hello and welcome I'm Claud Rini the executive director of the rley fellowship program at Harvard University it is my pleasure to introduce our speaker today Leah STS are Jeffrey s and Margaret ma Patos fellow in 2019 with an unprecedented number of democratic hopefuls in the presidential primary race Leah Stokes took to the so to social media to analyze the strengths and weaknesses of each candidate's proposed climate policies within months campaigns were calling her directly to Ask for advice
in the years that followed Leah has become one of the most prolific defining voices for clean energy policy in the United States she believes that while individual efforts to curve climate change are important Collective action and federal and International at Federal International level are necessary to weigh Society of fossil fuel in 2021 she co-author root Maps which became the back backbone of some of the climate policies at the heart of the inflation reduction act she thought endlessly for
the Bill's passage despite resist resistance from Congress in addition to her advocacy and policy work Leah is a professor of environmental policy at the University of California Santa Barbara and co-host the popular climate podcast a matter of degrees while at rockliff she is working on her next book The Campaign for the future the book traces the passage of the inflation reduction act while also telling the stories of several new parents including herself working TIR tirelessly to make the leg
islation reality she hopes that it will it will illustrate what a small group of people can do to stop the climate climate crisis and to change the world in which the next generation of children will grow up today the Q&A session of the program will be hosted by this year's shutzer fellow Oscar Lopez and now please join me in welcoming Leah Stokes thank you so much Claudia um it's wonderful to be here today um first I want to thank my fellow fellows who have been such an inspiration uh the artis
ts in particular have inspired me to take up crochet and wear a ridiculous sweater today so they get the praise or blame for that um I also want to thank the Radcliff staff who have been so supportive uh particularly with child care support through this program which I think is super important um I want to thank my research partner Maddie renali um who's helped with this book project my assistant Jess L my husband who's here today I also want to thank um it's a little emotional I don't know why
Shany Kleinman who's been such an amazing support for me um I want to thank two people from the hospital who helped with my children when they were born um Dr Katherine EA eoko and Gail Moran and I want to thank the people who've talked to me uh for this book project so last year President Biden p uh signed the inflation reduction act it was the largest investment in climate action in American history and uh it was something that I worked on alongside thousands of other activists across the Unit
ed States and so this book project that I'm working on tells the story of a bunch of these activists working to try to uh pass this law and as was mentioned by Claudia it also tells the story of a bunch of new parents who were uh going through Big Life Changes is whilst trying to protect the future uh for their own children so I'm a political scientist and you may know this particular image right this is Schoolhouse Rock it's how a bill becomes a law and he sings He says I'm Just a Bill I'm only
a bill and I'm sitting here on Capitol Hill and he tells the story about how he goes to the House of Representatives and he goes to the Senate and then he makes it to the president's desk and in many ways that's the story I'm telling in the book but it is a slightly more complicated than that you'll be shocked to hear one of the things in this video if you go back to it is that he says that bills start with an idea and this is the image that they show it's a bunch of people coming up with an id
ea about how there ought to be a law for that and so this is where I think laws really start they start with ideas and I'm going to go back to a perhaps surprising starting point I just rewatched this documentary and Inconvenient Truth how many people have seen this film right it was a real Watershed film it came out in 2006 it won the best documentary that year and uh it really changed the conversation about climate and as I was thinking about my own journey in climate action which began just b
efore this film came out I decided I had to rewatch this movie I needed to understand what we were talking about in this sort of first wave of really big public Consciousness around climate change and I remember distinctly when this film came out um Al Gore actually came to Toronto where I was living as I was an undergrad at the time and he gave a talk and I got to sit in the front row even got to shake his hand which was super exciting for me as a I suppose budding nerd political scientist to b
e and I remember vividly that at the end of the film there was a black screen where words came up and it told us what we could do about climate change so I thought I got to go back to that I need to say some of you maybe remember the black screen yes nice so I went back I was like okay I got to do it so here's the here it is it my memory did not fail me in this particular instance it says the climate crisis can be solved here's how to start you can reduce your carbon emissions in fact you can ev
en reduce your carbon emissions to zero you ready for it buy efficient appliances and light bulbs recycle and that was very much the Zeitgeist at the time I was running my first climate campaign um it's called rewire and I ran it with my husband and and as you can see the he wasn't my husband at the time that took a couple decades um but as you can see here what is this symbol it's an iconic outdated compact fluorescent light bulb right this is pre- LEDs let's be real but we thought we were were
going to change the world by installing efficient lights that was going to do it right we were going to take on the climate crisis that way and so in this particular instance we got people to turn off the lights we got them to save energy and you know what they saved about 12% of the energy not so bad that's actually pretty good for a behavior change campaign I just want to say um and this is another image this is the city of Toronto where I was living at the time in 2008 I'm actually in this p
hoto you can't quite see me you have to like blow it up really like I'm super tiny but I'm there in this photo and this was a campaign in 2008 called earthour did anybody participate in this 50 million people around the world participated in this campaign we all sat in the dark for an hour I did it 2008 this was going to change the world right if we just turned off the lights we could solve the climate crisis and this these ideas this kind of Paradigm that comes out of this moment persists today
we ask with rewiring America a bunch of Americans what is the number one thing they think that individuals can do to fight the climate crisis we asked this in 2022 and this is the audience participation part somebody shout out what you think the answer was recycling recycling wow Oscar for the win indeed recycling number one answer so and this is by just to be clear I'm not criticizing Al Gore who won the Nobel Prize for a reason and has done far more than most human beings on the climate crisi
