An Electric Number: 2035
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When talking about climate change, we often get deep into the weeds quickly and throw a lot of numbers around. And these numbers can feel really disconnected from our lives: Two degrees, 415 parts per million, 36 billion tons of carbon dioxide.
In this episode, we've got one number we really want to focus on: 2035. It’s a date that carries a lot of hope and opportunity. If we can make progress by 2035, then we can actually make a lot of changes to our energy system and really our entire economy.
And guess what? We have nearly all the tools to achieve that aim. In this episode, we’ll detail the reality of climate solutions -- they’re right here, right now.
Katharine and Leah will explain: why 2035? Where did this date come from? It’s a radical departure from what the clean energy community had been talking about. Up until last year, most people were planning for the electricity system to be cleaned up by 2050. And suddenly, that number has been pulled 15 years forward.
Featured in this episode: Tim Echols, Donnel Baird, Sonia Aggarwal, Jesse Jenkins, Bracken Hendricks and Sam Ricketts.
Follow our co-hosts and production team:
A Matter of Degrees is a production of Post Script Audio
TRANSCRIPT
Leah Stokes: Tim Echols and Donnel Baird are two very different people.
Tim Echols: I'm an evangelical Christian and I believe that God gave Adam and Eve a responsibility to care for the garden, subsequently the whole earth. Caring for it means tending it, and nurturing it, and making sure that you're not abusing it.
Leah Stokes: Donnel is a former progressive organizer. His obsession with the environment is rooted in his own experience of energy, poverty. He grew up in a one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn without heat, and his family actually had to heat their home using an oven.
Donnel Baird: Of course, that releases all kinds of carbon monoxide, all that to say like very early on, I was exposed to the relationship between energy and buildings and actually health. And as I got older and went to college, you could see that environmental justice and environmental racism as a structural issue. It wasn't just my individual family, but millions and unfortunately, billions of people around the world who struggle with these kinds of issues.
Leah Stokes: Tim grew up with automobiles at the center of his life. His family owned a car auction when he was a kid.
Tim Echols: So I've always loved cars. I worked at the car auction starting at 11 years old, selling peanuts to the car dealers. And then as I got older, I started a car detail shop there. And obviously just continued on with my interest in cars. After college worked for a Ford dealership.
Leah Stokes: Donnel grew up with poverty and activism at the center of his life. He worked as an organizer in Brownsville, Brooklyn. One of the poorest neighborhoods in New York City.
Donnel Baird: 30% of adults in the neighborhood are incarcerated. They enter the Juvenile Justice system for 17 blocks throughout this neighborhood. A million dollars per year is spent per block just to incarcerate people from that block. And I was a community organizer there for three years, and we were knocking on doors talking to the people who live there about how to fix the neighborhood.
Leah Stokes: But they do have one really big thing in common, they're both on a mission to electrify the world with clean energy and do it in their own unique way.
Tim Echols: So I drive a 2017 Chevrolet Volt. We've had two electric cars in our family at the same time. I have seven children so we have a lot of people driving cars.
Leah Stokes: Tim was a commissioner at the Georgia Public Service Commission and he's spreading the gospel of clean energy and electric cars to his fellow Republicans in the South.
Tim Echols: What I want to do is to help them see why this is a good idea and how this technology fractionally lowering everybody's power bill, bringing new opportunity in Atlanta and Georgia, and also using a Georgia grown fuel, right? How patriotic is that? I mean, that's what we ought to be doing.
Leah Stokes: Donnel is focused on cleaning up buildings, mostly for people of color who are more likely to live in unhealthy housing that's expensive to heat.
Donnel Baird: What we need to do now is we need to move buildings off of fossil fuels entirely.
Leah Stokes: He's the CEO of a company called BlocPower, which is electrifying multi-family apartments, like the one he grew up in and then powering them with renewable energy.
Donnel Baird: And so we have the opportunity to have these buildings be run off of 100% clean energy, and so that's what we need to do. So all the buildings in New York need to be upgraded and same is the case, Detroit, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Phoenix, Oakland, everywhere.
Leah Stokes: Both Tim and Donnel are trying to prove to the world that we can use the technologies that exist today to cut most of our emissions that we're making from our outdated, dirty energy system. We've made an extraordinary amount of progress over the last decade in terms of cleaning up our electricity system. And that's thanks to evangelists like Tim and entrepreneurs like Donnel. But experts tell us that we need to be moving even faster and that we should be aiming to clean up our entire electricity system within the next 15 years. Do you think we can do that, Katherine?
Katharine Wilkinson: I sure as hell hope so.
Leah Stokes: This is A Matter of Degrees. I'm Dr. Leah Stokes.
Katharine Wilkinson: And I'm Dr. Katharine Wilkinson and together we're telling stories for the climate curious.
Leah Stokes: When it comes to talking about climate change, we often get deep into the weeds quickly and ended up throwing a lot of numbers around.
Katharine Wilkinson: And these numbers can feel really disconnected from our lives. Two degrees, 415 parts per million, 36 billion tons of carbon dioxide. And these are all bad numbers by the way.
Leah Stokes: Right. And today we've got one number we really want to focus on and that number is 2035. It's a date. It's actually a deadline. It could be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on how fast we're able to move.
