Episode 123: Jason Bordoff, Professor of Professional Practice at Columbia University
Today's guest is Jason Bordoff, Professor of Professional Practice in International and Public Affairs at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) and Founding Director at the Columbia’s Center on Global Energy Policy.
After his tenure in the Obama Administration as Special Assistant to the president and Senior Director for Energy and Climate Change (on the staff of the National Security Council), Jason joined the Columbia faculty in 2013. As one of the world's top energy policy experts, Jason has led research and developed policy at the intersection of economics, energy, environment and national security. We have a great discussion in this episode, in which Jason walks us through the many aspects of the energy policy discussion and debate.
Enjoy the show!
You can find me on Twitter @jjacobs22 (me), @mcjpod (podcast) or @mcjcollective (company). You can reach us via email at info@mcjcollective.com, where we encourage you to share your feedback on episodes and suggestions for future topics or guests.
In today's episode, we cover:
Jason’s work at SIPA and Center of Global Energy Policy.
Jason’s time in policy in the Clinton and Obama Administrations and Brookings Institute.
SIPA’s mission and how it serves as a resource for decision-makers in the energy industry.
How the challenge among energy and climate policymakers is making research useful and actionable for industry.
How Jason found his way in working on energy at Columbia.
The early-optimism in Obama’s first-term to pass bipartisan legislation to address climate change.
The optimal role for the U.S. in addressing climate change.
What Jason would advocate a potential Biden Administration focus on to address climate change.
The importance of bilateral cooperation, in particular with China, in tackling climate change.
The significance of equity and justice in solving climate change.
The implications of the U.S. passing a carbon price.
How global sentiment toward climate change is encouraging and leading to social mobilization.
The role of the big fossil fuel companies in the clean energy transition.
Links to topics discussed in this episode:
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Jason Jacobs: Hello everyone. This is Jason Jacobs and welcome to My Climate Journey. This show follows my journey to interview a wide range of guests to better understand and make sense of the formidable problem of climate change and try to figure out how people like you and I can help. Today's guest is Jason Bordoff, head of the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University. Jason joined the Columbia faculty after serving until January, 2013 as special assistant to the president and senior director for energy and climate change on the staff of the National Security Council.
And prior to that, he held senior policy positions on the white house's national economic council and council on environmental quality. He's one of the world's top energy policy experts. Jason's research and policy interest lie at the intersection of economics, energy, environment and national security. We have a great discussion in this episode, and Jason is so deep in not only so many aspects of the energy policy discussion and debate, but also how to translate those into regular person speak was it, which is exactly what I need to understand this stuff, but also what I'm guessing a lot of you need as well. We cover a lot of ground and I hope you enjoy it. Jason Bordoff, welcome to the show.
Jason Bordoff: Thanks, good to be with you.
Jason Jacobs: I appreciate very much you coming on. I've had some of your colleagues now on the show, but it keeps coming back to you and I've been a big fan from a distance of your work and your writing and your speaking. I've listened to your podcast as well. I know that you're a host of a podcast like me.
Jason Bordoff: Thanks for plugging [laughs].
Jason Jacobs: And also, I mean, I- I think Columbia from a distance, you guys are really pioneering in terms of academia's role in bringing about this kind of systemic change for some of society's toughest problems. And so yeah, for those reasons and more, I'm excited for this discussion.
Jason Bordoff: Well, thanks. I appreciate your saying that, so am I.
Jason Jacobs: So, uh, well, gosh, you've done so much, but maybe we should just kinda take it from the top in terms of what you're doing now. Do you wanna talk a bit about your work at Columbia and the group?
Jason Bordoff: Sure. So yeah, I'm a professor of practice at Columbia School of International and Public Affairs. And I direct what is called the Center on Global Energy Policy. And I created it when I joined the Columbia faculty about well, seven and a half years ago now. Most of my career has been moving back and forth between policy making and policy research. So working in the Clinton administration and the Obama White House, and then think tanks like Brookings and now Colombia on the other ends of that. And the idea for the center on global energy policy, which came out of the series of conversations I had with leadership at Columbia University, when I was thinking about what I would do after the white house in a sense was building something that I wish there was more of when I was a policymaker. So there are great think tanks and- and great universities.
