Welcome to A Climate Change, a show where we talk with change makers and thought leaders who are taking action to stop the existential threat of climate change. I’m your host. Matt Matern. Last week, I sat down with Paul Bledsoe, former Clinton White House climate advisor and lecturer at American University, to discuss the differences in climate policy in the Harris and Trump campaigns.

Full disclosure, this conversation was recorded a few hours before the debate, so you’ll hear us making references and predictions. So now you get a chance to see which one of us was right and which one of us maybe was missed the mark. Now this interview with Paul was a long interview. I’m splitting it into two episodes. The first half of the conversation, Paul breaks down the importance of regulating methane admissions the future of electric vehicles and the role of liquefied natural gas.

We also talk about the economic and consumer benefits of clean energy, the impact of the IRA and slowing down inflation and creating jobs, and how the Harris campaign can bridge these issues to connect with voters in swing districts. I hope you enjoy and come back next week for part two of our conversation as a reminder, make sure to register to vote and do vote as this will be probably the most consequential election of our lifetime.

Okay, here’s part one of my interview with Paul Bledsoe. I’ve got an amazing guest on the show today. Paul Bledsoe, who is teaching at the American University environmental policy, he also worked in the Clinton White House back in the 90s as the communications director for the White House climate change Task Force. Welcome to the program again. Paul.

Thanks, Matt, good to see you again.

Yeah. So obviously, we’ve got a big thing coming up in today. Later today, there’s going to be a debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. So just to jump right into the deep end of it,

What do you expect on the environmental front, do you think there’ll be any questions, and how do you think Kamala Harris should best answer those questions if raised?

Well, I’m glad you asked about it right off the top, because I think, I think I was quoted in Politico today saying that I think Energy and Climate could play a bigger role in today’s debate than any previous presidential debate, and the reason is that both sides think they have an advantage. Donald Trump has been falsely claiming, for example, that Kamala Harris supports a friend a ban on hydraulic fracturing of natural gas, which is important in swing states like Pennsylvania, which is not true. She has opposed a ban on fracking for for many years.

But he Trump is more broadly attacking the Clean Energy Transition agenda that has been a centerpiece of the Biden Harris administration. And so he’s going to try to attack her on these issues. However, I think she’s she’s going to give better than she gets. The truth of the matter is that actually, natural gas has increased under Biden, while emissions of methane, a super greenhouse gas, from natural gas have been reduced so they’ve been regulating the methane that comes from natural gas.

More broadly, they have passed the most aggressive clean energy legislation in world history that has already led to hundreds of billions of dollars just in the last two and a half years of private sector new investment that has created hundreds of hundreds of 1000s of new jobs, and this is just the beginning. So I think she has a tremendously positive, future oriented story to tell about the clean energy economy and what it’s going to mean for Americans.

I think ultimately, the two things I want her to emphasize, one is that she does believe in keeping energy prices low for consumers, and in fact, clean energy will do that, especially over time. In in the next few years, not only will electric vehicles be cheaper to operate, which they already are far cheaper to operate. They’ll be cheaper to buy. That’s why all automakers are turning toward them, because they’re easier to produce and to service. And then the second thing I hope she talks about, I believe Kamala Harris has to emphasize how huge the economic impact. Of climate change already are for average American households.

There was a study done last year that average American households are face that two thirds of average Americans say they are already seeing an economic impact from climate change on their bottom line, whether it’s fires, whether it’s home insurance, whether it’s flooding, whether it’s heat waves that prevent them from working. Climate change is an economic issue that is undermining our public safety, our ability to work outside, our ability to breathe clean air, and I want her to make that a kitchen table issue, something that’s Trump is denying protecting Americans from an issue that is already causing us huge economic and public health harm.

We have these record wildfires in California just this week as one example, but there are dozens of others. There were 30 different billion dollar weather disasters in the United States last year. Cumulatively, weather disasters caused hundreds of billions of dollars to average Americans. So this is a problem that’s right in front of us, affecting us now, and Donald Trump doesn’t care.

He just wants to use the issue, exploit the issue in his biased, perverse way for a political advantage, when what he’s doing is risking the future of our public safety in our economy.

Well, I guess then the question is put to put yourself in Trump’s shoes for a minute and say, How does he answer the question on climate change? I believe they asked him a question and Biden last debate, and effectively, Trump ducked it. And because Biden was not really on his A game, you know, was not really able to hold Trump’s feet to the fire on that one, or act really answer it, you know, with the great effectiveness.