Katharine Wilkinson: I know the bad, 2035 is a point of no return for the climate according to scientists. If we can't drastically lower heat trapping gases by then, we're looking at catastrophic scenarios.
Leah Stokes: But it's also a date that carries a lot of hope and opportunity. If we can make progress by 2035, then we can actually make a lot of changes to our energy system and really our entire economy. And you might have heard this number 2035 recently. Here's Joe Biden in a speech he made in July.
Joe Biden: We also know that transforming the American electrical sector to produce power without producing carbon pollution and electrifying and increase share of our economy will be the greatest sparing of job creation and economic competitiveness in the 21st century. That's why we're going to achieve a carbon pollution free electric sector by the year 2035. We need to get to work on it right away.
Leah Stokes: I could just like cry listening to him say those things, to be honest. Like, "Oh my God, this is so exciting."
Katharine Wilkinson: I also like how he says 2035. He'll really gives it a nice...
Leah Stokes: Yeah, it was very dramatic.
Katharine Wilkinson: Yeah. Well, Leah, I know this is something that you've written a lot about. So what exactly is Joe Biden proposing here? I mean, what's the transformation that he is putting into words?
Leah Stokes: It's hard to describe how exciting this is. There is no state in the country that is pledging to clean up its electricity system by 2035. So what Vice President Joe Biden is saying is that he wants to do for the entire country what states are trying to do just for themselves for 2040 or 2045. He wants our entire electricity system to be clean, 100% clean by the year 2035. That is so much faster than we had been talking about.
Katharine Wilkinson: And it's actually in alignment with what science tells us we have to do.
Leah Stokes: And I think Joe Biden really summarized the opportunity that we have before us very well.
Joe Biden: It's going to create at least one million jobs in construction, engineering, and manufacturing in order to get it done. It's going to make the places where we work healthier, improving indoor air quality and water quality. It's going to save tens of billions of dollars in energy costs over time. That's all real.
Leah Stokes: It is real. These aren't just numbers on a page. They're jobs. And we're going to hear directly from Donnel and Tim about the kinds of jobs that they're seeing right now in Georgia and New York, as they focus on cleaning up our energy system. But first, I want to help people understand why 2035. Where did this date come from? Because it's actually a radical departure from what the Clean Energy Community had been talking about. Up until last year, most people were planning for the electricity system to be cleaned up by 2050. And suddenly, that number has been pulled 15 years forward.
Katharine Wilkinson: I mean, that's a radical shift. So what happened?
Leah Stokes: It's actually a pretty fascinating story and to tell it, I needed to talk to the two people who are largely responsible for getting this 2035 idea into the mainstream. So I just want to take this back to the first time that the three of us met, which was largely in a tweet. So I was evaluating climate plans at the beginning of 2019 on the great website called twitter.com. And one of the first plans that I evaluated was Inslee's electricity plan. Can you guys just remind me the grade that I gave you for your plan?
Sam Ricketts:
I believe it was A. I don't actually recall.
Leah Stokes: That's Sam Ricketts.
Bracken Hendricks: Didn't you ding us because you thought it was too aggressive and you gave us A minus, B plus something like that. You pulled us down.
Leah Stokes: And that's Bracken Hendricks who has a better memory.
Bracken Hendricks: I do recall getting on the phone with you the very first time and having you grill us about the level of ambition and the level of achievability. But I think by the fact that we're on this podcast, we must have ground down your resistance and ultimately when you over. So I take that as a measure of success.
Leah Stokes: Yeah, exactly. I feel like I was maybe, I don't know, not the most polite person in hindsight.
Katharine Wilkinson: Leah, you were being like a really obnoxious professor, tough grader on these guys in they're like shooting for the stars. And you're like, "Don't shoot for the stars. That's unreasonable."
Leah Stokes: Yeah, I know. Sam and Bracken are now my friends. But they're also a couple of the most influential policy nerds out there who have been working on climate change and clean energy well before it was the hard thing to do. They were both instrumental figures in crafting the climate policy for Washington State governor and former presidential candidate, Jay Inslee. You might remember Inslee from early in the Democratic primary.
Jay Inslee: This is our moment to put the greatest threat to our existence, to our economy, to our health at the very top of the nation's agenda. This is our moment to reinvent our economy. 20 million [crosstalk 00:10:54].
Katharine Wilkinson: This was such a big deal. He and his campaign put together this incredibly comprehensive climate policy and they were laser focused on moving climate solutions forward, like no other campaign from this primary or any primary in history.
Jay Inslee: We're the first generation to feel the sting of climate change and we are the last generation that can do something about it.
Leah Stokes: Yeah. They came up with 200 pages of climate plans and Inslee has been working on this issue for a long time. Bracken actually co-wrote a book with him on climate solutions, way back in 2007. The plans that they came up with during the primary really built on that early work. Those 200 pages were truly a masterful document covering almost every part of our economy.
Bracken Hendricks: When we were putting together this policy about getting to 100% clean electricity, we had this wonderful charge that we've been given by Governor Inslee, which was to be as ambitious as ambitious as the science demands, but be ready to actually do it on day one. Like push the level of ambition to the limit, but don't strain credulity and don't cross that boundary. And so we spent a lot of time thinking about how you would get to 100% clean energy. And we wanted to have a plan that would look really seriously at a 10 year mobilization and really push. We looked really hard at the data, we looked really hard at the technology and we felt like this is doable and this is as far as we can credibly get in 10 years. We're gratified now people are really running with this 100% clean energy by 2035 standard.
