Hyperscalers are driving the largest infrastructure investment cycle in recent memory. They need more energy to power their data centers, and they want it fast. Between 2024 and 2028, energy use from data centers is expected to triple. The problem, as I see it, is twofold: our nation’s grid infrastructure can’t deliver the power these technology companies need. Voters are nervous (and increasingly pissed) about what these data centers will mean for their utility bills.
So what should states do about it? One camp of thought says “just say no!” and implement a moratorium on data center construction. Jane Flegal, a Senior Fellow at Searchlight and former Senior Director for Industrial Emissions in the Biden Administration, has published two recent reports that point policymakers to a more positive-sum outcome.
First, the American Grid Infrastructure Fund — a dedicated federal funding vehicle to finance and coordinate grid investment at scale. The second proposes criteria to ensure the hyperscalers are good “grid citizens” that are held accountable for the energy they use.
I recently sat down with Jane to talk about her reports. We dive into the details of her proposals, identify how policymakers can build a political coalition to support them, and discuss why it’s so important that we capitalize on this historic moment to modernize and decarbonize our grid.
I really want to emphasize that last point. If we continue to let data centers build without concrete strings attached, we’re locking in more fossil fuel infrastructure and inevitably creating more public opposition. But if we just close our eyes, plug our ears, and tell the data centers to go away, we will lose out on an unprecedented investment opportunity.
And our grid needs this investment. Most of our grid hasn’t been updated for over half a century. A cleaner and more prosperous future requires a substantially larger grid and much greater transmission capacity. We need to seize the moment and think much bigger.
Below is a transcript of the conversation that has been lightly edited for clarity.
Danielle Deiseroth: Hi, my name is Danielle Deiseroth. I’m the chief of staff here at the Searchlight Institute, and today I’m joined by our senior fellow, Jane Flegal, to talk about climate, energy, data centers, and all of her recent work.
Just to start off, I would love to hear you talk a little bit about your recent paper that you wrote for Searchlight about state tax abatement and how state legislators can leverage this moment to really take advantage of this opportunity to build more grid infrastructure.
Jane Flegal: So, taking a step back, I feel like everyone who works on climate and clean energy right now is talking almost exclusively about the data center build out, which is sort of funny because none of us even considered that this would be a thing we’d be talking about even a few years ago. So it is remarkable how quickly the terrain changes. I think for me, I have felt from the kind of early days of this massive projected build out a couple of things. One, as someone who spent my whole career focused on climate change, and I know you know this, the projections for how much electricity generation and infrastructure we have to build in the US and globally, so that we can electrify other sectors of the economy, like transportation and industry, is really kind of an unfathomable scale.
It’s one thing to look at these models and say we have to 5x the grid by 2050 or whatever. But in truth, I think very few of us really seriously grappled with how significant that the challenge of infrastructure investment was going to be. Costa Samaras actually has a really good piece about the need to think about decarbonization as mega project for the Roosevelt Institute, which I’d recommend. But in any case, that was one thing, as we saw all this surging demand for data centers. I was kind of like, okay, on the one hand, this feels sort of scary. On the other hand, our own projections for climate infrastructure build out were at this scale, just not at this pace.
So, perhaps there’s an opportunity here. The second thing was more political, which is to say, for a long time, particularly on transmission and the grid, it’s been very difficult to build a political coalition capable of getting the kind of large scale planning and permitting and financing for the electricity grid that we need, in part, because there’s been pretty concentrated political opposition to a larger role in grid planning and permitting from some states and some utilities.
So one of the things that I thought was interesting about the moment of data center demand was now we may have a slightly different political coalition capable of advocating for grid policy at scale. The data centers are obviously really invested in an electricity system that can actually serve their demand, and if we can use their political power to counter the sort of historical opposition from utilities and states it might be a real opportunity to do something big. That was my overarching frame, rather than just saying yes or no to the data centers, which is a fight I don’t want to get into. I think the question is how do you leverage the build out that is already happening to try to get the investments in clean energy infrastructure that we know that we’re going to need.
I’ve written a little bit about more federal interventions, but so much of the action on electricity governance happens in states. These governors specifically have really been grappling with some tough political tensions around data centers. On the one hand, there is often an imperative, or a perceived imperative, to draw these investments to the states the governors are in charge of, for reasons of economic growth, not for jobs necessarily, but for tax revenue, for sure. There’s countervailing pressure now, because there’s so much opposition to data centers, kind of across the board. For a long time, there have been these tax abatements for data centers to attract data center developers to any given state. Now, we’re in this moment where I think historically the governors were kind of in a race to the bottom around who can give the most generous tax benefits. So that the data centers come there. I do think that is starting to shift, just because public opposition to the data centers has become so fierce.
