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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Now we continue our election series 30 Issues in 30 Days. We're up to issue nine: Climate Change and Energy. Now climate, it was one of the official topics at Tuesday night's debate, but they only spent a few minutes on it. What there was has been pretty much drowned out in the post-debate media coverage, with all the focus on the chaotic tone of the debate and the president practically soliciting armed militia groups to stand by in the streets, but it was there.

Let's hear some of what the candidates had to say and get some fact checks and analysis with Time magazine energy and environment reporter, Justin Worland. He also has an article about Amy Coney Barrett and how she could affect climate policy if she's confirmed for the Supreme Court. Justin, thanks so much for doing this. Welcome to WNYC.

Justin Worland: Thanks so much for having me on.

Brian: Let's start with a clip of Joe Biden. This begins with a question from the moderator, Chris Wallace.

Chris Wallace: You propose $2 trillion in green jobs. You talk about new limits, not abolishing, but new limits on fracking. Ending the use of fossil fuels to generate electricity by 2035 and zero net admission of greenhouse gases by 2050. The president says a lot of these things would tank the economy and cost millions of jobs.

Joe Biden: He's absolutely wrong, number one. Number two, if in fact, during our administration in the Recovery Act, I was able to-- I was in charge, able to bring down the cost of renewable energy to cheaper than or as cheap as coal and gas and oil. Nobody's going to build another coal-fired plant in America. No one's going to build another oil fire plant in America. They're going to move to renewable energy, number one. Number two, we're going to make sure that we are able to take the federal fleet and turn it into a fleet that's run on their electric vehicles. Making sure that we can do that, we're going to put 500,000 charging stations in all of the highways that we're going to be building in the future.

Brian: Joe Biden on climate and energy from the debate. Here's just a few seconds more that completes the thought from later in that same answer.

Joe Biden: There’s so many things that we can do now to create thousands and thousands of jobs. We can get to net zero in terms of energy production, by 2035. Not only not costing people jobs, creating jobs. Creating millions of good-paying jobs. Not $15 an hour, but prevailing wage, by having a new infrastructure that in fact, is green.

Brian: Biden at the debate. Time magazine climate and energy correspondent, Justin Worland, is my guest. Justin, let's go through some of that. Is there a way to fact-check Biden's claim that setting a goal of ending the use of fossil fuels for electricity by 2035 would generate thousands or millions of jobs as he said?

Justin: It's an interesting statement because it really depends on how you get there. I think from a sort of intuitive perspective of somebody who covers this, it makes a lot of sense. The clean energy industry employs more than 3 million people. A few hundred thousands of those jobs have been lost just since the start of this pandemic. Just going back to the status quo of clean energy expansion is pretty intuitively going to create hundreds of thousands of jobs, just going back to where we were six months ago or eight months ago.

The other thing is just to look at some of his plans. He's talking about weatherizing homes across the country. That means going to millions of homes around the US and looking at the way in which the windows, the insulation, et cetera, and then fixing some of those problems. You can just think about that intuitively and you see it's pretty easy to see that's thousands of people who would be required to do these things.

The thing about these plans-- His plan is very long and does have a lot of specifics, but it is hard to go and say, "Well, here's the precise number of jobs that would be created." It's a pretty straightforward fact-check to just look and do a back of the napkin calculations, say, that does add up.

Brian: Can you say it adds up to a net plus in jobs because you have to subtract the jobs that presumably would be lost in the fossil fuels industries?

Justin: That's a very good point. There's a few things I'd say. One is very interesting, which is that fossil fuel industry tends to be less labor-intensive, at least at this point than renewable energy. It just takes more people to operate a solar firm than it does to operate the equivalent natural gas plant. Now, this could change, as the technology develops, and as there's new automation and innovation, but at this stage, that's the case. You might think, I think the next question is, doesn't that mean it's more expensive? The interesting element of that, of course, is that when you are buying coal or oil, you are paying someone for that fuel. In many cases, we're paying Saudi Arabia or some other country for the fuel. Of course, that some of those costs are shifted to labor and this case, what would be American labor, instead of buying the fuel.

