Is Decarbonization Dead?

For a long time in climate politics, the question has been, what path do we need to be on to avert absolute catastrophe? And are we on it, or do we have any chance of being on it? And the big win here in the past couple years in America was the Inflation Reduction Act. $370,000,000,000 of the largest renewable energy investment ever to build the infrastructure of decarbonization, to build solar panels, wind turbines, electric vehicles, and so much more. Was it as much as climate advocates hoped? No. Was it more than we've ever done before? Yeah. By a lot. Was it working to pull investment forward? Yeah. Absolutely was. And now it's been gutted in the big beautiful bill. President Trump won the election, and he has slashed into the wind credits, the solar credits, the EV credits. To the winner go the spoils. So what path are we on now, and what does climate politics need to learn from this loss? Are we just sort of courting catastrophe, or do we actually still have a shot? To try and help me answer these questions, I want to have on two people who were involved not just in the Inflation Reduction Act, not just in the lobbying effort against the big beautiful bill, but who are doing really important work on both the modeling and the politics side to try to figure out where the climate movement goes from here. Jesse Jenkins is a professor at Princeton. He leads the Zero Lab on campus. And with his teams, he's been one of the leading climate modelers, trying to figure out how much these policies will actually do. Jane Flagle is the executive director of the Blue Horizons Foundation, and she's a member of the Biden administration's climate policy team. As always, my email, EzraKleinShow@nytimes.com. Jane Flagle, Jesse Jenkins, welcome to the show. Thanks. Good to be back. Thanks for having us. So Jane, you worked on the Inflation Reduction Acts, clean energy investments, incentives as part of the Biden administration. So I I think the place to begin is what were the most important parts of that bill from your perspective? Yeah. So as far as climate is concerned, I think there are two broad buckets of interventions that the Inflation Reduction Act made. One was the tax policy of that bill. There was a technology neutral clean electricity tax credit, both for production and investment in clean energy technologies that was extended basically into perpetuity, like, until well, for for a long time. But what was unique about that was historically, we had had these sort of fits and starts of very short term tax credit incentives for solar and wind that kept expiring and then coming back up for renewal. And we'd have a legislative fight of should they be extended or not, which is that kind of uncertainty is not an environment in which private capital can make smart decisions about investing in energy …