Crafting Landmark Climate Legislation with Russell Kenneth DeGraff

Carbon

Oct 7

Russell Kenneth DeGraff spent 18 years as a staffer on Capitol Hill, including 12 years as the Chief Climate and Technology Advisor to Nancy Pelosi, notably during her second term as Speaker of the House. He was, as they say in the room where it happened when negotiating the landmark climate legislation of the last few years, including the Inflation Reduction Act, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, and the CHIPS and Science Act. This is a special conversation going deep into the backstory of how things work in Washington and how these once-in-a-generation climate policies came to be realized.

Episode recorded on Aug 6, 2024 (Published on Oct 7, 2024)

In this episode, we cover:

Russell's background and path to Capitol Hill
His roles in congressional offices, including work with Congressman Mike Doyle and Speaker Nancy Pelosi
The challenges of passing legislation in a closely divided Senate
Negotiating and passing major climate policies like the Inflation Reduction Act, and the role of the House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis
A case study on negotiating solar canals
Dynamics of working with key senators, such as Joe Manchin
Russell's current work with Stanford and Harvard
Reflections on January 6, the political climate, and the 2024 presidential election
Advice for getting involved in electoral efforts to support climate action
Risks of losing recently passed climate policies if Democrats lose control of Congress
Why climate change is inherently a political issue

Cody Simms:
From MCJ, I' Simms. Today's guest is Russell Kenneth DeGraff, who most recently spent 18 years as a staffer on Capitol Hill, including 12 years as the Chief Climate and Technology Advisor to Nancy Pelosi, including during her second stint as Speaker of the House. He was, as they say in the room where it happened when it comes to negotiating the landmark climate legislation of the last few years, including the Inflation Reduction Act, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, and the CHIPS and Science Act. This is a special conversation going deep into the backstory of how things work in Washington and how these once-in-a-generation climate policies came to be realized. So let's dive right in. But before we start, I'm Cody Simms.
Yin Lu:
I'm Yin Lu.
Jason Jacobs:
And I'm Jason Jacobs and welcome to My Climate Journey.
Yin Lu:
This show is a growing body of knowledge focused on climate change and potential solutions.
Cody Simms:
In this podcast, we traverse disciplines, industries, and opinions to better understand and make sense of the formidable problem of climate change and all the ways people like you and I can help. Russell, welcome to the show.
Russell Kenneth DeGraff:
Thanks for having me, Cody.
Cody Simms:
Let's start right there with your name, Russell Kenneth DeGraff. Apparently on the Hill, you were known as Kenneth DeGaaff and now I've met you as Russell. Explain a little bit about the name thing.
Russell Kenneth DeGraff:
Long story short, my friends and family have always called me Rusty from before birth and it was never part of my name, but I was Kenneth on Capitol Hill. I didn't think that the speaker would ever hire a person named Rusty to do this work who was a young person like I was at the time that she was considering me and it wasn't part of my name. It is now, but people who have called me Kenneth for all these years should still feel free to call me Kenneth. That's fine. I have no complaints about that. I just don't want people using a name that doesn't belong to me and that happens in DC, the pretend familiarity of Washington in order to pretend that you know someone well. No, it's just using somebody else's name that they don't answer to. It's just rude.
Cody Simms:
Let's jump right in then to the start of your chapter on Capitol Hill, which is you started out by working, I believe with Congressman Mike Doyle out of Pennsylvania I think. What was that path like and then how did you ultimately meet Speaker Pelosi?
Russell Kenneth DeGraff:
I think it really comes for me even before that when I was growing up as a child in Nashville, I had a single mom and we were doing what we could to get me to have a good education and her to survive and she had never gone to college. Watching her work to put food on the table for both of us was just really a cool thing to experience as a kid. I really love her a lot and one of the things I remember was Al Gore running for president in 1998 talking about the things that were actually important to me explicitly for my issues, which were at the time climate and about how to connect our country to what became the internet. Those were his two big issues. They resonated for me at a time, at a young age. I was a kid who was building computers in high school and in middle school to save money. That was how I paid my way through college was actually building computer products like software databases from Butler University, the student database, the student detention and adjudication database.
Cody Simms:
In 88 with Al Gore, was he a senator yet in Tennessee? What was his role then?
