Remarks as Prepared for Delivery by National Climate Advisor Ali Zaidi at Harvard University on U.S. Climate Progress and the Path Ahead
Thank you, Professor Stock. I knew Jim first as the author of Econometrics, and then as a generous mentor, gifted problem solver, and brilliant colleague in the Obama administration.
Thank you for your incredible contributions and thank you for welcoming me back to my alma mater.
I am grateful.
As we gather today, the fury of climate change rages as fires swell in the foothill communities of Southern California – a heavy moment that reminds us: There are no climate havens anymore. Communities far from the coasts flooded by hurricanes. Communities far in the north melting from extreme heat. Communities in the wealthiest nations. Development status provides no escape for a crisis that impacts us all.
Over the last four years, the Biden-Harris administration has mapped the impacts with new satellites, better data, and a portal providing real-time information that communities can use to adapt. We also mapped the impacts on our macro economy and fiscal health, on our infrastructure and institutions and onto the insurance markets – all propelled by two executive orders issued in the first year of the administration that recognized good data and rigorous analysis form the essential foundation for resilience.
Then we got to work bending the curve on the risks.
We created new grants to raise roads, to harden substations, and to deploy permeable pavement and restore critical wetlands, expanding our ability to absorb the next downpour. We brought together labor, industry, and the health sector to better engage the risk from extreme heat with new standards that protect workers, new canopy in communities that were literally hotter because of historic redlining, and new missions for old institutions, challenging development finance to step up. We broke the fever on an epic drought out west by securing 3-million-acre feet of water in a river that feeds 40 million people, supporting rapid conservation, and standing up long-term infrastructure, from desal to catchment to a modernized canal – covered with solar, built in partnership with my friend, Governor Stephen Roe Lewis, now delivering greater water and energy security to the Gila River Indian community. And we shined the spotlight of innovation on resilience, launching a set of resilience gamechangers and convening the best and brightest to hasten the commercialization of fire-tech and water-tech and more.
Earlier this month, we transmitted our learnings to the United Nations – our national climate resilience framework, and the largest public investment in resilience ever, as the backbone to a new national adaptation and resilience planning strategy. But the most important piece of our approach is hard to capture in any document.
I saw it last month, as I swore in new members of the American Climate Corps (ACC). When Hurricane Milton knocked down Andie’s community – in Boone, North Carolina – when it took away so much, Andie decided to give back. Today, I am happy to report that over 20,000 young people have now answered President Biden’s call to join the ACC. Faced with the heavy and heart-wrenching, they, like Andie, decided to answer with hope and hard work.
As we enter the second half of the decisive decade for climate action, this is why we will win a safer and more prosperous future: because we carry with us a fundamentally rewritten climate playbook – an approach that eschews the gloom and doom and embraces the hope and possibilities. In our new playbook, we have pulled the upside of climate action both forward and close, even as we took on a problem that is global in nature and decades in the making. We are pursuing climate action in a way that is co-located with economic opportunity and coincided with pollution reduction – a geographic and temporal alignment of benefits designed to earn the political economy to go big, go fast, and go the distance.
Last night, I saw that sense of hope and possibilities in the faces of the folks from California, as I stood beside the President at the White House, looking into a crowd that was watching him sign two new national monuments into the care of future generations.
That moment marked over 670 million acres of lands and waters protected – the most by any President – an ode to what he calls “America the Beautiful,” but also proof points of a new approach to climate action that enlists nature as part of the solution to the crisis we face down, not just to help us adapt but also to help us attack the root cause.
Last month, we announced a new Nationally Determined Contribution – a new climate target for America that gets after the very root cause of the climate crisis, by taking aim at the greenhouse gas pollution responsible for warming our planet. We announced a target to cut our emissions by 61-66% by 2035, relative to 2005 levels, the next evolution that moves us on a straight line toward a net zero emissions economy by no later than 2050.
We developed this new target by going bottom up, sector by sector, finding opportunity, economic upside, and emissions reductions – everywhere.