Brian: Staying with that same Biden answer, what's the difference between the year 2035 fossil fuels abolition for electricity, that goal, and the 2050 zero-emissions goal that he referred to there? How are those two things different?

Justin: Yes, the big thing, of course, basically boils down to the difference between electricity and energy use more broadly. Electricity, when you flick on your TV or you turn on your light, you're using electricity. Energy more broadly includes what factories are using, what you're using the power of your car. It is significantly easier to transition the electric grid, which is what we use to power our lights to clean energy sources than it is to change all of our cars and trucks and really some of the more difficult to handle industries, things like cement or the airline industry. These are really difficult to deal with. That's the primary difference between the two.

Brian: Another thing that came up at the debate with Biden had to do with whether he supports the Green New Deal and what that phrase means. We picked this up as Trump is challenging Biden on why he and Obama didn't create a lot of renewable energy jobs when they were in office.

President Trump: You were vice president. Why didn't you get the world-- China sends up real dirt into the air. Russia does, India does, they all do. We're supposed to be good. By the way, he made a couple of statements. The Green New Deal is $100 trillion. [crosstalk]

Joe Biden: That is not my plan. The Green New Deal is not my plan. [crosstalk]

Brian: Three men talking at the same time. That happened once or twice that night. "The Green New Deal is not my plan," said Joe Biden. A short time later, the moderator Chris Wallace follows up.

Chris Wallace: The Green New Deal and the idea of what your environmental [crosstalk]

Joe Biden: The Green New Deal will pay for itself as we move forward. We're not going to build plants that, in fact, are great polluting plants--

Chris: Do you support the Green New Deal?

Joe Biden: Pardon me.

Chris Wallace: Do you support?

Joe Biden: No, I don't support the Green New Deal.

President Trump: Oh, you don't? Oh, that's a big statement. That means you just lost the radical left. It's gone.

Joe Biden: I support the-

President Trump: No you don't.

Joe Biden: -Biden plan that I put forward. The Biden plan, which is different than what he calls the radical Green New Deal.

Brian: "The Biden plan, which is different from what he calls the radical Green New Deal." Was the last line there. What's the difference between the Green New Deal and the Biden plan?

Justin: I think it's important to define the terms like what is the Green New Deal? The Green New Deal, at least as it's being used today, refers to this resolution that was introduced by AOC and by Senator Markey last year. First, it's a resolution. Washington speaker resolution is like a declaration of principles. It doesn't have any teeth or implementation to it. It's just a declaration of principles. That's really what the Green New Deal is.

It calls for, among other things in addition to the climate-focused element of eliminating the US emissions, it calls for things like a job guarantee, guaranteed universal health care, a lot of social and equity concerns that AOC and Markey and others have argued, really need to be considered along with climate change. The Biden plan is, it's not a piece of legislation, but it is a more concrete plan and that it lays out specific mechanisms about how to get where the plan wants to go and also does not include a lot of those more controversial elements that some would argue are not as connected to climate change. There's no job guarantee, there's no discussion of universal health care in the Biden plan.

It is similar in the sense that the Biden plan does include a lot of discussion about equity, about issues, about social concerns related to the energy transition, related to what happens to people who lose their fossil fuel jobs. I think Biden would acknowledge that and he does acknowledge that, in some ways, there are elements of the Green New Deal in his plan but it is a plan and not a resolution like the Green New Deal.

Brian: What's the $2 trillion that Chris Wallace referred to in his question as a Biden plan price tag?

Justin: As you can imagine, $2 trillion can buy a lot of different things. The Biden plan includes many different elements. I would break down a few different points almost along the lines with our discussion about the power sector and carbon-free electricity and a total net-zero economy. One point is, what kind of spending needs to happen to get to carbon-free electricity? This is incentives for utilities to move away from fossil fuels.

