During an interview with NPR released on Thursday, White House Deputy National Climate Adviser Ali Zaidi said that even if climate executive orders by the Biden administration are struck down by the courts, they end up pushing the industry and cited rules in the Obama administration that met their targets even though they were stayed by the Supreme Court and said that Biden wants orders that “make irreversible progress.”
NPR White House Correspondent Asma Khalid asked, [relevant remarks begin around 3:10] “So, Ali, do you see room for more executive action? And I guess I’m also wanting to understand your political sense of that because I do think there are folks who will say, look, some of the efforts made by President Obama some years ago were ultimately undone by conservative courts.”
Zaidi responded, “Well, here’s what I’d say about some of the initiatives under the prior administration, the methane emissions standards…that got rolled back, but the industry moved in the right direction. There’s a lot more work to be done, which is why we’ve already proposed new methane rules that go above and beyond anything that was done in the Obama administration. And the industry, and frankly, the workers have been largely supportive of making these investments to bend down methane emissions.”
Khalid then asked, “So, if I’m understanding you correctly, you’re almost saying that even if ultimately courts decide to perhaps rescind some of these executive actions, by putting forth an executive order, it pushes the industry?”
Zaidi answered, “Yeah. The power plant rules that Obama set up got stayed by the Supreme Court, they got rolled back by the Trump administration, we’ve already met those targets ahead of schedule, relative to what was set in the regulations. So, I do think there’s an incredible ability to drive change in the marketplace by setting robust, rigorous standards that reflect where we think the market can go. And I think the market can go faster and faster because of the investments we’re plowing in now.”
Later, Khalid asked, “I want to ask you, though, about how durable you think some of these achievements are. Because let’s walk through kind of a worst-case scenario here…say Democrats lose the House and the Senate, right? Let’s fast-forward and even say a Republican president is sworn in in 2025, more conservative judges and justices are confirmed. How durable are the achievements that you are putting into place now that you think that they will be able to withstand all of that?”
Zaidi responded, “So, this is a great question because this is the question the president asked his campaign team, that he asked us when we walked into the White House, he asked us this every step of the way. And he’s got a term for it, he says, I want to make irreversible progress. And here’s what I think that means, when a company decides — a car company, they decide they want to produce electric vehicles, they set up, essentially, the factory for six to eight years to produce that kind of vehicle, right? So, they haven’t made a bet on the conviction of a year of good policy in Washington. They’ve now put steel in the ground that will require them to produce a certain type of thing for the next six to eight years. … And then, on the deployment side, one in seven of the clean electrons that are floating around on the grid today, one in seven, there are about 60 million homes’ worth of clean electricity on the grid, one in seven of that was installed during the Biden administration, just in the first 18 months or so. We’re about to double or triple the pace of clean electricity deployment. … If we’re deploying at that pace, we’re going to be in a place, within a few years, where a preponderance of the grid is powered by clean electricity. No one’s going back and taking solar panels and wind turbines out of the ground and replacing it with dirty energy.”
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
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