Leah Stokes: Unfortunately, Inslee dropped out of the race pretty early on, but his singular focus on climate change transformed the primary. Suddenly, it was a race to the top where everybody was trying to have the boldest climate plan. Inslee clearly made an impact on the race. I ask Sam and Bracken about what that was like. So the campaign failed. Obviously Jay Inslee is not becoming president and he dropped out pretty early, but then this weird thing started to happen where first Elizabeth Warren adopted his plans. And then at the very end of the race, suddenly Joe Biden has adopted his plan. So, what did you think about that? Do you feel like the campaign was a success? Is this an example of failure actually being success?
Sam Ricketts: When Vice President Biden released his Build Back Better Economic Recovery agenda with so centrally placed clean energy investment in the center of it and included this 2035 electricity decarbonization schedule. We were thrilled. We were thrilled with that and the entirety of the agenda. But just an enormous credit to the movement that has galvanized a real meaningful change as to what climate solutions are in the US political infrastructure.
Katharine Wilkinson: You guys don't have big egos and it's hilarious. You refuse to take any credit for this fantastic thing that you did. It is hilarious. But you're climate people, you've been both working on this for well, over a decade. You've been trying to chip away at the carbon intensive system and it hasn't been easy. And has this been one of those moments where you feel like, "Yeah, I made a difference?"
Sam Ricketts: Yes.
Bracken Hendricks: If you tell me I've made a difference, Leah, I'll believe you.
Katharine Wilkinson: So the political pressure worked?
Leah Stokes: It did. And today Biden has the most comprehensive climate plan of any candidate for president in US history. We're talking about two trillion dollars in the first four years of the administration. That's 20% of the federal budget. He's pledged to have 40% of investments go to disadvantaged communities, which is exactly what environmental justice groups have been pushing for. And he has pulled up that electricity target to 2035, which is faster than any state in this entire country. That is a 15 year acceleration from the 2050 target that we had previously been talking about.
Katharine Wilkinson: Okay, Leah, so that's the story behind the political momentum that gets us to 2035 taking hold as a target. But I'm curious about the underlying trends. I mean, clearly Inslee said this has to be rigorous. So if this accelerated date is possible, what changed in terms of technology and cost?
Leah Stokes: That's a great question. Let's dig a little bit deeper into why this is doable and to do that, we've got to get a little more technical.
Katharine Wilkinson: Are you taking us to Wonkland?
Leah Stokes: Yes, Katherine, we're going on a great adventure to Wonkland. But it's really not that bad there, I promise. It's my favorite place to hang out. And we've had two great guides to help us get through Wonkland. Both of them are highly respected energy experts, but neither of them started out in energy. The first expert is Sonia Aggarwal. She is the Vice President at Energy Innovation, a non-partisan clean energy research group. And they create reports that people like Bracken and Sam turn into policy proposals. In 2005, Sonia was studying outer space.
Sonia Aggarwal: I was working actually in astronomy research in South America and working at an observatory in Chile.
Leah Stokes: Sonia found herself in this beautiful mountain observatory, studying a binary star system that might become a supernova in something like 10,000 years. And she looked around and thought, "Hmm, maybe I should be studying something with a little bit more immediate impact."
Sonia Aggarwal: I was having a lot of fun watching these dynamic curves coming out of the star, but really the whole time thinking about how much I care about this planet and work that might make a much larger scale difference in my lifetime on this particular rock in the solar system.
Leah Stokes: So she switched which planet she was interested in, and she started to focus on energy. She earned her master's at Stanford University focusing on engineering and she started to work on climate. This was in the mid 2000s and that's when a lot of people started to notice major changes in renewable energy. She noticed them too.
Sonia Aggarwal: So that took me to looking at solar and wind in more depth. And at that time, really, they were niche technologies that were not really at scale yet, but it certainly seemed like the curves of cost declines that were already emerging in these technologies were really impressive. Doing some calculations about learning rates and the way that technology tends to evolve as it gets deployed gave me a lot of hope for the potential future of these technologies.
Katharine Wilkinson: Sonia is talking about something here that may be familiar to people, the idea of learning curves, right? We know them from school when we're learning a new skill or language. And with technology, the more you make of something, the cheaper that something gets.
Leah Stokes: That's right. And it's played out in pretty miraculous ways. Take for example, computing, every two years the capability of microchips doubles and the costs are falling. So when we made a transistor back in the 1960s, it would have cost about $8 to make. And today that same transistor costs a fraction of a cent. That's why we can all have super computers in our pockets. And it turns out that the same thing has been happening for wind and solar. And solar, every doubling of manufacturing capacity brings a roughly 20% drop in costs.
Katharine Wilkinson: And it sounds like Sonia has a front row seat to how this is playing out.
Leah Stokes: Yes, as Europe put an emphasis on renewables, manufacturing and installations exploded. In America, the Obama administration invested $90 billion into clean energy at the turn of the last decade. In the first half of 2020, the US and Europe both got more electricity from renewable energy than coal. The costs of wind power have also dropped by 70% since 2009. And the costs of solar have fallen even more by about 90%. Electricity from the sun and the wind are now cheaper than anything else in many parts of the world.