The second point, a large part of the total energy consumption is around the transportation sector. There's things like funding for local transportation and public transportation. There's funding for charging stations and vehicle tax credits for people to buy electric vehicles and other low emission vehicles. There's also a huge investment in energy innovation. Biden proposes creating this thing called the Advanced Research Project Agency on Climate, which is modeled after a similar agency on energy. Which was also modeled on one-- From the Defense Department and this would spend billions and billions of dollars trying to come up with new innovative solutions to these issues.

We could talk for the whole day about the many different little pieces of this plan, but it's basically a sort of all-out spending on a whole bunch of different things that will take us in the direction that he wants to go.

Brian: We're talking about climate and energy as an issue in the presidential campaign with Justin Worland, who is energy and environment correspondent for Time magazine. Now, here's an exchange from the debate between the moderator Chris Wallace and President Trump. Wallace has just asked; given the worsening California fires and other things if Trump accepts that man-made global warming is real.

President Trump: If you look at our numbers right now, we are doing phenomenally, but I haven't destroyed our businesses. Our businesses aren't put out of commission. If you look at the Paris Accord, it was a disaster from our standpoint, and people are actually very happy about what's going on because our businesses are doing well. As far as the fires are concerned, you need forest management. In addition to everything else, the forest floors are loaded up with trees, dead trees that are years old and they're like tinder and leaves and everything else. You drop a cigarette in there the whole forest burns down. You've got to have forest management--

Chris Wallace: What do you believe about the science of climate change, sir?

President Trump: I believe that we have to do everything we can to have immaculate air, immaculate water, and do whatever else we can that's good. We're planting a billion trees, the Billion Tree Project and it's very exciting for a lot of people.

Chris Wallace: Do you believe that human pollution, gas, greenhouse gas emissions contributes to the global warming of this planet?

President Trump: I think a lot of things do, but I think to an extent, yes. I think to an extent, yes, but I also think we have to do better management of our forest.

Brian: Saw that from the debate, and Justin, let's fact-check and analyze a few things from that section. Are we, as a country, doing phenomenally on emissions as Trump says, and if so, why?

Justin: Phenomenally is not the word I would use. It's a really interesting picture because this year, emissions have declined or are likely to decline. When you look at the whole year, about 10% in the US. That is a really remarkable decline. Of course, that was largely due to the pandemic and the subsequent lockdowns. The bigger, longer-term trend is that emissions have declined about 12% since 2005.

Just for some perspective, report from the UN Environment Program last year or two years ago, excuse me, said that between 2020 and 2030, the world would have to decrease its emissions about 7.5% every year in order to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement. That's what we did this year, essentially, for 10 years and nobody expects for once, us to continue to meet emissions targets by economic lockdown and devastation because it really is harmful to people. In short, phenomenal is definitely not the right word, though this year, we did experience a sharp decline.

Brian: Although even that 12% decline that you say, since 2005 would probably surprise a lot of people who would think that our emissions would have been going up during these last 15 years.

Justin: Yes, that's a very good point. The expectation, the projections are if we are to do nothing, emissions will basically flat-line even as the economy grows. The primary reason for that is because coal is just not cost-effective anymore. Coal, just a few years ago, just at the turn of the century was 60% our electricity source, and now it's down to less than a third. It's just going to continue declining because it just costs too much. That's really was the primary contributor to our emissions. Things will flat-line but flat-lining is not enough.

Brian: Also referring to the clip, what were the implications of the Paris Accord for US businesses that Trump objected to there? Is he right that it put the US at a competitive disadvantage with other signatories?

Justin: The short answer is no. He wasn't right. There's several misconceptions about the Paris Agreement that Trump has continued to put out there. One of them, the primary one I would argue is that US is being obliged to do X, Y and Z. The Paris Agreement is really a framework and the way it works is each country comes with their own commitments and says, "This is what we've talked about it at our national level. This is what we plan to do." Each country can tailor it to their own domestic needs.

