Remarks as Prepared for Delivery by National Climate Advisor Ali Zaidi at Georgetown Law School on the Biden-Harris Administration’s Work to Rebuild our Middle Class and Accelerate American Manufacturing and Innovation
I am grateful to be back at Georgetown for the conversation and the chance to take stock of where we stand at halftime in what has been dubbed the “decisive decade” for global climate action.
In the United States, under the leadership of President Biden and Vice President Harris, we have doubled our pace of decarbonization, built 100 gigawatts – 25 million homes worth – of clean power, and catalyzed a trillion dollars of private investment, creating good jobs across the nation.
The scoreboard looks good. The fundamentals are strong. But the hard truth remains that we have more field to gain and even less time to do it. The good news is that we carry with us into the second half a fundamentally rewritten climate playbook – an approach that eschews the gloom and doom and embraces the hope and possibilities. This new playbook is the gamechanger – and why I am confident that America will meet the moment.
Together, we will meet this moment because, over the last four years, we have proven climate action as the new foundry for economic opportunity and economic growth in the United States – the figurative factory floor where we are forging a stronger American middle class and mounting the comeback of American manufacturing.
Proven because the new foundry is already delivering – rising wages, expanding apprenticeships, over 600 new clean energy factories, and union density at rates double the rest of the economy. All of this is accelerating as the foundry taps into the salient, the proximate, and the visible uplift of our communities for its fuel.
We will meet the moment because, in our new playbook, we have pulled the upside of climate action both forward and close, even as we took on a problem that is global in nature and decades in the making.
We have pursued climate action in a way that is co-located with economic opportunity and coincided with pollution reduction – a geographic and temporal alignment of benefits designed to earn the political economy to go big, go fast, and go the distance.
Georgetown Climate Center is an apt place to reflect on this playbook because that approach of co-locating with economic opportunity and coinciding with pollution reduction is impossible to execute without partnership – the kind you work to forge through your efforts here – partnership top to bottom and shoulder to shoulder. That means federal, state, local, and Tribal governments, public and private sector – everybody coming together to make a difference, one neighborhood at a time.
Today, as communities are starting to breathe easier, to turn on the faucet with greater peace of mind, and to work jobs that not only provide pay and benefits but also purpose and dignity, we are unlocking that political economy boost – while those operating the brakes on climate action have become less effective, and the politics of climate inaction are deteriorating.
It might be an unexpected assertion, but it is true – drawn from wellsprings of hope and opportunity, change and improved circumstances, that I have seen as I have traveled from coast to coast, in small towns and big cities: People want us to keep investing in climate solutions and the clean energy economy of the future. And there is a reason.
Today, for hundreds of school districts, because of investments through the Biden-Harris Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the iconic yellow school bus is going green – Made in America, by union workers, and showing up at the end of the driveway, no longer pumping diesel pollution into the air.
Today, in communities built over the last century or two, where pipes had been buried for a hundred years and leaking for decades, pipefitters are not just bending metal but also the arc of methane emissions. That same investment is reducing energy costs and safety risks – and the receipts show the impact.
Today, on 80,000 farms and ranches across the country, a new revenue stream is now part of the ledger as the United States leads the next generation of agricultural practice – one that is smarter both in withstanding the trials of climate change and in sourcing the solutions, with farmers paid, finally, to help the land breathe in the carbon from the sky.
Whether on wheels, under our heels, or growing from the ground on which we stand, these climate solutions are now and here. They are delivering the salient, the proximate, and the visible. And, in turn, they are fueling that new foundry, forging economic opportunity and economic growth all across America.
The success of this paradigm-shifting strategy – this new playbook – also comes from harmonizing two sets of tools, the tools to deliver investments and the tools to set standards, all in support of our economic goals.
We have seen this strategy at work: The investments from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the Inflation Reduction Act, and the CHIPS and Science Act enhanced by a complementary architecture of federal standards that spur demand and generate the regulatory certainty needed to accelerate capital formation and encourage entrepreneurial risk-taking.
It is an important combination, and the success of our new foundry comes from both – the catalytic public investments and tax credits and also the standards that send a signal to the market, spurring long-term investment and firming up that next bet on America.
Bringing the breadth of our tools and partners together helps as we swing for the fences in every sector of the economy. Looking for wins everywhere – power and transportation, buildings and industry, lands and agriculture – gives us a better shot at delivering for everyone. When executed well, the gains from all-in and searching-for-opportunity-everywhere climate action cascade deep through the economy.