I think as a policy maker, the energy world is changing so quickly. The pace of climate change, the severity of it, the pace at which technology is advancing renewable costs are falling the shale revolution, I mean, on and on. So it's hard to keep up with how quickly things are changing, all of those raise important policy issues that you need to confront. And then you're inundated with information that is often advocacy information from one side of the other, from environmental NGOs, from industry. And so it's very helpful is to be able to say, well, what's the reality here? Who can I turn to that's an independent objective source of analysis that doesn't have an agenda, but really has high quality research that they can provide and is looking at all aspects of the energy system, the climate change, environment, national security, the economy.
And I would often call academics, there's such power in the methodology, the rigor, the independence of academic research. But I think too often, academic institutions and universities struggle to make the insights from their research, useful to people outside of academia in the real world, for lack of a better term in the formats and timeframes, they need to be useful. So if you're a leading investor, if you're a head of a company, or if you're a policymaker, you are trying to understand what's happening in the world today. So you can make better and hopefully smarter and more sustainable choices. And we try to be a resource. So we define our success by, uh, we engaging with our colleagues at the university to produce high quality academic work, but also are we producing it in ways that are useful to decision makers in the world so that our insights are helping to influence them and we can make smarter choices moving forward about what our energy future looks like. That's the mission and the work that we do.
Jason Jacobs: What do you think it is that enables you to operate independently, relative to other academic institutions, given that I imagine you have funders as well.
Jason Bordoff: Well, I mean, Columbia University, I mean, all universities have lots of different funding sources, important things to have good rules for conflict of interest disclosure, all the rest. I'm not thinking we operate more independently. I think that's, what's so wonderful about academic institutions is how robust they are and the standards they hold themselves to, to produce independent and rigorous research. The point I was making was I think sometimes they struggle a bit to make that research relevant to, and useful to decision makers outside of academia. So that's where we've tried to focus and then work closely with our colleagues across the university, the Earth Institute, which we work very closely with and our affiliate of some of the leading climate scientists in the world. The school of engineering at Columbia is doing pioneering work and issues across the board, renewable energy, battery storage, carbon capture, and more. So we have just a fantastic group of colleagues, as you can imagine.
Jason Jacobs: And I have a number of questions about your work at Columbia, but before we go down that path, how did you find your way into academia? How did you find your way into energy?
Jason Bordoff: It was, uh, not necessarily like most of us, a straight line, but I studied international politics and having a graduate degree in middle East politics can't really study middle East politics without understanding the role that energy plays. And I was deeply interested in international affairs, foreign policy and the environment and science and the economy. And there's something about energy that just kinda brings all of those things together in a really interesting and unique way. So as I was doing government work, I worked at the treasury department during the Clinton administration and then doing my own research when I went to the Brookings Institution.
After that, I spent more and more time focused on those issues because they're just deeply interesting and combine all of those elements and also just, you wanna do work that's important and mission driven, and it's very clear now, but it's been clear for some time that climate change is one of the most important and most pressing issues that we face. And so trying to understand it and make smart choices about it and help policymakers make smart choices about it has just always been a passion and motivates the work that we do at the energy center and at Columbia.
Jason Jacobs: Great and can you talk a bit about your time in the Obama White House and what was going on during that time from a climate standpoint versus say today?
Jason Bordoff: Well, I don't think there's much going on in the White House and climate change today, I don't know that firsthand, kinda comes from reading secondary versus, or maybe there's things that are undermining the pace of climate ambition. So, uh, affirmatively harmful I fear, but for president Obama, climate change was a top priority and there were lots of other priorities too. Like the healthcare bill and pulling the economy out of one of the steepest economic downturns we've seen after 2008, 2009 recession.
There were a lot of priorities and a lot of crises they were dealing with. This was a moment in time you'll recall where there was a lot of optimism that we could reach by some measure of bipartisan agreement on the topic of climate change. There were cap and trade bills modeled on some state policies that even Republican governors had supported or policy tools that going back to George H. W. Bush had put in place to deal with air pollution, sulfur dioxide pollution, using a market based instrument like that. There was bipartisan proposals to do something like that at a national scale. And this was just a year or two after States like California, Cal had put a major cap and trade program in place.
So that was a major focus. I was in the first term of president Obama, not the second, the first four years, that was a major area of focus in the beginning. There were important energy issues that sidetracked people like the deep water horizon oil spill, for example, environmental tragedy in the Gulf. And that legislative approach was a major area of focus in the first term, along with a host of other things like increasing fuel economy standards and other regulatory approaches. And then I think it's fair to say that in the second term, the Obama administration realized the likelihood of passing significant climate legislation was not high.
