Episode 119: Rep. Sean Casten, Illinois’ 6th Congressional District
Today's guest is Sean Casten, U.S. Representative of Illinois 6th Congressional District.
Congressman Sean Casten is an American entrepreneur and Democratic politician, serving as the U.S. Representative for Illinois sixth congressional district. A freshmen in the 116th Congress, he is the first Democrat to represent the sixth district in nearly 50 years. We cover a lot in this episode, including Sean’s roots and how he came to care about climate change. We also discuss how his thinking on the problem has evolved from his time as a science and engineering student in college to his career as a clean energy entrepreneur to his current role as a member of Congress. I learned a lot in this one and I hope you do as well.
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:
Sean’s experience as an entrepreneur.
Sean’s background in science and his interest in climate change.
How business revealed to him the regulatory and legislative barriers related to climate development.
How his father and his work in cogeneration plants influenced his interest in biofuels and climate.
The challenges faced by mission-driven energy companies.
Why he feels, in general, the tech component is overstated as a barrier.
Why deployment of technology is the real challenge.
How Sean transitioned from business to politics.
Why framing climate change, in a way that appeals to constituents’ specific interests, is key.
The specific areas of the Green New Deal he takes issue with.
How the needs of addressing climate change far exceed what’s politically possible currently.
Why critical issues, like climate change, cannot be decided by the majority.
What Sean recommends concerned citizens should do to address climate change.
What Sean believes the U.S. needs to do to address climate change.
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 Congressman Sean Casten, an American entrepreneur and Democratic politicians serving as the U.S. Representative for Illinois sixth congressional district. He's serving as a freshmen in the 116th Congress, and as the first Democrat to represent the sixth district in nearly 50 years. We cover a lot in this episode, including Sean's roots and how he came to care about climate change. Why he came to care about climate change; and how his thinking on the problem has evolved over the years through his schooling, through his higher education pursuits, through his illustrious clean energy entrepreneurial career and now as a member of Congress. I learned a lot in this one and I hope you do as well.
Congressman Casten, welcome to the show.
Sean Casten: Hello, Jason. Nice to be here.
Jason Jacobs: Well, I'm glad we got the two minutes of niceties before we jumped into this, because now I don't need to be intimidated. You seem like a pretty approachable regular guy.
Sean Casten: Don't be fooled.
Jason Jacobs: Oh, so that's just your act. You're like a pool hustler, right? It's like, Oh, you play the nice guy, but then the claws come out. But I'm so grateful for you making the time to come on the show.
As I mentioned before we hit record, my whole career has been as an entrepreneur. And now I'm concerned about climate change, which leads me to having discussions like this. But this is a newer area for me. So when I interview other entrepreneurs, I'm a lot more in my element. I'm talking to you because policy and democracy are so fundamentally important to solving the climate problem and I'll go wherever solving the climate problem takes me. But this is an area just admittedly that, you know, I'm a lot less comfortable and knowledgeable.
Sean Casten: Well, I think we have some significant similarities there. I'm also just an entrepreneur who sold his company and was looking for something to do after 2016. I don't mean to trivialize it. The one difference is I've been concerned about climate change, basically my whole professional career.
And I started thinking that this was a science problem. Did basic research, worked on developing biofuels, did technology consulting for awhile. And we just kept coming across companies that had completely proven technologies. That were economic that were robust just in some cases that were 40, 50 years old and couldn't sell them. And so if you learn anything coming up in the sciences, it's that you have to deal with the facts as they sit, not as you might wish them to be. The facts, as I wished them to be, was that I actually had a business education; the facts as they sat with this seemed like a business problem rather than a science problem.
And so I started a couple companies and we had a decent amount of success, but you gradually realized that there are no thermodynamic laws that prevent us from dramatically lowering our CO2 emissions. There are no economic laws that prevent us from doing so profitably, but there's a whole lot of United States and state laws that get in the way.
And when we sold our company, we felt like, all right, the good news; you know, once again, I don't know anything about politics. But the good news is I don't know how to change the laws of thermodynamics, and I don't know how to change the laws of economics, but I know how to change the laws of the United States.
And here we are.
Jason Jacobs: And, you know, what's funny is that I think the biggest lesson that I've learned as an entrepreneur is that once you go into an area that you didn't know anything about and you figure it out, it's not that then you are an expert in that area and you should stay in that area. It's that you then have the confidence that you can then go into another area that you don't know anything about and figure out. I feel like that's actually the most valuable learning is the process, not the actual specific domain expertise.
Sean Casten: Yeah. And, and hopefully carry enough, you know, keep your ego in, check enough that you don't come to believe that you're smarter than everybody. I mean, I always felt, I don't know what your feeling was, but I feel like the role of a really good CEO is basically to be a switchboard operator.
Your job is to understand when your lawyer's talking to you that this is actually an engineering problem. And then when your engineers talking to the, this is actually a sales problem. And then when your sales is talking to you, there's actually a marketing problem. And it doesn't mean that you as a CEO have to be an expert in all those topics, but you have to know how to recognize where all the connections are and get the right people in the room.
Cause specialists can sometimes, you know, burrow down into that rabbit hole and that's got a non trivial number of parallels with life and Congress.
Jason Jacobs: So I have lots of questions about that, but before we go down that path, going back in the way back machine for a moment, you mentioned that you've cared about climate for your whole professional career.
Did it start in your professional career or like when did that happen and why did that happen do you think?
Sean Casten: So basically, the apple tried to jump a long way from the tree and it rolled back. My dad has also been a climate junkie his whole life. He was working at Cummins Engine Company back in the seventies. I was born in '71.
And he set out to try to build cogeneration plants when nobody knew what that was. And he ended up testifying before the Senate because he was getting so frustrated. You know, what could happen here? And testified in the law that became the Public Utility Reform Policy Act or PURPA, which was the first law that allowed non-utility generators to sell power to the electric grid.