So I think a lot of these governors, you see Spanberger grappling with this, you see others grappling with this, are in a situation where their legislatures are kind of like either ban data centers altogether or get rid of the tax breaks altogether. On the other hand, there are people, particularly in rural communities, who are often quite supportive of the data centers, so it’s kind of this weird political situation. An idea that I had was that rather than kind of yes no tax abatements, could you think about helping governors solve this political problem while driving investment in the grid by saying data centers are welcome in our states and can get X tax benefit if and only if they agree to abide by a certain set of conditions that I talk about as being kind of good grid citizens.
I think the reason that matters is that I feel like the public does not have a good understanding, for good and fair reasons, of what the agreement is between data centers and utilities and governments about who’s getting and who’s giving what. It all feels very opaque and kind of buried in these rate cases at utilities. So I think if you have legislatures or governors kind of articulating this is what the deal is. If you come here, for instance, you have to be able to flex your demand for electricity at given times, or you have to contribute to a fund to reduce the financing costs of transmission infrastructure, or you have to pay for the costs that your new demand causes on the grid. Just kind of clarifying what that contract looks like at a political level, rather than letting it get negotiated bilaterally, felt like it might be useful. So that’s the idea behind it. I do think there are definitely challenges. This issue around the race to the bottom is a real thing, and so I think the state conditionality frameworks works best if you could get kind of an interstate compact, where several states, where there’s a lot of data center development, agree to this. But I don’t think that’s impossible, given how much controversy there is about this stuff now.
Danielle: I would love to talk a little bit about what’s at stake, because what you said earlier, instead of saying yes or no, there’s so many data centers that are already under construction right now or are in the pipeline, and because of the patchwork of states legislating on data centers in different ways, there’s real variability in whether clean energy gets built or perhaps behind the meter gas gets built to power these data centers instead. So, do you want to say a little bit more about what could happen if we do this well? What’s at risk?
Jane: There is this, why does this matter piece to it. My bias coming into this was because I am interested in advancing electrification for climate. For me, the obvious ask of these companies was to invest in and build a public grid that benefits everyone. Help us do the clean energy and grid expansion that the world needs for economic growth and climate. Which is a different question than just how do you meet this very near term demand from data centers, right?
f you’re just asking the latter, you can roll up a bunch of diesel gen sets to some poor neighborhood and power your data center, which I think would be a very suboptimal outcome, not just because discretely you’re losing the potential upside of having the hyper scalers actually help us address the grid problems that got us to this point in the first place. But also, there are very serious pollution impacts associated with some of the behind the meter gas stuff, particularly because of the technologies that are being used at the moment.
I do think there’s some misunderstanding about how bad the behind the meter gas strategy is. Some people would argue that my view of this is a little rosy eyed or naive, but I think the truth is that we as a country should never be in a situation ever again where our electricity system is so sclerotic and broken, that we can’t meet demand to cleanly power growth. We should all be kind of embarrassed about that, and that is the case right now. The problem is we have demand and we don’t have enough supply and infrastructure to meet that demand, so I view to a large extent the build out of the behind the meter gas as a symptom of our decadal failure to invest in the grid.
This is what happens, and I think it is also true that some behind the meter generation is inevitable. Both because it takes way, way too long to plan, build, and interconnect demand and generation, and all of these companies are motivated by speed to power, meaning they want to get electricity as fast as possible. And right now we have a system that takes seven plus years to connect to the grid, so that’s not going to be workable for these companies. There’s kind of the speed to power argument for behind the meter thing, and then I think there are some other arguments that given the scale of the demand, they were probably always going to have some form of backup power. So there would be a rationale for some behind the meter stuff. Even if they were all fully grid connected, and what we’re seeing now is a hybrid: partial behind the meter, but not fully isolated from the grid. A plan to connect in the future, which I think is interesting.
I think the climate community is quite freaked out about the build out of gas to meet this moment, and and I understand that anxiety. I will say that my view on this is that the way to deal with this is to build so much cheap clean energy over the next few years that these gas plants run at very low capacity factor, so that they exist and they’re helping us manage peak demand, but they’re not running all the time, and dumping Co2 in the atmosphere. But that requires us to fix our permitting system, so we can actually build all this clean energy.