Russell Kenneth DeGraff:
He was a senator from Tennessee, so he was in the Congress for a few years before that in the early 80s in the House on the Energy and Commerce Committee, which is important and we'll get to that in a minute because what you're able to do in the Energy and Commerce Committee is just so overwhelming than the rest of the House. So having done that work at Butler and the computer work, and I was also a protester, activist on campus. This is the time of the Iraq war. This is the time of the 2004 election when that was stolen from him in college. So that was the 2000s. If I think of it, our email went from DOS-based shell prompts to Gmail in just the course of that four years. Having had that tech background and the programming background and the politics backgrounds, I was protesting in the streets.
We did the DC protest for the Iraq war. There was amazing Iraq War protests back in the day and I believe people like Speaker Pelosi who thought that they were better ways out that solution than to go into war and I didn't trust the surgeon Dr. Bush to do it either. So in that time at Butler ended up getting arrested at a protest for LGBT rights at the Lutheran Church. They were continuing to do spiritual violence to their members by rejecting gays and lesbians and committed relationships from being able to enjoy any kind of semblance of a spiritual life within their church. I thought that was outrageous and got arrested in a civil disobedience for doing so, but that's what has made me so angry about the current climate protests that are out there. Maybe we get to that later. I think the role of protest is very important to helping make sure that people understand the climate movement and what is necessary for them to do. I don't like all of it that I see right now, but I definitely understand the role of protest.
Cody Simms:
How did you ultimately find your way up to Capitol Hill?
Russell Kenneth DeGraff:
So I worked in a congressional in Nashville that was kind of groundbreaking at its time. It was a guy who ran against the incumbent. Once the incumbent ran for Senate, the need for the race fizzled at that point and the seat opened up and my guy was still in the race, so I stuck around the race. It was fun working in that high level on anything like that was fun and educational, even though we didn't get to take on the really conservative incumbent who was I think was too conservative for Nashville. The ultimate winner ended up liking me a lot and so I ended up graduating from Butler with this thing called the Truman Scholarship.
The people I've met through them have just been part of my life ever since, and same through college and high school. In the process of getting the internship that I landed the summer after my graduation in Washington through this Truman summer, the congressman connected me with I guess the husband of a staffer he used to work for who ran Consumer Reports Magazine's DC office, said I was able to become a free laborer for the summer. That summer was the summer that we worked on the Media Ownership Rules of 2003 at the FCC, which was this big left-right coalition to help overturn the FCC's media conglomeration rules that would've allowed for bigger networks to own more stations, and that was in the time of the Iraq War protests.
Cody Simms:
Was that the first big net neutrality blow up if I remember correctly?
Russell Kenneth DeGraff:
It really, really was, and it was the first time in a long time that tech has had a floor fight.
Cody Simms:
The internet was really new. Broadband was very new at that point.
Russell Kenneth DeGraff:
And it was a really big flash point in the culture in the political moment. It was for several years in that 2003, 2006 era, and so I was on the Hill a lot because of the early days of the internet. We were doing a ton. I worked on the energy team.We did some fun things at Consumer Reports and then onto the Hill for Congressman Doyle, I got really lucky there with an amazing member and an amazing chief and the fantastic office with a congressman from in Pittsburgh who served on the Energy and Commerce Committee and served in the energy role that needed to go back and do the rack and sack of Waxman-Markey and the ACESA Clean Air Act law was absolutely instrumental in getting that bill with the finish line out of the House.
Cody Simms:
That's interesting. A congressperson from Pittsburgh, which I think of as a epicenter of coal from an economic perspective and steel making obviously is helping to get the Clean Air Act over the line.
Russell Kenneth DeGraff:
His job wasn't to help the coal industry get over the finish line, which they never ended up doing obviously. His job was to get the steel and the industrial side and he worked intensively hard with Jay Inslee on the provision to make sure that we had border adjustment in this, that we considered border adjustment in Waxman-Markey from the day one and it worked and it was because of a person like Mike Doyle to be able to get that kind of deal. It was an incredible experience working with him. I didn't handle that day to day. That was incredible. Other staff like Katie Ottenpack Kavanaugh and Gene Warnbeck, but it was just amazing. One of the most real and down to earth members you could have ever wanted as a staffer to work for. You could take him in any idea, if you could sell him, he'd do it and it would work. You could talk about some really groundbreaking things on the internet. We talked about Girl Talk and that went incredibly viral.
Cody Simms:
I brought Girl Talk to a concert when I worked at Yahoo. I ran Yahoo's developer network and we brought Girl Talk to come give a big giant concert at one of our hack days. It was amazing.