That’s right. I mean, Kamala Harris is a former state attorney general in California, a former prosecutor. She’s not going to let Donald Trump off the hook on climate change. I predict that she’s going to push the issue, really, in a tough way, and demonstrate, have a grand moment where she demonstrates that Donald Trump is only interested in his own selfish political interests and not in the safety and long term stability of our country and our economy, and that’s a climate change issue, and so I think she’ll be able to do that very effectively. But what does Trump say this time around?

If you get into the mind of Mr. Trump for a minute here, well, he’s he’s been attacking, over the last few months, the Biden Harris clean energy effort. So he claims that, for example, it’s impossible to get electrical vehicle charging, which is not true. There are more chargers than ever under Biden Harris, they produce those. Strangely, he’s contending that under Biden Harris will be buying more Chinese electric vehicles when two things happen that are preventing that under Biden The first thing is that we have put in place very large consumer and industry tax incentives for investments in our own electric vehicle industry. The only way for us to out compete China is to create a more dynamic American industry.

That’s precisely what Biden and Harris have done with inflation Reduction Act and huge tax breaks. And then, ironically, the second thing is, then Biden has put in place 100% tariff on the importation of Chinese vehicles. So in fact, the Biden Harris policies toward electric vehicles have been far more effective than those of Donald Trump, where he sort of just allowed the Chinese to eat our lunch and so but he attacks with lies constantly, and I expect him to do the same tonight.

Well, I guess the question on electric chargers. I read an article about this recently that the rollout hasn’t been as smooth, and haven’t hasn’t resulted in as many electric chargers as we would like. And then kind of a related point is electric car production and consumer buying them has slowed down. And so what? What do you think’s going on there?

Both those things are true. There’s still so called range anxiety. Many Americans are reluctant to buy an EV because they worry about having a hard time finding chargers. And so. There are a couple ways we can get through this. One is, I worked with the Washington Post on a long article about having plug in hybrids as an interim technologies. That’s what I have now. So I have an EV effectively for about 50 miles per charge.

So in 90% of the time, I never drive more than 50 miles a day, so I’m just driving on the electric battery. But I do have a bat, a backup in the plug in hybrid of a gasoline engine on that rare occasion I need it. And in fact, the Biden Harris administration promulgated the rules such that these plug in hybrids could qualify for more tax credits. But ultimately, these problems are going to be solved within the next few years with new charging stations. We need to roll those out more quickly, and it is an important consumer issue.

This is why I think Harris has to really focus on how the Biden Harris, administration has been focused on reducing consumer prices, and this is why she’s supporting production of shale gas, because shale gas has kept it’s hit record levels of production, while keeping energy prices low for average Americans. So she has to take a consumer as well as a climate change focus on energy issues.

What about LNG? So the Biden administration stalled some LNG ports down in Louisiana, and, I believe, other places. And is that a good climate policy, but maybe not playing as well in middle America. Actually,

I don’t think it’s a really particularly good policy. Anyway you look at it, what’s happening here is that Russia has been dominating Europe’s supply of natural gas for decades, and finally, when Putin invaded Ukraine, Europe said, we’ve had enough. That’s it. We’re not going to fund Putin’s war on Ukraine by buying his natural gas anymore. And so they encouraged the US to ship over exports of our very abundant liquefied natural gas or LNG resources.

The key here is that US gas has far lower life cycle emissions than the Russian gas it’s replacing. And the main issue is methane. We’re regulating methane very stringently from natural gas, and in fact, methane from us gas has fallen substantially over the last per metric volume over the last few years, whereas in Russia, it’s a wild west attitude, they have massive venting and flaring of methane. So Russian gas has the highest methane emissions of any gas in the world. So in fact, replacing Putin’s gas with American Gas not only prevents him funding the war in in Ukraine, but it ends up in lower emissions.

The other thing is that Europe would otherwise just turn to coal, which has higher emissions than than gas too. So this has been a misconstrued issue. I think the reason the Biden administration put a pause in the LNG exports is they had grown very rapidly, and I think they wanted to take a look at the national interest here. But in fact, just 10 days ago, they approved a new one. So they have, in fact, approved additional ones, because I think the overall national security and climate arguments are in favor of us gas.

That being said, I think Harris will emphasize that we need to regulate methane more stringently, and we do need to do that. We should be leading the world towards zero methane natural gas, which we can do. It’s actually very cheap to mitigate leaks from the natural gas system. When you let the gas event or flare, you’re just losing the resource. So it turns out to be very cheap and easy to take the time to have the system be much more efficient and not allow the leakage of methane from gas.