Sonia Aggarwal: I think it was easy to ignore renewable energy when it was under 1% of the total electricity generation, for example. But that it's really grown and we're seeing higher shares, I think utilities can no longer ignore these technologies. And the writing is on the wall about the cost savings that they can provide.
Leah Stokes: This brings us to Sonia's most recent work. She and a couple of colleagues watched this play out and they started to ask themselves, "Can we transition the grid much faster than we previously thought?"
Katharine Wilkinson: It's a great question and what exactly did they find?
Leah Stokes: Well, she and her team spent months crunching the data, running different simulations and writing an analysis of what is possible by 2035.
Sonia Aggarwal: What we said was, "Can we run the models to try to understand how quickly can we actually get to a very high share of zero carbon electricity?" Because a lot of people were talking about trying to get to net zero by 2050 or 80% by 2050.
Leah Stokes: And in June this year, they came to a pretty stark conclusion. By 2035, the US can reliably and cost effectively hit 90% clean energy. In fact, it would even save money.
Sonia Aggarwal: And it was really amazing actually to find that we could come up with some pretty robust scenarios that dependably deliver electricity to customers in every hour at very high shares in the very near term.
Leah Stokes: So when we're thinking about what our electricity grid would look like in 2035, what are the big takeaways? What would our grid be like? Would it be cheaper? Would it be cleaner? How can we think about what an electricity grid could look like in 2035?
Sonia Aggarwal: Well, from the individual's perspective, it won't look much different. Except for that the air will be cleaner, the water will be cleaner, less kids with asthma attacks due to air pollution from polluting power plants. But the electricity that you receive in your house or in your business would look just the same. So when you flip on the light switch, there, the light would be. The way that the physical grid would look would be just a lot more wind and solar power plants, a lot more energy storage deployed, and then also we would keep around our existing hydro and nuclear power plants to get up to that 90% zero carbon share.
Katharine Wilkinson: Is it doable? I mean, how much faster do we need to be moving in order to hit that 90% target or even a 100% target?
Sonia Aggarwal: Yes. It's doable. That's one of the most exciting findings of the 2035 report. We're not talking about a 10 times greater rate of deployment of solar and wind or something, which sounds really hard. We're actually talking about just doubling the historical best rate of solar and wind deployment in this country each year in the 2020s, and then tripling it for those five years in the 2030s. So that is totally doable.
Katharine Wilkinson: Wow. I have to say, Leah, this is one of the more energizing pieces of information I've heard in a while. And I guess it leaves me with another question, which is, what about that last 10%? If Biden is calling for 100% zero carbon energy by 2035, is there a big difference between the 90 that Sonia finds is possible and the 100 that we're aiming for?
Leah Stokes: The 10% problem, something we talk about very frequently in Wonkland. We've really made it Katherine. For that, we're going to need to turn to another technical expert, Dr. Jesse Jenkins. He is a professor at Princeton University and a widely cited expert on cleaning up our energy system.
Jesse Jenkins: I run the ZERO Lab, which is a research group focused on providing decision support and insights to guide transitions to net zero energy systems.
Katharine Wilkinson: That's cool. I like your lab name. Very nice.
Jesse Jenkins: Thanks. It stands for Zero Carbon Energy Systems Research and Optimization Lab. Got to get an acronym out of it.
Leah Stokes: Like Sonia, Jesse was on a completely different career path before finding climate change.
Jesse Jenkins: I was a computer science major in the mid 2000s, thinking about a potential future career in software widgets and the like. Social media, whatever else might've come.
Leah Stokes: And then as an undergraduate, he took a class on the environmental impact of energy systems and he realized that he wanted to apply his analytical skills to something much bigger.
Jesse Jenkins: And so I took a U-turn at that point and really devoted my further studies to try and understand energy systems and opportunities for emissions reductions at that point in the transportation sector.
Leah Stokes: Jesse went on to get his PhD in engineering systems at MIT, and like Sonia, he's been closely tracking and modeling clean energy technologies over the last decade and a half. His research has also shown that we can get very high levels of renewable energy quickly and cost-effectively. But he also says that getting that last 10% of zero carbon electricity will be more of a challenge.
Jesse Jenkins: So what happens when it's winter months when it's cloudy and the sun is low in the latitude in the sky and it's high pressure front that it's cold and the wind dies for seven to 10 days in a row? So the more we depend on electricity to heat and cool our building spaces and to run industrial processes as well, the more important it is that we can weather those kinds of events. What the Germans lovingly called a dunkelflaute or dark doldrums periods. So long periods of time when it's both a dark, little solar output and where the wind is died out.
Katharine Wilkinson: Okay, dunkelflaute or whatever you should say.
Jesse Jenkins: Yeah, well, you got to have a compound word for everything in German. And to get through those periods, we need what I call clean firm or firm low carbon technologies. That is a big challenge for a decarbonized electricity system that relies heavily on wind and solar.
Katharine Wilkinson: So talk to us, Leah, about what clean firm technologies we're talking about.
