On Tuesday, former President Donald Trump was reelected in a landslide, becoming the first Republican to win the popular vote since 2004. Republicans also re-took control of the Senate, and will likely keep a majority in the House of Representatives as well.
In today’s show — which was recorded the morning after the election — the hosts unpack the results, and consider what they mean for the future of America’s clean energy sector. They focus on a series of questions: how can Democrats better message clean energy policy and energy affordability moving forward? Which Republicans in Congress are poised to be clean energy leaders? Will the Biden administration seek to expedite IRA funds before their term ends?
Credits: Hosted by Julia Pyper, Emily Domenech, and Brandon Hurlbut. Produced by Max Savage Levenson. Edited by Anne Bailey. Original music and engineering by Sean Marquand. Stephen Lacey is executive editor.
Political Climate is co-produced by Boundary Stone Partners, a leading bipartisan climate change strategic advisory and government affairs firm. Their mission-driven approach combines innovative solutions with expertise in technology, finance, policy, federal funding, and advocacy. Learn more and get in touch today at BoundaryStone.com.
Concerned about how the 2024 election might impact the programs, policies, and incentives that matter most to you? Let Boundary Stone Partners’ Climate24 service help you navigate the political landscape with their policy navigator tool, resources, and bespoke services. Learn more at BoundaryStone.com/Climate24.
Transcript
Brandon Hurlbut: Wow. Last night was maybe the hardest punch I’ve ever taken in my life. Struggling to find my voice right now, but as Emily said, “F*** it. We’ll do it live.”
Julia Pyper: That’s saying a lot coming from someone who boxes semi-competitively.
Hello. Welcome to Political Climate. I’m Julia Pyper. It’s the morning after the 2024 election. Former President Donald Trump was re-elected yesterday in a landslide. Although some votes remain to be counted, Trump appears to be on track to sweep all seven swing states. Republicans also retook control of the Senate. And as of this morning, the fate of the House remains to be seen. In today’s show, we’ll unpack the results of yesterday’s election and consider what they mean for the future of the clean energy sector. How can Democrats better message clean energy policy moving forward? Which Republicans in Congress are poised to be climate leaders? Will the Biden administration seek to expedite IRA funds before their term ends? That’s all coming up on Political Climate.
As always, I’m joined by my co-hosts, Brandon Hurlbut and Emily Domenech. Brandon served as chief of staff in President Obama’s energy department and went on to found Boundary Stone Partners and Overture VC. Good morning, Brandon. How are you doing today?
Brandon Hurlbut: Sad.
Julia Pyper: We will circle back on that. Emily, she served as senior energy advisor to Speakers of the House, Kevin McCarthy and Mike Johnson, and is now a senior vice president at Boundary Stone. Good morning, Emily.
Emily Domenech: Good morning Julia.
Julia Pyper: All right, let’s dive right in. Brandon, I want to go to you first. So you talked about this being a gut punch today. You were out on the streets meeting with voters, door knocking. Tell us a little bit about who you met there and maybe some insights you have on how we got to this point.
Brandon Hurlbut: First of all, Julia, this is super humbling. It’s a big loss. And talking to actual voters, I went out in California 45, it’s the most expensive House race in the country. Derek Tran is running against the incumbent Michelle Steele. And I knocked a lot of doors the last few days and it was super humbling.
With each voter that I talked to, I asked about the Inflation Reduction Act. Not one had heard of it, including a guy, Jose 51 years old, works at an EV manufacturer. No idea about the incentives or any of that stuff. So one of my takeaways is just a very stark reminder that the stuff we’re all paying attention to, a lot of the voters are not.
And I also had a really interesting interaction with a guy who was not on my canvas list. So the list that they give you for the doors is likely Democrats, right? You don’t want to be turning out your opponents. But this guy was not on my list. He was outside washing his car and he was a Black man probably in his early thirties. And I just struck up the conversation with him.
I said, “Hey, are you planning on voting?” He said, “Absolutely not.” And I was so curious. I was like, “Why?” He’s like, “Look, I was raised a Democrat my whole life. I’m not a Democrat anymore. Democrats aren’t doing anything for me. I see what they’re doing for everybody else, but not for me.” I said, “Well you know, we’ve done some stuff. Let me talk to you about some of the policies.” I said, “There’s this thing called the Inflation Reduction Act. Have you heard of it?” “Nope.” “We’re trying to bring jobs back here, manufacturing jobs, good jobs for working class people.”