Russell Kenneth DeGraff:
Remember when he was in every single blog post because a member of Congress talked about him? It blew up the internet for that three week period. It just felt like every blog talked about it. And of course now blogs are gone, so I can't find many of them. But they were there, man. They were there.
Cody Simms:
So you worked with Congressman Doyle and then what was the path to getting connected with Speaker Pelosi?
Russell Kenneth DeGraff:
Well, I wasn't looking to leave Mr. Doyle's office. He's a great member and I was having a lot of fun as his elected director. It was a great time. We had just taken over the minority again. You don't relish being in the minority. It's not as much fun to be in the minority in the House. I thought we were going to be able to get it back. I actually didn't have doubt about that. I knew that we were going to get it back. But then literally one day now Senator [inaudible 00:12:42] came and pulled me aside in a committee hearing room. I was in a hearing room for a different issue than what I was normally on and he pulled me aside and he is like, "Aren't you Doyle's telecom guy?" And he goes, "Yeah," and he pulls me aside and he just proceeds to just give me the nicest... one of the most amazingly effusive compliment streams that a person I've sat behind and next to down dais for at that point 5 years and from across the hall for the previous three.
He knows who I am. He is saying a lot of amazing things about the work that I've just done over the last... that's really kind. And he's like, "I'm going to be looking out for you." And then a few weeks later I get a call from somebody from the staff and he's like, "I would like to offer you a job in our office as our alleged director," and I said, " No, I can't take that. I can't leave Mike. There's just no other way." "Then I need to recommend you to the office of the speaker to the minority leader, and I think that you should absolutely consider taking that job." And the speaker brought me in. I met with the staff a number of times and the speaker brought me in. I will never forget that interview. How do you interview with Nancy Pelosi? It worked out.
Cody Simms:
Wow. So this was 2011 or so and then she became the speaker again in 2012. Is that when the House flipped back Democratic? I can't remember.
Russell Kenneth DeGraff:
No. We were in the minority for a very long time.
Cody Simms:
Remind me.
Russell Kenneth DeGraff:
Eight years. So she didn't become speaker again until 2019 as a result of the 2018 midterms.
Cody Simms:
Talk about the difference between working for her as minority leader and then working with her when she was Speaker of the House. How does your role differ in those two capacities?
Russell Kenneth DeGraff:
The minority where House Democrats are right now is not a good place to be. Now, they are enjoying their time. The five seat majority like this, the two seat margin, it's actually a lot of fun. I do kind of miss being there for this because they're having a lot more fun than they deserve to be. But in the minority, you don't win. You lose every day. You can't get your message out. You don't have the ability to hold hearings. You can hold a meeting in a room, maybe a camera will show up. You can't hold the big meeting in the big room and get the big witnesses because you're not anything. You are a guest at their show. If you think of C-SPAN as a show, they control the programming on that day. It is incumbent upon all of us to do productive actions, to think about actions that can deliver a House of Representatives and a Congress and the Senate that can control the narrative about what they do every day.
It's just fundamentally different in the House. You have one chance a day to hijack a bill and put your preferred bill on the floor instead. We have one of those votes in the last 50 years or 40 years. It's not a common occurrence, so you have to be in the majority to do anything. And my time in the minority was spent learning as much as I possibly could to be ready to be prepared to work as hard as I could in the majority, to effectuate as much and to be as ready to do as much as we possibly could given the circumstances that we were in.
Cody Simms:
Interesting. I mean, thinking of it as a sports analogy, you're basically on defense when you're in the minority for the most part unless you can pull some bipartisan legislation across, which right now is clearly a struggle to do so, and then you got to be ready to go so that when you're on offense, you know exactly what play you're running, I guess.
Russell Kenneth DeGraff:
No doubt. That's exactly the right analogy. And so I defended the Obama administration's work, their ongoing policy rules that were under challenge through hundreds of floor votes during the consideration of the budget amendments. Congress has annual spending bills. My July and August... June and July were just miserably always filled with the intractable problems of putting together these massive spending bills that have political headaches all throughout that are annual headaches that require annual solutions every year to solve intractable problems. Because the reason that they're intractable is they end up on my desk, if they're easy, they're resolved down in other places. If it's a committee problem, it's a committee problem. The Speaker gets the big ones and I have to keep things off the Speaker's desk.
Cody Simms:
The Democrats and in particular then Speaker Pelosi were the majority, it would've been what, 2008 to 2010 and then based on what you were explaining, again, didn't come back again until 2019 until recently. Is that right?