We took a similar analytical approach at the beginning of the administration, when we set a target for 2030. At the time, the U.S. was on track for 15-20% emissions reductions by 2030, and off track relative to any reasonable path to stabilize our climate. Especially, against that backdrop, a target of 50-52% was audacious, but, today, having more than doubled our pace of decarbonization – results outlined in our recently submitted Biennial Transparency Report – that target is suddenly within reach.
The math goes something like this. In 2005, overall U.S. emissions were over 6500 million metric tons. By marshalling a bold and broad climate strategy, harmonizing two sets of tools – the tools to deliver investments and the tools to set standards – we have unlocked a pathway that ranges between a little under to a little over 4000 million metric tons by 2030, and from the high 2000s to the mid 3000s in million metric tons by 2035.
This math is enabled by the strategy at work. The investments from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the Inflation Reduction Act, and the CHIPS and Science Act enhanced by a complementary architecture of federal standards that spur demand and generate the regulatory certainty needed to accelerate capital formation and encourage entrepreneurial risk-taking.
It is an important combination, and the success comes from both – the catalytic public investments and tax credits and also the standards that send a signal to the market, spurring long-term investment and firming up that next bet on America. Bringing the breadth of our tools and partners together helps as we swing for the fences in every sector of the economy. Looking for wins everywhere – power and transportation, buildings and industry, lands and agriculture – gives us a better shot at delivering for everyone. When executed well, the gains from all-in and searching-for-opportunity-everywhere climate action cascade deep through the economy.
Our past success and our future ability to break into the low 2000s in million metric tons by 2035 relies on this approach – one which engages every sector, every level of government, every layer of the capital, every party, and every part of the country.
I have spoken about this before – about why I think our project carries momentum and is structured for resilience – but it may be worth repeating: The robustness comes from an approach that has mobilized public and private in a tech-agnostic race to net zero as north star. From governors and mayors of every party to entrepreneurs and investors from every corner of the economy, we are together and united in the implementation, in carrying out this work. That unity in implementation is rooted in a unity of motivation. The incentive to finish the job is also stronger because the incentive is shared.
Here is what that looks like, tons and opportunity, the incentives, through the sectors.
First, in nature, the California monuments I mentioned were the most recent in over a dozen established by the President. Each of those an opportunity to strengthen nature; each also carrying memory and meaning. I felt that sense standing on the North Lawn as President Biden restored Bears Ears and the same in Arizona as he preserved the Ancestral Footprints of the Grand Canyon National Monument. Each time, so very powerful.
But in some ways, the monuments are just the punction – an exclamation mark – on a sweeping story. Like the decisive action we took to protect the trees that breathe in our excesses. Partnering with Indigenous leaders, the President conserved 9 million acres in the Tongass.
I remember sitting there mesmerized by the creativity I heard in a visit to southeast Alaska. And what luck to be part of scaling that approach, through the Glasgow Leaders’ Declaration, an Executive Order on old growth on Earth Day 2022, and then, soaring above the Amazon with the President as part of a historic visit to build even more momentum behind this approach.
The tons and opportunity in the nature sector also come from empowering our farmers and ranchers. Over the last four years, we have enlisted more than 180,000 farms and 225 million acres into climate-smart practices – measures that boost total factor productivity, add new revenue for family businesses, and cut emissions. We did not stop there.
We also changed the way we manage public lands, boosted high-integrity voluntary carbon markets, and pushed relentlessly for better MMRV. All of this provides a platform and path for more emissions reduction – and more economic upside – in this sector, especially as Congress takes up the Farm Bill this year.
Next, in the power sector, the biggest difference maker to the math, we added more than 100 gigawatts of clean energy to the grid – 50 Hoover Dams worth of new clean power in just four years.
We did it by listening to everyone and by choosing to go big. In the early days of the administration, the President personally convened unions and utilities, researchers and developers. I remember one of those meetings – each of us spaced so far apart, each of us, including serious utility CEOs, with our beak shaped masks, the ones that make you look like a duck. The conversation was good, the solutions clever, and we put them to work.
The progress has been incredible.
Last year, the United States added more power to the grid than we have in two decades – and 96% of that was clean. The new records on solar and batteries, on geothermal and hydropower, new records all across the sector, mean a chance at what I call the clean energy comeback – communities harnessing the climate imperative to produce local economic opportunity.