He’s like, “Yeah, I haven’t really done my research. I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He said, “All I see is division. All I see is the Democrat’s not getting anything done in all this division.” I said, “Well, I think Democrats are trying to compromise and Republicans often oppose just to oppose.” None of it. He was just like, “I’m done with the Democrats.”
And so I think there’s a lot of people that just judge on results and people that live paycheck to paycheck. Going into these homes, you see people, there’s seven people in these tiny apartments and they’re living paycheck to paycheck. You can see it and they’re just like, “Hey, am I up or down?” And a lot of them are down and we saw that in the exit polls. And so I think that what we see often is voters just want change and Trump really became the change candidate again. Kamala I think was seen as the incumbent because she’s the incumbent vice president and I think they’re just like, I don’t want more of this. Cause it’s not working for them.
But I think we’re going to have to have some real honest conversations with the Democratic Party. We can get into that, but it was actually talking to voters was really eye-opening for me.
Julia Pyper: And just to put a finer point on it, so you were in California’s 45th, Michelle Steele, the Republican incumbent. She is currently, as of 8 A.M. Pacific time on Wednesday, up slightly to retain her seat.
Emily Domenech: Yeah. I want to build off this just a little bit here. It’s something we’ve talked about in this podcast in the context of the clean energy space. Cost of living matters, the cost of energy matters, the cost of your groceries matter, and they matter to voters who are not people who are in the Washington Beltway, who are not involved in Silicon Valley, who are not investors, who are just trying to make ends meet. And at the end of the day, if we want clean energy policies to succeed, if we want clean tech to succeed, it’s got to be cost competitive. It’s got to be something that brings the cost down for the consumer so that they can see real benefit in their pocketbook.
And I think that’s what we saw a response to here. Everything’s more expensive and I can’t afford to make end’s meet, so I got to see something different. And there’s a lesson there again for the clean tech community to think about making sure that cost is something that’s on our mind at the front end.
Julia Pyper: Is it just the actual cost or is it how we communicate about cost? Because we had inflation coming up out of the COVID pandemic no matter who was in the office, we were going to have to contend with that the Fed was going to have to do what the Fed was going to have to do. That raised a lot of prices for everyone. Oil prices are actually coming down quite a bit right now due to market forces. We actually produced more than ever in the United States in August. And so you could actually see, even with an unleashing of “Drill baby, drill” oil producers are not going to necessarily produce more cause they’re already producing a heck of a ton and they don’t want to depreciate the price too much and not get a return. So there’s just other factors at play. So I wonder how much of it is true? Costs are a problem.
Emily Domenech: I mean, it is true cost. You can look at the cost of regular groceries for people is up.
Julia Pyper: Yes.
Emily Domenech: The cost of electricity across the country is up. Those are real numbers. We shouldn’t throw that away.
Julia Pyper: Correct. But is it something that any one presidential candidate could have done or are we not communicating well enough about how to get it better going forward? I think the Democrats had a massive communications challenge, and just to broaden the aperture a little bit, President Trump went on the Joe Rogan podcast. He empowered TikTokers. He went to the people where they’re already having conversations. Kamala Harris’s team hired social media experts to put content out through her channels. It’s a different strategy and I think that that’s a way to also meet people where they’re at, regardless of your exact policy, energy affordability. I think President Trump talked about it in a way that resonated much better. Policy aside.
Emily Domenech: Yeah. I also think it’s hard when your signature piece of legislation is the Inflation Reduction Act and you spend trillions of dollars on it and then everybody sees prices go up. That’s really hard to communicate, no matter what your strategy is. If you’re making an argument there, that’s a tough argument to make.
Brandon Hurlbut: It did reduce the inflation.
Emily Domenech: I also just…
Brandon Hurlbut: To be clear.
Emily Domenech: But it didn’t help regular people have lower prices on their groceries and gas, and that’s the kind of stuff that matters. To your point about your conversation with your voters in the field, what people think about every day. And I think we have to get past that like, let’s have an argument about the big picture policy piece and think a little bit more about where voters are. Like what are the things they experience in their day-to-day life. And I think that’s a big answer.