And he built a couple of companies doing that. So I sort of, I grew up with the environmental bug, but said, I don't want to do heat and power. Cause I feel like my dad's kind of solved that I'm going to do fuels. That was really why I went into my master's thesis was in biochemical engineering, trying to make cellulosic biofuels thinking if we could break the food-fuel link and make zero carbon fuels. That'd be way to get it through. And then my thesis ended up doing a lot of work on integrating ethanol plant design, into advanced power generation technologies with fuel cells and micro turbines. And then I got out of school and the first job I'd get is somebody who's really excited that I know about fuel cells and micro turbines.
So, you know, I sort of ended up back at the heat and power space in spite of trying to jump off of it. But I've, I've really grown up in this space and gradually, you know, you get there from science, but the culture of it was instilled in me pretty young.
Jason Jacobs: And some of the people that I've talked to over the years from the heat and power space or energy in general, they're in it because they're hyper motivated by climate change.
And they feel like that's the biggest lever that they have to try to help with the problem. And others, it's more just about like, you know, being fascinated by the grid and how it works or the sport of business or things like that. Like when you first went into this space many years ago, how much of it was driven by concern about the planet versus something else?
Sean Casten: It's always been the planet. That shouldn't have a judgmental value. There are very successful companies that are product-focused. They're very successful companies that are profit-focused, and there's very successful companies that are mission-focused. I've always been mission-focused. The companies I ran always were. You can have success in the other mode.
I think what's hard to have a mission-focused company in the energy space is that the real durable companies in the energy space have adapted their mission to the trends of the times. When power was deregulated and they all got into gas. When the gas market started blowing up, they moved into acquisition and merchant power plants.
When that space started blowing up, a lot of them got into the operating space and as one of my former employees said, he said, when you find really mission-focused, clean energy people, you can usually tell because their resume looks like job hoppers, because they've been doing the same thing all the time, but their parent companies kept changing mission.
It's hard when you have a mission-focused energy company, because capital markets are so fickle in this space. You know, you change the tax credit for wind turbines and all of a sudden that's the sexy technology did you, or you change it again and it's not. And, you know, during my career I've seen any number of technologies right up and down the "sexy" cheap equity capital ladder. To a large degree, the reason that I'm, you know, that we sold our company was market conditions change. I'm a developer at heart, but you know, the market conditions changed and you can just acquire and operate assets. That's fine. You can make a lot of money at that, but if you're a mission-focused guy, it's hard to just change your mission every five years.
Jason Jacobs: And after spending so many years in clean energy entrepreneurship, what are your big takeaways in terms of innovation in general and what its role is in the climate fight?
Sean Casten: I think, in most ways that matter, it's overstated. I emphasize "most" 'cause there's no question, but that there's, you know, really cool, innovative things we can do, particularly in the industrial side; you know, we need to figure out a way to make fertilizer without coming from natural gas, if we're going to truly have a zero carbon economy. We need to figure out to make steel. So there's, there's plenty of room for innovation; don't get me wrong. But there's a real danger. And I think it's held back the clean energy world in framing climate as a problem that is paced by innovation and economics.
'Cause it ain't true. And as long as you frame it that way, you give the forces of darkness and excuse for inaction. I have never built a power project that was less than twice as efficient as the electric grid. And I never built a project that had patents that weren't at least 30 years out of date. That ain't an innovation problem; that's a deployment problem. Switzerland uses half as much energy per dollar of GDP as we do. They get the same access to technology. They got the same access to talent. They got the same access to capital. What are they doing differently? And asking those questions really gets into saying, okay, some of these are business model issues. Some of these are regulatory issues. But what paces is the business model and the regulatory market. And if you don't fix those two, creating new technologies just puts new technologies on the back of a long and not particularly rapidly moving line of technologies waiting to be deployed.
Jason Jacobs: Well, there's a number of questions that I have there before we switch gears.
One other question I have on the innovation topic is that I've heard a lot as I've talked to different guests on the show about breakthrough technologies versus deploying what we've got and how deploying what we've got can only take us so far the way there. And we need fundamental breakthroughs and it's a debate.
Right? I hear different things. You know, some people say that, you know, we don't need anything new and other people say we need fundamental breakthroughs. And I don't know; from my seat, it seems like we need both, but what's your view?
Sean Casten: I'm not saying we don't need that tech innovation isn't great. I mean, look, I'm an engineer at heart.
I love innovation. I'd love the sex appeal of it. But there are an awful lot of people in this space who I think have a memory of their freshman economics class and have certain assumptions about idealized market function and conclude that if the market isn't buying something, it must be because there's a problem, right? And the problem is that the energy sector isn't anywhere close to a efficient functioning, competitive market. We'd like to believe it is. But the truth is that no sector that is as important as energy is we're going to be fully capitalist. Cause I don't think anybody really wants to live in a world where your access to air conditioning on a hot summer day is limited by your ability to pay.
You know, where your access to heat or your access to electricity, which, you know, has a pretty tight correlation to literacy as a function of whether or not you can afford to pay, to run a wire out to your home in rural Oklahoma. And so we've always had a fairly socialized energy system. Part of the proof of the pudding of that, the International Monetary Fund did an analysis last year. Looked at the total subsidies to the U.S. fossil fuel sector, direct and indirect just in the United States.
They did globally, but this is just the U.S. number. They found the total subsidy in the U.S. is 650 billion with a B dollars per year of subsidies to the fossil energy sector. We don't have anywhere near that level of, of support to the clean energy sector. And so if you start saying, well, we have an efficient market with a level playing field ...
Until such time as we either get rid of those subsidies or provide $650 billion a year of subsequently clean energy space, we don't have a level playing field. And yes, if you were to invent a technology that could offset all those disadvantages, you know, it would compete, you know, and be effective. I guess that's true. But you're running into this heavy headwind because of those market distortions. And if we don't remove the market distortions, we're just making our life a lot harder. So it's not that innovation doesn't have a role. It's that's innovation doesn't pace.
