Even Trump can’t stop America’s green transition, says Biden’s top climate adviser

The second is whether we continue to deal with more and more people transitioning. We have more than 100,000 farmers and ranchers now implementing climate-smart agricultural practices. Will this climate action, this distributed climate action, continue to expand?

The final thing is how good we are at building the things we need to build. Steel in the ground. One of the things we’ve been trying to develop as a specialty is the professionalism of developing social licensing around these new technologies so they can scale. Can we build as fast as we need to by making sure that when the tower goes up, the community feels like they built the barn together, not like they fell short?

We’ve talked about economic and industrial leadership, but political leadership is really important too. Trump indicated that he would withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement for the second time in five years. Wouldn’t that make it more difficult to get to the path you were just describing?

Does this action mean the end of U.S. climate leadership or sideline us in the progress we need to make? No, but it carries with it symbolism and perhaps a lot of second-order implications.

Since the beginning of this administration we have had a climate headquarters in the West Wing. New team. Gina McCarthy led it, and now I’m leading it. We have senior managers on my team who focus on every sector of the economy, with backgrounds in science, business, engineering and policy.

What happens when you don’t have that level of focus at the highest level with the huge commitment of very talented people leading it? What happens when the United States shows up to multilateral forums or bilateral talks and does not prioritize setting the rules of the road for a clean energy economy?

I think what’s happening is that the United States is marginalizing American workers in the race for clean energy jobs, and we’re underestimating our influence on a global level. Not only will the climate not pause over the next four years, our competitors will not slow down – to benefit from clean energy technologies, but also for global impact.

Four years is not a lot of time. You must have thought about this for a second term. Do you think about things you want to accomplish but can’t?

The big things are, first, the sectors where we haven’t reached escape velocity. We have to keep pushing for our economy. This is unfinished business that needs to be moved forward by state and local governments, by the private sector, and hopefully by the federal government.

The second thing is to make sure we invest enough in talent and workforce. We have a bad habit in this country of extracting talent from the top and not investing in organizations that attract more people into the workforce. Unions are at the forefront of this. Biden has spent a lot of time developing apprenticeships.