One last thing here. Cause I think Julia and I, we’ve talked about this a bit before on this pod where we’ve sort of said, how much can the president themselves do? I think we’re seeing a repudiation of some of these policies a little bit more across the board. The senate numbers are really, really strong for Republicans too. The House is absolutely still in play. This is not just about the presidency. I think it’s much more than that.
Julia Pyper: Yeah, I was just trying to parse out what you can actually do among listeners of this podcast in addressing energy affordability. So I think everyone has that at the core, no one wants to overpay for energy. I’m just wondering how that then played into the election. And there’s a timeline lag here between driving down costs of say clean energy solutions and when that will actually be felt. It will take several more years. And ironically, a Trump administration and Republicans in red states that are receiving the investments from the Inflation Reduction Act may end up getting the credit for it when those effects, if they’re retained bear fruit down the line. Brandon.
Brandon Hurlbut: I mean, we had a global pandemic and the government spent a lot of money to keep people afloat, and then we landed the economy in a pretty good spot better than every other country that experienced this. But the voters, that’s not the way they process that.
Emily Domenech: And they don’t feel that, I think that’s…
Brandon Hurlbut: They don’t feel that.
Emily Domenech: They don’t feel that in their day-to…
Brandon Hurlbut: They don’t get into…
Emily Domenech: Yeah. Sorry, go ahead.
Brandon Hurlbut: No, and then when we talk about the division, they don’t know what the filibuster is. None of that process stuff is anything that enters their mind. They’re just like, are they delivering for me or not? And so I think that that should spark some conversations with Democrats around some of the process because we find success is getting consensus sometimes rather than actually getting the thing done.
Emily Domenech: I mean would, again, getting consensus, all of these policies we talk about here are things that passed on a party line vote, that’s not consensus legislating, and I think it’s actually why people are concerned because they look ahead and they say, “Well, hey, this passed on a party line vote, and if everything swings the other way…”
Brandon Hurlbut: Yeah. But Emily, I’m not sure that they would’ve ever compromised on any of it, right? Because they didn’t want to give Biden a win.
Emily Domenech: I mean, they never called me. I mean for me, I was in the House of Representatives running energy policy for House Republicans and was not involved in a single conversation. So I think in this case, let’s be honest about the fact that we’ve seen pendulum swings here in the government before. We’ve seen party line politics work before, and it means that our policies flip back and forth. The one thing I’ll say, and I’ve said it on this podcast before that I think that clean energy developers particularly should be thinking about going into a Trump presidency, is that you’re going to get some permitting reform and it’s going to be easier for you to spend that money and build those projects. It’s way more complicated than just one team or another when it comes to building things in America.
Julia Pyper: To just close out on the affordability point. Going back to your comment, Emily, do you think that the IRA itself is just misguided, it’s driving up costs. It is the problem that, whether people knew the name of it or not is kind of what sunk Democrats or is it more that there’s goodness in policies like that and the related ones like the Bipartisan Infrastructure Deal and CHIPS and science, it’s just that it wasn’t communicated well enough. How do you separate out what we should have done from a policy perspective and the longevity of those policies going forward? Were they inherently flawed or is it that there should have been another thing for voters in there that made it more tangible as well?
Emily Domenech: I think oftentimes when we see huge influxes of government spending, and both parties are guilty of this, so I’m certainly not putting this on Democrats across the board. Big influxes in government spending often drive up inflation and make things more expensive for people here at home. I think that’s something that we saw here. So the question is collectively, were all of these very expensive bills together good for the US economy? I think the jury’s out on that a little bit here, but certainly people did not feel like that in their day-to-day lives.
When it comes to the policies, you know we’ve talked about this on the podcast with a lot of Republican legislators. There’s plenty of folks on the Republican side who think there are pieces of the IRA that represent good policy. I always like to point out 45-Q, which is a Republican policy that was drafted by Republicans and included in that bill. I think there’s plenty of other things like that that fall in a category of things people want to work on going forward that they’ll continue to work on whether Republicans are running the House or whether there’s a Republican in the White House, and if we’re looking for the longevity of these kinds of policies, that’s the stuff that I think it makes sense to focus on.