Leah Stokes: Well, there are a couple of different options to deal with these challenges. One is transmission lines. If we have one part of the area that has a lot of wind on a given day, and another part that doesn't, we can connect those two regions with transmission lines and share those resources over these larger geographic spaces. And of course, we can use storage technologies. We can store that extra energy and then in the evening, when the sun has gone down, we can use it drawing off of these batteries and other storage technologies. And there are other ideas that people are talking about new technologies, like flexible or small modular nuclear reactors that some people are quite excited about. And Jesse believes that like wind and solar, we could see similar cost declines through learning for these other technologies.
Jesse Jenkins: Basically what we need is a technology that has its own energy storage. So it's basically using a fuel of some sort and that's what we use fossil fuels for today. And they play that role well from a reliability and economic perspective but of course have significant environmental costs and drive climate change. And so what we need are firm resources that are clean, as opposed to fossil emitting from resources like coal and gas plants. And so our option set there is frankly, not as mature and not as good from a cost perspective as wind and solar. It includes geothermal energy, which today is fairly geographically specific and constrained to a small total scale in specific locations where we have the right geology to do geothermal.
Jesse Jenkins: The largest source of clean from energy we have today is nuclear power. And our existing nuclear fleet is certainly an important foundation for making further progress to decarbonize the electricity grid. But we're going to be seeing at best a small reduction in capacity and at worst significant retirement in our existing nuclear fleet. So if nuclear is going to play a big role, we really need to see a dramatic shift in the way we go about building nuclear power plants that can make them much more economic to build. That could be either making them much smaller and more modular and more manufactured in a shipyard or factory type setting, or it can mean approaching the construction process in a very different way that focuses less on the whizzbang new nuclear technology and more on, "How do we just do big civil works projects required in a nuclear project in a much more cost effective way in the US than we've been able to do over the last few decades?"
Jesse Jenkins: The other options involve burning fuels in combustion turbines like we do for natural gas plants today. We can either keep burning natural gas and then capture the carbon emissions and sequester the emissions permanently underground in geologic formations. That's known as carbon capture and sequestration or we can burn as zero carbon fuel like hydrogen or ammonia and then there's no direct CO2 emissions from that combustion, but we need to find a way to produce that fuel at scale without driving emissions. So yeah, if we can spend the next decade basically making the full suite of technologies we need to decarbonize as cheap as we've made wind and solar and batteries over the last decade, then we're going to be well positioned to get to net zero cost-effectively and there's no reason to expect that that that kind of cost reduction would not happen with concerted policy support.
Katharine Wilkinson: So both Sonia and Jesse are saying, we have the tools now to get to a zero carbon electricity grid pretty quickly. And it sounds like the tools to finish that job are on the horizon. They're not someday, maybe if we're lucky. So what about the other pieces of this, Leah? What about electrifying cars, water heaters, all the things today that run on fossil fuels?
Leah Stokes: Well, that's why I'm so focused on electricity because this is the fastest way that we can eliminate emissions from other parts of our economy. And it's also the cheapest, but it's going to require historic investments. Jesse and I talked about what that would need to look like. The benefit of cleaning up the electricity sector is that it allows us to clean up other parts of the economy, transportation, buildings, and even some parts of heavy industry. How much more electricity do we need when we start to electrify these other sectors?
Jesse Jenkins: We need a lot more electricity. And so that's where electricity starts to look like a linchpin in any successful transition to a net zero emissions economy. We want to get to net zero emissions sometime in the power sector between 2035 and 2045 if we're trying to get to net zero economy-wide by 2050. And that alone would eliminate a quarter of current US greenhouse gas emissions. But the other challenge is that we need to substantially expand electricity to help decarbonize the other three quarters of emissions. And so even if we get to 100% clean electricity by 2035, then we almost need to double all that electricity again by 2050, over the next decade to help fuel the displacement of fossil fuels in other sectors.
Katharine Wilkinson: On the other side, that means that there'll be a lot of work in this industry for a long time building stuff.
Jesse Jenkins: Yeah, it's going to be a major increase in energy related employment within the electricity sector, building wind, and solar, and transmission lines in particular. We could see an annual average about two to three million energy related jobs in the first decade of this transition or a net increase of about a million energy related jobs. And that's primarily in the wind and solar sectors and supportive supply chains, including transmission build out and manufacturing of wind turbines and solar panel components.
Katharine Wilkinson: And then there'll be even more jobs of course, and cleaning up the transportation sector in the building sector.
Jesse Jenkins: That's right. And building electric vehicles and batteries and heat pumps. There's a major expansion. It could be that we end up importing a lot of that from overseas or with the right focused policies, we could be insourcing rather than outsourcing a lot of that manufacturing and could be producing a lot of those components in the United States as well.
Katharine Wilkinson: I love those comments that Jesse makes at the end, because for so long, we've heard this framing about how much the transition will cost and how much we're going to have to give up. But what we know is that this has gotten dramatically cheaper as we've been unpacking. And whatever it does cost going forward is actually an investment. As Jesse said, we're talking about the creation of millions of jobs and not just jobs, but meaningful jobs, helping to build a livable future. And that's exactly what we heard in Biden's comments at the top of the show.
Leah Stokes: And this makes me so hopeful because here are the facts. We have the technology we need, we know how to do it. It will actually save customers money and it'll create millions of good paying jobs along the way. Cleaning up our electricity system is so exciting. I call it the first linchpin, because if we can clean up our electricity system by 2035, what that will allow us to do is clean up our transportation system through electric vehicles or buildings through using things like induction stoves, and heat pumps rather than fossil gas and even maybe half of heavy industry. And when we add up the clean electricity system with the newly electrified parts of our economy, we're talking about something like 70 to 80% of our emissions being eliminated with this plan.