Danielle: That requires us to pass permitting reform once and for all. I know you talked about this at the federal level as well, and some of your other work for Searchlight, and that is a core component that predicates everything else that you would propose. So I would love to hear a little bit more about some of the other federal solutions that go along with permitting reform.
Jane: I’m glad people are finally talking about permitting reform, and on the other hand, there are other tools as well. We do absolutely need to pass permitting reform, and I think a piece of a permitting deal is reforming the Federal Power Act, which governs how we plan inter regional transmission. But there’s lots of other things. So you know one thing that I kind of think is worth drawing out here is that, your polling points this out, everyone’s obsessed with affordability right now. I don’t want to become post affordability, because I understand that these are real concerns that people have. On the other hand, I think we need to be candid about the challenges of cramming all of our domestic energy policy through an affordability frame, especially if affordability is measured in capping or reducing rates in the next two years.
The truth is, there’s a very limited tool set to do that. But there are things that we can do. What are the things we can do that meet the dual imperatives of fixing the structural issues with our energy system and enhancing supply and creating a situation where we have enough energy to power growth, while also containing costs as much as we can. Not just contain the cost, but have a conversation about who should pay those costs, because so much of our current system for building out the electricity grid is very much dependent on placing those costs on the back of ratepayers, which is a really regressive way to fund nationally important infrastructure. Because as you know, we all get charged the same electricity rate, which is independent of our income, so it’s just not a progressive way to fund shared infrastructure. It’s also like not how we do it with highways or lots of other nationally important shared infrastructure.
That’s one thing about affordability. But the other thing I’ll say is that there are tools that can help reduce the costs of building new infrastructure today. What I don’t think we should do is say we are not going to build new infrastructure, because if we defer the investment that we need, we will end up in this exact same situation over and over and over again. That’s one thing that worries me a bit about rate freezes, or whatever. This will defer investment that we need to have, unless you figure out a way for it not to. But I think some of those ideas are a little overly cute.
Anyway, some of the federal tools. One is using federal financing for large clean energy generation and grid projects of various kinds, and the Trump Administration is doing some amount of this, and it’s certainly a set of tools that we used aggressively in the Biden administration.
Things like using the Department of Energy’s loan guarantee program, which is now called Energy Dominance Fund — same set of tools basically, it’s to reduce the cost of capital to build these projects that we know we need to build. The other is that parts of the Inflation Reduction Act were retained, including clean energy tax credits for some of the clean firm technologies we need. And by clean firm, I mean clean energy technologies that can be dispatched or used whenever they’re needed, irrespective of the weather. So that’s things like nuclear or geothermal or maybe gas with CCS, and I think part of what this moment is revealing is that despite my absolute optimism about solar, wind, and batteries. There are parts of decarbonizing our system that are going to require clean firm power, that’s what’s going to compete with gas. So again, if we end up with new gas plants because of behind the meter generation or on grid generation for data centers, the solution is to out compete those technologies. We really need investments in clean firms, and those federal tax credits exist, as does some demonstration funding.
So, those are just a couple of things that I think are really important. Maybe the last thing is that I mentioned Federal Power Act reform, but I think there probably is space and a need to have a much more ambitious conversation about what the federal government should be doing on the grid. We have this very fragmented jurisdictional patchwork of states and regional transmission offices and organizations, and then the federal government. I think if you look at the system we have today for building out the poles and wires that give us the foundation of the American economy, we would be like, why would anyone design it this way? This is crazy. So, I think, in part, because of the data center conversation, I think there’s the political space to ask some really fundamental questions about what should the federal role be in building a grid for growth that is funded progressively.
Danielle: So what I’m hearing from you is that it’s sort of a perfect storm, right? You have incentives for the data centers to be built quickly. You have very rapidly rising public opposition to these data centers. You have governors who have political problems dealing with all of this. And you have a federal government that has not only affordability concerns, but also national security. This is like the window to really get all these disparate parties in the room to come to some sort of positive outcome for everyone.
Jane: Totally. The Trump administration announced the rate payer protection pledge. It’s just totally toothless, and in a way, they were sort of on the right track of, we need a better contract between the public and these data center companies and utilities as it relates to meeting these challenges. So I think we need more big ideas, and there is a tendency on grid and electricity system issues to get so complicated and it’s so technical. Someone said, I think it was Robinson Meyer, like these people have their own language.
It makes it hard for policymakers, because when I would go around and ask people what should we do about this, I think there’s a reluctance to float big ideas, in part, because no one wants to be seen as dumb. I, on the other hand, I’m very happy to put myself out there. But we can’t let the complexity of this hamstring our ability to do the right things, so we’re going to have to. It’s a perfect storm in a lot of ways, there’s a lot of potential downside risk, but I do think there’s a lot of potential upside if we can figure out how to navigate it right.