Jason Jacobs: Was this thought process part of the calculus that led you to switch gears and move into the political realm?
Sean Casten: So it certainly led me into the policy realm. Politics is a newer adventure. You know, I was running this company out in Western Massachusetts. We built packaged cogen systems, cool little technology. We went running through industrial steam plants, found places where they were letting steam down through pressure valves and replaced those valves with turbines.
So you get basically free electricity from the energy thrown away. It sounds like that should be trivial. You shouldn't be much of it. They did five megawatts at UMass Amherst, six megawatts at an Equastar plant in Tuscola, two megawatts from a waste heat recovery play at a GM plant in Lansing. There's waste energy all over the place that you don't realize.
So here we were doing all that stuff and, every time we built a project, we had to get a permission slip from the utility on how to interconnect that project to their grid. And here, we're sitting here with the same technology they use; you know, it's a steam turbine, it's a rotating generator. There's nothing difficult about it. But the minute we put that on site at University of Massachusetts, at Equastar, utility lost money. Because now they weren't selling electricity. 'Cause this plant was making their own electricity. And they legally couldn't say I can't do this for economic reasons, but they are the party or were the party that was tasked with determining whether your system was safely designed to interconnect with their grid because they were the one liable for any disruptions in their grid.
And that's appropriate, right? I mean, you don't want somebody to just be, you know, randomly, you know, creating phase imbalances or, you know, voltage spikes on the system, but the interconnection rules became a way to make a economic problem manifest as a technical problem. And so I created a group in Massachusetts.
We ended up being the lead negotiator to create a standard set of interconnection rules in Massachusetts. That basically said there are legitimate issues that the utility has, but there's also illegitimate issues. And so we're going to stipulate a standard set of technical rules. And if you meet these rules, you can interconnect to the grid you're done. The rules were primarily technical, but also things like what's an appropriate level of insurance to carry, if there's an error. What's an appropriate level of time for engineering review, you know, et cetera, et cetera. It tooks us about a year and a half, but we did get it done. Now I got to tell a story here that shall remain nameless, but just to give a sign of how goofy the world was before that.
Jason Jacobs: And what year was this just for context?
Sean Casten: That was 2000 and probably 2002, 2003.
Jason Jacobs: Okay. But
Sean Casten: I got to tell a story and I, and I got to leave people nameless here cause I don't want to hurt anybody's feelings. But the piece that really sort of tipped me off of how insane this was, was we did a project at a jail; location of the jail to remain nameless.
They took two years for the utility to let them interconnect. It was a 50 kilowatt system, 50 kilowatts about 10 houses worth of electricity. The utility kept telling me they couldn't interconnect ... kept telling them to put pieces on the system that were completely technically irrelevant.
And they kept doing it, probably doubled the cost of the project by the time all was said and done. And they got everything done the utility to asked for. The utility, showed up and said, we're still not going to let you connect. And the guy in the jail looked at the utility engineer and he said, you got two choices in front of you right now.
You can leave this building your way. You can leave this building my way. And the guy from the utilities; he's like the prison guard in the jail, the utility manager, he's got a gun in his holster. And the guy from the utility says, are you threatening me? And the utility manager in the jail says, "you're goddamn right I'm threatening you." They interconnected that system a couple of weeks later, never killed anybody. Never hurt anybody. Safety was all there. And I'm sitting there saying, okay, here you have this system where the rules have been so corrupted that your ability to actually put this thing on, that's gonna save you money, that's gonna save CO2, depended on your access to a firearm in your, in your jurisdiction to use it. That's not a rule of law. That's not safe. That's not responsible. That's not a technical innovation problem, you know? And so thankfully we created some rules. So at least that particular system in Massachusetts didn't have to happen anymore.
And it's been, you know, since then there's been know that fight has been set in a lot of States and is largely over. There's a bunch of other fights like that. And I tell that, not to say that that's the biggest story, but it's an example of if you view this as an innovation problem, that's something you do if you're buried in textbooks. If you've actually been out there building projects and saying, why the heck can't I get these projects built you pretty quickly realize that it's not, you're not paced by technology.
Jason Jacobs: And so when you sold your company, was that the first time you started thinking about heading more into the political realm, or was this something that was building over a number of years? How did that transition come about?
Sean Casten: I've done a lot of policy stuff. The stuff in New England sort of morphed into a larger national initiative. I ended up being the chairman of sort of a quasi-parent association of this thing that we created in New England. So, you know, worked, you know, policy stuff on the Hill, testified before the Senate on what became, I think the 2006 or 2007 energy bill.
And I really wasn't thinking about politics, but when we'd sold our company, it was trying to figure out what to do next. And my good friend, Katie McGinty, who had been the Head of the Council of Environmental Quality in the Clinton White House. She was a Secretary of Environment in Pennsylvania. She had just lost a race for Senate in Pennsylvania, this was the 2016 cycle.
And the two of us got together and were most trying to figure out what we were going to do next, because I'd sold my company. She was trying to figure out where to go. And she said to me that if you. She said, if you know what you want to do in this life, and you're intellectually curious, there's no better job than being a member of Congress.
And if you don't know what you want to do in this life, and you're not, and, or you're not intellectually curious, there's no worst job. The hours are long. You're away from your family a lot. You know, it's a pay cut relative to what I was making before. I'm not asking you to cry for me, but if that's offset by saying you have these huge levers you can pull. And so if you really care about something, you know, I built $200 million of clean energy projects. I feel pretty good about that over 16 years. I can write a bill that's a, you know, a billion dollar bill. I have written bills to put a billion dollars, $600 million of grid, energy storage around the system so that we can more efficiently deploy renewables.
You can just get this vastly greater levers of power and the ability to access all sorts of expertise. And, you know, I give her credit for planting the seeds and pushing me to think about doing this. You know, the whole world of being a politician is the political side of it has very little overlap with the policy side.