Katharine Wilkinson: So we know this clean energy transition is happening now. It's not some far off someday, maybe sort of thing.
Leah Stokes: Exactly. And that's where Southern EV enthusiast, Tim Echols and green building Brooklynite Donnel Baird come into our picture. These are the kinds of people who are going to take that 2035 electricity goal and use it to catalyze climate progress in the transportation and building sectors. As we heard, Tim is a huge fan of electric vehicles. As a Public Service Commissioner for the state of Georgia, he's been pushing for incentives and targets to make clean cars more accessible. And when I talked to Tim, he was so enthusiastic about ride sharing companies leading the way on this that he actually became a Lyft driver himself for a short period.
Tim Echols: I really think that rideshare companies using electric vehicles are the best marketing campaign that we can have out there because they're giving seven, eight, nine, 10, 12 rides a day. And a lot of the folks getting in these cars and I've talked to the drivers and I've actually went in and experienced it myself. I said, "You know what, I'm going to rent one of these Lyft cars. I'm going to see how people react." And so for two different weekends, I rented one of these Bolts and I became a Lyft driver in order to experience this.
Katharine Wilkinson: As a Georgia resident and a homegrown Atlantan myself, I would be very delighted to have Tim pick me up. I'd probably make him drive me around longer so that we could just chat in detail in real time about clean cars.
Leah Stokes: Yeah, and that was his goal to unlock those kinds of conversations with people who just got into his car for a ride and it totally worked.
Tim Echols: And so their comments were all good. "Wow, this is a quiet car. This is a clean car. There's a lot of room in the backseat of this car. I love this. I could see myself in it." I learned that back when I worked for a car dealership when I was 22 years old. There's no substitute for giving a test drive, right? You can't just sit at your desk and talk about how cool this Ford is, or this Chevy is or whatever. No, you've got to get in the car and experiencing. So imagine every city having 50, 100, 200, 1,000 electric cars running around giving rides.
Leah Stokes: I love this. I just love the idea of Tim being a Lyft driver, because he just wants to turn a few more people onto electric vehicles.
Katharine Wilkinson: He's like such an evangelist in every sense of the word.
Leah Stokes: I love it. And the cool thing is that it's not just the people that Tim will just by chance pick up who are getting excited about electric vehicles, 40 million Americans are right now saying that they're going to consider an electric vehicle for their next car. And that's according to a survey from AAA. The thing that maybe not everybody knows is that battery range is way up and the cost of EVs have come so far down. I have an EV myself and I love it. It's way easier to drive than a gas powered car. You rarely have to stop and charge it.
Leah Stokes: But overall, sales in the US of EVs are flat and they were even before the pandemic. And it's pretty clear that consumers would be buying these cars in much greater numbers if they had better access to them. If they were more comfortable, with charging availability and EVs were actually marketed to people when they went to dealerships and tried to think about what car they wanted to buy.
Katharine Wilkinson: I totally feel that because I don't have an EV and in part that's because I live in a condo and there is no charging infrastructure. So this actually really takes me back, Leah, to our first episode on structural change versus personal action. Like we're just really challenged on personal action here without the right infrastructure surrounding us.
Leah Stokes: It's all structural Katherine. It's structural all the way down. A few years ago, EVs were on track to explode in your home state of Georgia where Tim also lives. And that was because of a tax credit that was created in 1998, thanks to three Georgia Republicans who wanted to boost Prius sales. They were interested in fuel savings and reducing US dependence on foreign oil.
Tim Echols: When you added the federal tax credit of 7,500 to the state tax credit of 5,000, it was essentially a free car. And once people figured that out, we were the number one market for the Nissan Leaf in America.
Leah Stokes: What it did do was catalyze a massive growth in EVs in the state. And it stuck around until Republican slashed it.
Katharine Wilkinson: I totally remember this. I remember Nissan Leafs were just popping up all over the city in Atlanta, and also EV infrastructure was popping up like at my favorite dive bar Manuel's Tavern. And that was a few years ago and then all of a sudden, it just felt like it came to a screeching halt.
Leah Stokes: Yeah. The tax credit went away in 2015 and the bottom fell out of the EV market in Georgia.
Tim Echols: Yeah. It really didn't have an impact on Tesla. As you look at Tesla sales in leases, they were pretty flat, but those Nissan Leafs, it killed the market for the Nissan leaf. Clearly the credit was the catalyst for George's EV revolution while it lasted.
Leah Stokes: And not only was that tax credit removed, wasn't there a fee put in place, can you explain that to us?
Tim Echols: It was a double whammy, right? We were doing a massive transportation omnibus bill for road, bridges, a lot of improvements. And I think our legislators said, "Wow, what are we doing giving away this money for these tax credits? And Oh, by the way, these cars aren't paying their fair share." And so instead of attaching what would have been an appropriate fee, maybe 60, $70, they said, "Well, it's probably about 100, let's just round it up to 200 and it's a $200 fee inflation adjusted." So I think I paid 213 on mine this year.