Julia Pyper: I think that’s going to be really interesting to sort of test the underlying thesis of the IRA putting, it was a partisan bill obviously, but are there good ideas baked within it that will stand the test of time? Like Marjorie Taylor Greene has a solar manufacturing facility in her district. She’ll have to make a decision. Does she really signal that she’s not pro that or does when rubber hits the road, she’s kind of like, okay, no, I take the scalpel approach.
Emily Domenech: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think we… I joke that the episode we did here on Political Climate on trade, Brandon and I basically agreed the whole way through the episode because Republicans and Democrats are approaching trade and competitiveness with China in really similar ways.
Brandon Hurlbut: Do you think the tariffs will actually happen? Emily, do you think he’s going to enact across-the-board tariffs?
Emily Domenech: You know, I think that one of the things I’ve said pre-election before we even had an outcome was that I thought there was going to be more protectionism regardless of who was in the White House. That is the trend we are seeing on trade policy. Certainly Trump has been broader in how he’s described what he wants to do, but I think we were going to see that under a Harris administration too. We were going to see more actions to block Chinese impact into this market. So particularly in clean energy, I actually think clean energy may end up being a case study for the rest of the economy because we’ve seen a pretty robust tariff infrastructure around say solar panels and other things like that that might be implemented in other sectors.
Brandon Hurlbut: I think there’s a lot of things that we can get into in this show going forward that hopefully will be useful for our listeners. Right now we’re doing some hot takes. This is very recent from we’re only a few hours past this election being called, and there’s a lot of questions I think that our listeners will have. Primarily on my mind is Trump said a lot of stuff, and I think a lot of voters thought he wasn’t serious. I’m very curious, Emily, what you think will actually happen? What are they going to do with agencies like the DOE? How real is the Project 2025 stuff? What is this going to mean for this industry?
And there is a larger Senate majority than people anticipated, right? People thought it could be a coin flip and even if the Republicans won, it was going to be by maybe one seat or so. So under reconciliation, some of those moderate Republican senators like Lisa Murkowski or whatnot, do not have as strong as a voice.
Emily Domenech: Yeah, I mean, I think, again, this is part of why I always tell people to look at down ballot races. The House is still, even if Republicans hold on the House, hold onto the House, we can get into a little bit of some of those members who I think are going to be interesting players if they do, but they’re still going to be operating in a universe where they have single seat majorities or single digit majorities certainly. So it’s really hard to get things through Congress when you have really, really narrow majorities like that.
And I think we’re still going to, there is always a starting point of rhetoric and then there’s reality at the end of the road. Democrats have experienced this when they had unified government of sort of where we started and where we ended up. You can use Obamacare as an example. We started up with we’re only going to have universal healthcare for everyone and government healthcare for everyone. And then we had to water that down to what could actually pass. It’s the way the process works.
So I think you are always going to get really strong broad commentary on the campaign trail and then you run into the reality of governing and legislating, and we’re going to see that happen over the next six months. Certainly we’re going to get new leadership in the Senate. If the House stays, we pretty much know what we’re dealing with with the leadership in the House. If Republicans retain the majority, there’s unlikely to be shakeups there. So we know what those folks are going to work on.
Brandon Hurlbut: I mean, Speaker Johnson said, your former boss said, he was going to support repealing the CHIPS and Science bill the other day. Do you think that’s real?
Emily Domenech: I mean, again, I think you have to be able to get through your majority. I will say in the speaker’s defense, his team later said he was misquoted and that he intended to talk about a different part of the law. But I will note that I think that again, people say big things and then we have to figure out what can pass and what can pass is often really different than where you started. And I have lived that as a senior staffer for House majorities for a long time.
Julia Pyper: Let’s talk about the House a little bit more. So we are recording this while we still don’t know the results there and it’s still a toss up at this point, but there are some races, I know Emily, you’re watching where Republicans are holding on to seats. Some of those are Republican climate champions frankly, but they were those swing districts that Democrats were looking to pick up. What are you seeing right now, Emily?
Emily Domenech: Yeah, I mean we talked about Michelle Steele at the top of the show. I think she’s a great example of a moderate California member who’s been pretty good on climate and clean energy. She’s worked with Democrats on geothermal legislation and other things in this space. So she’s a good example of one who I think could potentially hang on. Two other races that I think were looking like they were trending for Democrats last night that have turned around in the intervening hours is Mariannette Miller-Meeks in Iowa who has won several narrow races before and is now up over her democratic opponent. She is notably the Republican Chair of the Conservative Climate Caucus. So it would’ve been a big loss to folks who care about climate and clean energy for her not to be returning to the Congress regardless of what the outcome of the majority is.