I sorta think about like, I don't, I don't like the second law of thermodynamics very much. It really frustrates me that you can't build a perpetual motion machine, but you gotta deal with it. The political side of this job is not super fun, but you have to deal with that in order to do the policy piece.
Jason Jacobs: How did you pick what to run for which race?
Sean Casten: I didn't even really give it any thought. I cared about climate. We had just elected a president who among his many sins is that he doesn't trust scientists. And I had a climate denier as my representative here, who was on the ballot. And I just sort of felt like, okay, we're in a real dark place after that election, November 16th, and it's not going to get brighter unless we at least flip one house of Congress.
And I think I could be a part of causing Congress to flip control. This is the only election I have ever run for in my life. It's the only election I ever considered running for. And if anybody wants to know how to win an office, you should ask me cause I'm batting a thousand.
Jason Jacobs: And the guy that you unseated, he was what, like a five or six-time incumbent, right? And in a generally Republican district, correct?
Sean Casten: Yep. Six-time.
Jason Jacobs: And you ran on a, on a climate platform. So that as an outsider, just kind of hearing that on the surface that doesn't add up at all. How does that work? Given everything we hear about Republicans, not believing in science and not caring about climate change.
And if it's a Republican district with a five or six time incumbent, who's a Republican and you're running on a climate platform in a Republican district. How do you win?
Sean Casten: Well, number one, there's a huge difference between Republican voters and elected Republican officials. Republican voters have abroad range of issues and they may vote consistently straight ticket.
They may about different ways and you can meet them where they are. Elected Republicans have really been, become so completely beholden to dark money and particularly sort of the, you know, dirty fuel industry that there are different beasts. It's really shocking on the inside what a huge disconnect there is between the values of elected Republican officials in Washington and the values of their voters.
The separate answer to your question is, and I. And you probably get this from your own background. You know, when you convert, when you try to convert an engineer into a salesperson and you have to teach the engineer that people buy for love, and then they rationalize their purchase. That's always a hard thing to teach an engineer who gets into sales, but eventually, you know, the successful ones figured out getting people in a district like this to care about climate.
It's the same way; you meet them where they are. If you don't care at all about climate, but you want cheap energy, I can give you that. When I sold power projects, I didn't sell them to people 'cause I said I want you to care about my morals. I sold them to people because I said, I'm going to save a ton of money.
And I'd like to keep a hundred percent of the money I save. And my customer would say, no, I want some of the money and we'll send the negotiation. We can put a deal together if we have something that you care about. If you care about national security, let's talk about the risks to fuel convoys overseas, or let's talk about the risks to our drones that are all run out of bases in Nevada, that don't have redundant power supplies and don't have power supplies with their own supply chain disruptions.
If you're an Ayn Rand-toting Libertarian, let's talk about getting rid of those $650 billion in subsidies and having free markets, right? You can frame this in a lot of different ways that are all completely legitimate, factual ways of framing of saying that the world we live in is a world where we want cheap and clean energy.
I am proof in the pudding that you can do that. I'm proof in the pudding because I'm a white dude and a CEO who sold a company. Like I don't intimidate your average Republican voter. Right. You know, you have an opportunity, I think, as an elected official or as a candidate for elected office. Not just to follow where the people are, but, you know, to appeal to people's better angels and really shaped the conversation.
And I take a certain amount of pride in the fact that once we got out there saying, here's my experience, I can speak with some credibility. Here's the opportunity we have as a country to grow in ways that are very consistent with our shared values, regardless of where you sit on the political spectrum, people got it.
Jason Jacobs: So as I'm listening to you talk about that and how it's almost like unbundling of a climate platform to talk about specific issues and how they help people in a specific way versus kind of putting an overall label on it of climate, which has somehow evolved into with partisan connotations. I've heard you talk before about how you aren't necessarily a big fan of the Green New Deal.
I guess one question that brings up is is it because of that label and making it harder to unbundle and talk to specific constituents about specific issues? Or is it more about the substance of what the green new deal represents?
Sean Casten: So the Green New Deal is a beautifully aspirational document. Right. You know, it describes a world that I think we all want to live in, a world where we've got, you know, more, more social justice, more economic equity, more environmental equity, and in a world where we've gone to zero CO2 emissions. I've got no problem with any of that.
I completely support it. I completely share the goals and I am delighted that there's been so much energy that has forced that conversation because the zone of what we think is acceptable has expanded thanks to the Green New Deal. My issue with it, and the reason why I haven't gotten behind it, is that as important as aspiration is we don't have time to not be working on the details. And a document that was essentially not written by regulators and nerds and policy wonks, but written by activists.
And I don't say that dismissively, like we need activists. But a document that was written by activists is not a path of how to actually get to CO2, net zero CO2 emissions, on the timeframe that we have. And I think what's frustrating is that because dealing with climate has become so politicized, it's hard to have a sophisticated conversation.
Dems, take it seriously. Republicans say it's a hoax, or it's always been changing whatever else. And there's no real nuance that comes through. But imagine the politicians stood up and said, I'm going to eliminate the budget deficit in 20 years. And that was the, that was the entirety of it. Right. We're gonna eliminate it, you know, and that's, and that's my goal.
No journalist would say that's a really thoughtful, thank you for taking that positive position until they said, you better show me the details of how that's going to happen. What are the trade offs you gonna do? How are you thinking through what are the various bits and pieces? On the other hand, if you stand up as a politician and say, I want to eliminate CO2 emissions in 20 years, the first response you're probably going to get is why aren't you going to be as aggressive as the Green New Deal 'cause that says 10 years. That's not a serious conversation. Right. And we got a real hard conversation about how, how are you going to get there? What are the details of that plan and how do your details really understand the fact that if you're going to deal with climate change, which is a massive problem, you got to understand that our energy policy and our environmental policy, problems in the Clean Air Act that actually get in the way of lowering CO2 emissions, the distortions in our energy sector.
