The next four years of U.S. energy

Kara Miller: I’m Kara Miller.

Rob Stoner: And I’m Rob Stoner.

KM: And this is What if it works?

From the MIT Energy Initiative, this is What If It Works?, a podcast looking at the solutions for climate change. I’m Kara Miller.

RS: And I’m Robert Stoner.

KM: And today, an exploration of how the new administration might change the calculus around energy policy. What should we expect and how impactful might the changes be? We are joined by Chris Knittel. He leads the Policy Mission of MIT’s recently launched Climate Project. He’s also the associate dean of climate and sustainability at the MIT Sloan School of Management. And as if that weren’t enough, he is the former deputy director of the MIT Energy Initiative. Chris, thanks for being here.

Chris Knittel: Thanks for having me.

KM: So based on what we know of President-elect Trump’s positions and obviously it’s not just that, but Republicans have a pretty broad power coming up in the next Congress, at a high level, what do you think the implications are for climate policy?

CK: Yeah, so I would say that at least the biggest of the Biden administration’s climate policies, the Inflation Reduction Act, many components of that act are at risk for being repealed. That act focused on subsidizing clean technologies. And I think the new administration will be looking at each of those subsidies and trying to figure out whether or not they want those to continue.

KM: Do you think if you had to sort of look at that 30,000-foot view and you think about the energy transition, do you think this is going to slow it down? Is it going to actually put it in reverse and kind of go backwards? What would you say if you had to guess?

CK: It’ll certainly slow it down. The Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill, you know, were key pieces of legislation. And when they were passed, lots of academics and industry followers measured the impact of those acts as being substantial. So, if those are at risk, then clearly it’s going to slow the transition down.

RS: But a lot of the heat was directed at red states. I mean, this was not only about a clean energy transition. It was about a just transition. And the Biden administration really popularized this idea of climate justice and making sure communities that had been either at an advantage in the current energy economy or chronically disadvantaged did okay in the new world. Isn’t that going to save it?

CK: Well, certainly in the data bear out what you just said. So the Clean Investment Monitor, which sits at MIT and was pioneered by Brian Deese, has measured that roughly 80% of the Inflation Reduction Act subsidies are going to red districts or red areas of the country. So, I do think that’s going to potentially save some of those subsidies. But there will likely be a targeted approach by the new administration that will go through subsidy by subsidy and probably ask two questions: Do I like this technology, and do I like where this money is going?

RS: So the governors like where it’s going?

CK: Well, certainly some of them. But, you know, if we dive deep into the Inflation Reduction Act, we subsidized rooftop solar, we subsidized offshore wind, hydrogen, CCUS. Obviously, the offshore wind is purely going to blue states.

RS: Because we’ve got the coasts. Still got the coasts.

CK: That’s right. And if I was a betting person, I would not bet the offshore wind subsidies are going to survive. But there are other subsidies that are more likely to survive, whether that’s the subsidies on hydrogen or the subsidies on battery manufacturing, those are red state type subsidies.

RS: Yeah, a lot of really important manufacturing-related industries being supported by those subsidies.

CK: That’s right. We now even have a name for it. There’s an area of the country called the “Battery Belt”—Kentucky, northern Georgia—that area of the country is seeing a lot of manufacturing enter those regions, at least we expect, partly because of the Inflation Reduction Act.

KM: I expect a lot of people are thinking, but wait, one of Trump’s confidants, at least as far as we’ve seen, has been Elon Musk, who is obviously famous for thinking about some of these transitional technologies. You know, many, many people own Teslas, and you would think he would want his goal would be to incentivize the purchase of more Teslas. Does it matter that somebody who is not really super pro-internal-combustion engines is on, you know, has the president’s ear?