Another is Don Bacon from Nebraska who was a long time like moderate member who has represented AG districts and rural districts, but also been a pretty big champion of clean energy, particularly in the biofuel space. So he was down last night, now he’s up and it’s looking like they’re calling that race for Don Bacon. Those are the kinds of seats that, one, will make the House majority and two, in making that House majority make it frankly a more friendly majority for clean energy and folks who care about diversifying our energy supply here in this country.
So I actually think there’s lots of good, even if you’re looking at the House saying, “Hey, I was hoping it was going to swing Dem,” the people who are winning in these seats are again, folks from the Conservative Climate Caucus and other caucuses that have engaged on this issue.
Julia Pyper: I think it’ll be interesting to see, again, to what extent they have the sort of political power to stand up and take tough votes. When you’re in a Republican majority that you have the Senate as well, you’re going to want to do big things. I think Speaker Johnson said they want to get a reconciliation deal of their own through in the first 100 days. So there’ll be a lot of pressure to move fast.
I think it’ll be tough just personally if you’re in that seat to say, actually, I’m going to be one of the few votes to sort of slow things down or stand up for pieces of policy. We’ll see. Maybe they’ll feel empowered to do that, but it’s tough when you’re in a group of your colleagues who want to move fast and get things done.
Do the 18 Republicans who defended the IRA actually, are they able to follow through with that or did they sort of get swept up in momentum of getting something done soon to make history in their minds?
Emily Domenech: I’ve told this story before, but if you look at the history of House Republicans passing even messaging bills this last Congress, you saw a handful of members from biofuels focused states change the text of that legislation at the last minute because they had a powerful enough lobby because it was a four seat majority. So never underestimate the power of individual members to move the needle on issues they care about regionally and in their states if they’re engaged. But as a reminder to our listeners, that means that they need to hear from people because I think oftentimes we think, “Oh, well, they’ll just know that there’s jobs in their district” or “They’ll just know that this is an important facility” or whatever. But those personal relationships with members really matter, and I’ve absolutely seen them change legislation in a narrow majority. So I think that’s something people should take away from this.
Julia Pyper: Brandon, thinking about the House, are there any Democrat races you’re watching or just things you’re looking at. If Democrats can win it, what opportunities does that present and if not, and is that even possible?
Brandon Hurlbut: If the Democrats could flip the House, it would create a pretty strong firewall to some of the things the Republicans want to do. I am not sure we are in the middle of this. There’s a lot of races in California, swing races like the one that I was in, and it takes a while to count all those mail-in ballots. So I don’t know whether there’s a realistic chance. It would be really great. It would be something that we could sort of hang a big silver lining to build from, because I think some of the questions on my mind are, so Joe Biden and Kamala Harris leave in two and a half months. Barack Obama’s retired, who’s the leader of the Democratic Party? I don’t know. That’s an interesting question.
Number two, on some of the communication stuff that we’ve been talking about. It’s not a matter of, are the democratic leaders talking about the IRA enough? They are. We all get the press releases, we all get the Politico articles and E&E news in our world, it’s everywhere. But where the voters are, they are on a different channel, a much different channel, and I think it’s a very different channel than most of the Democrats are on, the leadership. So how can we reach those voters? How can we reach those voters that I was speaking to is going to be a big question because I’m not sure it’s a problem with the message or the messenger. I think it’s kind of what channel are you on?
And then number three, how are we going to navigate what’s going to happen with these agencies under Republican rule? And so I will be counting on Emily a lot for her insights and some of the others that we have. But yeah, and I also think it’s going to be interesting to see how Republicans read this because another thing that we do in this country is when either party wins, they claim this mandate. And what we really saw here in the end was a shift of three to four points to the right.
Julia Pyper: Which was in the polling margin of error. It was always possible.
Brandon Hurlbut: Yeah, actually the national polls were right. Anne Seltzer in Iowa, the Des Moines Register poll, she was 13 points off. That’s never happened. And some of the stuff that’s breaking my brain that Joe Biden did better with women than Kamala Harris.