Danielle: The one thing that I’ve seen in polling here and from other pollsters too is that transmission is also sort of this Goldilocks, like when you ask people in a poll, what do you think about clean energy, what do you think about fossil fuels, you see a lot of partisan divides in the way that you might expect, and maybe it’s because people aren’t really sure about transmission in the same way. But all that’s to say, there is, at least in polling, bipartisan support for building out transmission. So you really could see bipartisanship with this.
Jane: It’s like a totally technology agnostic vehicle to move electricity around. It doesn’t discriminate based on whether you’re moving electricity from a nuclear plant or a coal plant. We should all be invested in having a grid that works. It’s kind of crazy. I do worry a lot about the risk of it getting caught up in the political culture wars, but I’m very happy that for now that doesn’t seem to be the case.
I think the downside is I don’t think the NIMBYism that you would encounter around all kinds of built infrastructure you definitely see with actual transmission infrastructure. So whereas for me it’s like upside, we want public investment for the grid. On the other hand, it’s sort of like taking a data center and coupling it with a giant transmission line might be like better for society as a whole, but it could really inflame local opposition, you know? I’m not sure it helps with local opposition. So, that I think is a real challenge. It’s part of the reason I think we need more centralized and effective permitting reform, because I don’t know how we’re gonna bottom up our way through building the stuff we need.
Danielle: And it’s about, I think, communicating fairness. You talked about this. Who is the person who is paying for this, and how can we clearly communicate the benefits of what working families can see from all of this build out? Maybe do some education about transmission and our aging grid, and the broader imperatives about affordability and economic development too. It’s just, it does seem like there’s a lot of potential education that could be happening here too.
Jane: Totally, and I should say, the Trump administration has taken a bunch of actions that have made all of this much, much worse. So in some cases it’s like, okay, they’re doing pretty muscular industrial policy on big nuclear projects. That’s cool, and like the ratepayer protection pledge is at least kind of scratching at something that is real. But, the vast majority of the actions, whether it’s weaponizing the permitting regime to go after our cheapest forms of energy to deploy today, or you know, doing everything you can to make it impossible for companies to utilize the tax credits for clean energy, the tariffs — all of these things are definitely making what would already be an affordability crisis for electricity much worse, not better.
Danielle: They say energy dominance, but their actions are not necessarily speaking to that.
Jane: I think this is another potential political opportunity for Democrats, because I think, whether it’s fair or not, for a long time I think the Democratic Party has been viewed as not particularly in favor of something we would call energy dominance. Rather much more concerned with the pollution effects of energy and reducing demand for energy and advancing efficiency and picking only a few technologies that we like, like solar and wind, but doing everything we can to obstruct gas.
Now, it is the Republicans who are picking and choosing what they like and don’t like in the energy system, often in really kind of economically irrational ways, and so Democrats now have a real opportunity to juxtapose our agenda with Republicans. We are the party of energy dominance. We are the party that actually wants to build everything as fast as we can and isn’t going to discriminate based on technology choice.
That would obviously be a pretty significant pivot from where the party has been in the past, but I do think, in that frame, clean energy is really positioned to win, and that just wasn’t the case, even like four years ago. The cost declines in clean energy technologies have just been really incredible. Again, it’s horrible what is happening, and I think there is a potential for political upside.
Danielle: Hypothetically, if Democrats would win back Congress and the presidency in 2028 and they walk into the Department of Energy on day one, they’re going to have some really tough opposition from within their own party to say we got to swing the pendulum completely back, and take advantage of the precedent that the Trump administration has set to pick winners and losers. Democrats are going to have to really shift their positioning.
Jane: You see it even in the permitting fight today. People are mad, and I understand why they’re mad. But, at some point we have to kind of pick our heads up and say, okay, if Democrats win in 2028, I would assume that they would want to hit the ground running. And that means doing permitting reform before then. Also some of the pieces of a permitting bill that are being discussed right now are about permitting certainty and constraining the discretion of the executive branch. Which is the only way to stop what’s currently happening.
So, even though we’re mad and there’s kind of a don’t negotiate with your enemies vibe right now, I think that’s really short sighted, because A.) permitting reform is the only actual solution to that problem. And B.) I think Democrats really need to have permitting reform in place if and when they take power and want to advance their agenda. So, it’ll be interesting to see how it plays out. So much about climate and energy discourse and policy and macroeconomics have changed, and economics have changed in the last few years. It’s going to be really interesting to see what happens next.