CK: One would think, although this is where economics teaches us to think through the complete set of incentives. So, if I was Elon Musk, who has a dominant position in the electric vehicle market, I would probably be in favor of getting rid of the subsidies because I would be sitting there thinking my cars will still be sold. So, I’m going to hurt my competitors more than I’m going to hurt myself. And I think Musk has kind of hinted, if not said that directly in some ways, that he doesn’t really mind if the EV subsidies go away. And I think that’s his rationale, that it’s going to be much more damaging to his competitors than it would be to Tesla. So, it’s you know, we have this “rising tides raise all boats,” but so “lowering tides lower all boats, but if they lower my competitors boats more than mine, I might be in favor of it.”

RS: And he burned through just by selling so darn many cars he burned through his initial subsidy limit, didn’t he?

CK: That’s right. There’s that. And there’s also the fact that our research suggests the biggest limiting factor to EV adoption now is the lack of infrastructure. So the vehicles are pretty close to cost parity already. It’s the fact that an EV buyer is afraid that they won’t be able to charge their EV easily that’s keeping them from buying that EV. And Tesla has an advantage on that with their network.

KM: But do you expect then the network for charging will get built out?

CK: It may through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill which did allocate, I think roughly $5 to $7 billion to building more chargers. That was passed with bipartisan support, so I don’t expect that to be repealed. But our work also suggests that $5 billion is not enough to get us to large-scale EV adoption.

KM: I know you’ve looked recently at the notion that the U.S. has really managed to achieve economic growth in the last 15 years and has kind of decoupled that from CO₂ production. Are we able to continue doing that? Do you think that we will? I mean, that’s a really interesting thing because people often think, well, these two things, when a country is growing, there’s more pollution going into the air. Going ahead, what do you think will happen?

CK: So if I were to look at my crystal ball and the Trump administration has gotten rid of several key subsidies in the Inflation Reduction Act, I would not be surprised if the economy continued to cut emissions, albeit much slower than it would before. And one actually positive impact from the Trump administration in terms of cutting emissions is I would expect him to focus a lot more on drilling for natural gas. So that natural gas is likely to speed up the retirement of coal plants, which has been the major source of our emission reductions over the last two decades. So that will continue. I just think we’ll get a lot less renewables then we otherwise would have, but potentially a lot less coal than we otherwise would have.

KM: And just to sort of follow up on the clean technology, I know you talked to Representative Sean Casten from Illinois recently at MIT. And there is this kind of—he talked about this dilemma in manufacturing, which is, you know, let’s say you’re in the market for solar panels. You can have a factory in the U.S. where people obviously make more money than they probably would in China, so it’s like American-made jobs for Americans, but it’s going to cost you a bunch of money to put some solar panels on your roof. Or you can get those solar panels for much cheaper, put them on your roof, but the manufacturing has to be done in China or a lower cost in Vietnam, lots of places. How do you think about that question and what we’re going to see going forward? Obviously, lots of talk about tariffs on China, but people also don’t necessarily want to spend a bundle to put solar panels on the roof.

CK: Yeah, that’s going to be the conflict within the Trump administration. So, you know, in general, trade is welfare enhancing, or it increases our aggregate level of welfare or earnings. So if we moved to this more autarky type world, undoubtedly the cost of building things is going to go up. And the question is going to be for the administration whether or not they’re going to accept that higher cost for having those jobs, at least some types of jobs, more of them in the U.S. But in general, we believe trade increases the wealth of the U.S., but not uniformly. So the administration, I believe, is making a bet that they can, by reducing trade with China or other parts of the world, our aggregate incomes will fall, but the incomes of key constituents may rise.

RS: I mean, that’s a really key issue. I mean, everything they’re talking about doing, almost everything you’re talking about doing seems to me to be sort of inflationary. If we increase gas exports, we’re basically connecting American markets to global markets and prices will go up for Americans as a result of that. Canceling EV subsidies. So Musk is going to be able to raise his prices because the other guys are going to be more expensive. We’re eliminating renewable energy subsidies. We’re introducing tariffs on imported goods largely from low-income countries like China. We’re repatriating those jobs to a really high wage environment. So it’s going to go up. But try to look at the silver lining. Bringing things out of China means we’re also bringing things out of an economy that is extremely carbon intensive. And we’re going to make them in an environment here, maybe, maybe more in Europe, that at least for a while, maybe quite a while, is going to be comparatively low emissions. Isn’t there a chance then that the repatriation of manufacturing to this country reduces global emissions, maybe even quite dramatically?