s and he deserves that um award but the way we as a movement the way we as a society thought about this problem was fundamentally limited I love this comic by Tommy seagull I talk about this comic all the time it says it's that easy in the 80s pick up your litter and you can save the Earth in the 90s recycle and you can save the Earth in the 2010 the 2000s reduce your carbon footprint and you can save the Earth finally in the 2010s we took a slight detour completely restructure global economic s
ystems and you may be able to save a remnant of humanity it's a bit of a paradigm shift there right so that's the first Paradigm that I really saw when I went back to An Inconvenient Truth Now the film it has actually aged quite well the science is very accurate really interesting to rewatch and it takes up about 3/4 of the of the movie but you get to the end that's the solutions part right so here is Al Gore standing in front of a diagram the wedges diagram pretty popular thing at the time um S
ako and Paka helped come up with this idea and it was like okay we can just think about all these ways that we're going to reduce pollution and add them up and bada boom bada bing we're there and what I notice when I went back to this image we've got six things lined up right what is the common ity in five of them efficiency the word efficiency it comes up again and again and again and to be clear I was falling asleep last night and thinking about this I you know in Microsoft Word you can create
hot Keys like short cuts like if there's a word you type too often and you're like uh this is before autocomplete and things like that I programmed e to spell Energy Efficiency because I was typing Energy Efficiency so frequently so I it's part of the problem is what I'm trying to say so this was really the Paradigm that we were in for a long time and in some ways we still are in that we could use individual action and Energy Efficiency to solve this problem and I'm not going to get into this t
oday but there's another strand there too another meaning of the word efficiency which is economic efficiency right that we can make marginal improvements to the system we could send signals that would just TW tweak things in a certain way like I don't know a carbon Price Right tax on carbon an emissions trading system and that would just tweak behaviors change things at the margin and we would solve this problem and if you're interested in a critique of that I wrote a piece with m mildenberger
in the Boston Review called The Trouble with carbon pricing where we get into that but I don't have enough time to quite debunk economics today on top of everything else so where did we go we started to change the Paradigm right that's what the Tommy seagull cartoon is pointing us to and in 2018 when newly elected representative Alexandria Kazi Cortez in fact she was representative elect at the time she spent one of her first days on the hill in Nancy Pelosi's office staging a protest alongside
the sunrise movement alongside people like then executive director VAR Pros an amazing climate activist from the Boston area and you know they said hey I I think instead of getting people to recycle maybe we should pass a green New Deal we should restructure our society this idea caught fire right I mean I can't tell you how many people sent me this idea and of course I was drawn into its orbit and inspired by this activism that these people took and I want to say that this activism of course go
es farther back in time we could really trace it back decades but I want to trace it back just two years this is the protest uh at Standing Rock reservation against the Dakota access pipeline you may remember uh that there is still um a pipeline that is uh being built trying to be built through um Standing Rock and the community stood up and said no keep in mind there was an alternative route for that pipeline that could have gone uh through a white Community but they decided to put it through t
his indigenous community and there was a protest and then Donald Trump you may remember he got elected in 2016 I don't know that's that's hard to remember that one and people showed up in droves to support this community that was resisting fossil fuel infrastructure in a collective way one of the people who went to that protest was Alexandria kazio Cortez she was not a representative at the time she was a bartender and she decided to drive across the country to go to this protest and she says th
at she decided to run for office because of this experience of being part of collective action because of her experience at Standing Rock and it was actually the day after she left that she got a phone call from these activists who were running Progressive people for congress so the green new deal as the indigenous scholar Nick eses has pointed out can really be traced back as well to this resistance so let's talk about that first Paradigm Shift we are not trying to get people to recycle we are
not trying to make this about individual action in fact it is the fossil fuel company BP that really popularized the idea of a carbon footprint because it took away the focus off of big polluters and put it onto everyday people as if we were all to blame for the Energy System around us and so the paradigm shift is towards organizing and I like to use the image of an Excel spreadsheet to show that because as I like to say the spread sheet is mightier than the sword and that is not just a Cheesy s
tatement it's also true if you ever organized you know you need a spreadsheet to do it because you need to know who's going to do what where when and you need to come back and make sure they did it right so we need to actually organize if we want to change the system let's talk about that second Paradigm that I mentioned Energy Efficiency and the shift that happens in this period so this is um from the alliance to save energy it's an organization that started just after An Inconvenient Truth cam
e out right and they were running campaigns just like I was running as an undergraduate they were going into for example shopping markets and having Eureka moments with everyday people like did you know compac florescent light bulbs exist and you could use them and your bills could go down wow so exciting these are the campaigns that they were running and I just want to point out who was funding this work it's a little bit tiny you might not be able to see so I'm just going to blow that up for y
ou oh the American Gas Association interesting huh the lobbyists for the fossil fuel industry started to fund Energy Efficiency in the wake of popular Collective Consciousness about the climate crisis and it's not just the American Gas Association I decided to look in that 2007 uh annual report that they put out still on the internet you know looks pretty 2007 to me and this is really the who's who of climate denial these are organizations who funded denial throughout the 1990s as Naomi oresky a
Harvard Professor has shown in detail uh that's things like the American petroleum Institute and of course Exxon Mobile but it's also the who's who of climate denial from the electric utility industry I recently wrote a paper where we looked at which Electric utilities were funding climate denial during this period when fossil fuel companies were funding climate denial and these are them my friends we we found the same people the same organizations who were funding climate Deni from the utility
industry were also funding Energy Efficiency campaigns they were saying yeah yeah we can solve this climate thing it's just going to be marginal improvements on a fossil fuel-based Energy System like that'll work right it's not going to threaten us and so we have Southern Company we have Duke Energy American Electric Power Etc and sea in case you're wondering as the parent company for SoCal Gas I think one of the ways we can most iconically see this period and the way we thought about the world
