Remarks as Prepared for Delivery by National Climate Advisor Ali Zaidi at the Financial Times-Nikkei Investing in America Summit

I appreciate the chance to join the Financial Times-Nikkei Investing in America Summit, and to reflect at a moment when the United States has become a magnet for private investment.

Over the last four years, one trillion dollars of capital moved off of the sidelines and onto the field. A manufacturing renaissance was sparked in the shadow of a legacy of deindustrialization. American workers were empowered to lead in the manufacturing of critical technologies.

On a challenge that defines our time, the United States came back to the table – and led in the way a superpower should. We doubled our pace of decarbonization, accelerated innovation in critical technologies, and stood up 600 factories to make them, revving up America’s industrial capacity once more. We set off, as I have previously noted, a period of unprecedented expansion in American energy production, and it is period defined by the dominance of clean energy.

Nothing about this capital mobilization or economic revival was preordained.

We are here – and building back better from an awful economic crisis – because we chose to come together around a vision that invests in America. A vision borne of discontent with the status quo, of driving by that idled factory or blighted plot and of doing nothing.

For too long, these places – where the loss of opportunity was fenced in and the chance for a comeback seemingly fenced out – have stood as powerful monuments to underinvestment. To a failed economic policy that promised prosperity would just trickle down – but never delivered. Over the last four years, we started the essential project of bringing down those fences, the barriers to economic opportunity, of lowering costs for American families, and of creating jobs – 16 million jobs with rising wages and with unemployment at its lowest level in 50 years.

That essential project is incomplete, and we are all on the hook to finish the job.

Despite being incomplete, the project carries momentum – and is structured for resilience.  The robustness comes from an approach that has mobilized public and private, at every level of government and every layer of the capital stack, in a tech-agnostic race to net zero as north star. From governors and mayors of every party to entrepreneurs and investors from every corner of the economy, we are together and united in the implementation, in carrying out this work.

Unity in implementation is rooted in a unity of motivation. The incentive to finish the job is also stronger because the incentive is shared: By working hard to deal everyone into the economic upside of developing and deploying climate solutions, we avoided spurring a merely cyclical change and instead succeeded at creating a truly structural shift.

To go the distance, we must keep investing in America – in our infrastructure and in our people and in the interconnected policies needed to maintain America’s position as the destination for private capital.

I will start with infrastructure and the most significant investment of its kind in America since Eisenhower’s Interstate Highway System. This is the foundation, literal and figurative, for our ability to attract private capital and to compete for leadership in the industries of the future. Over the last four years, that has meant modernizing our grid and expanding the reach of broadband, revamping the research capabilities of our national laboratories and rebuilding our transportation system, better guarding against new risks like cyber and better delivering on the promise of clean water, all necessary to sustain our families, farmers, and factories.

Each category of infrastructure comes with a compelling investing-in-America rationale, but I want to engage and elaborate on one category in particular that is occupying substantial column space and airtime.

Whether we want to pull additional private capital onto the field or more specifically lead the global race on clean energy or artificial intelligence, a bigger and better electric grid is key. The recent news is good news: Our back-to-normal load growth – a double-digit rate of growth akin to what we witnessed nearly every decade from the end of World War II until the turn of the 21^st century – should be a spur to invent and invest, not a signpost to slow down.

As we meet this new opportunity – what I see as a tailwind toward the net-zero north star – we need to harness all the tools we have available. New poles and wires are critical, which is why this administration has greenlit or underwritten over 5,000 miles of new, high-capacity transmission. But there is so much more.

To me, it is so important that we also focus on the three Rs – rewiring, repowering, resilience.

Rewiring means investing more in advanced conductoring to get more electrons across existing rights of way, dynamic line ratings to raise the grid’s speed limit, and batteries (“Storage As Transmission Assets,” or SATA) and capabilities like topology optimization to deal with rush hour traffic.

Repowering means investing more in places with idle or suboptimized interconnections, plugging in where an old power plant has shuttered or where an old power plant no longer dispatches at nameplate capacity, uncompetitive in an era of cleaner and more efficient technologies.

Resilience means investing more in a grid that can withstand the next storm, or at least bounce back faster; hardening substations, burying lines, and getting more technology developed and deployed to address persistent grid-adjacent issues like vegetation and stormwater management.

Many of the provisions of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law will expire in 2026. Over the next year or so, there will be an opportunity to populate the policies and priorities Congress should take up, and building a bigger and better grid – from new poles and wires to the three Rs – should be table stakes in any such conversation, if the United States is to remain a magnet for private investment in the decade ahead.