I want to give you two examples – one more obvious and the other, hopefully, to make you smile.
Two years ago, sparked by demand from the solar industry, a former steel plant in Leetsdale, Pennsylvania, a relic of the World War II era, announced it was making a comeback. Two years later, that spark has sustained, and the plant has tripled in capacity. Hundreds of jobs in a place where, just a few years ago, opportunity seemed forever fenced out.
And then in Milford, Utah, there is Scotty’s Diner, which also got a taste of that cascading economic opportunity. In a town of just 1,500, Scotty’s got a call from a construction crew for an unusually large order – 40 burgers and 40 fries. The owner has since doubled her staff to keep up with the appetite from what she calls “the geothermal thing” – a mega, two-gigawatt geothermal project now being built in her rural community.
That one plant, by the way, permitted on our public lands, increased total U.S. capacity for geothermal generation by 50 percent and reimagined the frontier on a critical clean energy technology where the U.S. can now have the edge.
These jobs – whether at the steel plant or the diner – bring so much more with them than a paycheck. I saw that this fall when I visited a clean energy factory with Sierra Club’s Ben Jealous. Ben pointed out something that has stuck with me ever since. In the hallway out front, he told me to look at the Earth Day artwork made by the kids of the factory workers. It was what you would expect – the most colorful expressions of wonder at nature and its beauty – and conveyed so much more. The artwork captured how the kids saw their parents: not as workers who walk on the ground, but as superheroes soaring to save the planet.
It is not just about putting steel in the ground or even in the spine of the American middle class – it is about filling our wings with a sense of soaring and uplift.
Today, we should all feel that sense of soaring because America is back in the business of doing big things. Too often in our discourse, we talk as if our imaginations have shrunk, as if the Hoover Dam was the apex of our ability to blueprint and build. But this discourse ignores the facts.
Take a look off the coast of Virginia, where the utility company and workers from the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, IBEW, are building a two-gigawatt offshore wind farm. Two gigawatts – the same size as the Hoover Dam – and yet just one of 10 similar offshore wind projects that the Biden-Harris administration greenlit over the last four years. Projects that are now spurring a 50-state supply chain, with steel going into the water and clean electricity coming onto the grid. An industry that was just in our imagination a few years ago, towering high today and lifting up our workers and communities at the same time.
We see it shine through in solar as well.
Half the solar installed today came online during the last four years, and, somehow, that may be the least exciting part of the story. Because of President Biden and Vice President Harris’s leadership, a technology that was invented in America decades ago is finally being manufactured in America too. In fact, we have quadrupled our capacity to manufacture solar panels in the United States since the start of this administration, and we are set to double that capacity again in a few years.
That is not all. Thanks to tax guidance that the Treasury Department recently finalized – one of over 75 tax guidance projects completed since the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act – we are now bringing ingot and wafer manufacturing to our shores. More energy jobs, more energy security, more opportunity and growth unleashed by our new foundry.
By the way, this manufacturing renaissance is also a big deal for innovation – important for America but also for the world’s ability to race toward and reach collective climate goals.
We know this: Manufacturing is the necessary bridge between invention and impact. No country can lead on innovation without the industrial capacity to turn plans into products. That is why America’s manufacturing renaissance delivers on so many bottom lines; because American scientists and engineers can now shine a brighter light into the future. That is good news for everybody.
Of course, whether it is geothermal, or wind, or solar, or some other fuel or technology altogether, the value proposition depends on a bigger, better grid.
That is why, since the first day of this Administration, we made this a priority. Today, the Biden-Harris administration has financially boosted or environmentally approved over 5,000 miles of new capacity transmission on the grid – adding roads to the electricity highway system, something that must remain a massive national priority. We have worked to adapt the grid to the new realities imposed by the climate crisis. On a bipartisan basis, investment is now moving to bury lines, harden poles, or lay redundant cabling. Senator Murkowski, a champion of this resilience work, talks eloquently about one of these projects – a new high voltage cable that is going to be laid between Kenai and Anchorage. The next time the community faces the prospect of an outage, that cable becomes a vehicle to allow neighbors to help neighbors.
In addition to the new lanes on the electricity highway system and the physical upgrades to boost its resilience, I am excited about another opportunity we are chasing: simply operating our existing energy highway more creatively.