And I think the US will, over time, have the lowest methane emissions in the world, if it doesn’t already, and that could lead to a global revolution making natural gas much cleaner as we transition away from fossil fuels.

Well, I think that a lot of times in these debates, and probably for a lot of voters out there, there’s a very simple they’re not looking at and are not as well. Schooled on environmental issues, as you are, obviously. And so they’re looking at headlines, and they’re saying, hey, Kamala Harris was against fracking now she’s for it. Are you a flip flopper, Madam Vice President? Or, you know, where do you stand? You know, we know Trump is drill, baby, drill. And, and if we’re from Western Pennsylvania, that’s what we care about.

Well, it turns out, in fact, I’ve written a piece today in The Hill newspaper on this turns out that gas from Pennsylvania has far lower methane emissions than gas from the southern states, in particular Texas and the Permian Basin. So Pennsylvania gas has far lower life cycle emissions of greenhouse gasses than does gas from other parts of the country. And the reason this is important is that the Texas, Louisiana and other uh southern delegations have prevented regulations of small wildcatters in the south, and they’re the ones who have really, really high emissions.

And so that’s one of the reasons why Pennsylvania gas has so such low methane emissions compared to, say, Texas. The other reason is that in Texas, they’re more interested in producing oil, and so they just allow the gas that’s CO emitted to just vent into the atmosphere, and that’s why, indeed, Pennsylvania gas has lower emissions. So I think there’s an easy way forward for Harris here, emphasize regulation of methane to make gas cleaner cleaner than Russian gas, cleaner than coal, cleaner than Texas gas.

That should play very well in Pennsylvania, I guess then the question is, you know, moving away from maybe an environmentally focused debate to immigration and inflation, things that are maybe more challenging issues for Harris to face. How do you How would you advise her to face issues like that?

Yeah, so this is why I say she needs to emphasize the consumer benefits of the clean energy transition, and that means lower costs, more jobs over the long run. I mean, we have been subject, over our recent history to very high price spikes of oil, of foreign oil, in particular, and that has been very injurious to our economy. We have kept the price of natural gas and oil fairly low under Biden Harris, even as we produced even lower cost things like solar and wind as well as other technologies that are coming on board.

So the truth of the matter is we’re creating a domestic superpower of diverse energy, including clean clean energy, and that keeps prices low. That is a consumer issue. And in fact, energy has been a bright spot in inflation that’s otherwise essentially been caused by the hangover of demand from the from the covid pandemic. So I think she’s got a strong answer on on inflation, on immigration. I think we have a strong answer too, which is, we need to help those countries in Central America address the problems that have people flooding all over our border.

It’s almost impossible to stop the level of people who will come, and she’s been working on that. And the other thing is that Biden put in place a really tough border protection strategy. Within the last six months, it’s been more effective. And then the final thing, and I think this is the thing that will win her vote, is that the Republican Congress got behind a really tough immigration strategy that Biden said he would sign, and as soon as Trump realized it would take a campaign issue away from him, Trump ordered Republicans in Congress not to support their own proposal. And so Biden and Harris wanted to get tough on immigration, and Trump stopped it.

Yeah, I think that that’s certainly a winning point, and she should hammer that home. I would say the mistake of the Biden administration is not taking immigration more seriously sooner, and that they kind of let it linger there for a few years and and if they had taken the action that he took six months ago, three years ago, or at least two years ago, he’d be in a far stronger position than having waited and, you know, kind of letting it dither, while, interestingly though, they seem very competitive in a state like Arizona, where the polls are really. Connect so and it is worth, worth noting that that Biden didn’t wear in Arizona in 2020 so I think they’re getting a handle on the issue.

Yeah, certainly there’s an improvement. You just wonder if, if they had done it sooner, whether he’d be running away with or she’d be running away with it, had there been action on it, on it sooner, because they should have known this was going to be a major issue in 2024 and just get out ahead of it, versus waiting, maybe putting a little bit too much stock in in this bill passing, you know, six months ago, that Trump kind of killed, but pivoting a little bit from that, I saw recently that 18 Republicans were against revoking the IRA, which none of them voted for the first time around.

But I guess some of them are starting to see the benefits to their district, or maybe seeing that this is an issue that that suburban voters in moderate districts are are okay with or like and and that they’re not going to to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

The private sector, in just two years has made hundreds of billions of dollars of new investments around the country. Members of Congress see that investment happening. Turns out that the majority of that investment has actually happened in Republican areas, in red, red states and districts. And so it’s just good economic policy. And I think that I predicted it when it passed, that I think it would be such good economic and energy policy as well as climate policy that it would never be repealed. And I still don’t think it’ll be repealed.