And so it's shifted toward a strategy of using its existing executive authority. What are the things that it can do with laws already passed like the Clean Air Act to try to make as much progress as it could on climate change. And that's what led to things like the clean power plan being developed to try to reduce emissions in the power sector. Those were subject to challenge in court, but the Trump administration has walked most of those back anyway.
Jason Jacobs: And so as you see today, looking forward and you look at the overall problem and you look at what's been happening the last few years at the federal level in this country and then you look at the upcoming election, what can you see as the optimal role for the U.S. in addressing the global climate challenge? And then it'd be great to come back around after you enter that, to talk about what the implications are of that as it relates to the upcoming election.
Jason Bordoff: Yeah, well, I mean, they go hand in hand and I think the upcoming election is critical in many, many, many respects, but including climate change. It's important to remember that it's hard to design almost a worst environmental problem to try to solve because it is intergenerational. We are already seeing impacts today, but the impacts will be felt also very far in the future and you need to mobilize action today. It's also a global problems which raises important free rider and collective action problems. So the U.S. is only 15%. You could say only, it's actually a big number, but it's 15% global emissions. That means that in order to address this problem, all nations need to hold hands and- and- and move together. And that raises lots of concerns. So an argument against action as well, if we do it, but no one else does, we're trying to drag their feet. Why are we incurring these costs on ourselves, et cetera, et cetera.
So what that means that in order to make progress, you need leadership, you need international leadership. And I think it's been a significant problem and real foreign policy failure that this administration has completely abdicated international leadership and climate, and actually in many other respects, like the pandemic too. So I think it's gonna be important that an administration that wants to prioritize climate change as I suspected by the administration would, would reengage in the international community, demonstrate international leadership and try to build momentum for all nations to try to take action. Then we at home in the U.S. need to be able to take action, and that's not gonna be easy. I mean, it's still, we don't know if the Republicans or Democrats will control the Senate. Even if the Democrats do, it's gonna be by a small margin.
So getting meaningful legislation through Congress on climate is gonna be difficult. And so I suspect that means that we'll need to continue to find ways to use existing regulatory tools for emissions and transportation, fuel economy and the power sector. I think significant investments in innovation and R&D to try to really advance the technologies that we're gonna need to meet this challenge, and then try to find areas of bipartisan cooperation, if possible, to move the ball forward as well, cause I think we'll need, and you can imagine something like a- a national standard the way States have for low carbon electricity in the power sector. Let's try to move there and try to get low carbon electricity. Uh, I don't think a full economy-wide carbon price is probably viable anytime soon, but maybe that could change. And the last thing I would say is all of this takes place in the context of 2008, 2009.
Today, we are again in a place even worse now of significant economic pain in the country and around the world as a result of the shutdowns to deal with the pandemic. So even though we're digging out of that, we're gonna be pretty far from full employment for several years to come. And that is gonna mean that incoming administration or even any administration would need to prioritize measures to think about boosting the U.S. economy. Some of that is gonna be narrowly defined, a stimulus near term, helping send checks to people, providing loans, to keep businesses solvent, helping state and local governments with aid.
But I think at a time when we're gonna have a longterm economic downturn, we have a very low cost of borrowing for the federal government. We have an economic rationale and also an important need from the standpoint of priorities, like climate to think about longer term investments in the U.S. economy. Investments in innovation, investments in infrastructure, something starts to blur the line a bit between what might narrowly be called stimulus and what some might call industrial policy. And we can start to help jumpstart those industries that are gonna be really important to transition to a lower carbon future.
Jason Jacobs: So going back to your point about global leadership, are there specific things that either you would have liked to seen the Trump administration do or that you would advocate that the Biden administration do if Biden does win the election to try to most impactfully increase our leadership in the right way at the global level?
Jason Bordoff: Well, sure. And I mean, again, there's many dimensions to this there's trade, there's public health, like the pandemic our NATO partnerships, our TransAtlantic relationship. I think a number of ways in which the U.S. has stepped back from a standpoint of- of international leadership. I think it's quite worrying in the face of a global pandemic when it's hard to control that if you don't have real coordination between countries, people move about relatively freely, seems to me, at least like the U.S. isn't even trying to lead in that global effort. That's worrisome. So it's also true for climate that both of these are problems where we should let science tell us what the right answer is. I think the Biden administration I suspect, I think it's promised it would very early on rejoined the Paris climate agreement that is necessary, but not sufficient. And so then the question is how do you rebuild those international partnerships and alliances?