I will start with something wonky: dynamic line ratings. Our grid, as it stands today, has a static speed limit for electricity across the system. But that static speed limit is designed to safeguard the grid during the worst conditions. It does not allow electricity to travel faster during most times when conditions are good. Today, thanks to better sensors and AI, we can set that speed limit through dynamic line ratings. When conditions are good, we can raise the speed limit on the grid. We can squeeze far more capacity out of our existing infrastructure.
Another way we can get more out of the grid is by repaving the roads our electricity travels on. Most transmission cables use the same design that has been in place for a century: aluminum wires that transmit electricity, wrapped in stainless steel cables for durability.
Today, newer advanced cables being made in America employ carbon fiber and superconductors instead of steel and aluminum, making them stronger, lighter, and capable of carrying far more power than a traditional cable. By “reconductoring” our transmission lines, we can quadruple the pace of power we can add to the grid.
Finally, we can use the grid in a fundamentally different fashion by co-deploying battery storage with transmission, Storage As a Transmission Asset. Batteries can help manage rush hour traffic on the grid. When demand is high and you want to move a lot of electricity through the system, you can use the electricity stored in batteries to supplement power generation. When demand is low, you can recharge them. Overall, batteries help optimize the utilization of the transmission system that you have – fewer emissions, more resiliency, lower consumer costs.
To take advantage of that opportunity, we need to make even more of those batteries here, even more cheaply.
Batteries are another example of technology invented here that we had lost the capacity to make. America once at the frontier of the technology but then, for decades, ground ceded to others. Today, thanks to our new playbook – to the investments and the standards – the United States has become a magnet for that investment. Almost overnight, we have gone from a laggard to a leader, the top nation destination for private investment in this space.
We are making the batteries and – double click on them – the anodes and the cathodes, the separators and the materials that go into them too. Earlier this week, I was with President Cecil Roberts and the United Mineworkers at Ruff Creek, where they are now training up workers to make critical inputs – the active materials that go into the cathode of a cutting-edge battery that operates without nickel and cobalt. A union that powered America’s rise in the industrial age is back on the job, ensuring our competitiveness in the global clean energy economy.
Investing in the capacity that these UMWA workers will now create is essential – because mineral security is essential to climate security. Just as the climate imperative compels us to race forward on securing raw materials, as the U.S. is now doing in places like the Salton Sea, we also have to sprint to stand up our capacities to refine and upgrade, recycle and remake these raw materials, as the clean energy economy becomes a circular economy.
Ultimately, it is not just about the grid, or the batteries, or even the inputs. Ultimately, it is about coming together and doing the work of uplift.
I saw it in Western Michigan, where a shuttered nuclear power plant is coming back to serve two rural co-ops – the Hoosiers and the Wolverines – the co-ops teaming up despite their rivaling basketball loyalties. There, I met a union worker who thought he had retired, but was now coming back – out of retirement like the plant, beaming with a sense of pride, and eager to lift up the next generation of workers who will deliver carbon-free electricity to the grid.
I felt it this summer, standing in the Oval Office as Senator Capito, the Republican Ranking Member, and Senator Carper, the Democratic Chair of the Environment Committee, walked into the Oval Office together and shook the President’s hand; as Joe Biden signed into law a bipartisan piece of legislation to advance nuclear energy, our domestic supply chains, and America’s ability to lead on the next generation of tech.
Time and again, even when folks count us out, we show our ability to come together and do the work of uplift.
To ratify the first environmental treaty in decades, we came together – the manufacturers association joining with environmental advocates to lift up the common ground. To pass the biggest investment in infrastructure since Eisenhower, bipartisan votes gathered to lift up clean energy technologies and environmental remediation. And as we have implemented this historic agenda on climate and clean energy, governors, mayors, and leaders from all parties have come together, proving climate action as a new foundry for economic opportunity and economic growth – truly a project of uplift.
This morning, I was in sunny Philadelphia in a sandy lot for the last stop of the American Climate Corps Tour. The young people there have grown up in a world where the sky turns orange; smoke fills their lungs from fires burning hundreds of miles away; where they get push alerts on the phone warning of the next flood or hurricane barreling through. These young people have all the reason to be angry or despondent. But they have rejected that. Instead, they have answered President Biden’s call from this past Earth Day to join the first-ever American Climate Corps. Choosing to write a different story – one that ends not with doom and gloom but with hope and possibilities. We have so much work to do. But we carry with us this new playbook. We carry with us proof that climate action can be the new foundry for economic opportunity and economic growth in the United States. And we have the example of our youth, who are showing us the way. We have and we must keep coming together and doing the work of uplift. That is how we meet the moment in this decisive decade.
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