Danielle: In large part, thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act. You worked in the Biden White House, and were instrumental in helping to pass that legislation, and I am really just such a fan of how you describe your theory of change behind the IRA. I’m an eternal optimist, especially when it comes to climate change. I firmly believe we are going to mitigate the worst impacts of climate change. We know what we need to do, and the green spiral that — capital has invested in these technologies because of the IRA technologies getting better and cheaper. I sort of look at that as like a bulwark against even what the administration is doing, and Democrats need to remember what we did and what we set off and not forget that if they win again in 2028.
Jane: Yeah, I think that’s right. And Nina Kelsey is the academic who first wrote about the green spiral. I am very inspired by it, and I think there is often a lot of confusion about what the theory of change underpinning the Inflation Reduction Act was and wasn’t, and confusion about whether it was a failure. I think there was some confusion about whether what we were trying to do was deliver kind of charismatic projects to local communities to build broad-based political support for Democrats. Like was it an electoral strategy based on charismatic projects, or was it really the more green spiral approach?
The only way you’re going to get the changes you need is to drag a part of capital with you. By investing in these clean energy industries and making them not just marginal, but powerful, serious actors, you would help shift the political economy of climate action and create a loop where there’s an incentive for vested interests to want more ambitious climate over time.
That feels like a slightly different theory than what most people, I think, would describe the Green New Deal theory as. They are related to one another. But, they’re different in important ways.
When Democrats lost the election, I’m not an optimist, so I was like, everything that we just worked for is going to be gone. As a result, I was sort of positively surprised when much of the Inflation Reduction Act stayed in place, actually. Especially because Trump was like “repeal the green new scam.” I mean, that’s what he called for, and Republicans protected pieces of that bill. I think that the explanation for that is some combination of a small set of stakeholders really building important relationships with those offices over time, and that work is really underfunded in philanthropy in my view, but that’s one piece of it. The other one is we had industry interests and sort of moneyed interests advocating to keep these things in place. I think what I underestimated was just how much cultural polarization there would be on like solar and wind, in particular. There’s sort of like irrational disdain for those technologies.
Danielle: Trump thinks windmills kill birds, and hates them.
Jane: They hate them. I had underrated the effectiveness of that fierce cultural opposition to technology. There’s probably more that we can learn there about why we don’t want to repeat these things.
The reason the green spiral is important in my view is that climate is not like almost any other public policy problem where it’s like okay we know we need to pass X healthcare policy, and we’re gonna pass it next year, and then we have fixed the health care system. Climate change is a multi decadal problem that we’re gonna have to manage for a very long time, both in terms of emissions reductions — even if the IRA had been maintained in full it would not have gotten the world to net zero emissions, it wouldn’t really have even come close. We’re going to have to keep coming back and coming back, both on emissions reductions, but also on adaptation and resilience, as we experience impacts of climate change. So, this idea that you actually do need a durable politics for climate action, I think, is in some ways quite unique to climate, actually, and more important than it may even be in other areas. I’m optimistic that we can metabolize that and continue to make progress in that way.
Danielle: There’s analogs to the data center grid policy, as well. You have capital, you have legislators. There could be this opportunity to forge a durable coalition to result in positive outcomes for everybody. But, there’s been a lot of talk about quiet climate policy and climate hushing, and whether this more sort of behind the scenes coalition building can result in more durable policy if we’re not going out in front of voters and just saying climate, climate, climate all the time when it is polarizing to a lot of voters out there.
As someone who was very close to the messaging development around the IRA, I think that was the lesson that I took away from it all, is that I did underestimate the cultural backlash.
Jane: Yeah, the climate hushing thing. One thing about my theory of change that transcends a bunch of this stuff is that I really believe in policy sequencing. I do not think that anyone would argue that it is good electoral advice to Democrats or Republicans today to make climate action the tip of the spear in your election. Everyone knows that is true, like anyone who’s saying that it’s not true is lying.
On the other hand, I’m not convinced that you can never talk about climate. It really is quite context dependent, and also I don’t think it means that that will be the case forever. That’s part of the kind of green spiral theory — not only are you building these concentrated economic interests who stand to benefit from more aggressive climate action over time, but you’re also investing in technologies to bring them down the cost curve, making it cheaper to take climate action for everyone. The notion is, if you can reduce the marginal unit of political will that is required to overcome cost barriers for climate action, you will be in a much better space politically, because you’re not asking people to make sacrifices in the name of a global invisible gas.