And if you can fix those, which itself is really complicated, you better understand capital markets because we have something like $8.3 trillion of depreciated capital in the energy space. If you have a plan to turn that over in 10 years, you better tell me where the $8.3 trillion coming from, what the ratio of public to private capital is, what the incentives are to invest and how people are going to make that investment in a world of declining energy prices.
Now we can talk through all that stuff and more times. I have a lot of thoughts on all that, but the details matter. The aspiration is fine, but if everybody voted on the Green New Deal, it would not give us a policy. It would give us a talking point and I'm vastly more important in making sure that we have a detailed roadmap to get there, that we put the pieces in place.
And we do that recognizing the tradeoffs and factoring in things that, you know, people who have had careers like mine, knowing their gut. People who have only come up in climate science, has only come up in the energy sector, have only come up in capital markets. They don't necessarily know where that connective tissue is.
Jason Jacobs: While listening to this leads to a question I don't think I've ever asked before, which is if you are motivated to, by solving climate change and helping avert this existential crisis and how to frame it, or whether it's an existential crisis, that's another whole discussion. But this grand challenge that we have, is it counterproductive when you're trying to get things done in Washington to talk about climate change? Like, should you leave that word out of it and talk about deficits and budgets and cost savings and efficiencies and competitive advantage and jobs and not talk about climate change, even if you're motivated by climate change?
Sean Casten: I think it's always good to speak to your audience in the language they speak. Right? If we did this whole interview in French, you'd probably lose a good chunk of your audience. On the other hand, if you want people in Paris to understand that you got to translate it. I think you modulate for the audience that you have. You know, I do think that if you look over certainly in my career.
I think the single most important thing that Congress has ever done to lower CO2 emissions was for quarter eight, 88. Nobody talks about it, but for quarter eight 88 was the rule that deregulated our electric sector and said for the first time that we were going to dispatch power plants based on the lowest cost of operation, rather than based on what a central utility planner decided should run.
That was passed in I think '90, I want to say '94, '95; it was finally all done. And since that was passed, the nuclear fleet went from 60% to 90% capacity factor, because it was the lowest marginal cost provider. And before it didn't really have any incentive to run more or less. It was just getting recovered covered on capital.
Since that time we built 200,000 megawatts of combined cycle, natural gas. It was almost twice as efficient as the electric grid. That's 20% of the entire U.S. grid was built in about a 10 year span. And if you want to know why coal is now dying, coal has gone from 50% of the power grid to 20% in the last year and a half it's because the nuke squeezed it out.
And then when the price of gas fell, we had all these assets there that just gobbled it up and coal is dying because it's uneconomic. Now, if somebody would have billed that of saying, we're going to do this because we care about climate, you can argue about whether it would have gotten done. I don't even think the people who wrote that were thinking about climate.
But it's a good proof point that clean energy and cheap energy are synonymous. And there is no such thing as cheap coal. Certainly there is no such thing as cheap coal that doesn't belch out soot every day. You can be cheaper, you can be sort of, kind of maybe a little bit cleaner, but you can't be both.
So, yeah, you modulate for your audience, but I'd also say that, like, if you frame the question non politically not, do you agree with Donald Trump that, do you agree with Nancy Pelosi that. If you just frame the question of saying, do you think that climate change is an existential crisis that we need to address? Overwhelming majority of the people agree with you. I think it's a less political issue than we think it is, except that we've allowed people to weaponize it for partisan advantage.
Jason Jacobs: So for someone like you, who's been motivated by addressing this problem for such a long time, one concern I would have stepping into office like you've done is that there's a lot of other things you need to care about as a representative of Congress, beyond this problems that are important things.
But if you're trying to have the biggest impact on climate, would those things be a distraction? How do you think about that?
Sean Casten: You know, the beauty of this job and what I, you know, I still pinch myself that I get to have this job. There is no possible way for any elected official to have expertise in all the things you have to vote on. You do your best. You get a good staff. You get good advisors. You're try and get good briefing materials. But the government that our founders came up with, at least in theory and I think more in practice than people appreciate, is a government of citizen legislators. And I can be the guy who's smart on energy and climate policy.
And I don't have to be the guy who's smart on healthcare policy, because if I've got a question, I can go to Donna Shalala. Right. I don't have to be the guy who's super smart on, on all the inner workings of the NSA. Cause I can go across the aisle to my friend, Denver Riggleman and ask him, you know, what he knew from his time as an NSA contractor, or I can ask, you know, a couple of the ex-CIA agents in our class.
So there are pockets of deep expertise around the various members in Congress. And it goes back to Katie's advice to me; if you know what you want to do, and you're intellectually curious, it's an awesome job.
Jason Jacobs: So just as a concerned citizen here, that cares about climate change and wants to help. As I look at our political system and our democracy, what are the most important things that need to happen to help push things in the right direction?
Sean Casten: I got to get pessimistic for a moment. What we have to do on climate, the necessity that the science forces us to do if we want to continue to survive as a species, is way, way North of what anybody thinks is politically possible right now. And look, I'm delighted to be a part of the 116th Congress.
I'm delighted we flipped the house. We haven't really done anything on climate. We passed HR9 to rejoin the Paris Climate Accord, but we have been constrained by what, you know, at least leadership thought was politically possible. And we can quibble about that, but it is what it is. And I think the question we have to ask sort of as a society is.
What do you do when the science tells you to do something or democracy? Because science at core is not majoritarian. It doesn't matter whether one scientist says the right thing and ninety nine say the wrong thing. The facts are the facts and the truth is going to come out. If we waited to build the world's first transistor, until the majority of the country understood quantum mechanics and electrical engineering, you never would have had the Internet.
If we waited to send a man to the moon until the majority of the country said, yeah, I agree with the scientists about rocketry, we never would have had a space program. And climate change sort of somewhat uniquely has been framed in this way. That says you can't really act on what the science says is unambiguously necessary until you have the will of the majority of the public to go along with it.