And one very important milestone in that will be just over a year from now, November of next year will be the UN climate meeting in Scotland that is sort of one of the big ones like there's Paris, there's Copenhagen, there's inaudible 00:14:08] the- the, they meet every year, but occasionally there's a big one, and this is gonna be a big one, cause it's the stocktaking agreement. This is the meeting at which nations around the world, look back on the commitments they made in Paris. They assess whether we're meeting the commitments we made. And if so, we hopefully ratchet up our ambition to move collectively further down the road together towards decarbonization. It's gonna be challenging for the U.S. 'cause we have not been moving forward with our domestic policy, as one would want over the last several years. And we'll want to show up at that meeting with a strong domestic target for lower carbon, a nationally determined contribution.
And there's gonna be a lot of analysis and a lot of domestic policy work that has to be done and a lot of international cooperation to get there. It's not just multilateral cooperation, it's also bilateral cooperation. So one of the most important relationships and probably in the world is gonna be the U.S.-China bilateral relationship when it comes to climate change. And so I think a key question there is whether cooperation between the U.S. and China can be segmented from the rest of the U.S.-China relationship, which I think if you're Republican or Democrat is gonna be in a very strange place.
Where the U.S.- China relationship is perhaps at one of its lowest points ever. And that's gonna make cooperation difficult. We're gonna need technical cooperation on new clean energy technologies, but many U.S. companies feel burned by how they've been treated in China. So it's gonna be challenging to make sure we have a positive agenda on climate with China, and whether that can be segmented from some of the other problems we have in the U.S.-China relationship right now. But it's important for climate change.
Jason Jacobs: I recently did an episode with Maggie Thomas from governor Inslee and Senator Warren's campaigns. And she's now with Evergreen Action. And one of the things she talked about was kind of the three pillars to the evergreen plan of standards, infrastructure, and justice. I'm curious what you think about that plan. I don't know how familiar you are with it. And also just if those would be your pillars, or if you have a different frame to think about the ways that the U.S. should be investing in decarbonisation and the clean energy transition.
Jason Bordoff: In terms of what we should be spending our money on you mean?
Jason Jacobs: Yeah, like that. I mean, the way they laid it out, there's kinda three buckets of investment, their standards. And it was actually standards over a carbon price, which is a whole conversation in itself. And then there was infrastructure and kind of bundling the infrastructure, the trains, the building, uh, buildings and efficiency, and kinda all the things that need to be kind of built out in this country, but both to improve our quality of life, but also clean and then justice and how things like environmental and social justice, can't be decoupled from the clean energy transition and that until we address the systemic racism and inequality in this country, then the climate movement will be called back. I may be articulating the evergreen position wrong, but I think that's what I heard from them. And so I'm just curious, like, where are the areas of commonality as you think about our best path forward, and then where are some of the differences.
Jason Bordoff: I think that's a good summary of what a policy agenda that a lot of people are coalescing around. I think Dave Roberts, who's a great reporter at Vox wrote up something recently about where, how the Democrats are finding areas of common ground. And- and I think captured a lot of what you just said, pa- regulations like standards for different sectors investments in the economy. And I think it's very important, actually, the equity and justice component. You mentioned my podcast, I was just talking a few days ago about this with Mary Nichols, who is the head of environmental Bureau in the state of California looking back, this is also a year when we're reflecting on the 50th anniversary of Earth Day. And I was talking to her a little bit about what she remembered. She was attended the 1963 civil rights rally the March on Washington, and was very involved in the civil rights movement.
And then you had on earth day in 1970, one out of every 10 Americans come together on the streets of this country in rallies and protests for the first Earth Day, basically, uh, to cross party lines, it was urban, suburban. It was Republic and Democrat to say, we can't live this way anymore. We can't have air that we can't breathe and water that we can't swim in or drink. And that helped lead to some of these landmark things like the creation of the EPA and the Clean Water Act and Clean Air Act, but they were separate. And that's been a criticism of the environmental movement for some time that it hasn't been as tightly connected to other social justice agendas, including civil rights. And what I think is interesting now at this moment, when, how we talk about and think about racial justice in this country is suddenly front and center in an urgent and important way.