Even though I know it has horrible consequences for humans and ecosystems all over the planet, it is just hard because it’s a global invisible gas, and a lot of the worst impacts are feared in the future. So, we should be honest that climate hushing may be a near-term tactical requirement, and I think that in some ways it is, and we are not going to get the entire global economy to net zero by never talking about climate change. Over time our analysis of this stuff needs to evolve, but I think in this moment, yeah, it’s just there’s a lot of progress that we can still make without leading with climate,
Danielle: Shifting gears a little bit, you keep saying the term net zero, and there has been a lot of discussion about climate targets. A lot of the Green New Deal discussion was really set off by the IPCC report, which was now like quite a few years ago. But setting global climate targets and certain metrics and barriers that we need to hit by a certain timeline to mitigate the worst effects of climate change. So, what do you think about those types of measurements and metrics? Do you think that that’s still the right way to be viewing emissions reductions in 2026?
Jane: Yeah, this is such an interesting question. I do think some of the targets and timelines have been very bad for climate action and climate politics. First of all, there’s this kind of false scientism that they imply, which just isn’t true, like it is not true that if we don’t get to net zero by 2030 we will, the world will fall off a cliff, like that’s not going to happen.
And so, as a scientific matter, some of the targets and timelines were just not correct, and so that in and of itself is kind of a problem. It freaked everyone out, and was not scientifically credible. It certainly is true that every 10th of a degree of temperature warming matters, and so we should avoid as much of it as possible, but it’s not a cliff from which we fall, so that’s kind of one thing. The other thing is that emissions, climate change is a global problem, and we tend to set these targets at sub-global levels, like at the state level. Like a city or an individual company makes a net zero commitment, and it’s just like that. I think this is not the right way to think about the problem.
Just take the United States, for example. Even though the bulk of emissions growth over the next few decades is projected to come from non-OECD economies, the whole world does have to get to net zero scientifically at some point. Like, that is true. And so, eventually we are going to have to get very close to zero or net negative. I think the notion is if the US is going to expect that, you know, the world decarbonizes, and especially rapidly developing economies, it would behoove us to demonstrate that a rich developed economy can actually do this without major sacrifice. That I think is the rationale for the for the weird jurisdictional targets, and they do give you something to aim for, I guess.
I worked on industrial emissions in the White House, and not a lot of people were paying attention to industrial emissions, and the fact that we had to sort of like reverse engineer our policies such that we could hit like the nationally determined commitment for our UN climate ambition did kind of create the space for me to be like you’re never going to hit this target unless you focus on industry. So in a way that was positive, but it focuses you on very near term actions without thinking about whether they’re durable.
So for instance, if California has a net zero by 2030 target or something, you can, if you’re in office, say we’re going to ban all internal combustion vehicles tomorrow, and that will take care of a huge chunk of the emissions. Your emissions accounting does not account for the fact that next year you could get voted out of office, and all of that work gets undone, and because greenhouse gas emissions are a cumulative problem, you have potentially made the problem worse, not better. So, like the near-term emissions focus has some real downsides, I think. The question is, what can you measure that would be a way for sort of understanding whether we’re making progress or not toward decarbonization? And there aren’t yet, that I’ve uncovered, perfect answers to that question. But I do think starting to think more in terms of measurement of investment additionality. So if you’re a governor in a state, how much new transmission infrastructure have you, like, would this have been there before, exactly? Like, how many gigawatts of new clean power have you brought online through your policies? How many electric vehicle charging stations deploy? Whatever it is, just kind of near-term metrics that are upstream of the emissions impact.
The other thing that I mentioned, that it has, that you have this near-term focus on emissions, but if you think about climate change as a global problem, one of the most valuable things the United States can do, especially given where emissions growth is projected to happen, is to invest in and bring the cost down of other clean energy technologies. If you’re sitting behind a desk and you have an emissions accounting rubric in front of you, investing in innovation and geothermal, it’s very hard to estimate what the emissions reduction of investing in a new technology is today, and and it could end up being one of the most important tools for decarbonizing Africa, and you have totally failed to capture that in your near-term emissions accounting analysis. So, I think on net it’s a mixed bag, but I tend to think that it can often foreclose more than it enables, and that we should probably rethink some of these targets.
Danielle: Jane, with that, we will wrap. Thank you so much for sharing all of your expertise, and I’m excited to hear you speak more about emissions targets, and how we can reframe our thinking around that.