The best infrastructure, of course, can neither be built nor leveraged for economic advantage without the requisite talent, which is why investing in America necessarily means investing in Americans, in the workforce of today and tomorrow.

Today, capital is moving off the sidelines because it sees talent on the field. We can build on this phenomenon, and one powerful tool is strengthening the partnership between industry and labor unions. Over the last four years, I have seen this partnership in action.

In Georgia, I met the laborers and electricians and other building trades’ members who put 100 million craft hours into constructing the first new nuclear plant in decades that will deliver one million homes’ worth of power. A few months later, I met a utility worker who thought he had retired, but, like the shuttered nuclear plant he once operated, is now coming back online in western Michigan. I met the steelworker from Ohio now manufacturing the fuel to power the next generation of reactors; he is helping break our reliance on countries like Russia for that fuel.

It is a story line that is repeated in other sectors, too, like transportation – where union workers are pulling nickel out of the ground, manufacturing the active material for cathodes, making the batteries and EVs, from cars to big rigs and buses, and even repairing the vehicles when they break. This is happening in Minnesota and West Virginia, in Tennessee and Georgia, in Texas and so many other places – I have met those workers, and there is a critical investing-in-America thread that runs through all of those meetings.

Yes, these workers are animating the economic success we are producing today, but they are also advancing our ability to sustain that success.

They are using their voices to prioritize what we need to go the distance – and a big part of that is pulling up the next generation through registered apprenticeships. This training pipeline is a vital investing-in-America asset, which is why more and more businesses are seeking out ways to bolster these registered apprenticeships and why, a few months ago, a bipartisan coalition of two dozen governors announced a goal to support 1 million new workers through registered apprenticeships over the coming decade.

Investing in workers, in good jobs with good benefits, allows us to harness this moment not just to put steel in the ground but steel in the spine of the American middle class. It is the right thing to do, and it is also the smartest economic bet.

I want to close my remarks, finally, with an observation about the sensitivity to interconnected policies needed to maintain America’s position as the destination for private capital. Especially at this moment of political transition, it is important to spotlight how seemingly disparate policies hold together – a point that is hard to make without examples.

Take the case of wind and ships. Reasonable people can disagree about the case for policies that support the expansion of U.S. offshore wind. Folks can disagree about the steepness of the cost curves, challenges with grid integration, or economics relative to other capacity. Different views on technology improvement, anticipated cost of capital, or a multitude of other factors can lead reasonable people to different policy conclusions.

But any complete discussion about dialing back, or perhaps even disassembling, aspects of the current U.S. offshore wind policy must also consider the cascading economic implications for a supply chain that has created opportunity across all 50 states. For example, if you care about shipbuilding, how might the upending of policy expectations in U.S. offshore wind – around permitting certainty or tax incentives – impact the U.S. shipbuilding revival that offshore wind has set off?  In the Gulf Coast states, where dozens of vessels are to be built, what would be the impact?

The same question can be asked about the mining jobs, for nickel in Minnesota or lithium in Nevada, that exist because of the demand pull from current U.S. electric vehicle policy. Or the steel plant that came back to life in Pennsylvania and has been growing in capacity ever since because of the boom in solar. Decisions on wind can impact ships, decisions on EVs can impact mining, decisions on solar can impact steel. This is the complexity of the ‘scalpel, not sledgehammer’ approach that has floated up recently in the investing-in-America discourse in Washington.

Where we go from here is both exciting and fraught. There is the interconnected that we can and should map, and, frankly, there are aspects whose interconnections might remain invisible without the benefit of hindsight. To be simplistic, it is a bit of a Jenga tower exercise: There are opportunities to build higher and stronger, and there are also risks. Any block that is pulled could challenge the structural integrity of the whole thing. I share this as an observation, and, maybe, as a note of caution. Mostly, I share in the spirit of underscoring the criticality of this dimension of analysis if we are to maintain America’s position as the destination for private capital.

Nothing about where we find ourselves was preordained. We are here because we chose to come together around a vision that invests in America. That essential project is incomplete, and we are all on the hook to finish the job. And that is exactly what we will do.

To go the distance, we must keep investing in in our infrastructure and in our people, sensitive to the interconnected nature of the structures and supply chains we have built. We must stick together. Public and private, at every level of government and every layer of the capital stack, no person or zip code left out. And we will get there.

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