 28th. Thanks for listening.