The issue of equity and racial justice and environmental justice seems to me, a- and this is a huge positive woven, much more closely into the discussion about climate policy and how we think about the kind of climate actions that we put in place and the different impacts that fall on different communities and different ways of climate change impacts themselves. So I think that's quite important. I think your question was also that investment and so I guess I was asking, because I think government spending is a necessary, but not sufficient part of climate policy, I guess, is how I would put it. We are not going in my view to government spend our way out of the climate problem. Doesn't mean we don't need government spending. We certainly do. And you need to think carefully about where you do it, especially in a time when spending is constrained.
Again, now it might be a little less so because we do need to spend for the purposes of economic recovery, but we have to remember that emissions come from the way energy is produced and consumed, and the way that energy is produced and consumed in this country, largely reflects decisions made by hundreds of thousands, millions of individual businesses and firms and government doesn't determine directly how we produce the next car or produces a roll of steel or produce, uh, electricity. So we will also need broader climate policy in the form of regulations and standards that change the incentives people have, will require them to do things that take account of the environmental harms of their actions. That is how we dealt with those problems of air and water that were so terrible in the '50s and '60s. And then we had policies that came in place that restricted, what people could do.
And therefore we found ways to put technology on coal plants to remove sulfur dioxide from the air, we changed the behavior and the technologies that people were using to address those environmental harms. And then in addition to that, we will need government spending as well for areas where there are market failures. We need to invest in innovation and R&D. We can jumpstart new industries the way the Recovery Act 10 years ago did for solar. For example, a colleague of mine, Varun, who you've had on just wrote a paper about that a day or two ago, things that represent sort of public goods problems like national charging or transmission infrastructure. Those are sort of large scale infrastructure plans that can really help move the needle forward more quickly, where there's a need for government investment as well.
Jason Jacobs: So there's a couple things I'm wrestling with them there. I'd love to just put front and center and get your thoughts on one is carbon price. And the reason I bring that up is that I've talked to a lot of guests that have said that the most impactful that we could do, if we did one thing on the policy side would be to put a carbon price in place. But then there also seems to be consensus that it is not close and it may never happen politically. When I brought Maggie on though, she actually had a different position, which is that even if it could happen politically, she's not convinced it's the most impactful thing we could do and would lean harder on standards. And doesn't necessarily think that a carbon price is the right thing to do, even if it could happen. What do you think?
Jason Bordoff: I do think that a carbon price and our modeling shows this, the work that my colleague Noah Kaufman does, the energy center does a lot. It actually does more than many realize. And one way to think about that is that carbon emissions, we tend to focus on areas of emissions that are very salient, like cars and how we produce electricity. But if you add up all the electricity and all the cars, that's less than half of emissions. So there's a lot of nooks and crannies in the economy that result in carbon emissions that are not always front and center. So it's hard to be targeted. Well, ideally, what a carbon price does, if it's economy-wide is it gets at all those sources of emissions. So ships and trucks and aviation work, and again, induces people to change their behavior, invest in different types of technologies and encourages new innovation.
So I think the carbon price would be very impactful. It is not the silver bullet. I'm not pretending that if we had a carbon price, suddenly the climate problem is solved and think about what a carbon price would do to the price of the pump of gasoline. And then look at the carbon taxes they have in Europe. And they're still driving a lot of internal combustion engine cars in Europe, even with petrol prices, including taxation that are way in excess of what you would probably have with the carbon price. So it's not a silver bullet, but I think it would have a big impact. And then the question is whether it's politically possible to get there, or whether you can achieve those outcomes in other ways, there is some discussion among some moderate Republicans about kind of a carbon tax. I don't think it's very far advanced, so I'm not sure I would bet on it right now, but it is interesting that 2016, a carbon tax was a centerpiece of Bernie Sanders plan when he ran for president his climate plan.
And now it seems like some environmental groups and even Sanders in his campaign has sort of said, well, it's nice, but it's not really that important. And it's not strong enough. It's not robust enough to the extent it is not framed as a position of maybe the far left, for lack of a better term. Maybe that creates more political opening for people in the middle to come together around it. I'm not sure political economy is necessarily my area of expertise, but if you're gonna atop a different approach like regulations and standards, you could have a standard for the auto sector, which is a- a sense what California and National Fuel Economy and EPA standards have done. You can have a standard fee electricity sector. You can have a standard for how we produce aluminum and cement and steel and carbon intensive industries.
