David Remnick: The Inflation Reduction Act, the official name of the climate bill has been a very long time coming, much too long. In 1988, this magazine covered the congressional testimony of James Hansen, a NASA scientist who declared that global warming was bound to imperil the planet itself. Hansen said that it was time to stop waffling so much. 34 years later, the evidence of our collective waffling is all around us, wildfires, floods, temperature records broken year after year. While the Inflation Reduction Act is a huge political victory for the Democrats, there's a much bigger question surrounding this bill.

What difference will it make and when? I called up Elizabeth Kolbert, one of the very best thinkers on climate. Kolbert is a staff writer for The New Yorker, a Pulitzer Prize winner, and the author of books including The Sixth Extinction, and Under a White Sky. Betsy, we're talking in a week in which the former president of the United States has had his house searched, he's being questioned. In New York, all kinds of things are happening second by second. Yet the week before, we had a political moment that arguably is meaningful for our grandchildren. How do you assess the political moment and the bill that just passed where climate is concerned?

Elizabeth Kolbert: Well, it's certainly, a very significant moment, it was often called the most significant piece of legislation the Senate has ever passed on climate change, as a lot of people pointed out, that was a pretty low bar because they've never really passed a piece of legislation on climate change. I do think that potentially, it marks a watershed moment,

David Remnick: Well, let's go through the bill, what it is where climate is concerned, what's there that's positive to begin with?

Elizabeth Kolbert: Well, the bill mainly relies on tax credits or a lot of tax credits for industries and for producing clean energy of all sorts. Then there are a lot of consumer-facing credits, for example, to buy an electric vehicle or put heat pumps in your house, replace your oil-burning furnace with heat pumps. It relies very much on a carrot approach as opposed to a stick approach, urging people trying to make things cheaper.

I think that the fundamental theory behind this is if you get some of these industries really going the prices will continue to decline. Non-carbon energy sources have already become much, much cheaper over the last decade or they've become so cheap, that the transition to clean energy will just happen as a result of economics.

David Remnick: Trying to battle climate change is so complex, so international, so interwoven, is there any way to assess in an empirical way what the effect of this bill will be?

Elizabeth Kolbert: I don't even think anyone honestly has attempted the international numbers, but people have tried to look at the national numbers, and you get a range of figures about what it will do because part of it is dependent on the price of fossil fuels. What becomes tempting to do depends on how cheap or expensive other options are. If you give me a credit tax credit to buy an electric vehicle, and I'm a rational consumer, let's say, then part of my calculation presumably would be what's the price of gas. Right now, gas is expensive. EV might look very good in those terms. If gas prices fall again it might not look as good. That's just an example. One example out of many, many that are in this bill.

David Remnick: You say the bill is mainly dependent on carrots incentives, rather than sticks. What are the sticks that are missing? What would you like to have seen in such a bill that would have been even more effective?

Elizabeth Kolbert: Well, in another version of the bill back in the days when it was called build back better, there were penalties. One of the issues that we're dealing with here is there are two parts to this clean energy transition. One is constructing new energy sources, putting up new sources of energy that don't emit carbon, and the other is backing out the sources that do emit carbon. Both of those have to happen.

David Remnick: Concessions were made to say the least in order to get the support of Joe Manchin and they include drilling in Alaska, in the Gulf of Mexico, and other concessions, how damaging were those compromises to the larger effort that you described?

Elizabeth Kolbert: Well, if you look at once again, the analyses that have been done, they would say that they were fairly trivial compared to the good that the bill could do. Now, a lot of people were very upset about them. We can't be burning more fossil fuels, that's just incompatible with the project of fighting climate change. If you can't acknowledge that and can't say that then it's not clear how far you can get.

David Remnick: Betsy, how do you feel about the name of the bill, the Inflation Reduction Act? Essentially, they're hiding a climate bill behind a fig leaf of inflation lowering.