CK: Yeah, I think there’s a few channels where that’s the case. One is if China is producing less stuff, that stuff will get produced in likely a cleaner energy system. That’s what you mentioned. You also indirectly mentioned to others, which is we’re going to be raising the price of stuff. So we’re likely to be buying less stuff. And that is going to put downward pressure on consumption generally. So that too will push emissions downward. And then there’s the second order effects, which is we’re going to be moving things around less as well. And that might have a negative impact on emissions. And by negative, I mean a positive impact.

RS: Meaning on ships and things.

CK: Fewer emissions. Yes.

RS: Yeah. I mean, another way to reduce the emissions, of course, would be to have a carbon tax. And I know you’ve thought a lot about that. Would that be a more efficient thing to do than try to, you know, bamboozle everybody into doing what we want them to do?

CK: Certainly in an indirect way, we might be moving in that direction through Europe’s carbon border adjustment mechanism, the CBAM, which is kind of in a piloting phase right now, where at some point any import into Europe will be adjusted based on its carbon content. And that is creating pressure by the countries that were exporting to Europe to think about adopting their own carbon taxes. And it’s also providing some cover for U.S. policy makers on both sides of the aisle actually to think about, well, if we’re going to start doing tariffs, maybe we do tariffs based on carbon content as opposed to just flat out tariffs, which would then potentially augment the impact that you mentioned.

RS: Chris, you know, 15 years ago or more when you first came to MIT, which I remember, you had a big old Suburban with a license plate that read Tax CO2, which was, I think, supposed to be your calling card as an economist. Do you still have that license plate? And what are you driving now?

CK: Yeah, so I do have that license plate. And I’ll admit it’s still on a very low-fuel-efficient car. It’s on a Ford Bronco, one of the new ones. I also have as the spare tire cover on the back of it a graph of the temperature rise on the globe from 1880 to 2023. So.

RS: So hang on. What are you thinking?

CK: So, look, maybe this is why I worry so much about how the energy transition impacts middle America and parts of the country that academics may not always concentrate on. I grew up in the Central Valley of California, which even though it’s in California, it’s much closer to middle America. You know, I grew up hunting and fishing and driving in the back of pickups and I frequently have conversations with that area or my old friends from high school about climate change and their skepticism of the importance of climate change and so on. So that’s where I constantly get the feedback on, you know, how does what we’re saying sell to different parts of the country?

And the other point I often make is, you know, the energy transition, not everyone has to transition. We need them to want to transition. And we’re not going to solve climate change through charity or through forcing products on consumers that they don’t want. We need to design products that they want and use that are cleaner than they otherwise would have. My Bronco burns gasoline. If Ford produced a battery electric version or a plug-in hybrid version, I would be the first one to buy it. And that’s a point I also make, is that we need to incentivize the manufacturers to want to clean up their act, but they want to sell cars to us. So at the end of the day, it comes down to designing policies where making the decision that’s right for society and the person are one of the same.

KM: I have to ask you, how often do people say, dude, you have like CO₂ emissions on this graph and you’re driving…

RS: Professor dude!

KM: Yeah, professor dude, but they may not know that, and you’re driving a Bronco. What’s going on here?

CK: Oh, more than a handful. And it usually happens at the gas station where somebody says, “Isn’t that a little inconsistent with what car you’re driving in?” And then they get a five-minute lecture on, No. Why? No, it’s not inconsistent. And here’s why.

KM: It’s good to know. So if you see Chris’s car in your neighborhood, make sure you have some time if you start bringing this up.

CK:That’s right.

RS: The other great irony, of course, that you’re driving a Bronco is that they have huge engine problems. If they’d made an electric version in the first place, that would be a much more reliable and better car.

CK: Yep. Yep. Certainly maintenance costs and reliability, electric vehicles are a positive. Yeah.