And this is a complicated topic. And I think if we're honest, you are never going to get to a point where the majority of the American public really understands, you know, Milankovitch Cycles and the waxing and waning of CO2 over our time and how that affects our species and ocean acidification. We shouldn't expect them to, right.
But we need to have a way to recognize as a society that, you know, I mean, take the COVID crisis were in right now; we shouldn't have shut down the pandemic preparation group within the NSA. And my God, we shouldn't have gone out and said, well, let's take a poll to determine whether the public thinks we should prepare ourselves against pandemics.
And we shouldn't take a poll to say, what's the best way to develop a new vaccine and how should we test? Like, that's leave that to the subject matter experts. And I think somehow we have to find a way to address climate consistent with the science. Even if that's anti-majoritarian.
I mean,
Jason Jacobs: where does that leave us? What needs to happen? You might say, well, the presidential election is critical or, you know, we need to flip the Senate or there's like these 20 races that are key races in swing States that we should put all our guns. I'm just trying to figure out like, okay great, so we don't have the political will to get done what we need to get done.
And we can't wait until the whole public cares. Okay. Well then let's get it done. But what does that mean? Where do we go? What do we do?
Sean Casten: Number one, like regardless of the party or the person you elect, elect people who all agree that science cannot be politicized and it's dangerous to politicize it. Now in this moment, you're gonna be hard pressed to find a Republican; they'll pay lip service to it, but they vote against it.
It wasn't always that way. Hopefully it won't always be that way. You know, that's not to say that that every Dem is perfect on this issue either. I think if you ask people, what are your top issues that you campaign on? I tell people my top three issues were climate, climate, and climate. I got a very small number of my colleagues where it's in their top three.
And I think we do have to push people to say, you know, is this a priority for us? And are you willing to get down to the details because the details matter. And there's lots of unintended consequences if you don't. But I think separately, don't wait for government. Cause look at the end of the day, it is in all of our individual self-interest, we've framed this as a collective action problem, which it is.
But if you put a solar panel on your house, no, it's awesome. You don't pay electric bill anymore. If you have a Tesla, you go from taking your car for a tuneup every 15,000 miles to every a hundred thousand miles. Now you may not be able to afford that. Right. And so we've got a question about how do we actually get that capital deployed, but there are a ton of things that we can do in our individual lives, that collectively add up to a big deal and we can do them out of our own self-interest. If you're a school superintendent, you know, have you ever done a proper energy audit of your building to figure out how much you might save, if you put in more efficient windows and more efficient lights and maybe re-insulated some creaky hallways. If you own a business, go and ask your utility manager how many, two year paybacks he's been turned down from your CFO, because he said it's a non core part of the business. And we don't put our capital into non-core projects. There's a ton of that stuff out there. And if we do that, we will be wealthier and we'll be cleaner. And I think we all have a role to play in fighting for that win-win.
Jason Jacobs: So I get that, but we started this discussion by you saying that you can get way more done by passing legislation than you can in innovation, because it's not an innovation problem. It's like a business model and policy problem. And you started by saying that fossil fuel subsidies don't do, we don't have a level playing field.
And I know that with the pandemic and all the job loss and unemployment, that the oil and gas industry, you know, with the Cares Act, for example, they've received more funding than any other industry as it relates to the recovery. And so I want those things to change. I think they're important. You want those things to change.
You think they're important. So what should I do to bring those things about, I know there's other things I can do. I can drive an electric car. I can make my home more efficient, but like I want those big things to happen. So how do I help make those happen? Or should I just put my head in the sand?
Sean Casten: No doubt that we have to flip the Senate.
We have to flip the White House for this stuff to matter. And I don't for a second mean to diminish the importance of regulation that is after all, as you pointed out, why I got here. I'm just saying that for the average person, you also have agency in your own life. You know, as I tell my daughter sometimes, you know, when we're driving around and they'll say, you know, something to the effect, they should really fix that store.
And we say, who is they? Right. If it has to be, it is up to me.
Jason Jacobs: Yeah. But like we're over 700 people in the My Climate Journey Slack room. It's not a big number, but it's a high horsepower group and they have time and they have financial resource. Right. And there's an election coming up in November. What advice do you have for that 700 person group between now and November to have the biggest impact on pushing things in the right direction?
Flip the
Sean Casten: Senate, flip the White House, hold the House. And when you do that,make it very clear in whatever way you're getting involved-- maybe you're a volunteer, maybe you're a financial donor, whatever you get involved-- make it clear to people that this issue matters. One of the things that I think is, is, you know, now that I live in the life of having pollsters and all the rest of that is there's a huge disconnect between what people say matters to them when you just ask them what their issues are and the polls you get from likely voters. Because likely voters are not really a very representative sample of the population. You know, I was telling some, some students awhile ago, they said, why isn't gun control... why isn't opioid addiction a bigger thing? It seems like you guys are always talking about Social Security and Medicare.
And I said, yeah, it's because old people vote. You know, if you get a phone call at your house and the first question is, are you likely to vote in the next election? If you say, no, the call stops. So you've got to make it clear to elected officials that this issue matters, that you care not just about the goal, but you want to know the details of how you're going to get there. You know, and push people even up to the President.
I mean, I've made the point, I've met most of the Democratic presidential candidates in my question's for all of them was is climate a top issue for you? They all said yes. And then my follow up question was okay. That's great to hear. You have a Department of Energy that does energy policy, you have an EPA that does some energy policy, some climate policy.
You have a Department of Transportation that does some energy policy through transportation. You have the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. Who are you going to put in charge of this thing that you've said is one of your top three priorities. And how are you going to structure your department?
