The Carbon Wave

A Matter of Degrees

This episode explores the behind-the-scenes struggle and ultimate success of passing the Inflation Reduction Act, as recounted in Dr. Leah Stokes' new

Key takeaways

The Inflation Reduction Act stands as the largest climate investment in American history.
Dr. Leah Stokes introduces the 'carbon wave' concept to replace the individualistic 'carbon footprint' paradigm with a focus on structural change.
Manufacturing investments from the IRA have reached Republican districts, helping to sustain the policy through political shifts.
Clean energy auctions in India demonstrate that solar plus storage can be 20% cheaper than coal-equivalent generation.
Effective policy change relies on networks of nonprofits, think tanks, and activists rather than isolated academic efforts.

Main topics

The Inflation Reduction Act
Carbon Wave vs. Carbon Footprint
Climate policy negotiation

Notable quotes

The spreadsheet is mightier than the sword.

Conclusion

The episode serves as an inspiring call to action, emphasizing that sy

Transcript preview

Speaker 4 (0:00) On July 14th, 2022, the climate bill that I had worked on for years seemingly died. Senator Joe Manchin, the pivotal 50th vote, had walked away from the negotiation table again. In Washington, my friend Adrian Devaney, a Senate staffer, sat in his home office, watching his kids through the glass door and sobbed. He had given a decade of his life to this bill. He barely slept for three days. Speaker 4 (0:32) And out in California, I held my not-quite-one-year-old twins and cried too. Speaker 4 (0:38) Late that night, another friend, Sonia Agarwal, called from the White House. She'd been working on this bill for almost 18 months straight. The two of us had been on the phone many days, and she told me that night, this is just a bump in the road. We are going to win, she said. But you know, it's a really big bump. I could hear her son in the background mimicking her, yelling, it's a really big bump, over and over again. We laughed between our tears. For nearly two weeks, it seemed like the story was over. Reporters wrote the bill's obituary. Pundits explained where we'd gone wrong. And I felt lost. At the time, I didn't know it, but there were closed-door meetings happening with Senator Manchin in the Senate basement in total secrecy. Speaker 4 (1:33) Finally, 33 days after the bill was condemned to death, the Inflation Reduction Act was signed into law. It was and remains the largest climate investment in American history. This is the story of how that happened. Speaker 4 (1:58) This is a matter of degrees. Speaker 3 (2:00) I'm Dr. Leah Stokes. And I'm Dr. Katherine Wilkinson. And in this episode, we are once again flipping the format. But today, Leah is the one in the hot seat because, drumroll, she wrote Speaker 4 (2:12) a new book. That's right. I have a new book out September 1st. It's called The Carbon Wave, a story of democracy, parenthood, and the race to protect our planet. And the book tells the unlikely story of how the largest climate law in American history passed, you know, the so-called Inflation Reduction Act. Speaker 3 (2:32) The book is detailed and personal. It is suspenseful and deeply inspiring. It gives us a front row seat to how policy change unfolds. You can pre-order The Carbon Wave right now at bookshop.org. We'll put a link in the show notes. Speaker 4 (2:52) And in this episode, we're going to bring on two of the book's main characters. They are people who gave years of their lives to making this law a reality in both Congress and the White House. Speaker 3 (3:04) But first, I'm going to take this opportunity to talk to the author. Leah, what exactly is a carbon wave? So as I think... Speaker 4 (3:14) Pretty much all of our listeners know the carbon footprint is a really ubiquitous idea. And that's because it was popularized by fossil fuel companies. They spent hundreds of millions of dollars advertising this idea. And the concept is that everybody as an individual is responsible for their carbon pollution. You have to, like, you know, bike or recycle or compost or something like that. And it's a very individualistic paradigm. So the carbon wave is a concept that is supposed to replace the carbon footprint. And it's the idea that we can join with others in a collective to change the rules of society, to change the structure, the infrastructure of our society. It's that structural work that is actually going to defeat the climate crisis. And that is where we should be focusing our attention. So the carbon wave is kind of like how droplets in the ocean join together to become a really big wave. That's the same idea, a bunch of people coming together to change really big things in our society. And in this book, Speaker 3 (4:19) I Speaker 4 (4:19) use that metaphor of the carbon wave to tell a story of how thousands of people joined together. To pass the largest climate law in American history, which then rippled out heat pumps in homes and electric cars that got them on the road and solar panels all across the country and batteries, right? It had such a big effect to change the structure of society. And that's why we have to focus on big structural changes through carbon waves. And of course, as a droplet Speaker 3 (4:50) in the carbon wave that saw this bill come into being. You were a pregnant droplet. You were pregnant with twins during this time and then giving birth. Tell us what that chapter was like for you. Speaker 4 (5:05) At the time that I was working on the Inflation Reduction Act, well, it wasn't called that back then. It was called Build Back Better or the Green New Deal or whatever you want to say. At the time, I was pregnant with twins. It was super high risk. We didn't know what would happen if the kids would survive or not. Today, happy to tell you they're five years old, happy and healthy and smart. And deeply identical. Yes, they're identical twins. They also look like me. So, but at the time, we didn't know what would happen. And so it was really high stakes on the personal front. And the work I was doing with this bill in Congress was also very high