And then if you design those standards in a way that allows some flexibility, so it might be cheaper for one firm than another to reduce emissions and there's some tradability between them, you end up getting something that starts to look like a carbon price being applied to different sectors. And that is an approach that has actually worked reasonably well for some States that have tried to pursue it. And I think, again, that would be, you'd call it necessary, but not sufficient. We're still gonna need a series of other government policies, including government, federal investments.
But those could actually do quite a bit to set those standards 'cause cap and trade really what it is as you're saying as an economy, we're gonna put a cap on how much CO2 can be emitted. And then we're gonna not determine where those emissions come from. We're gonna let people in the market figure out who can reduce emissions most cheaply. And so if you set a standard for a particular sector, it can, depending on how you design it, start to look like that. And one thing that's important about an approach like that, that provides some of that flexibility is that it can help lower the cost of achieving your climate target, your whatever your emission reduction target is.
And I think that is important because we do see in some other parts of the world in Europe and elsewhere, that when the, especially at a time when the economy is struggling, we need to ensure we maintain political support for stronger climate action. And so I think, especially as you start to have more and more stringent climate targets that try to get deeper and deeper reductions in emissions and potentially the cost of the next marginal ton of CO2 is a little bit higher than the last one. As those costs go up, you wanna make sure that you're minimizing to the extent possible, any costs to consumers, to make sure that you maintain as much political support as possible for being able to take stronger and stronger climate actions.
Jason Jacobs: I mean, it's great to hear that you also believe that environmental and social justice is- is intertwined with the climate fight and better integrating those things is good. So I'm there. I initially had concerns when I first came in that it was hard enough to tackle one of those and that while they were both important, they should be decoupled and focused on independently and I'm starting to head down a different path where I believe that they are interrelated. My question though and I feel like there's this fork in the road is that if you do need to- to address both one way to go is to National Mobilization and Green New Deal and Unite & Inspire and March and go and mobilize and kinda lump everything into this like big unveiling type of thing.
And then the other is kind of more of like a quiet, almost like Bill Belichick where it's just like heads down, do the work, grind out a win here, grind out a win there. Don't talk about it. Words don't matter. It's actions and just kinda one foot at a time, just do the work. And the big movement is just gonna be polarizing and gonna make it harder to get anything done. Like just keep putting wins on the board and shut the heck up. I don't have an answer there. I'm curious how you thinking about that because I've really been struggling with it?
Jason Bordoff: I think it's a really important question and it sounds like a cop out, but I- I think it's a hundred percent true. Like we need both. So when we have moments of ability to drive change, whether it's the way different companies or financial institutions are thinking about deploying capital or policy, if we have a moment to enact policy, whether it's a regulation that an administration does or Congress, how do we design those? Like what do we actually do that matters a lot. There's a whole laundry list of things one could do, and some make a much bigger dent in the greenhouse gas problem than others. So I think it's really important that people are doing kind of technocratic work to say, if we're gonna design policy, how do we design it? And what do we focus on that's actually gonna really make the biggest dent in the climate problem, not marginal reductions, but the big reductions we need.
And, you know, that's the kind of work we do at a place at the Energy Center at Columbia, but that's not sufficient because we're not going to have a political environment that allows for the adoption of those kind of wonky policy proposals, unless sentiment changes in this country. I- I wrote about this again recently in a column I did in foreign policy magazine about the 50th anniversary birthday and the mobilization, the sense that the whole country was coming together and demanding change. We're moving in that direction. If you look at public opinion, polling actually on both sides of the eye lab is a much more for Democrats than Republicans, but it's changing on both sides of the aisle. Climate is a higher and higher priority.
Certainly that's much more true for younger cohorts than for older cohorts. And so we have student strikes, school strikes when people were going to school before the pandemic, Greta Thunberg on the cover of time magazine as person of the year. We're moving in that direction. But I don't think we're there yet where there's a sense of mobilization where people are coming together and demanding that we do something about this problem and policymakers do something about this problem. So I think we need that level of mobilization and activism. And then the question is once you have that come to fruition, where there's a sense that people have to act on it, how do we make sure we have the solutions in place and the actions they should be taking that actually are smartest, most cost effective and make the biggest dent possible in the carbon problem?