Because the structure of our government, there is no desk at which the buck stops right now. And I think that's a conversation that we all need to be asking. This is a big problem. It needs a organized whole of government effort. And it's important to ask our elected officials, are you going to organize your office in a way that makes sure that this can get done. Do you understand where the moving pieces are elevate the conversation, because then that forces my colleagues to say I better bring my A game to this meeting, which means I'm going to have to read up and get smart on this issue as I am on the Medicare Part D "donut hole," that all the seniors asking me about all the time.
Jason Jacobs: I guess a few follow up questions there. One is just for that 700 person group that I mentioned; if we do want the Senate to flip, if we do want to take back the presidency, if we double click there, like what should they do? And then a follow up to that is assuming we did those things successfully, and we were in a position of control to push meaningful legislation forward. And you had a magic wand and could push one or, or let's say one to three key things to happen. What, what would those things be? I know those are two distinct questions.
Sean Casten: The first one is you can go through and you can see, you know, there's various people have different ratings of which Senate seats are most likely to flip.
And I won't, you know, I won't go into all that detail cause I think there's a consensus view and it evolves with the day to day. The thing though that I think is universal is get people registered to vote and make sure they vote because the overwhelming majority of Americans share the values of, of you and I and your 700 people group.
And frankly, I think that even Mitch McConnell agrees with that. The reason we're having such a fight about vote by mail legislation and making sure that we have extended voting hours and not disenfranchising people is because there is a shared bi-partisan recognition that the majority of Americans are good people. So get them to vote and they will elect good people.
And that will be to the detriment of the bad people. But, but that one's really important. Your second piece was if I'm the King, a couple of things that I do.
Jason Jacobs: Yeah, we got control. Hooray. Now we can do meaningful stuff finally. So what?
Sean Casten: You know, let me just start with principles. I've said for a long time that there's only three things we have to do to solve the climate crisis at least in the U.S. Number one, we have to hit Switzerland's level of energy efficiency. BTUs per dollar GDP will be accretive that'll cut our CO2 by probably 60 to 70%. We won't get all the way there. Number two, we have to do a massive R&D program to figure out how to decarbonize those hard to decarbonize industries.
That's the innovation piece that really matters. How do you make steel? How do you make fertilizer? How do you make cement? Because you cannot credibly say you have a path to zero CO2, unless you can do that. Number three is you have to recognize that zero CO2 by 2050 is too slow. Zero CO2 by 2030 is too slow.
We have to be at zero CO2 emissions by 1985. Because that's the last time that the atmospherics, CO2 levels in the atmosphere, were consistent with where it was during the bulk of our evolution as a species. And that means we got to figure out how to make some fairly large structural changes to suck CO2 out of the atmosphere and the oceans.
That is scary as I'll get at. If it doesn't scare you, you don't understand the problem, but we've got to do it. A lot of agricultural changes from what that means regulatorily. Wave a magic wand. Number one, eliminate all of those indirect fossil fuel subsidies. Give it a level playing field because capital markets are awesome things.
They will respond to market signals. They will deploy capital but you've got to go out and take away the subsidies. Now I'd like to staple that to a pricing of the externalities, make sure that people get paid for reducing CO2 emissions because of the value of that. Make sure that people pay a penalty for emitting CO2.
We can have a long conversation about how to structure that, but at least as a first step, get rid of those subsidies and let people compete on the merits. The second thing, and this is really hard, but it's gotta be done is we really need to change the organization of the executive and the legislative branches.
What I said about there being no one in charge of energy policy in the White House, it's just as true in the Congress, right? We have an energy and commerce committee, but energy futures are regulated by the agriculture committee. The capital markets are regulated by the financial services committee that I sit on.
If we're going to suck CO2 out of the atmosphere, well, some of that's going to be ag committee. We've also got transportation and infrastructure committee. There is no coherent place within the legislative branch that this expertise resides as well. And nobody ever wants to change committee structures in Congress because their fiefdoms and their sources of power.
And of course the people who were most reluctant and the people who are most powerful, but we do not have a committee structure in Congress, nor do we have an executive branch structure that is remotely optimized to deal with this massive existential crisis we face. And if we agree that this should be a strategic focus, get the damn organization set up to deal with it.
And maybe that's just still me as an entrepreneur talking, but we're not, we're organized to deal with yesterday's problems.
Jason Jacobs: Any thoughts of, of what that organization would look like or what criteria it should reflect?
Sean Casten: You know, it should reflect the economy as it sits today, not the economy as it was decades ago.
Think about how big tech is in our economy relative to agriculture. We have an ag committee. Tech is the jurisdiction of just about every committee out there, just as an example. Right. You know, and there's a longer conversation with that. I want to just give you one last thing, which is somewhat nerdy.
But it would go a country mile towards changing this. We need to overhaul the Clean Air Act. And those are fighting words for environmentalist, because if you open the door to changing the Clean Air Act, there's the potential for a lot of forces of darkness to come in, but notwithstanding the court's ruling and mass versus EPA, which I agree with that the Clean Air Act gives the government the authority to regulate CO2.
The Clean Air Act really, really doesn't work for CO2 emissions. Almost any pollutant you reduce the ways that you reduce it in the Clean Air Act increase your CEO to emissions. If I mandate that you put a scrubber on a coal plant to get rid of particulate, that's going to consume parasitic loads is going to increase your coal combustion.
Increase your co two emissions. Ditto for a catalytic converter on the car. And we've, we've done that, you know, because we essentially regulate the concentration of pollutants, not the absolute level of pollutants. And so most of what we do is to lower the concentration of pollutants and the exhaust, but that has the effect of increasing the flow.
There are so many opportunities where the industrial space, private capital markets would love to invest their capital in things that would make them wealthier because that's what they do. And if they can put capital to work lowering CO2 emissions, they're going to make more money, but too often than not, they can't do that because to do that would trigger a reopening of their air permit that would block their ability to manufacture because of the way the clean air is structured.