RS: I’m sort of heartened to see at least some of the domestic car makers kind of defending their EV investments. You know, they’ve built factories, they’ve co-invested at least in battery plants and so on, retrained their workforces. You know, now they’re facing four years where maybe the government won’t quite be the wind in their sails that it has been, but they can’t go back. I mean, they’re not going to write off tens, hundreds, of billions of dollars of investment. So maybe we just sort of get over it and it’s not so bad.

KM: Oh Rob with the optimistic view.

RS: Come on, what if it works? My wife hates me when I say these sorts of things.

CK: You know, our research does suggest that we can reallocate money to be more effective, allocating it away from subsidizing the vehicles to subsidizing the charging stations. So if the Trump administration was dead set on no longer subsidizing the vehicles, it is possible that they could spend even less money and at the same time get the same penetration if they transferred more money toward charging stations. But I haven’t seen any discussion of that. It seems like all the discussion has been we shouldn’t support EVs in any way.

RS: How can we go backwards?

KM: Back, beginning of 2024, you wrote an opinion piece about how essential it is that when we transition in terms of energy sources, we not leave people behind economically. And there’s been so much examination, and there will continue to be, about things Democrats did wrong. How did they underperform in the 2024 election? Not just at the presidential level, but, you know, in the Congress as well. And I wonder if you can just talk about sort of that aspect of it, the idea that there is an energy transition going on, but that is not evenly felt.

CK: Yeah, that’s been a frustration of mine for quite a long time—well before I wrote that opinion piece. We need to get buy-in from all parts of the country. And I’ve written quite a few papers that look at the potential impacts of an energy transition either on jobs, households, or energy poverty is the most recent paper. And, you know, the impacts of the energy transition are not equally felt, and they predominantly fall on the shoulders of people living in Middle America and people living outside of the cities. And this has two effects. One is if we do adopt policies like the Inflation Reduction Act and we’re actually quote unquote successful, those policies leave a bad taste in the mouths of people living in in the middle of the U.S. But the second and potentially more important impact is it creates an environment where they’re going to resist those types of policies. So and I think that’s what we’re seeing in Congress. It’s the coastal representatives that are pushing the most for this energy transition. And we’re not paying enough attention in terms of designing policies that do disproportionately help middle America. Now, we talked earlier about the Inflation Reduction Act, where the money is going to the red states. But I don’t know if that’s known and I don’t think that is widely known by policy makers.

RS: It’s taking time for the Inflation Reduction Act to kick in and for the volume of those subsidies to rise. But did we get it wrong with the IRA? I mean, could we have done better in being more inclusive of red states and poorer communities?

CK: I think the IRA was a major step forward in terms of just recognizing that. So under the Inflation Reduction Act, we have energy communities. There are a few ways you can become an energy community based on how much fossil fuel employment you have. What’s your unemployment rate? Do you have a coal mine or a coal plant that recently shut down? So that’s the first bill that I can think of that explicitly differentiates communities that have been hit hardest by this transition. And if you’re an energy community, your subsidies are higher than if you’re not. We’ve done some work that suggests, you know, you could certainly make it better. I think there is a little bit too much backward looking and not forward looking, but it’s a major step forward in terms of recognizing that the impact of the energy transition is not going to be equally felt. Therefore, maybe the policies should not be equally levied across the U.S.

KM: I wonder how much of this is also, you know, we were talking about this before, this idea that a lot of money is going to red states and red state governors, but how much is there a kind of skill mismatch? So you’ve given this great example before, which I really like and had never thought about, which is we saw a lot of action from the UAW over the last few years in terms of a strike, unhappiness with the way they were being paid, and so on. But one of the real concerns for the UAW is that as you transition from building internal combustion engines to building electric cars, a different set of skills is needed. So I wonder if, like, just because you’re sending a check to a red state, does that mean that the people in that state have the skills that are needed or like outside people coming in to take those jobs? And maybe you can talk about that a little.