Jason Jacobs: I'm glad you brought up Greta because another thing on my mind is do you think, I think Greta is great and what she's doing is important for the movement. I think Julio Friedmann is great and what he's doing is important for the movement. But my question for you is, are they on the same team? Can- can those types of viewpoints coexist under one umbrella?
Jason Bordoff: I think so. I think not, everyone's gonna agree on everything, but they first and foremost share a passionate desire to do something about the climate problem and reduce emissions. Now, look, there are different views about what the scale and the full suite of those solutions needs to look like. I think Julio's view, and it's actually supported in my view by lots of analysis we see from different agencies and stuff. It is very hard at this point, given lots of years of inaction to see a pathway, to anything close to 1.5 degrees Celsius warming without deployment of a broad suite of technologies, not just renewable energy, but hydrogen and carbon capture and potentially carbon removal. One of the other things that should be a concern for all of us. I mentioned Earth Day a minute ago in 1970 landmark laws, because we were polluting the air, polluting the water.
So what happened when we put regulations in place that reduced how much we were say polluting the Hudson river over time, the Hudson river starts to clean itself up. So it's much cleaner today than it was 20 or 30 years ago. That's not the way the atmosphere works in carbon emissions. When you put a ton of CO2 up there, it's gonna stay up there for a long time. And so when I said a minute ago, we needed a moment of realization that we come together around a sense of political urgency that, Oh, wow, we really have to do something about the climate problem. And now everyone is on the same page or close to it. If you kinda don't come to that realization until pretty late, it's hard to roll the clock back. And I think that's why there is growing interest in things like carbon removal technology, whether it's technology based or land-based like forestry.
So if we're trying to think about not just decarbonizing power, but trucks and planes and ships and how we make steel and how we make cement, I kind of feel like we want every option on the table and that certainly is gonna be renewables and batteries. But even there, we need batteries for a long cycle. Like how do we do seasonal storage or multi-day storage? So we're gonna need a very broad suite of technologies. And I think I don't wanna speak for him, but that be my guess how Julio thinks about trying to focus on the broadest set of range of technologies possible.
Jason Jacobs: And there's one other discrepancy or distinction I think between the Gretas of the world and the Julios, and I don't wanna speak for either of them either, but this is just from what I can gather again, from the cheap seats is the role of the big oil majors in the transition, right? Because I think there's one school of thought that says, look sure they have the resources and the capabilities, but they've also been doing things the same way for a long time. And their culture is not gonna change. And they've been resisting every step of the way. And they say the right words and then actively work against those interests behind the scenes, through trade groups and otherwise, and we just need to burn them down.
And then there's another school of thought like Julio's, which is like burn them down. Like we need them, we have to work with them. No one could help us get there more than them. Like you're shooting yourself in the foot, don't get all righteous, like just do the job, stay focused on one and a half degrees or two degrees or whatever the number is as low as possible, but work with what you've got, whether you like them or not. And I guess I'd put that to you. How do you think about that? I don't know if juxtaposition is the right word, but yeah.
Jason Bordoff: Yeah. It's a really important question. And I mean, you can understand, a- at least I can understand some of what they're both saying. We need, it's not just oil and gas companies it's mining companies, utilities like car makers and companies across the board to be much more focused. Um, the climate challenge and- and you see a growing pressure from investors for them to be doing this for businesses to have longterm business plans that are consistent with the low carbon world that disclose their emissions and their vulnerability to climate risk. And to the point you just made a minute ago that and a minimum stop harmful practices for the oil and gas industry flaring or methane leakage or other things, and- and but maybe most importantly, stop stymieing climate policy and hopefully advocate for climate policy.
So be part of solution, I thought it was really interesting recently that BlackRock, which took the position of saying, we're gonna try to be an active investor. I know they get a lot of criticism. And, but the one example recently where they, as I, one of it, if not the largest shareholder of Chevron supported a resolution to require Chevron to disclose their lobbying and advocacy spending around climate. And I think that's a really interesting example of what you were saying, trying to hold companies accountable.
Now, I think Julio's, and again I'm not speaking for him, but a view that is related to what you just said is in order to think about a full range of technologies we need to decarbonize the world and continue to meet rising energy demand, 'cause we're still seeing energy demand rise rapidly, especially in emerging markets in South Asia and elsewhere, that's gonna mean a lot more renewables, but that won't be sufficient. It's also gonna mean a new hydrogen economy. It might mean a wide scale use of carbon capture. There's a host of things where the project management skills, the engineering skills, the capital budgets that some of these large companies have can absolutely be deployed to help bring those about faster. You just need to make sure that, that's [laughs], in fact what they're doing and make sure there's accountability, uh, in that.