It's really hard to fix that. The Clean Air Act is the second longest document in the federal register after the tax code. It's complicated, but until such time as we do that, the Clean Air Act will continue to be an obstacle to lowering CO2 emissions, and we need to get those in alignment and then run down hill.
Jason Jacobs: So my last question is just, I heard you talk before. I think it was on Julia Piper's podcast, but you were talking about, if you want to know who to go to for what, going to look at what they ran on and, and that you ran on climate. And so therefore, like you're someone who, if people have questions on climate, they know where'd it go.
And that, unfortunately, there's not enough people that ran on climate and that really understand the issue, you know, running around in the halls of Congress. So I guess my question for you is in my mind, there's, there's two ways to fix that. One is to get more people that know and care running through the halls of Congress and the other is to make information more readily accessible to them.
And so I wanted to put that to you. What do you think is the best way to address that? If you believe that that is an important high leverage thing to fix?
Sean Casten: It's probably a little bit of both and I want to be really clear. I don't think Congress would be better if everybody had my resume. I think Congress works when there's a diversity of resumes, because I can't possibly match Donna Shalala's expertise in the healthcare sector, but I'm glad that she was there, you know, to be a counselor to me.
And I can't imagine that, you know, that you could just go and provide a white paper to members of Congress that would give them the same level of expertise that you'd have, if you spent 20 years working in that industry and running companies and selling companies, there's just lived experience that's there.
So I think the diversity matters. I think a lot of it though is just. I got to come back to where we started the conversation. A good CEO is not a CEO who can do the job of everyone in the organization. A good CEO is a CEO who recognizes, you know, sets of vision has a longterm goal, surrounds themselves with talented people, empowers those people to do their job and defers to the expertise that's there. That's a little bit harder to screen on, but if you realize, you know, I, my legislative director has an MPH. She's really good at healthcare policy. It's awesome because I know that I have somebody who I can lean on in my, in my staff for healthcare policy questions.
That was an intentional hire if you go out and this is, you know, a source of a little bit of frustration. When we were hiring my legislative assistant for energy, we got 200 resumes. Every single one of them had environmental policy experience and not a single one had energy and industry experience.
And so ultimately we hired somebody from outside to bring them in. 'Cause I sort of felt like within this organization, I can find a ton of people who understand environmental policy. But you can't change environmental policy unless you understand how it interacts with energy policy. That's what I said before.
There's environmental issues, there's energy issues and there's, and there's capital market issues. They all overlap. So yes, if we can find people running on those issues and they resonate, you know, support them, help them get elected. But I think in many ways it's more important to let people know that this is an issue that people care about.
And we expect our elected officials to be smarter than us on these issues. And that means if you don't come with it, you better get a staff that can educate you. You better defer to folks who have that expertise. You better work through to make sure you understand the bills when they go get voted on.
And, and, you know, we have done that. When Bill Clinton tried to overhaul our healthcare system, it didn't succeed, but it wasn't a very sophisticated conversation. I'm not knocking Hillarycare, but I'm saying there wasn't a sophisticated national conversation about healthcare. Fast forward to like once people said, well, this is an issue that really matters.
I better get educated. All of a sudden you've got a lot of people campaigning on healthcare. And you created a moment where the ACA was possible because you had elected officials who were forced to become smart on this. And we're now sort of educating the public on things that they had learned from this amazing collection of resources that they were able to assemble.
I think on climate where we're sort of where we were when Clinton was trying to do healthcare reform. Except that we don't have 20 years to get smart on it. We've got to figure out a way to supercharge that transition, but we've at least seen how that transition can happen.
Jason Jacobs: Is there anything I didn't ask you that I should have, or any parting words for listeners?
Sean Casten: Oh, I'm sure we can talk for another five hours.
Jason Jacobs: That is true because there is a ton of things we didn't cover. We've already spent more than an hour.
Sean Casten: You know, I think, I think the biggest thing that I just, that I think is really important for people to understand is that we have a challenging converting to a clean economy.
But it's a really good problem to have, and it's exactly the opposite of the problem. That's been framed. Almost everything we do to lower CO2 emissions also lowers our cost of energy, energy efficiency, solar panels, electric vehicles, all that stuff has the practical result of reducing our demand for energy and supply demand still works, right?
The price falls. We have seen that in every market that's adopted green energy is the fundamentals of energy markets have created tremendous value for consumers. The challenge that creates is how do you continue to provide the capital in these markets when the commodity that the capital is making is worth less and less?
That's a really good problem. I mean, cause essentially it's you allocate the economic gain that's being created by this industry. We haven't really grappled with that because we've spent 25 years telling a completely fictionalized narrative that this is a, how do you allocate the pain problem? Because folks have been lying about the fact that it's conversion.
But as you know, the fact of the matter is in the last I told you, since 88 was passed this bill, I told you the CO2 emissions from the electric power sector have fallen from 1300 pounds a megawatt hour to 950. The price of power has fallen by 6%. That was before COVID. That's not because, you know, there was some massive government disruption in the system.
It's because markets that were driven to pursue low cost energy, pursued low carbon energy, because if you don't have to buy fuel, you don't have to pay for fuel. That is an awesome opportunity. The challenge that we have is how do we figure out really quickly, how to make sure that that gain is appropriately allocated in the systems that we still have incentives to conserve, that we still have incentives to build, to build new clean energy plants, to invest in efficiency while still making sure that consumers benefit from that transition.
And that's a solvable problem. It's just not the one we've been working on. And the sooner we can focus on that, the sooner we can all start running downhill.
Jason Jacobs: I like it rather than leaving us with the answer. You're leaving us with a big thorny thought provoking question for us all to chew on. And maybe at some point we can circle back and do a follow up.
Sean Casten: Sounds great.
Jason Jacobs: Okay. Congressman Casten. Thanks again for coming on the show. This was great.
Sean Casten: Really appreciate it. Thank 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 jjacobs22, 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 leaving a review on iTunes. The lawyers made me say that, thank you.