Elizabeth Kolbert: Yes, I think that unfortunately speaks volumes to the fact that the Democrats didn't want to go out there with a climate bill going into the midterms, wanted to go out there with an Inflation Reduction Act, I think, is unfortunately pretty telling about climate--

David Remnick: This is something that's very hard to fathom. I understand why people want inflation to come down. Everybody wants that to happen. At the same time, no one goes unaffected by climate change. At this point, everyone is seeing it, whether you're living in spitting distance of extraordinary fires, or just the general heat that's affected us in so many ways, who is unaffected by it? Who's able psychologically at this late day to turn a blind eye to what is facing us all?

Elizabeth Kolbert: Well, I mean, that's such a good question, David, and I have spent a lot of time thinking about it. I certainly do think that this summer, a lot of people should have gotten the message. We've run pieces, and many people have run pieces of just going out and talking to voters who are being directly affected, I have to sell my cattle because there's not enough water.

People find ways, this has just become an ideological issue. What we found in recent years is that ideology is really, really powerful. People can believe even in the face of overwhelming evidence, even when it's really hurting them. I mean, we just saw these incredible floods in Kentucky, a red state, is Kentucky now going to go vote for people who are firmly committed to climate action? I sadly don't expect that to happen.

David Remnick: What is the ideology exactly of disbelief and climate change, of trying to ignore it, of putting it off the political table?

Elizabeth Kolbert: Well, I think that climate change, if you really start thinking about it, it does raise a lot of issues that do intersect with people's ideology. Ultimately, George Bush famously said back in the early '90s, when he signed the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, our way of life is not up for negotiation. Well, climate change challenges that. Our way of life may not be compatible with dealing with climate change. When you come to that, when you come down to that realization, then I think it raises for people a lot of very visceral concerns, and I can understand that.

David Remnick: How would you spell them out? What are the specifics of it?

Elizabeth Kolbert: Well, for example, I mean, I'm a trucker, there's a million economic interests and jobs that are potentially affected if you say, look, our priority is fighting climate change, you really do have to rebuild the American economy from the bottom up, because right now, pretty much everything we do is dependent on fossil fuels, the way that Americans have always lived you can call it exuberant or you can call it wasteful.

You pick, we live in suburbs, very much spread out suburbs, people are especially after COVID going back into their cars, all the ways that we live, that potentially do have to be rethought because they're very energy intensive. I think that people would really rather just say, well, it's not happening. My driving around cannot be responsible for this flooding that just happened. It's just easier to feel that way.

David Remnick: Now, the bill hopes to get people to buy electric vehicles and make their homes more energy efficient. Can we make a real difference by making these kinds of changes in our daily lives? How far does this get us? If the process needs to be far more radical, what does it need to take in?

Elizabeth Kolbert: If we all drove electric cars and there a lot of cars in this country, and trucks, if they were all converted to electricity, and that electricity were generated from carbon-free sources, it would make a very big difference so that is the case. Now, the other issue with climate change is it ramifies throughout the world, the US's emissions, which historically speaking, we are the biggest contributor to climate change.

The US is responsible for a quarter of the CO2 that's up there, added CO2 that's up there, so that's huge. Going forward, we're going to be responsible for a smaller and smaller proportion because other countries' emissions are still rising and ours are declining. This problem, it's not one that gets solved. That's another political problem here. You do not solve climate change. You simply make it worse or less worse.

David Remnick: A bill doesn't get passed and then we then have a sunny and breezy summer next time around.

Elizabeth Kolbert: Exactly.

David Remnick: Do you think that this new bill will have any political effect on other countries, and particularly, the countries that are along with the United States, the principle culprits in warming?

Elizabeth Kolbert: One sad thing, or problematic, let's put it that way, is that this bill is coming right after Nancy Pelosi went to Taiwan. The Chinese announced, "We're not going to cooperate with the US on a bunch of issues anymore," and one of those was climate change. Now, does that really make any difference? I can't tell you, but the Chinese, who now are by far, far, far and away, the world's biggest emitter on a year-by-year basis, they are also suffering. They had terrible heat waves this summer. They are suffering tremendously from climate change. They know that. The leadership certainly knows that.

They, like us, are trying to be leaders in these new technologies, but also like the US, they are very focused on immediate economic growth. Whenever there's a dip in growth, the leadership then tries to pump up the economy, and that often involves and has recently involved using a lot of coal. It's really, really hard to say. I think one of the questions, and it's a big question mark, is do these new technologies get developed that turn out to be both carbon free, and cheap, and convenient and all the things that we look for in our technologies, and I'm not just talking about your electric car, I am talking about these huge industrial processes.