is this anybody know what this is what is thisius it's a Prius indeed I drove a Prius anybody else drove a Prius back then nice popular right and we really saw that this was our way of doing the right thing and I want to be clear it was a good thing to do at the time but you know what the thing about a Prius is from the first day you buy it you know it had that also like video game style thing where you were supposed to you know break only so much so that you could just use as little oil as pos
sible but you know what the problem is the day you drove it off the lot it ran on um oil and the last day you ran it it ran on oil this is a this is a fossil fuel machine no shade against the Prius owners I was one of them but it is fundamentally a fossil fuel machine guess what this is anybody recognize this the Chevy bolt wow we got some real car people or I don't know what climate people in the front right this is a Chevy bolt this is a really interesting Paradigm Shift right because some sud
denly you know what this can run on electricity and that electricity will be as dirty as it is on day one that you buy that car maybe it'll be a mix of gas and coal maybe some wind and some solar but guess what you stick solar on your roof your car can be 100% running on solar and as the grid around you gets cleaner and cleaner with every year not just by chance but through activism Collective action your car gets cleaner too so this is the machine that does not run on oil on day one and does no
t run on oil on the last day in fact it gets in a certain sense cleaner over time as the electricity system gets cleaner that is a paradigm shift my particular passion is um this one this is a furnace in Massachusetts actually a lot of them run on Oil and Propane uh very expensive and very dirty some of them of course run on gas too these are delivered fuels um and that machine even if you buy an energy star super efficient gas uh furnace it runs on fossil fuels this is a heat pump or at least i
t's a schematic of a heat pump it runs on electricity and so whatever the grid mix is on day one that's as clean as it is and then the last day it gets cleaner I started to see the world differently you know I was at this point I don't know 12 15 years into working on climate change this is how long it took me Paradigm shifts kind of mess with you you know they take a while and I started to think about okay here is all the pollution in the United States it comes from these sectors we've got the
electric power sector it's about a quarter the transportation sector another quarter we got buildings it's about an eighth industry is about another quarter and then we got Agriculture and I started to think well how can we remove pollution from these parts of our country economy the first thing we need to do is clean up our electricity system this is what I spent a lot of time my first book thinking about how to do that once we have 100% clean electricity and even on the current grid mix we can
use that electricity to power of course our cars but not just our cars we can power mopeds we can power bicycles we can power trains you may not know this but in the South for example in the United States a lot of our trains run on diesel they're very very dirty we could Electrify those trains we could we could Electrify trucks that largely go through low-income communities and communities of color so it's not just cars and of course airplanes will be a little hard to Electrify so that one we w
on't do but the Lion Share of the transportation sector we can Electrify we can also Electrify buildings through those heat pumps heat pump water heaters induction stoves and this chunk here heavy industry we often say is the hard to decarbonize sector right this is difficult to do but what people don't realize is that about half of it can be electrified not everything is a steel plant or cement plant some things are beverage manufacturing food manufacturing Pulp and Paper and they can run on th
e same electric machines as all the other parts of our society and so what I started to realize is that just two things clean electricity combined with electrification could actually solve three4 of the climate problem in the United States so the next paradigm shift that I think we've really gone through in this intervening period is away from efficiency as an end goal this marginal incremental improvements on a fundamentally fossil fuel based system towards clean electricity and electrification
which is a transformational change so if I were to go back to this film to this ending when I rewatched this a couple weeks ago I thought this is just factually in acccurate statement so if I was going to edit it I might say in fact you cannot reduce your carbon emissions to zero unless you organize with others to restructure our Energy System through clean energy and electrification so just a couple addendums there but you know like I said Al gour nothing but love 14 years later you know what
the problem with Paradigm shifts are they take time and in the intervening period the Youth of yesterday day like me they grow gray hairs they start to get older maybe they have families get married maybe they gain a little bit of power along the way so that's an upside but the gray hair is you got to pay for that somehow and in that time period you know what else happened the climate crisis got worse because we largely did not change our Energy System and so I'm going to take you now to the yea
r 2020 which was the second hottest year on record just behind 2016 this was when we had a massive Democratic primary there were more than two dozen people running for the presidential nomination in the Democratic party uh I don't know if people watch these debates they came on night after night there were so many people I mean I'm a political scientist so like I could name them all but uh we know that the average American person would maybe name one of them and that's the guy who won his name i
s Joe Biden um but the other people right maybe they didn't know them some people loved of course Sanders some people were into Warren I don't know what Tulsa gabard was doing there um and then there was this guy anybody know who he is who's this any guesses from the audience I know there's a lot of them like I said we're not all political scientists memorizing all the people anybody know Jay Insley wow Dena for the win all right Jay Insley Governor Jay Insley of Washington State this person dec
ided to run for president why because he wanted to lift up climate change as an issue and it was pretty exciting for us super nerds out there who knew who the heck he was and were paying attention and he had staff who decided to write 200 pages of plans as part of the campaign for what we could do on climate change if we took it seriously as a national mobilization what we could do to flesh out that vision of a green New Deal that representative AOC and of course Senator Marky had really launche
d two years prior two of those people who wrote those very long documents were Sam Ricketts and Bracken Hendrick who would become some of my closest friends and allies for the work ahead because when I read those documents I felt really excited they included ideas like hey could we get to 100% clean electricity by 2035 this was a really bold Vision 2035 we're going to have an entirely clean grid and these activists managed to slowly well really campaign staffers turned activists because I don't