CK: No, that’s an excellent point. And I’m going to really throw out a question because I don’t know the answer to this is, are we trying to protect a geographic region or a person? And those are two very different objectives, right? So we can if you think about the Inflation Reduction Act, which is providing bigger subsidies for specific regions of the country. So that’s meant to protect Appalachia or the industrial Midwest. But that’s not helping necessarily that coal miner or that assembly line worker. And I don’t think we have a great idea of great policies to protect the people that are impacted so we could protect a town and will no longer have the town collapse because the automobile plant shut down. But that’s not the same thing as protecting the workers that were at that plant. And obviously, it depends like how we protect those workers depends on where they are in their life. You know, it might be impossible to protect that 65-year-old automobile worker. There’s no chance he or she is going to be retrained to do something or there’s very little chance. But maybe that 25-year-old worker that just started we could think about providing him or her with the additional skill set that they can transfer to another industry.

RS: Of course that presupposes that they want another skill set. I mean, Sarah Smarsh, I don’t know, she’s the recent author of a book called Bone of the Bone: Essays on America by a Daughter of the Working Class, has been talking about how, you know, we have to respect the possibility that working class people want to be working class people. They don’t want to be reskilled. They don’t want to advance economically necessarily. I mean, we’re looking at it. I mean, not to cast aspersions on your profession, we’re looking at the situation through the eyes of an economist. Maybe we’re getting it wrong socially and not recognizing that people have preferences.

CK: Oh yeah, and I didn’t mean to imply that we’re going to necessarily change them from being a working class or a union worker or whatever. But I’m just thinking that if I’ve been trained to be on an assembly line and that assembly line, which EVs take, I believe the number is 20% less labor to build them, you know, can I be on another assembly line or can I transfer my skill set to installing heat pumps or installing solar farms so we can keep those workers potentially pretty close to where they were geographically and skill-set-wise and so on. But we need to realize that a lot of the policies we adopt are really doing a decent job at protecting locations rather than individuals. And what I don’t see are retraining programs or retooling programs or, you know, that may not require too much of a shift from, you know, that assembly line to installing solar panels or heat pumps and so on, but still require some level of retooling.

KM: Is there any sort of research looking at, you know, when a plant opens in North Georgia and all these new jobs open up, are the people who are taking those jobs inhabitants, or do people come in because we know like, you know, when there are energy booms in like North Dakota, lots of people travel from wherever they are, which is not North Dakota to North Dakota to participate and then might leave again when like there’s a bit of a bust in the cycle or what? I mean, gold rushes are kind of like that. People come from other places. And so I wonder, do we know, are those helping the people who live in Georgia or people coming from wherever?

CK: Yeah, I think it depends on the job. So the fracking boom, you know, we actually have written a couple of papers on looking at who was attracted to that boom. And that’s by and large, men in their 20s. Those are the ones that moved to North Dakota. But you’re not going to get the 50-year-old man or woman with a family moving great distances. The moving costs are just grow exponentially as we get older. So I think when that plant opens up in North Carolina, at least the more permanent type jobs are just pulling predominantly from people living already near that area.

KM: I wonder if you think, you know, there’s so much sort of Monday morning quarterbacking about the election and about social issues and about inflation. To what degree do you think the issue of the energy transition and maybe a mishandling of it or maybe it could have been handled better, to what degree do you think that factored in or mattered at all in terms of the decisions people made?

CK: I don’t know the answer to that. But what I will say is I think the Democrats have missed their opportunity and have not handled it well. And, you know, you mentioned a 2024 piece I wrote. I can remember going to I think it was some meeting in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 2018, in the heart of the Democrats. And I remember standing up there saying Democrats need to start caring about poor people again because I was expressing my frustration with the energy transition, which is at that time in particular, everything was about handing money to wealthy people living in suburbia, whether that was rooftop solar or EVs. All of that was focused on that demographic.

RS: To get a $7,500 subsidy for your EV, you’ve got to buy an EV.