David Remnick: Let's talk about two crises at once, and arguably, the two most urgent, which is climate change and at the same time, a not only national but global movement, not everywhere but in so many places toward authoritarianism and away from either democracy or democratization. How do you relate those two things?

Elizabeth Kolbert: I think it is very interesting. I think it is possible that we'll look back in history and say, historians will connect them and they'll say, "These people were facing a crisis and they turn to authoritarian governments." People do these scenario building for climate change, and one of the bad scenarios for climate change is rising nationalism. Everyone is just siloed and does what they think is good for themselves, and that might involve burning a lot of coal if you've got coal.

I think there's, in climate circles, governance circles, there's a sort of general sense that nationalism, rising nationalism, is not good for climate change. Perhaps there'll be some benevolent dictator out there who will show us the way to actually make changes, which have been hard to make in a democracy as well. I think we have to be honest about that.

David Remnick: Are you saying there's a tension between democratic government and fighting climate change?

Elizabeth Kolbert: So far, if you look at this country, we just haven't seen a tremendous amount of political support for fighting climate change, that a lot of people would argue this is a ginned up, controversy has been ginned up by the fossil fuel industry. I think there's a lot of truth to that. There's been a tremendous amount of misinformation. There's been a tremendous amount of fossil fuel money that's gone into campaigns. We haven't mustered the political will in this country, in this democracy, to really take meaningful action, until just now. How's that?

Now, I would say in Europe, Europe is much further along than we are. The EU has much more comprehensive legislation. I would say, some people, a lot of people would probably say that the EU countries rank higher on the scale of democracy than we do. I don't think there's necessarily an inherent tension, but I do think that we do have to acknowledge that so far, democracy has not risen to the challenge.

David Remnick: What is the further responsibility of a country, a rich country like the United States? When I see that Congo, for example, is going to increase mining deforestation just as we see in Brazil, and those countries explicitly or implicitly say, "Look, we are developing countries. This is the only way we can make our way out of poverty." Someplace like Congo, for example. What is the responsibility on a place like the United States or Europe to answer that really urgent challenge that if left untended makes the problem dramatically worse?

Elizabeth Kolbert: I think it's a huge responsibility. We are the historical emitters between the US and the EU, so we have a really big responsibility. I don't think there's any standard that you could use, honestly, by which we have lived up to that. The Americans always tout their "leadership" on climate change. The US has actually been constantly at the forefront of blocking a lot of climate action. Donald Trump withdrew from the Paris treaty, which didn't even have any mandatory provisions, just withdrew out of pick.

There was a fund that basically wealthy nations agreed that they were going to devote $100 billion a year, direct $100 billion dollars a year in financing to developing countries for both clean energy development and adaptation, that was supposed to be $100 billion a year by 2020. They have never met that goal. I was just talking to someone in Bangladesh just the other day about this, and he said, "It really shows that they don't give a damn." I think that is the message that we've put out time and time again, and that message has been received.

David Remnick: Betsy, maybe we owe ourselves maybe a day, maybe a week of self-congratulation after this bill, but when we wake up, what's the next step? What is absolutely necessary in your view?

Elizabeth Kolbert: The challenge is on so many fronts. It's basically huge research and development push. It would mean streamlining a lot of permitting for these projects. One of the issues that we're going to increasingly get into is citing a lot of these clean energy, projects citing, solar citing, wind citing offshore wind, so we probably need to change some of our regulatory regimes.

We need to figure out whether that is by penalizing or putting a price on, we need to figure out, as I said, ways to back out this carbon energy. We can't just add the clean energy, we have to close down the natural gas plants, the coal plants. We need to rebuild our grid. This is huge. A lot of this is pretty boring technical technocratic stuff that needs to get done.

David Remnick: Elizabeth Kolbert, thanks so much.

Elizabeth Kolbert: Thanks, David.

[music]

David Remnick: Elizabeth Kolbert is a staff writer, and you can find her work on climate change and much more at newyorker.com.

Copyright © 2022 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.