Russell Kenneth DeGraff:
That's right.
Cody Simms:
And so that first chunk when Obama first came into office is when the Affordable Care Act aka Obamacare got passed. And that was the big, we're now on offense. We're going to focus on this piece of legislation. And that was really the crux of the focus. And then there's been a lot of defending that legislation for the last 10 years thereafter. And that then takes us to the next wave of legislation, which I think we're going to spend a bunch of time on, which included the Inflation Reduction Act, the CHIPS Act, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, etc, I suppose would've been the next big wave of packages which were all part of originally the Biden administration's cumulative Build Back Better agenda if you think back to the 2020 election timeframe. Am I remembering correctly?
Russell Kenneth DeGraff:
You got the timeline down. It's just sad because I kind of want to go back and talk about healthcare for a little bit. I worked on that law with Doyle at the time intensively, and the lesson that I pulled from that was that it is incumbent upon Congress to pass legislation as quickly as possible so that you can begin to sell the benefits of it. It hurt that President Obama didn't have 60 votes for more than six months at his time, but he chose to spend so much time getting Republican buy-in that just evaporated, didn't end up happening.
Had that bill been enacted much sooner, we see a much better law now. So there is an opportunity cost of delay, and I think we saw the same in the Inflation Reduction Act that we'll get to later, but the working on the Affordable Care Act was fascinating because then you get to see how these big multi- committee processes work. I got to have a really cool insight into how these really unwieldy processes work and how to accelerate my work within them by having worked so much on that healthcare reform bill, and that was essential to doing the work later to put together the IRA, which was the mother of all multi-committee jurisdictional projects.
Cody Simms:
How much effort do you feel like you put into passing the Affordable Care Act relative to defending the Affordable Care Act? And I ask this from the perspective of depending on what happens this fall, I wonder how much effort is going to have to be spent over the next N amount of time defending things like the Inflation Reduction Act relative to all of the work that just went into getting it passed.
Russell Kenneth DeGraff:
You have to pass a law for you to know what's in it and for you to be able to sell it. You can attack a bill from the moment it comes out because you know the fundamental premise that is against it. You can always criticize a framework because you know the critiques against a framework, but you can't sell the benefits until you've actually figured out what those are. And so you really can't sell the bill until you've passed it, and that's why getting consensus as quickly as possible was my number one goal throughout the entire enterprise and was to minimize conflict and to minimize conflict by doing radical listening and figuring out what it would take to get people to support a package of the most important climate reforms in American history and climate investment and climate reforms. We were changing how government works on climate.
I mean, this was not a tax credits bill. We were fundamentally rewriting how government interacts with climate change. There is still more to do. That is not an enterprise that was done in the course of just a couple hours. That took a multi-year process that begun the moment that Speaker Pelosi had the votes to be called speaker. That only happened as a result of people being able to change the power of the House to give her the resources to be able to have a full standing committee focusing on the climate, creating the plan that is what became the President's plan, that became what we are all now living under thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act.
Cody Simms:
Let's start going into this section of history. So as a reminder to me, I was doing a little bit of historical timelines and I was looking... it's amazing we all just lived through this, but just prior to the triumvirate of those bills that I mentioned, Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, CHIPS Act, and Inflation Reduction Act, the government had passed a ton of COVID spending like a ton, ton of it. The Cares Act under Trump, which was $2.3 trillion, I believe, another 900 billion for COVID in budget reconciliation, and then another 1.9 under Biden as part of the American Rescue Plan Act in 2021.
The government had just been through this huge wave of like, oh my gosh, almost unprecedented levels of spending toward public programs that it wasn't originally planned to spend on. And under that backdrop came, hey, let's now pass the Democratic platform that Biden was elected under and that the House and the Senate became Democratic under, which is this Build Back Better agenda, which I believe the House originally passed a broadly sweeping bill that kind of included everything that was on the wish list, and that ultimately got paired back into these three pieces of legislation we know today that actually became law.
Is the setup there correct? Am I remembering that history correctly?
Russell Kenneth DeGraff:
Can I do you better?
Cody Simms:
Please.
Russell Kenneth DeGraff:
Because this is happening today. We can now finally say it, but because Tim Walz in Minnesota, what we are talking about, we did in the House, in the House Build Back Better law, which is to solve the root causes of families' poverty, which is often childcare and home care for those who need it, be they seniors or friends of families with disabilities. We have to do a better job of fixing families those immediate crises so that they can begin to flourish. That is the work of the House Build Back Better, that is what Minnesota was able to do under Governor Tim Walz and that bill passed the House. We need to keep the Senate to get it. We can do this. We can't pass it now because Mike Johnson's running the House, so we can do this. This can be done. We can finally solve the root causes of families going poor in this country. We can make sure no kid lives through poverty, through the child tax credit. We can have these things. These are not progressive things. These are just democratic things.