I saw it in Western Michigan, where a shuttered nuclear power plant is coming back to serve two rural co-ops – the Hoosiers and the Wolverines – the co-ops teaming up despite their rivaling basketball loyalties. There, I met a union worker who thought he had retired, but was now coming back – out of retirement like the plant, beaming with a sense of pride, and eager to lift up the next generation of workers who will deliver carbon-free electricity to the grid.
This clean energy comeback can also be, if I may be so bold, a chance to come together.
I felt that sense this summer, standing in the Oval Office as Senator Capito, the Republican Ranking Member, and Senator Carper, the Democratic Chair of the Environment Committee, walked into the Oval Office together and shook the President’s hand; as Joe Biden signed into law a bipartisan piece of legislation to advance nuclear energy, our domestic supply chains, and America’s ability to lead on the next generation of tech.
Yesterday, the President issued an Executive Order on powering artificial intelligence with clean energy. The executive order directs action based on stakeholder engagement and spade work by a task force he formed, led by Bruce Reed and supported by a number of us – including the President’s national security advisor, national economic advisor, and national climate advisor, me. The premise is simple: America can and will both win the AI race and power those new capabilities with clean electricity. Driven by AI, our now back-to-normal load growth – a double-digit rate of growth akin to what we witnessed nearly every decade from the end of World War II until the turn of the 21st century – should be a spur to invent and invest, not a signpost to slow down.
As we meet this new opportunity and as we race to the next NDC, there is actually a common imperative: We need to harness all the tools we have available to build a bigger and better grid. To do that, new poles and wires are critical, which is why this administration has greenlit or underwritten over 5,000 miles of new, high-capacity transmission. But there is so much more.
To me, it is so important that we also focus on the three Rs – rewiring, repowering, resilience.
Rewiring means investing more in advanced conductoring to get more electrons across existing rights of way, dynamic line ratings to raise the grid’s speed limit, and batteries (“Storage As Transmission Assets,” or SATA) and capabilities like topology optimization to deal with rush hour traffic.
Repowering means investing more in places with idle or suboptimized interconnections, plugging in where an old power plant has shuttered or where an old power plant no longer dispatches at nameplate capacity, uncompetitive in an era of cleaner and more efficient technologies.
Resilience means investing more in a grid that can withstand the next storm, or at least bounce back faster; hardening substations, burying lines, and getting more technology developed and deployed to address persistent grid-adjacent issues like vegetation and stormwater management.
If we do these things, if we build a bigger and better grid, we can go the distance on our 2035 climate target – and unlock so much economic upside on the way there.
Third, the transportation sector. Over the last four years, the big move here has been in cars and trucks. I remember the drive to the Ford factory in 2021, my first trip to Michigan with the President. I was bullish, but still cautious about our ability to go from laggard to leader in a transportation story that was increasingly being written without U.S. workers and businesses.
At the time, we barely made any batteries despite the fact that the Nobel prize for this technology went to a professor here. Our national labs pioneered the breakthroughs. And yet we were very behind. Today, that has changed. If you tally the factories that are producing and those being built, we expect 10 million EVs worth of battery manufacturing capability will be online by 2030. The game has fully changed. And double click on those batteries. We are making those components here, too – the anodes, cathodes, and separators. We are even racing forward to supply input materials, new lithium facilities and an expansion in recycling – putting old materials back into the supply chain and recognizing both that mineral security and climate security are inherently interconnected and that the clean energy economy must be a circular one.
Our success in going the distance in the transportation sector, however, depends on more than bringing the EV supply chain back home. It depends on securing the lead in the next generation of battery technologies, like solid state, and being an early mover in the scale up of clean energy technologies in heavier parts of the sector. America must lead on clean freight, and we cannot do that if we do not lead on clean fuels.
That is why I am so proud of our work on sustainable aviation fuels, as a proof point for what is possible. When in the early days of the administration, we pulled together all the airline CEOs, SAF production measured in the single digit millions of gallons. Four years later, after investment in infrastructure upgrades, acceleration of R&D, and new tax measures like the recently finalized 45Z tax credit, we are on track – based on our accounting this week against the SAF grand challenge – to produce more than 3 billion gallons a year by 2030.