Julia Pyper: Right. Yeah. And the youth, I think there’s 53% according to one poll that broke for Trump.
Brandon Hurlbut: And the youth.
Julia Pyper: So you can’t take anything for granted.
Emily Domenech: He also did better in blue states across the country, significantly. You saw big trends to the right in New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Vermont, Maryland, Delaware, every single one moved to the right. And I think again, that’s a much broader response. And it’s also why frankly we’re looking at the Senate makeup that we have and a potential House that stays Republican.
Julia Pyper: Which I don’t think we’ve mentioned. I think President Trump won the popular vote for the first time for a Republican in what, decades?
Emily Domenech: It’s the first time since 2004.
Julia Pyper: In 2004. Yeah. That’s another historic moment right there. You can’t deny it.
Emily Domenech: Significant swings among Latinos particularly too.
Julia Pyper: Yeah. I think the one upside is the Democratic system worked. Both parties expressed a lot of fear and doubt about the democracy of America. And I hope one thing that’s at least got some clarity, it’s not a perfect system, but hey, it stood the test. We’ll see.
Brandon Hurlbut: Julia, if it had been the other way around, I think it would’ve been different.
Julia Pyper: My only hope is that people feel reinvigorated that the system worked because their views were reflected if they were feeling a lack of confidence in it. But it’s probably a fight we’ll continue to fight.
Getting a little more down to brass tacks. I do think if we’ve talked about the IRA all the time, but we should also be paying close attention to what a Trump Administration can do within its own powers, right? So they’ll have control of agencies, will they revoke safe harbor for some of the tax credits or change the nature of those rules that make it harder for investors to know exactly how the tax credits will work? We’ll have to watch for that obviously.
Brandon Hurlbut: Will they spend the appropriated money?
Julia Pyper: Well, right, exactly. Well, Trump has said he would not. And so that puts grants and various loan authorizations in question. So if you have an application pending, that could be a tumultuous time for you right now to figure out if that’s going to follow through, if the money’s not already out the door. And that’s been something he said for a long time. So no one should be necessarily surprised, but we’ll have to see how that actually plays out and how fast they move or if that was more of a campaign talking point than it is a realistic policy move.
Emily Domenech: Yeah, I would just say I think the only case where this is really relevant I think is looking at the Loan Program Office for example, where that is not money that has to be spent by a certain time in the same way that traditionally appropriated funds are allocated by Congress. It’s something that you can use, but you don’t have to. And in the past, I think Republicans have typically sort of sat on the loan guarantee program and not really used it. I’ll be really curious to see if they do that again, given that every time, every time control of the White House flips, it just goes right back to business as usual. So I think I’ll be interested to see if there’s different approaches in a second Trump term because they saw sort of what the outcome was when the party control flipped after their first term. Do they approach things differently to look for more lasting policies because they sort of have seen this flip-flop in regulatory control or other things.
Brandon Hurlbut: And there’s applications for projects that are in Republican districts in the queue. So does that matter?
Emily Domenech: Yeah. I think also it comes down to President Trump approved the largest loan guarantee in history to the Vogtle nuclear plant. So maybe they look at more investments in nuclear because that’s something that they’re broadly supportive of. So I think there’s lots of nuances here that we’re going to have to see shake out over the next six to nine months probably.
Brandon Hurlbut: Emily, is it fair to say that even with this outcome, there’s going to be a lot of activity in DC around policies that matter to many of our listeners and they’re going to need their voice to be heard? Is that right?
Emily Domenech: Yeah, I mean, I think it was going to be a tax reauthorization year no matter who won the White House. We were going to be talking about tax issues on Capitol Hill with the need to extend the TCJA, the Trump era tax cuts. So that means there’s opportunity for folks who care about the tax code. I think there’s plenty of opportunity for folks who care about, again, building and deploying here in the United States, not just on the legislative front when it comes to permitting reform, but on the regulatory front. I think it’s very likely that President Trump will go back to an approach to NEPA and the other regulatory hurdles that we saw in the first term. And that’s all really good for building things here.
So I think, again, there is always, I’m a House girl by trade, so I’m used to, we do our election cycle every two years. There are always big issues for people to talk about and in a narrowly divided government, particularly in the House, there’s plenty of nuance to this discussion.