CK: That’s right. And, you know, maybe from a pure climate perspective, if we just care about maximizing carbon reductions in that given year, that’s the right thing to do. Because like you said, Rob, you need a lot of money to buy that EV. You need a roof to put those solar panels on. So you’re already pushing toward the upper part of the income distribution. But that might have been myopic because I think it might have been missing the fact that this is a long-term game and we need to get buy-in, not just from EV or $75,000 car buyers with roofs. We need to get buy-in from the complete country.

RS: So simple question. How do we do that? How do we how do you design a policy that isn’t regressive as the transition tends to be? Because it raises the cost for energy, which is a disproportionately large fraction of poorer people’s budgets than wealthier people’s budgets. How do we do this without always messing with them? Yeah.

CK: Yeah. Well, one way is, is…

RS: In the long term, I think your long-term point is also really important, right? You can’t just give them a subsidy.

CK: Yeah. Again, just to give you an answer to the short term. Well, there you go. That was going to be my first answer, but I was going to make the point that that’s not a sustainable policy because it’s too expensive. We briefly talked about carbon taxes earlier. We’ve shown that if you structure a carbon tax correctly, 75% of low-income households, bottom quartile households can make money off of the policy. The question is, will they trust that? Can we communicate that to them? But it’s certainly possible to design policies that actually transition the economy and are a greater burden to the wealthy consumers, which I think are what we’re looking for. The question is just how do we build the support for those policies?

KM: Another sort of aspect of this whole transition and of sort of convincing people is the issue of convincing people that it’s expensive not to change policy or not to transition, because there’s we’ve focused a lot on like how expensive it might be. Right. Maybe you have to you know, maybe you had a job in a regular assembly line and now you’re going to electric vehicles and that may cost you your job. We’ve obviously we’ve seen a lot of hurricanes and floods. And people who live in Florida know how expensive it is now to ensure their homes. But yet I didn’t really see that as a part of anything that any candidate anywhere talked about. Not the ones I heard.

CK: There was very little discussion about climate, I think, in this last election cycle, certainly at the presidential level. But you’re exactly right. The costs of climate change are also not uniform. We talked about the costs of the energy transition not being uniform and the costs of climate change are going to fall predominantly on the south and coastal areas of the country. And how we communicate that is a tough one because a lot of the costs are in the future, even though we are starting to see stronger hurricanes, slower and wetter hurricanes, and more droughts and more wildfires and so on. So the concern, though, is by the time everybody realizes how bad climate change is going to be, it’s going to be not too late, I hate using that phrase, but it’s going to be much later than we would have wanted to.

RS: Hard to reverse. That’s for sure.

KM: Do you think there’s an effective way to make that economic case? Because when I think about the places that are growing the most, Florida, Texas, those are also the places where insurance rates are going up the most. They are Republican places. People were worried about eggs and the cost of eggs and meat and like these sort of basic things that they buy. Well, if you own a piece of property, you probably insure it.

CK: Yeah, I think that we are going to start to see that. And there was a recent paper that’s a NBER working paper that looks at the reassurance rates and where they’re going up in the country. And it is those areas that you mentioned as well as big chunks of Middle America. So people are going to start to see their costs go up. The question I have is whether or not they will connect the dots. Will they realize that this is because of climate change and not just because rates are going up for everything or whatever excuse they give. And that’s, I’m a professor, I got into education for a reason. So I am a true believer that education matters and work here. But that’s the education that we’re going to have to push out there insofar as it’s credible and defensible.

KM: So let’s look ahead. You’re an economist. You care about climate policy. You think a lot about government. Maybe, first, what do you expect when you think about what the next four years will look like at the intersection of those things? What do you expect to see?

CK: So I expect to see big chunks of the Inflation Reduction Act to continue. So I do think we will continue to make movements toward hydrogen demonstration projects around CCS or building more battery manufacturing plants. I also expect that China is going to start sadly dominating in key industries that I wish we had more foresight to support and that, in particular, electric vehicles. So China by far is already leading in that space. And the EV future is not going to be squashed by the next four years. The Trump administration is not going to salvage the internal combustion engine vehicle in the long term. It might delay EV adoption in the U.S. and it might keep us driving around in gasoline vehicles. But if you look at the rest of the world, they’re already moving toward EVs. So this is a critical moment for our automobile manufacturers to continue their leadership in the automobile space. And my biggest concern over the next four years is we’ll be leapfrogged by everybody else. And that’s going to actually have very long-term repercussions.