know spoiler alert this guy didn't become president um they managed to get other candidates to adopt these ideas including eventually then Vice President Joe Biden he ended up running on the same ideas that Governor Insley was running on including 100% clean electricity by 2035 and of course part of the reason why then Vice President Joe Biden took up these ideas was because the youth movement of today was so much more effective than the youth movement of my era they were focused on Collective a
ction they were focused on transformational change they were not interested in efficiency they were not interested in individual action and they really changed the way we talked about this they said we've got 11 years there's a deadline here people this is coming out of the intergovernmental panel on climate change report that talked about what had to happen by 2030 they said hey we want you to actually talk about climate change we want a climate debate there was eventually a climate debate they
won that and they said we want a green New Deal we want a transformative law that will change this country one of the people who like me was middle-aged by this point who was sort of maybe you could say a child of the Inconvenient Truth era who grew up in the climate movement is this woman her name is Sonia Agarwal and she would become one of my closest friends and one of the most impressive people I've ever met son Agarwal at the time was working for an organization called Energy Innovation wh
at they were doing was helping to think about how we could decarbonize the entire planet and what they did was they built this tool it's called the energy policy simulator and it allows policy makers all around the world because there's different ones for different countries to log in and to think about what would happen if I changed this policy how would carbon pollution ution go down or other pollution like methane what would happen if I did this to actually think about structural changes to p
olicy that would reshape our economy and they were having a lot of success with this work Sonia was advising people all around the world really about how we could make transformative changes to policy she was also pregnant at the time she was about to have her first child and on her due date which was September 9th 20 just weeks before the presidential election not knowing who would win not knowing if it would be a second Trump Administration not knowing if we would have a chance to pass a trans
formative climate law because the Democrats controlled the house and the Senate and the White House she went into the hospital she had to check to see if the child was ready to be born and when she came out that day the baby was not born but the sky was orange the Sun never came up that day because there were forest fires burning nor North of San Francisco that turned the skies orange it was a reminder of what the stakes were for her own personal life in terms of her decision to have a kid what
kind of world she was bringing her child into and what her responsibility was to change that system now you all know what happened next it's a relatively happy ending to the story Joe Biden was elected president took about a week I don't know if you all lived through that week remember Tuesday happened and then it was until Saturday that they called the election little stressful um Joe Biden was elected president keep in mind this is just weeks after Sony has her kid she gets a phone call she th
ey ask her hey would you help out with the transition would you help us try to staff the department of energy and she says okay sure I could do that yeah sure she helps out a little bit you know even though she has a kid then she gets another phone call they say hey would you be willing to join the White House Brian De who had worked under the Obama Administration and was going to join the Biden Administration he was the National Economic advisor he had seen that under the Obama Administration c
limate change did not get enough priority and focus within the white house because of the way the policy councils were set up this is a little boring and in the weeds but essentially we've got a National Security Council a National Economic Council domestic policy Council and sure some of them might care a little bit about climate change but that issue tended to get lost within all the other important things that those people had to do and so he along with other people such as Ron Clan who would
go on to become the chief of staff to President Biden said we've got to actually set up a climate policy office within the White House we need people whose full-time job it is to report to the president about climate change otherwise this issue will fall too down too far down the to-do list and so when Sonia got that phone call she was asked if she would be willing to serve in the climate policy office there were a thousand reasons to say no remember she had just had a newborn she was hypotheti
cally on her maternity leave and she already had a really important job her work at energy Innovation was helping to reshape the Energy System around the world but when you get asked if you will go to the White House to serve the president you probably think you got to say yes now keep in mind that at this this moment we did not know who would control the Senate I had a friend we had been working on this policy report that all summer long about oh yeah we're going to win the Senate and here's ho
w we're going to pass thing through budget reconciliation you may remember that the forecast going into that election was that the Democrats were going to have like 52 seats maybe 53 Total Wipeout and I my friend who had been working on the report with he said to me Leah I've been thinking about it and it could be that at the end of election night there's 50 seats for the Republicans and 48 for the Democrats and the two seats for the Georgia senators will go to a runoff on January 5th and I said
his friend his name is nian I said noran I think you've been reading too many conspiracy theories on the internet and guess what he was right that is exactly what happened we did not know who was going to control the Senate and so when Sonia was asked would she give up time at home with her newborn child to move her family across the country she didn't even know if there would be a wind of opportunity to pass the transformative climate law that she knew was necessary if we wanted to make real p
rogress on climate change at the pace and scale that's necessary but nevertheless she said yes and she joined a group of other people including Massachusetts own Gina McCarthy Ali Zade um this is another person jahi Weiss who will be giving a talk I think on Monday at the Kennedy School jahi actually had a child basically on inauguration day and he also said yes to this job so Sonia found her her kind of new best friend and jahi Weiss these two new parents who were going to work on climate chang
e for the president and then of course January 5th happened a very exciting day the Georgia runoffs happened and none other than John ooff and rapael waro won their Senate seats and we knew that we had a chance to pass a transformative Bill through this obscure process called budget reconciliation it is a process that allows you to pass a bill with only 50 votes in the Senate but of course that was January 5th and I think you may remember the next day even better this is January 6th the next day
of course insurrectionists descended on the capital several people died you know they tried to basically undermine democracy and we still are dealing with the ramifications of that event and on that day on January 6th Sonia thought deeply about her decision to join the White House to be honest she told me she was a little bit scared she didn't think that this job would somehow be dangerous but watching what was going on on TV it made her scared she had a newborn kid at home and she also thought