Julia Pyper: A couple other points I just sort of conclude on and we’ll continue to unpack on our next episode as we know more, but some bright spots for folks who are in the climate community. Probably more so on the Democrat side. Senator Heinrich won in New Mexico. He’s a great champion of energy policy overall, and I think he has a reputation of working across the aisle. He’s just smart on these issues. He won his Senate race, so that’s a good champion to have back in the Senate.
We also are in California, don’t know the final result yet, but it looks like Proposition 4, which authorizes a bond for water wildfire and land protection measures is on track to pass. That’s $10 billion that could flow into the state through a bond measure. We’ll have to see how that plays out, but we’ll keep watching that one.
Climate power and others have been celebrating Democrat Josh Stein in North Carolina. I think it was a candidate quality factor there. President Trump won North Carolina handily, but you did see a Democrat win the governorship, and that’s sort of interesting because he did include clean energy talking points in his campaign. He’ll likely help Shepherd through some of those state-based investments. So that’s a nice, maybe local win there to ensure investment dollars keep flowing in that state into clean energy projects.
So a couple of little highlights there. There’ll be more of those that we can unpack in the days and weeks to come. But Brandon, any other sort of small wins you’re tracking as we continue to wait for the final results?
Brandon Hurlbut: We’ll see about the House. I’ll be tracking that very closely. I think I read that in Washington State there was a climate ballot initiative and they kept the same policy. It didn’t get overturned. So there’s maybe some small wins out there like that, but it was a pretty dark day last night. I mean, it doesn’t get much darker.
Julia Pyper: Well, any final thoughts from you, Emily, before we leave it here?
Emily Domenech: I mean, again, I think we have a lot of work to do. We were going to have a lot of work to do on Capitol Hill regardless of how the election turned out. We’re heading into a tax reauthorization year. There’s a lot of policy to be done. There’s a lot of things that matter to people who want to build in America, who want to bring industries back to America. And I’m hopeful that we can find some, we’ve talked about the China issue before being sort of a unifying bipartisan competitiveness with China, bringing more people to the table and bipartisan ideas. I’m hopeful that we can find things like that and AI, and again, looking to grow energy here in the United States that help us to bridge some of these partisan divides in the future.
Julia Pyper: Brandon, actually, final word to you. What do you think the Biden administration, Biden-Harris administration folks will do now? It’s November 6th. What does the next few weeks look like for them?
Brandon Hurlbut: Try to do as much as they can to run through the tape. They’ll try to figure out what applications, what grants that they can just move forward with. Try to implement as much of that as possible and try to protect some of the things that would be vulnerable. For instance, I think when you look at the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, that was like the $27 billion that went to the EPA. That’s sort of called the Green Bank. They had thought about this scenario, and so they had gotten a lot of that money out to third parties. So there have been some strategies in place to deal with the scenario, but it’s not a long time. You got the holidays. So I think they’ll be doing whatever they can.
But then I think we’re going to have to answer a lot of big questions about how this happened and what we do going forward. There’s going to be a lot of reflection and it’s not obvious who is the leader. And so there’s going to be a lot of conversations in DC and we’d like to bring our listeners into those.
Julia Pyper: I heard, saw a meme or something where it was like election day and I’m going to extend it to maybe election week is like traveling at an airport. The calories don’t count. You can drink at noon. I’m going with that.
Emily Domenech: It’s a bipartisan sentiment…
Julia Pyper: Exactly. Airport lounge for everyone.
Brandon Hurlbut: Does that include sobbing? Because that’s what I’m doing.
Julia Pyper: Crying. You can cry too. Yeah, go into one of those little pod, but there’s free wine, don’t worry.
Emily Domenech: Oh my God.
Julia Pyper: Little cookies.
All right, we’ll leave it there today. Thank you both for jumping on the mics the morning after. Thanks everyone for listening. Political Climate is a co-production of Latitude Media and Boundary Stone Partners. Max Savage Levenson is our producer. Sean Marquand is our technical director. Steven Lacey is our executive editor. You can get all of our show notes and transcripts at Latitudemedia.com. And if you want us to talk about a specific topic, please email us at politicalclimatepodcast@gmail.com. Please feel free to help spread the word about Political Climate on LinkedIn, X, and beyond. I’m Julia Pyper. See you again soon.