Jason Jacobs: We gotta wrap up in a couple minutes, but I guess bringing it back around to your work at Columbia, for other academics who are listening to this discussion, what's your rallying cry for them in terms of the role that academia should be playing in this transition and how academia can do better going forward?
Jason Bordoff: Well, I think president Bollinger at Columbia talks about something he calls the fourth purpose of universities and doesn't have a better name yet, but there's teaching and research and service in the community. The fourth purpose, which is about impact in the world and trying to make sure that the research that you are doing is actually helping to change social conditions in a positive way. And so I think there are lots of aspects to that, but climate change is one of, if not the most important issue where we need the kind of rigor and objectivity that universities can produce. I mean, universities are motivated in an ideal world by trying to separate truth from non-truth. What does the research tell us is happening in a certain space, but that's not sufficient that work may or may not be useful to bringing about change in the world to driving different behaviors, to changing social conditions.
So how do we set a research agenda that is targeted on addressing the problems that you think maybe not, what's gonna be relevant on Capitol Hill in the next, you know, few months, but what will be relevant over some reasonable timeframe to the kind of problems that people are addressing and how do we deliver a better understanding of how you design policy, how you build low carbon technology, the impacts of climate itself, climate science, the intersection between climate and other issues like ethics and racial justice.
I mean, there's a host of issues there where just the breadth and capacity of a university research faculty is so powerful. And I think what we try to do, as I said at the outset at the energy center is make sure that the insights from that were research, the questions we're asking are informed by what we think will be most useful to solving this problem in the future. And then the work we are is being produced in ways that we think will be helpful to people to make better decisions. And I think that's something that universities increasingly are doing and need to do even more of to make sure that they are not disconnected, but are very much involved and trying to figure out what the solutions are to some of the world's biggest problems like climate change.
Jason Jacobs: I like that, and I feel like we could spend a whole episode just digging into the tactics and learnings around how to actually bring that about in practice. But my final question is just if you could be working on anything that is not what you're doing now, to be most impactful, to the same problems that you're working on now, what would you be doing?
Jason Bordoff: Well I think if you ask me about the same problems, which is how do we think about a smarter and more sustainable energy system, it might be something in technology. Trying to really, as we said a minute ago, we will still need technological innovation in my view, beyond the technologies we have today to achieve a zero carbon world and do it in a way that continues to pull people out of poverty around the world, expand and enhance standards of living. And- and we're gonna see rising energy demands. So thinking about companies, investors that are kind of on the front line of that, and, you know, we know lots of examples of people who are doing that. I think that would be a really exciting place to be 'cause it would be very impactful if you could help advance some of the emerging nascent technologies that can really be transformative differences in taking a step change, not just incremental change toward, uh, pointing us toward a lower carbon future.
Jason Jacobs: So one day we might see Jason Bordoff executive chair of some spin-out technology that's, uh, disruptive to in the energy world coming out of Columbia?
Jason Bordoff: Well, other than being unsure that I have the skillset to do that well, that would be a, probably a fun thing to do. But yeah, [laughs].
Jason Jacobs: Well, I mean, you've done the think tank and you've done academia and you've done government. So it seems like innovation is the thing to tackle next.
Jason Bordoff: That would be fun. I'd love to do that. You can teach me about Silicon Valley, [laughs].
Jason Jacobs: Well, you can teach me about everything to do with the domain that we're living in right now, so we can trade.
Jason Bordoff: Good.
Jason Jacobs: But Jason, this was an awesome discussion. I learned a lot. I could have easily talked to you for hours more. I can't thank you enough for making the time and coming on the show.
Jason Bordoff: Great. Thank you. Really enjoyed it. Thanks for having me. It's good to talk to you.
Jason Jacobs: Hey everyone, Jason here. Thanks again for joining me on My Climate Journey. If you'd like to learn more about the journey, you can visit us at myclimatejourney.co. Note that is .co not .com. Someday we'll get the .com, but right now .co. You can also find me on Twitter at Jay Jacobs22, where I would encourage you to share your feedback on the episode or suggestions for future guests you'd like to hear. And before I let you go, if you enjoyed the show, please share an episode with a friend or consider leaving a review on iTunes. The lawyers made me say that. Thank you.