that the stakes of this job were too high and so on January 6th she sat down and she decided to make a day one priorities list for herself not for the president for herself what was she going to try to accomplish during her time in the White House what were the things that were most important to her because she knew that every minute in the White House counted every hour every week every month and that she would only be there for so long and that she was giving up time at home with her newborn
child in order to take this job she shared this list with me she told me that she would leave it open on her computer so that when she was trying to find other files she'd just stumble across it every few days and be like Oh yeah this is where I'm trying to go this is the direction she wanted to have clarity because she knew that in such a complex organization like a white house she could lose her way and she needed to know what she was there for and what she was trying to accomplish I'll just s
ay that one of her ideas is to get to deliver on President Biden's campaign goal of 100% clean electricity by 2035 that was the thing that we ended up working on together one of Sonia's first jobs one of her first assignments in the White House was to figure out what would the president commit to under the Paris climate agreement you may remember that in 2015 countries from all around the world got together and they said here's what we can do on climate change and everybody makes pledges to this
they're called nationally determined contributions and so Sonia was assigned to figure out what should the United States pledge this report had come out just weeks before that green New Deal sit in at Nancy pel's office maybe you know this report somebody actually left it in my neighborhood in the little lending library they printed it out and left it there which totally warmed my heart at the time um this was a really important report which looked at what do we have to do if we want to limit w
arming to 1.5 degrees and it was an assignment to the scientists and they came back and they said we have to cut carbon pollution by 45% below 25 levels this decade by 2030 if we want to have a chance of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees it's a lot of numbers but the basic takeaway is CAU carbon pollution in half this decade okay so Sonia had to figure out well what what was the United States going to do were they going to be able to do that and so she called up the agencies right that was her job
she called up the department of energy she called up the Environmental Protection Agency but keep in mind this was weeks after the end of the Trump Administration the Trump administration had gutted all of these agencies people had been fired or they had quit or he'd relocated entire offices to Kansas where people did not live and so half the people quit in the process these are true stories and so she struggled to find people who had back that vision and sense of possibility and hope because t
hey had been so hammered by the Trump Administration and so she got some ideas from some people but she also found herself in a peculiar way turning back to the energy policy simulator remember I told you she had made this tool for policy makers to help them figure out what they could do to cut carbon pollution suddenly she was a policy maker she was an adviser to the president and so she went back to her own tool it was for free on the internet any of could go there she started to plug in some
numbers and ask herself questions well what if we did this how much carbon pollution could we cut what if we did that and she went back to the agencies and presented some of those ideas you know she said if we cut if we if we get to 100% clean electricity by 2035 wow that's a big cut right what if we dealt with methane how could we do and so in this bottomup way in part using the tool she had created she figured out that the United States could make a really big cut on carbon pollution this is e
nergy innovation's own analysis using that same tool which shows all these ways that we can cut carbon pollution throughout the economy and so it was you know she presented this idea to the chief of staff Ron Clan it eventually made its way to President Biden and he agreed to her rather ambitious plan and on Earth Day He announced that the United States would pledge to cut carbon pollution 50 to 52% this decade more than the 45% that was required under the ipcc this was a really huge Target this
is really one of the most ambitious goals globally and it was because Sonia decided to take that job and to give up her time with her family that she was able to make this difference now of course she knew that without a climate Bill through Congress this would be really hard to do right doing everything through regulations with this supreme court I don't know man that would be really hard so I want to take you to my own January 6th story as I mentioned I had been working throughout the summer
on a report with my friend nian sub Manan who I mentioned Sam Ricketts my student Olivia Quinn and Bracken Hendricks these were people from the Insley campaign and we had been thinking about dreaming about how could we pass a big climate Bill through reconciliation what could we do to the electricity system how could we get to 100% clean electricity by 2035 we've been working away on this report and then we watched the election play out in November we watched the Senate basically get hung and we
said well Sam I'm going to give Sam credit for this one Sam said ah there's no point to our report right now we shouldn't work on it let's just wait and see what happens so on January 5th what did we find out that actually we did have a opportunity to pass a law and so January 6th I spent my day trying to get this paper ready for publication knowing that there was actually a purpose to the work that we had been doing the other thing that I did is I'd written this book where it's called short ci
rcuiting policy and I interviewed over 100 Advocates as well as opponents and I thought about how did they manage to pass laws at the state level one of the key things that I found was that people needed to organize and work together if you had one organization one nonprofit and another and they weren't talking to each other it was going to be a lot harder to get the law passed and in fact when theeta Scotch pole a political scientist here at Harvard as well as mat mildenberger a political scien
tist at UC Santa Barbara did post-mortems on what's called the Waxman Mary Bill the really big law we tried to pass during the obom administration on climate action what they consistently found was that it had not been enough of a broad-based movement to pass the law that it was really one organization the environmental defense fund that was playing behind the scenes and wasn't really building a broad Coalition of groups who wanted to see that law pass and so I had that in the back of my head an
d I went to Evergreen action which was focused on clean electricity and rewiring America focus on electrification you know my two obsess clean electricity and electrification and I said we have got to organize we have got to get everybody who wants to get clean electricity into this bill to start hanging out on the zoom remember it was the pandemic we need to start meeting we need to organize and so we set up a clean electricity working group and we set up what's called the federal electrificati