Leah Stokes: So every year you've got to pay 200 plus dollars because you own an EV in Georgia?
Tim Echols: Yeah, just to get the tag. That's right.
Leah Stokes: So Georgians are right now being punished for owning electric vehicles. And Tim has been on a mission ever since to bring back the EV tax credit and break down some of the barriers to electric vehicle adoption in Georgia. And he's not just doing this out of pure kindness. He wants to create a strong market so other companies can set up shop in Georgia and he feels like this is a way to speak to his fellow Republicans about climate action.
Tim Echols: After that point, I think we realized, "Wait a second, we've got to change our messaging on these cars. We've got to start talking about technology. We've got to start talking about economic development. We can't leave it to our Democratic colleagues to message this out or we'll never get this credit back." So let's talk about how all autonomous cars are going to be electric and how we want to attract companies like Tesla and anybody that's making autonomous cars or any autonomous car technology. We want to attract them to the Atlanta area. Therefore, we need to make sure that the climate is right for electric vehicles and that means reinstating some tax credit.
Leah Stokes: It's hard to say if Tim's efforts are going to be successful, if he'll manage to get that Georgia EV market to bounce back anytime soon. But there have been some promising signs of shifting attitudes towards clean electricity in the state. As a public service commissioner, Tim is overseeing plans for thousands of megawatts of solar in Georgia and expansion of rooftop solar access for customers.
Katharine Wilkinson: And I think people are sometimes surprised that these projects happen in Southern states. I mean, I can't tell you how often people in the climate space are like, "You're from Georgia?"
Leah Stokes: Yeah. There's a lot of support for clean energy, even in red states. And Tim knows that we can keep that happening, but selling climate change to conservatives is a lot like selling a car. You've got to know your buyer and pick your words carefully.
Tim Echols: I think my interest in the climate really comes more from my faith as opposed to anything else. I tell my Democratic friends all the time to be careful and what they're asking their Republican friends to say, right? I know rhetoric is really important in this political climate. People want you to say the words like somehow that's magical or something. But I am very cautious in the words that I use because I know that people will get a soundbite of it or they'll take that clip and they will use it against me.
Leah Stokes: So Tim rarely uses the phrase climate change when he's pitching his ideas to other Republicans. But here's the thing, poll after poll shows, conservatives love the clean energy technologies that are really driving our energy transition.
Katharine Wilkinson: Yeah. And I think that's because building all this clean infrastructure creates a lot of local jobs and tax revenue for cities and states. And rooftop solar actually allows people to have more control over their energy or even full energy autonomy. And we actually saw this also in the state of Georgia some years back when the Tea Party and Sierra Club ended up working together to make solar policy better for the state.
Leah Stokes: Right. And this is the reason why you hear Biden framing this as an economic opportunity focused around jobs. And when I talked to Donnel, a former progressive organizer, he told me something kind of funny about his own journey.
Donnel Baird: Even though I was a socialist when I was 19 back in college at Duke, I am now I guess a hyper capitalist, I guess.
Leah Stokes: So climate change is transforming all kinds of people. Tim is out there signing up to be a Lyft driver on the weekends and Donnel is tapping his organizing roots to grow his Brooklyn based startup company, BlocPower.
Donnel Baird: I am a tech entrepreneur. I've raised millions of dollars as a Silicon Valley venture capital to try and build a giant for profit company where one of the major outcomes is the reduction of greenhouse gases.
Leah Stokes: BlocPower is working to upgrade all kinds of buildings, churches, community centers, apartment buildings, and through his company, Donnel installs new installation, electric heat pumps, and even onsite solar. Some projects are bringing in 50% cuts in energy bills and 70% drops in emissions.
Donnel Baird: Yeah, so we're super focused on low income and moderate income buildings. There's five million medium size buildings throughout the country. They're not single family homes, they're not skyscrapers in Manhattan, in New York City. They are schools, small businesses, houses of worship, community centers, gyms, right? These are medium size buildings that are bigger than a single family home. There's five million of them. We think they represent about seven to 13% of US greenhouse gas emissions, depending on which data set you analyze. And they waste about $100 billion per year on fossil fuels. And so we focus on those buildings.
Leah Stokes: And Donnel is doing this to make money and create jobs, sure. But he's also doing it to address climate change and for much more personal reasons.
Donnel Baird: It is important to me because I am black. I know this is a podcast, but I am a black American, male and we have really high rates of unemployment and that creates a lot of frustration and despair in the black community and there's all other kinds of negative things that come out of that. People need a purpose and people need to be connected to something larger than themselves and there can be good purposeful work that's not exploitative, that's not extractive, that helps to stabilize families and communities and so that's what we want.
Donnel Baird: If you go into the Bronx, we're working on a project there. The Bronx has the highest asthma rates in America. They have thousands of buildings that burn oil for heat and hot water year round, 365 days a year. And oil truck pulls up to the apartment building, pumps oil into the boiler in the basement. You burn that oil to heat up hot water which provides heat and hot water to that apartment building. It's incredibly bad for the environment, but it's also, I mean, you're burning oil in your basement and everyone's breathing that stuff in. And that is part of the reason why the Bronx has such high asthma rates.
