The second thing, in my view, is the deployment-led innovation agenda. Roughly half, probably less, of global emissions reductions that we’re going to see are going to come not from renewables and electric vehicles, but all the other stuff that’s not yet at commercial scale. The U.S. is remarkably good at inventing new technologies and demonstratin... See more

My view on this has always been: The models are assuming that it exists at a large scale to solve for the climate problem, so we have an obligation to do the instrumental work to figure out if that’s possible to begin with.

We’re starting to do that, which I think is very good. The challenge with removing CO2 from the ambient air and putting it some... See more

it’s that we need to make these processes streamlined, centralized and fast so you can get a thumbs-up or thumbs-down decision that can’t be dragged out in court for 50 years.

So the Department of Commerce creates this strategic infrastructure agency?

Jenkins: Sure. We didn’t electrify the country to begin with by just tweaking existing regulatory i... See more

But the point with some of these technologies is that there are nonclimate co-benefits. There are agricultural benefits. You can have productivity and yield increases as a consequence of doing this on fields where you’re better managing the pH of soil so the land is more productive.

So I tend to be more optimistic because I really believe that for n... See more

What are the most important things to do in the next few years? — because there are ways to make progress on all of them in most political contexts, you’re just not going to get exactly what you want.

The first thing is to remove nonmarket barriers to wide-scale deployment of the commercial clean energy tech. I think that a permitting bill needs to ... See more

I’ve been thinking about it as a race between feedback loops. It’s a race between the positive but bad feedback loops in the climate system and the feedback loops that we’ve been trying to cultivate politically, where you’re driving down the cost of technologies and building political will. And that’s the problem.

I do think there may be some opportunity to better integrate climate into our trade policy. And I think the U.S. is going to be more muscular in its approach to economic statecraft as it relates to energy and supply chains — whether that’s countering the rise of China in other countries or whatever.

The environmental movement that provided most of the horsepower to date for climate politics and climate policy was built to stop bad stuff — not to build good stuff. There’s been a recognition of that for years.

Bill McKibben, who is a big proponent of a maximalist approach to climate politics, also recognizes that the only way we solve the problem... See more