on policy Coalition and of course other groups were doing this too the Equitable and just National Climate platform is an amazing um alliance between environmental justice groups and big green climate groups as is the climate action campaign and so this time we were a lot better prepared we were actually talking to one another as a movement and trying to work together we made a lot of progress we managed to get a bill that was being discussed in the Senate through the budget reconciliation proce
ss in the house that would cut carbon pollution 45% this is a figure that Senator Schumer's team made at the time and it included something called the clean electricity payment program this was the idea that came out of that report that I wrote on uh January 6th alongside all those other people it was a huge plan $1 150 billion to decarbonize our electricity system and it went alongside a bunch of clean energy tax incentives and there were lots of other things that I had been working on in these
little slices and we were starting to finally make progress this was in the summer of 2021 the second thing I really learned when I thought about the postmortem of the Waxman Market bills that I mentioned by Scotch pole and mildenberger was that if we didn't get Grassroots movement if we didn't get people calling Congress and putting pressure this might never happen and I would call up all the big groups that have very large lists I won't name them here for politeness reasons but you can imagin
e them and I say hey when are you going to turn on the phones when are you going to get people to call when are you going to get people to write emails I will say the chesap climate Action Network which is not a big green but is an amazing organization did it the whole time love those people but the really big groups they weren't doing it and so I finally said I'm going to do it keep in mind I'm literally a professor and I called up this wonderful person named um Jamie hen and Duncan Mel who's a
longtime campaigner and they said well we can just do that and we literally with zero dollars created a website made a phone number told people how to call Congress and got and started to drive tens of thousands of phone calls into Congress to pressure for this bill and the best thing was a bunch of people copied us they made their own phone caller so Justice Democrats and the sunrise movement did it a bunch of corporate groups did it and suddenly we started to have grass power pushing on Congr
ess to actually act I also did an enormous amount of media work for this bill I took over 200 interviews during this time anytime anybody asked me if I talked to them I said yes maybe because I was mad but I just felt that every single opportunity to talk about climate change was a potential opportunity to change the world this is an image of me on Democracy Now at the tail end of July at the time there was a bipartisan infrastructure bill working its way through the Senate and it was not a clim
ate bill this was not a climate bill and I was out there alongside people like Senator Mary and representative Alexandria Kazu Cortez and others saying no climate no deal if you don't pass a climate Bill we don't support your infrastructure Bill and it just so happened that at the time of that interview you know the zoom room when you see behind the screen and people aren't wearing pants my version of that is that I was actually in a hospital room at the time I was uh quite pregnant in a very hi
ghrisk pregnancy and I had to be hospitalized for continuous monitoring and so I asked them if you don't know democracy Now goes on at 8: in the morning and I was in California so that was 5 in the morning and even though it was the summer the sun is not up at 5 in the morning and so I said hey could you guys get me a light to one of the nurses and they wield in this light that's better used to get a baby out of a vaginal Canal than to light a television interview and I will say that one of the
lights was broken so we were not misusing medical equipment just for the record and 2 days later my children were born my children ended up staying in the hospital for several months during that time I testified in front of Congress um and the day that I brought um my kid home from the hospital there was a forest fire burning nearby in Santa Barbara just like what happened to Sonia because the climate crisis was already unfolding that day was my own child's due date because they were born rather
early and on my child's due date I got a call from journalist named Coral Davenport she is the New York Times journalist who always gets the scoop she said hey Leah I got the deal I got the scoop that bill that idea the clean electricity performance program thing that you've been working on you know like massive personal sacrifice to get that done mention mentions a no on it so it's dead so do you have a comment and I said to her uh I need five minutes I hung up on her I talked to all these oth
er people and I said what do I say you know I have to communicate the gravity of the situation but I don't want to upset people and I called her back and I gave her this quote it says this is absolutely the most important climate policy in the package we fundamentally needed to meet our climate goals that's just the reality and now we can't and I just started to Trail off and my husband was looking in the background he's like stop talking stop talking I was like this is sad it's so sad and and h
e was like I was like she's not gonna use that well did she put that on the front page of the print edition of The New York Times she did indeed and they say you should be careful what you say because you never know what we'll end up in the front page of the New York Times and unfortunately you know the devastation emotionally from the movement was really hard The Fallout from this was hard within days one of my students Nela Jefferson a member of Sunrise movement started a hunger strike in fron
t of the White House and so I watched several young people starve themselves because of their sadness and belief that this was a really huge loss and unfortunately one of the people who was working with us in that organizing group took his life in the in the in the time after this it was really rough that being said I got a text that day from someone who worked for Senator Schumer and he said hey Leah that's not very helpful some of us are trying to still do this and there's still so much worth
saving and it snapped me out of it it made me realize that if we really believed that this was a once in a generation opportunity then it didn't matter if my thing was dead there was more ways to cut pollution and so I spent my satday atur because it was a Saturday working alongside Congressional progressives in the house the Congressional Progressive caucus Senator Tina Smith and figuring out ways that we could fill the hole Senator Schumer did the same thing as did Sonia aall in the white hous
e and we figured out ways we could put policies into the package that would cut carbon pollution I'm running out of time of course it's a long story but I'll just give you the last parts of it Senator mansion in December went on television and he said the entire bill was dead I call this period the Dunka flout us which for my German speaking friends in the audience is the dark do drums in German it's a period for when the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow and you can't make enough rene
wable energy and that's the period we went into we could not seem to get this bill going again then he killed the bill again in July here we have Coral Davenport and Lisa Freeman with that story uh that was a really really dark time and I stayed up when he killed the bill again in July I stayed up very late that night I was crying it was rough and wrote a piece it's called what Joe mansion cost us and it ran in the New York Times for the entire weekend alongside uh hundreds of other activists we