Katharine Wilkinson: I'm so glad that Donnel made this point because it drives me fricking bananas when people in the climate space are like, "We need to only focus on climate change. It is so confusing when we start talking about other things like, Oh, I don't know, jobs and justice. Why would we talk about those things?" And it's like, "Guys, we about those things, a, because we have an opportunity to multisolve and b, because we can bring people to this topic and to this work for other reasons. The work can be common ground solving for a lot of different needs and a lot of different concerns."
Leah Stokes: Exactly. I am a huge fan of Donnel and his company. Because in addition to making these community and justice benefits, he's also pointing out that the work of climate progress is also about job creation.
Donnel Baird: I started thinking about, "Could we create jobs for local families to green their buildings and to retrofit and renovate the buildings that they lived in like the ones I grew up in?" Part of the reason that we should electrify buildings is we'll create, depending on who you talk to, somewhere between one and four million jobs, electrifying buildings.
Leah Stokes: I've been trying to electrify my home and first of all, I've had literally a hole in my kitchen wall for four years. So I wouldn't say we're the best at moving projects forward. But one thing I've noticed is that when contractors come over and we say, "Oh, we want to get rid of gas." They say, "Well, why you do that? Gas is so fantastic." Dah, dah, dah. So it seems like it's hard to find the right contractor who actually wants to do building electrification and understands why you would want to do it. Is that kind of your experience too?
Donnel Baird: Yeah, absolutely. We're going to have to invent new kinds of construction companies and contractors across the country who understand building electrification and are passionate about it and can execute and implement building electrification projects. Contractors and construction companies get all kinds of fees and payments from the natural gas industry or the oil industry. They get fees and payments from manufacturers of products that use natural gas and oil. And so in some ways they are economically and financially tied in with the fossil fuel industry, which is something that I think when we think about what needs to happen here, the fact that the construction industry, Leah, to your very good point is incentivized or lean towards fossil fuels. That needs to be reorganized and reoriented.
Leah Stokes: We have so much to do and so little time to do it. And that is why Donnel has had this vision to start a company and try to clean up our building sector, which is crucial if we want to make any progress by 2035.
Donnel Baird: We've got these four crises, right? We have like Black Lives Matter and a civil rights crises. We have the COVID-19 crisis. We have an economic crisis and the unemployment crisis that we have, which is headed towards great depression levels and then we have our climate crisis, right? And electrification allows us to address all four crises at once. As we go build into building and remove them from fossil fuels, the buildings are healthier, they're less likely to spread COVID-19 through the air and ventilation systems.
Donnel Baird: We're reducing greenhouse gases. We're creating jobs and if we electrify buildings in communities of color and hire workers from the communities of color, then we're addressing historical inequities in communities of color. And so building electrification is the way out, right? It is the way for our country to dig ourselves out of this hole that we're in and yeah, I look forward to working with you and with everybody else to get this done.
Leah Stokes: It's crazy to listen back to that conversation because I actually recorded that with Donnel 10 days before Biden made his speech at the DNC where he talked about the four crises identified the exact same crises that Donnel did. So Donnel is either psychic or he has his finger on the pulse here and building electrification really is a key solution to all these crises that we face.
Katharine Wilkinson: That is really wild that he basically scooped the Democratic National Convention. But no, I think he lays it out so plainly that not only do we have climate solutions, but climate solutions are job solutions, climate solutions are equity solutions, climate solutions are economic solutions. And when we remember that we're either multisolving or we're not solving it all, then it's just like, "Okay, let's get rolling." Literally, what is there to lose?
Leah Stokes: People like Donnel and Tim and Jesse and Sonia and Bracken and Sam, all these people make me so hopeful about what we can accomplish in the next 15 years, because 2035 is right around the corner.
Katharine Wilkinson: 2035, not just some random date.
Leah Stokes: I hope the next time folks hear that date, they remember these stories and the stakes that we've laid out here. Cleaning up the electricity system is a huge linchpin. It's something that can catalyze our climate action across the entire economy.
Katharine Wilkinson: Well, holy hell, Leah, we have really covered a lot of ground. I feel thoroughly briefed on what did you say? 70 to 80% of the problem, how we solve it.
Leah Stokes: Yeah. And that's why I'm really excited about the election. Like everybody else, I'm nervous but I see that with this plan for 100% clean electricity by 2035, we're not just cleaning up our electricity sector. We're cleaning up our transportation sector, our buildings, and so much more. And it really just gives me a feeling like, "You know what, we could just solve this thing." This is A Matter Of Degrees, co-hosted by me, Leah Stokes.
Katharine Wilkinson: And by me, Katharine Wilkinson.
Leah Stokes: We are a production of Post Script Audio.
Katharine Wilkinson: Jamie Kaiser, Sidney Barton, and Stephen Lacey produced the show.
Leah Stokes: Sean Marquand edited, mixed and scored the show.
Katharine Wilkinson: Additional music came from Blue Dot Sessions. Our website was designed by Caroline Hadilaksono. A special thanks to the funders and supporters who made this show possible. The Hewlett Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, The 11th Hour Project, UC Santa Barbara and others. The show art was designed by Karl Spurzem. You can subscribe on Spotify, Apple, Google Podcast, or any other place you like to get your shows.
Leah Stokes: And you can follow both of us and our production team on Twitter. You'll find our accounts in the show notes.
Katharine Wilkinson: Stay with us as we tell more stories for the climate curious.