KM: It really becomes a competitiveness issue is the way it sounds. Like we wake up in four years and we’re like, well, Trump isn’t president anymore, but as you say, China or whatever other places are so far ahead of us on X, Y, and Z, we can’t catch up anymore.

CK: Yeah. And the Trump administration might be able to salvage, you know, John Deere or industries like that. You know, we’re basically in homing that production, but they’re not global industries at the same scale as EVs or solar panels and so on. So if the Trump administration is going to really be anti-clean technology, then that’s going to put us four years behind on those industries. And by then it might just be too late.

RS: So as I look at the nominees that the President-elect is putting forward, I’m struck by how their thinking is somewhat ideological, possibly not science-based, not as informed, certainly not the basis of science-informed policy. But that’s your thing. So what’s a guy like you to do for the next four years? You just sort of retreat and maybe work on K-12 education? Or is there a role for an out of work economist or are you out of work?

KM: Let me tag on to that question in terms of not just what you are doing for the next four years, but what do you think Democrats should do or think about for the next four years? There’s a lot we can’t predict, but I’m pretty sure they’re not going to be in power during the next four years. But what should they be thinking about?

CK: So I think there’s bipartisan support for policies that reduce emissions, but the focus of the policy is on something else. And I’ll give you an example. So over the past few months, we’ve been through the new Climate Policy Center here at MIT, we’ve been modeling several bills that subsidize or promote or incentivize more electricity transmission. So those bills, if adopted, would have a negative impact on emissions. So we would get emission reductions from being able to move the electrons from the places where wind and solar are most effective to where the people live. But what we’ve also shown is those bills have huge impacts on reliability and resiliency in the face of storms. So one in particular, if you were to pass that bill and have, you know, we simulate a thousand storms across the U.S. that cut out generation because of whether it’s hurricanes or droughts or and you can get 70% reductions in the outages faced by customers with that additional transmission. So that’s a bipartisan topic, right? We’re all looking for resiliency and reliability in our electricity grid. It has this co-benefit that it leads to lower emissions.

There’s also we talked earlier about the border tax adjustments based on carbon content. A Republican in a Gulf Coast state might support that because it negatively impacts Chinese imports. But that, as Rob was mentioning, might shift the things we do buy to cleaner areas of the world, and that would have a benefit from the climate perspective. So I see the next four years looking for co-benefits or looking for policies that improve some other aspect of our lives, but also lead to lower emissions. And I do think there’s a lot of room for those policies.

RS: Do you think they’re going to listen to you? Is there a forum or some sort of channel that you work through?

CK: So the Climate Policy Center is explicitly bipartisan. We are actively having conversations with both sides of the aisle. We’re looking to work with both sides of the aisle on understanding what certain legislation or rules inside of agencies might do to lots and lots of outcomes. So not just carbon emissions. That’s our plan, is to continue to have those conversations, maybe have more state-level conversations. But I do think there’s scope here for passing legislation that improves the climate but improves other things that have more bipartisan support.

KM: Chris Knittel is the head of the policy mission at MIT’s Climate Project. He’s also the associate dean of climate and sustainability at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Chris, thank you so much for joining us.

CK: Thank you for having me.

RS: Thanks, Chris.

KM: What If it works? is a production of the MIT Energy Initiative. If you like the show, please leave us a review or invite a friend to listen and remember to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can find an archive of every episode, all of our show notes, and a lot more at energy.mit.edu/podcasts and you can learn more about the work of the Energy Initiative and the energy transition at energy.mit.edu. Our original podcast artwork is by Zeitler Design. Special thanks to all the people at MITEI and MIT who make this show possible. I’m Kara Miller.

RS: And I’m Rob Stoner.

KM: Thanks for listening.