criticized Joe Mansion we said that he was dooming his own grandchildren and secretly unknowingly to us that Monday so this all happened over the weekend that Monday he went back to Senator Schumer and he said actually maybe we could still have a deal I was texted a press release 10 days later to a on on Joe mansion's website that said mansion reports the inflation reduction Act of 2022 and I said what the hell is the inflation reduction act they had been secretly negotiating in the basement an
d still got to yes on climate the amazing thing is that this bill will still cut carbon pollution by an estimated 40% below 2005 levels that gets us four fifths of the way to that goal that Sonia helped set in the white house it's still a transformational bill despite all the craft that Joe Manion put in it and despite all the things he cut out and so it was that in August 2022 the inflation reduction act got signed into law thank you so much I'm happy to take questions [Applause] now well Leah
thank you you so much for that thrilling um very exciting presentation um I'm left pretty hopeful actually which is not something you often have when it comes to um climate change that's why I wore the sweater it wasn't wasn't morning clothes that was going to be my next point was your sweater just really blew my socks off almost um so I'm interested in you know knowing a little bit more about what you learned um in this process of trying to get this transformational bill passed yeah you know I
was a political scientist I still am so it's not that I didn't know anything about how bills become a law but I wasn't actually an expert in the Congressional process you know Sam rickets who I mentioned he also had a child during the same period he's going to be someone else I write about in the book he worked for Senator Insley I'm sorry he worked for representative Insley at the time he served in Congress Insley before he became governor of Washington state and so he was a real real creature
of the Congress he' worked in the house he knew everybody he knew what the Energy natural resources committee was what the environment and Public Works resource committee was he knew how the House and Senate worked and so he really mentored me in many ways and taught me a lot of things over a really short period of time and you know that was that was a really big learning process for me and I feel that doing applied work even as academics can feed back into our academic work you know that it can
help sort of make the academic work that we do more living and more real and really reflect reality something that was really um interesting in your talk was this Paradigm Shift um and around Energy Efficiency and um we've had a question here about whether efficiency is relevant at all do you think there's still a place for that or do you think it's sort of obsolete given the necessary changes we need to make as a society well the good news is that the clean electric machines are the most effic
ient machines anyway if you look at the the efficiency of the most efficient gas furnace something I've spent far too much time uh thinking about it's like maybe 98% efficient if you look at the heat pump it's 400% efficient and so the movement to Electric machines is also the choice for the most efficient machine this isn't really a trade-off the point that I'm making when I critique Energy Efficiency is not that you know it's a bad idea that we shouldn't save energy or reduce our energy use bu
t the fixation on that to the exclusion of actual transformational change that moves us out of the fossil fuel-based Energy System is a distraction that I don't want an efficient gas machine anymore I want an electric machine and this Paradigm Shift really has been pushed of course by people like Saul Griffith who helped found rewiring America this organization that I'm part of which is really trying to help people understand that if they want to make individual Behavior changes for the climate
crisis the best thing they can do is buy electric machines get a heat pump get a heat pump hot water heater you know get an electric car those are the big changes that we actually have to make and on a similar vein do you think there's still a place for individual actions for recycling for the like should we still be doing those things or should we focus all our energy into like calling Congress Collective action I mean look I'm an environmentalist there's this like meme right now that's like of
course like I'm an environmentalist of course I'm G to compost you know this meme on the internet see I'm young and hip I know memes um so I mean look I compost I write bicycle um you know I do all those things but the point is that that isn't going to break the system it's not going to change the system it's great if you want to do that if that gives you meaning if it helps you act in line with your values but we should not confuse ourselves that that is going to get us where we need to go at
the pace and scale that's necessary and we should recognize that the people who want us to believe who want us to fixate on self- purification in our small little carbon footprint way that's that's the fossil fuel industry they'd like us to focus in in wordss rather than trying to actually disrupt the system because if we focus our energy on disrupting the system that would actually threaten them all of our purification self fixation it doesn't threaten them in the least that is why BP the fossi
l fuel company is the one that popularized the carbon footprint and so we've had this Paradigm Shift towards Collective action have has the fossil fuel industry had a similar Paradigm Shift what what are you seeing from their side to try and you know combat this in ways that we wouldn't normally think about they've always been organized they got the memo a lot faster than us um you know the American petroleum Institute the Global Climate Coalition uh the Global Climate Coalition of people don't
know was one of the uh denial organizations that operated throughout the 1990s that organized the industry to lie to all of us about climate change I didn't tell this story but the first time I heard about climate change I was in high school and I had this brilliant geography teacher and he presented climate change as a debate we didn't really know just because CO2 levels were going up and temperatures were going up does not mean that CO2 was causing temperatures to go up obviously that was when
I first learned about climate change why that wasn't an accident it wasn't something wrong with my teacher the fossil fuel industry literally wrote is still writing textbooks that deny the science of climate change they are putting these messages into society that confuse everyday people so they have been organized from the start and the question is can we get organized enough to oppose them um we've had some questions of wanting to know a little bit more about your background um someone was as
king beyond the failure of the Waxman Mary um Bill were there other moments before you worked on this major bill that really shaped your thinking about what was possible and what strategies would really work yeah so I mentioned this briefly I wrote this what I believe is a boring academic book it's called short circuiting policy the whole time I was writing it I was like no one will ever read this book this is a waste of my time I should be trying to change the world instead I'm writing a boring