This is important because it sets certainty for businesses and it also allows for an international collaboration. The big thing, this is a really fascinating development right now happening in the European Union is, they're talking about putting a tax on imports from countries that aren't dealing with climate change effectively. A big part of that is, are they meeting the standards of the Paris Agreement? You're going to have a situation unfolding relatively shortly. We'll see what happens with the election, of course, but where countries are going to say, "Hey, look, if you're not compliant with this global agreement, we're going to make it harder to purchase your goods." American companies are certainly aware of this and concerned about it.

Brian: Everyone seems to agree that better forest management would help with the California fires but Trump uses that to downplay the need to do anything about warming. We have a caller who we're not going to have time to put on the air, but who says, "You got to be nuts to believe that California is burning so much more because of a fraction of degree change in the temperature." What would the reply to that be from a science perspective?

Justin: I think this is a big issue in climate communication generally, which is that two things can be true at once. It's absolutely true that there needs to be better forest management, but it's also true that a warming climate contributes to drought and creates a setting that allows fires to spark. I would just say it's a fraction of degree. That's a global average. Temperatures have warmed 1 degreed Celcius on average, but that doesn't speak to what the particulars are in a particular place. It also doesn't speak to what the highs are at a particular time. 1 degree is an average, it's not representative of the local situation at a given moment.

Brian: Do you know the California fire zones' numbers in that respect?

Justin: It's a good point. I don't know those numbers off-hand but I will just say that generally speaking, in most places, a big part of this issue is that the extremes are so much more extreme. That's a trend that's pretty much consistent across the globe.

Brian: Before you go, you have an article in Time magazine about Amy Coney Barrett, and how she could affect climate policy if she's confirmed for the Supreme Court. Her nomination is another way that Trump could affect the climate policy of the United States, I guess, how so?

Justin: Pretty much most climate policy made today at the federal level comes through the agencies. Conservative jurists have argued for some time that agencies shouldn't have the authority to make some of the decisions that they make. Right now, they use the Clean Air Act as a justification to produce climate policy, but conservative jurists say, "The Clean Air Act doesn't actually mention climate change, so therefore you can't do it."

Then thinking more broadly, there's a new president and the new president enacts a new law about climate change that says the EPA needs to do something. A lot of conservative jurists would say, "Actually, Congress does not have the ability to tell this agency what to do. That's Congress's job, it doesn't have the authority to tell another agency." This is all really wonky. The bottom line is that a lot of conservative jurists don't think that the constitution allows for agencies to enact regulations related to climate change on their own, essentially. This is a big roadblock for future climate policy.

Brian: How much climate-related environmental regulation has the Trump administration actually undone or what are some of the biggest parts of that?

Justin: The Trump administration has targeted-- I think that there's a count, a New York Times tracker that says 100 rules and regulations. They have had-- I don't have the percentage off-hand, but a large percentage of those cases have been tied up in the courts. A conservative jurist would change that direction or change that reality pretty much immediately.

Brian: I'll throw in one other thing that's a political analysis of yours. An analysis of Trump's language and behavior on climate and energy compared to other Republican elected officials, and even the official positions of his own campaign. You note, for example, that Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell said he accepts the scientific consensus on global warming, but as talk of the Green New Deal rippled across Capitol Hill, he said, "I do accept it. The question is, how do you address it? The way to do this has to be consistent with American values and American capitalism, meaning through technology and innovation," McConnell said.

Lindsey Graham has said something similar to that. They sound different from Trump who questions the very idea that science can know, but you conclude the Lindsey Graham position, the Mitch McConnell position is a distinction without a difference from Trump. Why is that?

Justin: The thing is, you can say climate change is real, but if you aren't actually going to put forward substantive legislation or policy to deal with it, then that distinction is meaningless. I would say, of course, who knows what the future has in store. Maybe with a future president, Mitch McConnell, and Lindsey Graham will have different proposals. Lindsey Graham has, in the past, advocated for cap and trade. It's totally possible that in a different political universe, these guys come up with their own substantive policy, but today in 2020, saying you believe in climate change, but not actually supporting any measures to address it, is pretty meaningless.

Brian: Time magazine energy and environment reporter, Justin Worland. Thank you so much for joining us.

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