stakes, and we didn't know if it would survive either. So I really braved those stories together. And the other main protagonists in the book were also my age, also having kids, and also dealing with sort of the high stakes life and death scenarios that is parenthood and policymaking. Speaker 3 (5:58) We learn about a very innovative use of a slightly defunct surgical light as you stage your hospital room with the help of your nurse to go on Democracy Now! That for me is kind of the quintessential moment of these two braided stories, the personal and the professional, Speaker 4 (6:17) coming together. I was hospitalized late in my pregnancy because I had to be continuously monitored. At that time, there was this huge heat wave hitting the Pacific Northwest, and I got asked to go on Democracy Now! at five in the morning. And I knew the sun wouldn't be up and I'd be in a hospital room, so I asked. nurse to see if she had a light that I could use to sort of light my makeshift TV studio. And she ended up wheeling in a giant surgical lamp that was broken. So we weren't misusing hospital equipment, but it had a light that was bright enough to take a baby out of a birth canal and sort of mimics the sun. And that was the sort of thing that I was up to, trying to kind of balance the work and my pregnancy and parenthood as the kids were born. knowing that the most important thing that I could do for these kids was really to protect their home, which is our planet and our climate. Speaker 3 (7:08) And of course, this book is about policy. It's about passing the IRA, but it really is a story about people, the people who worked incredibly tirelessly, long hours behind the scenes to build and pass this largest climate bill in American history. And we're very lucky to have two of those amazing humans here with us today. Speaker 4 (7:32) On today's episode, we will be joined by Sonia Agarwal, who, at the time of the story, was the special assistant to the president for climate policy. When she started in the White House, she also had a four-month-old son at home. And so she was kind of balancing motherhood and really high-level policy work. Today... She is the CEO at Energy Innovation. Speaker 3 (7:57) Our second guest, Adrienne Devaney, was Director of Energy and Environmental Policy for Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. Adrienne was the senator's lead climate negotiator, and now he advises nonprofits and businesses on climate strategy. Speaker 4 (8:12) And the three of us worked really closely on this law, and then I interviewed them a lot to build this book and tell this story. Let's go Speaker 3 (8:22) ahead and bring in Sonia and Adrian to help us tell a little bit of it. You all got into lots of what the late John Lewis would call good trouble together. But before you were the avengers of climate policy passing this biggest climate bill in history, how did you meet? Speaker 1 (8:45) I believe when Leah and I first met, we were both interns, summer interns for Resources for the Future, which is a think tank in Washington, D.C. I can't remember exactly where her office was in that building. I do remember. I was in like Speaker 4 (9:02) the holding pen. I didn't have a private office. I wasn't fancy enough. Speaker 1 (9:05) Yes, that's right. Well, I was in a closet. It was basically a closet that held dusty old books. And it was about four feet by four feet. And that was my space. And that was the life of an intern in D.C. back then. We mostly ate a Speaker 4 (9:24) lot of frozen yogurt, actually. Oh, yes, that's right. There was a frozen yogurt place at Speaker 1 (9:29) Mr. Yogato in DuPont Circle. Right. So that was how the two of us first connected. Speaker 4 (9:35) And hilariously enough, you know how I met Sonia? This podcast. We interviewed her for one of our very first episodes about... trying to get to 100 % clean power by 2035. And it's so funny to have a recording of when you first meet a person, because I think I asked Sonia, like, how did you decide to have a baby? Because she was pregnant at the time. And she told me that she was sort of grappling with the idea and, you know, how would it shrink her focus from sort of like protecting all life on earth to like one being. And it was such a crazy experience because that's how I saw it too. So meeting Sonia was like meeting a sister in that way. There was such a commonality between the way that we saw the world. So magic is how I might put it. Speaker 3 (10:24) Sonia, did you feel the magic when you met these two? Speaker 2 (10:28) Of course I did. How could you not look at these individuals? It would be hard to not feel magic. There's a lot of people that one meets in trying to do the work. really smart, passionate, wonderful people that are doing really important work, maybe adjacent to what you're doing. And then there's every once in a while you run into people who you're just like, oh, we see the world in a very similar way. And I feel like we can skip over just a ton of this kind of background of, you know, what do you think about this? And what do you think about that? Because we can just jump right into, okay, here's the issue. And I absolutely felt that way when meeting both Adrian and Leah. I feel grateful to history for letting me find them. Speaker 3 (11:12) And I should say that Sonia and Adrienne are not the only characters in this book. There are many, but there was really a fourth important character, right, Leah? Yeah, Speaker 4 (11:23) the book also centers on Sam Ricketts. friend and brilliant advocate who designed many of the policies that eventually ended up in the Inflation Reduction Act. And he was supposed to come today, but literally Sam had a conflict because he had to go meet with like a governor's team on climate, which is the more important thing. So, but that gives us an opportunity to just shout out, metaphorically speaking, the really thousands of other people who were working in Congress, in the White House, outside of government. even journalists telling stories, right? Like kids in the street protesting. This law would not have happened without all of those people. So