academic book The Strange thing was that actually a lot of people read that book bizarrely became what is an academic bestseller and I think the reason why is because through the process of interviewing over a hundred people who had passed renewable portfolio standards clean electricity standards net metering laws at the state level what I was trying to do was understand how do we change policies what does that actually look like I have this crazy schematic diagram from that book which shows ho
w we can use public opinion to change the laws how we can use the media to change the laws how we can use the courts and so those same strategies that I often saw our opponents using to try to roll back clean energy laws I I started to think about how we could use them to try to pass clean clean energy laws and that's for example why I was so adamant that we needed to have everyday people calling Congress because we needed Congress to believe that everyday people cared about climate change that'
s why I did so many media interviews because we needed as much coverage of climate change in the media as possible we needed people to believe that this was something that people wanted and of course that's true people do want climate action but we have to make that visible to politicians and that was something I really learned when I was researching my first book and do you think that that I mean you sort of answered this but do you think that you know even when there's maybe not a bill on the
table is it worth us as constituents writing to our Senator calling our congressman and really pushing this issue onto their agenda absolutely so I'm going to be giving a talk in the gov Department the political science department at Harvard uh I don't know two weeks from now or something and I'm presenting this other paper that I'm writing with a bunch of colleagues David Brockman Alex hurdle Fernandez my student Olivia Quinn and mat mildenberger and uh what we did it's really cool paper is we
got data from Congress about who contacts Congress this is data that nobody's ever seen before right it's kind of a black box you know that people are calling about you know ceasefire or they're calling about um you know January 6th or whatever you know that's happening but you never get to see it right we never we never can see inside the black box of what happens in Congress but with this paper we partnered with one of the software providers and they gave us the anonymous data so we could see
on aggregate what are people talking about and we have it over four years and what we see is that and and I really I was just watching representative um Alexandri OK kazio Cortez doing like her Instagram live which you should just always watch if you want to be inspired she's so brilliant and just says brilliant things but she was just saying like hey guys you need to have sustained pressure keep calling keep writing because what we really see in the data from that paper is that there's a spike
around like a news event or an event and then it really Trails off and if we want Congress to act we want them to do things we have to have sustained ongoing pressure and so yes it's not just one and done calling Congress you can call Congress every day if you want they'll put you on a frequent fly list I think is the name for it but that that contact really does shape how um members of Congress understand what their constituents want and so you're here at Radcliffe working on this book it's goi
ng to be amazing we can't wait to read it um but some of our viewers want to know if you're working on any other policy measures at the moment um and and what's next for you um besides the book on a policy front yeah I feel like I cursed myself a little bit although it's really just the world it wasn't me when I wrote my first first book one of the big arguments that I made was that we don't really know what laws are until they're implemented I have this concept called the fog of enactment which
is this idea that when we pass the law like there's a lot of uncertainty and we don't know what the consequences are going to be and that's because it's during implementation that a lot of the details get worked out and so unfortunately or fortunately the activism never ends and I'm still working with a large number of environmental groups um primarily rewiring America but other groups too to make sure that the law is implemented well for example on Monday There's a comment deadline for this th
ing called 45v if you want to do policy you really start have to get into alphabet number soup where you need tax code 25c 25d I don't know this is not like a very compelling rap song or something but 45d comments are due on Monday it's for the hydrogen rules why does this matter there's a really lucrative tax credit in the inflation reduction act which helps produce hydrogen theoretically this could help decarbonize parts of heavy industry but if it's not done properly it could actually prop up
coal plants and gas plants in the electricity sector and so alongside amazing work primarily by the natural resources defense Council people like my friend Sam Kau and Rachel fakery you know they're doing a lot to try to pressure the Biden Administration to make tight rules and that the Draft rules are pretty tight they did a good job but the problem is the industry is trying to fight them they're saying that they want those rules to be weak and the issue with the movement is that we focus so m
uch on passing the law if we're lucky if we actually do that but that we struggle to keep that moment momentum going during implementation and if we don't stay in the fight the the organized interests will be there and they will do things that don't actually further our goals so you know that's one of the things that I'm still working on to try to make sure that this law can make as much carbon um pollution Cuts as possible and just um one final question you know sometimes it can feel really ove
rwhelming to deal with the climate crisis and everything we see going on right now what is it that gives you hope to keep going ah the most common question is what can I do when what gives you help those are the ones I already told you what you can do electrify electrify electrify um also organize organize organize um I feel like every tenth of a degree matters this is something that the scientist Katherine heho talks about a lot uh climate change is not as Rob verik our wonderful fellow fellow
said it's not a past fail exam what we do now will change the future and I think too many people think the story is already written it's not we we didn't already do the pollution in 2050 we're still here in 2024 we still have time on the clock now is it getting tight is the game looking a little stressful yes and I'm very bad at sports metaphor so I should stop with that as soon as possible um but the point is that the future is not yet written and what we do now can change that and so I feel th
at staying involved in activism and doing what I can to try to change the future gives me hope because it gives me a sense of agency what we call self-efficacy right maybe perceived control which is funny way of saying it right it gives me a maybe false sense that I can do something about it and I think that that is what allows me to keep my eye on the prize because every every tenth of a degree that we cut makes a huge difference for literally billions of people around the world let alone all t
he other organisms like the frogs for example well on that note um we've run out of time so I'm going to leave it there but thank you so much Leah for your wonderful presentation and thank you to the audience for your questions yay good job Oscar
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