We must do this and more, in rail and in marine and in heavy trucks. And must keep going.
Finally, buildings and industry, both hard to decarbonize but for two very different reasons.
In buildings, we spent the last four years enlisting local governments to update codes for new build, raise ambition in existing build, and define the frontier of zero emissions buildings. We transformed our industrial capacity to meet new market demand for heat pumps – which now lead the market in new construction and are stoking a massive manufacturing buildout and good, union jobs all across the country.
In industry, a make-or-break sector I have spoken at length about before, we cut methane pollution with hundreds of administrative actions, bent the curve on HFCs and N2O, capped leaking wells and sealed leaking mines, and launched a broad strategy to boost the economic efficiency, global competitiveness, and environmental performance of steel, cement, aluminum, and other heavy industry. From grants to 33 pathbreaking projects to new tax credits to a multi-state Buy Clean program, we launched a race to the top on the technologies of the future.
Our success in both of these sectors, however, and our ability to meet our 2035 target, require a lot of additional innovation.
The breakthroughs will be of different types – and not just in the core technologies. We need breakthroughs in buildings of the balance-of-systems kind, to make it easier to rewire and retrofit. We need breakthroughs in retail finance and permitting, a major acceleration in expanding the affordability and time to install, that will hopefully be aided by the investment that the Biden-Harris administration made through the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, capitalizing CDFIs and green banks around the country. We need breakthroughs in trade policy to level the playing field and level up in a way that sees the GHG molecules as they move – embodied carbon – in products crossing borders.
But I am optimistic about the path to progress.
Necessity is said to be the mother of innovation. We need ways to cut energy costs for homes and small businesses. We need ways to grow global competitiveness for our heavy industries and the workers they employ. These breakthroughs are not just a chance to cut emissions, they are also a way to deliver on these other bottom lines.
This is the way forward – nature, power, transportation, buildings, and industry – each sector with proof points, each with possibilities yet untapped.
Today marks my last speech as National Climate Advisor, so, if you will indulge me, I want to finish with some gratitude and a final reflection.
I am so grateful to the President and Vice President for the chance to serve this nation that I love, and to my first boss and the nation’s first National Climate Advisor Gina McCarthy.
Gina brought the motivation of a public health expert and a grandmother to a fight that needs those perspectives – that seeks every day to answer the questions: How do we pave the way for clean air, clean water, and communities that can sustain healthy people? How do we leave the next generation sustainable prosperity, a better, brighter future? Gina has been an incredible guide and good friend, and I am so thankful to her.
I also want to thank my team, the Climate Policy Office staff. As they crammed into my office on the ground floor of the West Wing during our regular team meetings, I always felt so blessed to be surrounded not just by such genius but also by such heart – the best of public service. The President and Vice President pushed for massive ambition and this team – along with the best partners across the federal agencies – answered that call every single day.
And finally, a reflection.
My favorite sermon from Dr. King is the one about unfinished dreams that talks about the agony and joy of working on projects that cannot be finished.
Over the last four years, we took on the climate crisis in a way that sought to do so much – not just to pull down our emissions, but to lift up our people and communities. In places, where the loss of opportunity was fenced in and the chance for a comeback seemingly fenced out, we started the project of bringing down those fences, the barriers to economic opportunity, of creating jobs and purpose, and of delivering justice long overdue.
As an immigrant, brought from Pakistan to Pennsylvania by the most amazing and wonderful parents, I have lived my American Dream. That is why for me, this job, and the project that has consumed all my time, has been as much about climate as it is about putting more rungs in the ladder that reaches into the American Dream. It has been my chance to give back. It has been an unfinishable project, but it has been a joyful one.
Dr. King talks about Schubert’s unfinished symphony and about building temples of peace and of love and of justice. These are beautiful projects, moral projects. And the joy comes from just being a part of their building, from the process, from the work. That is the reward.
As I leave my post, I am so profoundly grateful to have had a chance to work on a symphony, on a temple, on a project of such significance. My wish for you is the chance to be pulled into the same. It is the greatest honor and such a profound source of joy.
Thank you so much.