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About this episode
Jane Flegal has worked inside philanthropy at the Hewlett Foundation, industrial emissions policy at the Biden White House, and carbon-removal market development at Frontier; she's now a senior fellow at the Searchlight Institute, writing some of the smartest climate policy analysis around. We cover a lot of ground: industrial policy versus market approaches, what the IRA got right and wrong, philanthropy's proper role, data centers and the case for an infrastructure fund, and behind-the-meter gas, among other things. This is a long one, and spicy!
Chapters:
00:00 – Introduction
03:11 – Flegal's thesis: building a clean grid fast enough to power growth
06:29 – Why she rejects degrowth
09:27 – The Roosevelt essay: climate as more than a market failure
13:30 – Why clean energy underuses its political muscle
15:24 – Industrial policy and the green spiral theory of change
20:40 – Was IRA the right approach?
22:12 – Lily Bermel's paper and the fight over what survived
23:21 – What she would have done differently under IRA
30:11 – Philanthropy, Silicon Valley, and what government is for
33:29 – The epistemic crisis inside environmental NGOs
39:09 – The abundance movement and what each faction misses
44:16 – What establishment Democrats get wrong on climate
46:06 – Why issue polling misleads
50:34 – Republicans and the Cold War analogy
52:47 – Data centers and the American Grid Infrastructure Fund
59:13 – Affordability politics and who pays for the grid
1:08:14 – Emissions, behind-the-meter gas, and flexible load
1:13:57 – The clean firm debate: storage plus transmission?
1:20:14 – Capacity markets, ERCOT, and the case for planning
1:24:32 – Utility incentives, public power, and affordability fixes
1:35:55 – Permitting reform and the land footprint asymmetry
1:41:05 – NEPA reform and the political window
1:48:21 – Where fresh policy thinking comes from
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