I just don’t think there will be the votes, uh, certainly not among Democrats, but but among most Republicans to do it too. The other thing is, we have had tax incentives for clean energy for a long time, and they have usually been bipartisan. It’s really only in the Trump era that it’s become so partisan. Again, Trump just wants political issues, culture war issues. That’s his whole strategy is to create an us versus them, grievance politics.

And the thing I really like about Kamala Harris’s campaign is she’s made it future oriented, positive about what America can do, not about blaming each other. And I actually think she’s going to be able to turn the tables on him. I think he’s going to look as he increasingly has someone who blames everyone else for his problems.

Well, just a fascinating kind of turn of events over the last couple years is how Elon Musk has gone from kind of maybe a little bit left of center to now being right of center to maybe being far right of center and and now Trump partnering up with him, which is also fascinating, because, you know, Musk has made his fortune, fortune building electric cars, and Trump has basically said that he’s going to kill the electric car.

So what do you make of this craziness, you know?

So, I mean, first of all, anyone who thinks they can tell what Trump is lying about, what he’s telling the truth about, is, should, should really be betting the stock market and making a fortune, because I don’t think even Trump knows the answer to those questions. I mean, he lies so constantly that he’s not even sure of what he thinks on individual issues. And Elon Musk himself is an opportunist, right? I mean, the fact that he that Biden and Harris had put in fact the in place the largest incentives for electric vehicles and in global history, and then he’s turned against them.

It just shows that all he’s interested in doing is solidifying his, you know, trillionaire positions on a variety of issues with the US government. In particular, one issue right now, SpaceX, Elon Musk, company that controls the majority of us satellite launches, including our national security related satellite launches. Unfortunately, we have private, privatized a lot of that work away from NASA into the private sector, and Musk has those contracts.

First of all, it’s just bad policy that he was ever allowed to have a majority of satellite launches that any one person would be but I think Musk’s play is that he wants to have Trump owing him, and to sort of have a hegemony of. Position as a company, SpaceX, on, on, on satellites and other things that are in his business interests. So I think, as usual, Elon Musk can’t be counted on as a true friend of the climate. It’s it’s obvious that he is really more interested in just his business. And the funny thing is that any good that Elon Musk did with Tesla will be far outweighed if Trump becomes president.

I mean, Trump is going to attempt to underturn, overturn every regulation on greenhouse gas emissions we have he did this the first time. Don’t take my word for it. He says that’s what he’s going to do. He’s going to withdraw us from the Paris Climate Agreement. This happened last time he was president. He undermined global climate momentum just when we need it. Because here’s the thing, Matt, we are much closer to really bad climate problems than most anybody in American politics wants to realize. And so Elon Musk endorsing Trump is the worst single thing he could have done for the climate.

Well, I think, yeah, the list of things that distinguish Harris from Trump, one of them ending the National Oceanic oceanographic administration is certainly on the top of my list. Is, that’s right. I mean, the work that I worked with NOAA when I was in the White House for several years, these are the leading scientists in the world who are giving us real time information on what’s actually happening in the climate I mean, it’s incredibly important to businesses, to local communities, to weather planning, to everything, and he wants to eliminate it. It’s insane.

It’s just it’s ideological madness, far right wing ideology gone crazy and berserk, and it’s incredibly dangerous. And there are other ways that Trump will be very dangerous on climate that we can talk about, but I really think that it’s increasingly going to be a voting issue in this election, because the choice is so stark, and because Harris is wisely appealing directly to younger voters who really do care about climate change.

Polls have shown that voters under 40 increasingly are willing to vote specifically on climate change, and I think she’s done a brilliant job in reaching directly out to those voters and talking about climate as a key issue to our future.

And that was part one of my conversation with Paul Bledsoe. Please make sure you’re subscribed to the podcast so you’re the first to hear Part Two when it drops next week. I urge you to listen. It was a very insightful conversation. Paul Bledsoe is a lecturer at American University. You can follow Paul on exit, Paul Bledsoe, and that’s B-L-E-D-S-O-E. You can also read his work by visiting his website, paulbledsoe.com or you can just google him.

Paul writes from many different organizations to learn more about our work at a climate change and how you can help us reach our goal planting 30,000 trees in the Amazon this year. Visit a climate change.com don’t forget to subscribe to our podcast on Apple, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. If you like this episode, please share it with a friend. See you next time.