As the top climate adviser to President Joe Biden, Ali Zaidi has helped make ideas that were once draft documents on his laptop become part of the biggest climate action the U.S. has ever taken.
The climate-related regulations and legislation the president and congressional Democrats put in place have significantly cut carbon pollution while unleashing clean technology investments that could transform major American industries.
Zaidi helped carry out Biden’s vision of climate action that leans into the economic benefits of a clean-energy transition, breaking the old stalemate of jobs versus the environment.
“In so many places that have seen economic opportunity go away in the last several decades, we’ve created economic revival,” Zaidi told Newsweek in an extended interview during his last week in the administration. “The question is, will we sustain it for decades to come?”
Climate adviser Ali Zaidi at a White House press briefing last January. Zaidi said President Joe Biden’s policies spread the benefits of clean energy “to every ZIP code.”
Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images
The incoming administration of President-elect Donald Trump aims to undo many of Biden’s climate actions and instead focus on fossil fuel development.
In this conversation, edited for length, Zaidi spoke about the policies he worked on that might stand, and whether clean energy and climate action can become a more bipartisan effort.
Newsweek: When we last spoke, before the election, you said you felt the nation’s climate and energy future was at “a fragile inflection point.” What’s your view of that now?
Ali Zaidi: The United States is positioned to continue to deploy clean energy and continue to decarbonize the economy. The big question for the country is where will be the factory floors that source the technologies that are deployed here and around the world?
In a way, we’ve achieved escape velocity on parts of the climate journey. The shift to cleaner, cheaper, more reliable power on the grid—I think that is a secular and sustained trend in the power sector. The shift toward vehicles that can get from point A to point B in a more cost-effective way and without putting pollution into the sky—I think that is a secular and sustained trajectory.
The question becomes who will be the leader—from a manufacturing perspective, from a geopolitical perspective—in shaping this clean-energy future around the world? And I think that very much remains at an inflection point that can break a bunch of different ways.
How much of what President Biden and his team, including you, achieved on clean energy and climate action do you think will stand in the coming four years? What parts do you think are most at risk from an administration that has said it wants to unwind many of these policies?
Look, the demand for electricity on the grid is burgeoning in a way that it hasn’t in several decades. It returns us to the growth that we saw for most of the decades after World War II. We need to be able to harness all sources of energy and, frankly, technologies like solar and wind and batteries, nuclear power being built out on the grid in some cases, are the fastest, safest, cleanest bet for meeting this demand. So, I think there are interlocking aspects to what remains a pretty irresistible set of economics, especially in the electricity sector, especially in the transportation sector.
I think there are a few places, if you take a look across the economy, where there’s more of a fragile ecosystem. Think about another transition that’s taking place, the industrial sector—steel, cement, aluminum—these industries that, on their own, would be a G20 country in terms of emissions. There’s a race underway around the world, and the Europeans and others have plowed a lot of not just resources, but prioritization, in being the leaders on the next sort of revolution in industrial technologies.
For the U.S., we’ve made a big investment and decision to prioritize that over the last several years, most vividly demonstrated by the grantees that received about $7 billion from the Department of Energy for everything from making more efficient Kraft macaroni and cheese to setting up our steel plants to lead the world.
That’s also very fragile because we’re in very early innings. There are some places where we’ve achieved what I described earlier, this sort of escape velocity, where the Biden administration put booster packs on the rocket and it took off. In other places, unfortunately, we built the launchpad, but it’s going to take a little bit more work, and if we don’t, we get left behind.
You and your colleagues have not just been packing up the office to leave since the election. We’ve seen a flurry of action. Is this an attempt to, I think the phrase is, “Trump-proof” some of this action?
This is an effort to make sure that the most people in the most places across the country feel the benefits of the investments and the standards that the president and vice president were working to advance for four years.
If you think about it, the period of time you describe is a meaningful period of time, even in the totality of an administration, to try to get stuff done. And that’s exactly what we’ve been doing, sprinting through the finish line.
What’s been remarkable is the pace of implementation of some of the legislative efforts we’ve done. What was once a Google Doc on my computer in the summer of 2020, when the president was running, then became legislative text that [then-Senate Majority Leader Chuck] Schumer and Speaker Pelosi, in partnership with the president and vice president, were able to get across the finish line.
People say, “You guys got this big clean-energy tax credit done in the last few weeks.” Well, that’s years in the making. You know, we propose those rules and then we finalize them.
So, all of this work is the product of long, deliberate sustained effort. In many cases, the baton passes from one administration to the next, Democrat to Republican. And we’re passing the baton forward, and I, personally, will be rooting for the success of the United States of America and folks who are suiting up to serve our country and lift up Americans into economic opportunity into the middle class.
I’m wondering why, you think, that Vice President Harris did not realize more electoral benefit from what is objectively historic climate action? Why didn’t that show up at the ballot box more than it did?
I think issues of climate security were just not as prominent in the conversation this fall. And there are a lot of factors that go into that that, at least currently, I don’t have license to get into.
What I do think, what I take away from this election is there’s incredible appetite around the country to continue bringing economic opportunity back to ZIP codes where we’ve seen that stripped away from them over the last several decades.
And to me, our work on climate has been articulated into a playbook that is very responsive to that question. A global problem that was decades in the making is now being addressed by investments that are delivering local benefits, and that’s a paradigm shift that I think will continue over the long run.
But I don’t think that climate was on the ballot in 2024. There was no referendum on this set of policies.
It did seem to me that the vice president was pretty quiet on this issue during her campaign. Should she have campaigned harder on this, given the achievements they had to brag about?
I think there’s a lot of eyeballs putting [the campaign] under the microscope, and a lot of hot takes on the 2024 cycle. I remain covered by the Hatch Act, and so… [Note: The Hatch Act prohibits most federal employees from engaging in partisan political activity in their official capacity.]
I’ll ask you again in a week. How’s that?
Yeah, another week. [Laughs] But, I think a central thread in our climate work has been this focus on investing in America and expanding economic opportunity, and I think both the president and vice president have been outspoken about the benefits and the case for investing in America.
One of the interesting phenomena is where the investment went, especially from the Inflation Reduction Act—a lot of it landed in red states. Easily more than half of that was going into congressional districts where the representative is a Republican. Do you think that points to the possibility for more bipartisan agreement on these issues, or will it remain as polarized as we’ve seen it recently?
The long arc on the political economy of investing in clean energy and climate security points upward. What was a partisan, party-line vote to pass the Inflation Reduction Act has given way to a bipartisan implementation effort.
I’ve sat on the stage with [Republican] Governor Stitt and Governor Holcomb from Oklahoma and from Indiana. I’ve been to the state of Georgia and celebrated these projects with a Republican administration on the ground.
You know what I think is remarkable about the transformation over the last four years? It’s that we’ve gone from climate change impacting you no matter your ZIP code—and that’s really been punctuated in recent months—to a new paradigm where the atlas of opportunity from the clean-energy economy reaches every ZIP code as well.
So, I think that every time the steel goes in the ground, we get closer and closer to a consensus in Washington that we’ve got to keep accelerating in this direction.
And, you know, Washington has lagged the rest of the country on this. Both sides of Pennsylvania Avenue have lagged Main Street in coming to terms with both the scale of the challenge and the scale of the opportunity.
I think we’re going to keep catching up, and hopefully, keep stepping up to do the right thing.
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