Cody Simms:
The big elements from that original House Build Back Better Act in late 2021 that passed that didn't make it into the three laws. I think a lot of them were things like extending child tax credits. It was universal preschool, I believe, it was paid family medical leave. Those things ultimately still are not law of the land today.
Russell Kenneth DeGraff:
Better home care, more housing. There were also still investments in the federal trade communication. It would've been really helpful, others for broadband at the Commerce Department, there's a number of different things that I think would've actually been some really interesting pots of resources here that did evaporate and should remain back on the table.
Cody Simms:
So take me through then, the House passed this very sweeping bill that was inclusive of all of these things and most of what became Inflation Reduction Act, Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, CHIPS Act, but ultimately in getting it through the Senate and getting it signed into law there was a year plus set of negotiations that broke these things up into three chunks plus the items that we just talked about that didn't ultimately make the final legislative cut. What happened?
PART 1 OF 4 ENDS [00:24:04]
Russell Kenneth DeGraff:
We can't get to that part yet. We've got to start with the select committee. The select committee, the chair, Kathy Castor, who was the best chair you could have ever imagined, led by a team by Unruh Cohen, who I just can't say enough great things about, and Allison Cassidy the first year and Eric Fins the second, just great, incredible staffers who helped put together a very complicated task. Which was, what the heck does Congress do to save the climate after the failure of the only other climate law we've tried to pass? How do we somehow get a coalition together within our caucus because it's clearly going to happen?
I waited a long time for a bipartisan gang to form on climate that was ever going to take any meaningful, reasonable first steps to take the urgency of the climate crisis seriously. We started from a basis about the cost of inaction. It was a very natural conversation. All of us agreed the cost of inaction is the place to start. It sets the Republicans on the defensive from the very moment they walk into the room because they have to act. They know they have to act, or at least they're going to continue to bury their head in the sand.
But they began to start the work thanks to the speaker's brilliance for coming up with the idea to do the legwork of getting consensus within our party and the stakeholders about what we should do next. They wrote an incredible plan that was incredibly detailed, that was absolutely a roadmap for our committees and got a bunch of really smart experts from the AAAS fellows to pull the best of science and to make sure that the committees had the best science. It was a function that was absolutely essential and it is criminal that is no longer being served in Congress.
This was the years that the Democrats ran the House, Speaker Pelosi's had a global warming or climate change committee in each of the Congresses that she's been speaker and Markey ran the first several and Ana Unruh Cohen and Kathy Castor ran this latest version and Kathy Castor did an amazing job. And our members, the members on that select committee did the work both in and around the caucus to understand and did the work on themselves. These were some members who, I think, would tell you that they are some of the hardest line environmentalists that they've ever experienced.
They, themselves, because they are that kind of attorney who has done that kind of work, they got to a place with our law that they are thrilled about.
Cody Simms:
So, this ultimately is what led to the legislative strategy of what became the climate part of the Build Back Better Act and ultimately became the climate part of the Inflation Reduction Act and the infrastructure law, which are really a carrot-not-stick framework. It's the whole we're going to take a tax credit approach in the USA, we're going to incentivize companies to financially do the right thing as opposed to smacking them for doing the wrong thing, which has really been the approach Europe has taken, for example.
It was somewhat taking this, here is our legislative strategy and here are the ways we're going to enact these because if we do these things, here's what we project the world will look like in a decade. Am I hitting the right storyline here?
Russell Kenneth DeGraff:
I don't love that concept. It ignores two things that fell out of IRA that were in tdhe House Back Better law. One of them was the Clean Electricity Performance Plan. That was a way to really re-shift our grid to get guaranteed clean power much faster by charging utilities who were laggards. That was a key element of our plan that just didn't make the Senate cut. The one thing it did was the methane fee that was designed to help make sure that American production and natural gas is the cleanest in the world.
If we're going to credibly sell our gas to nations that are going to want it, making sure that it's as clean as humanly possible is essential.
Cody Simms:
Purely framing it as the US is a carrot-based program and Europe is a stick-based program not entirely accurate when you look at the breadth of nuance in all of this legislation. And also, it sounds like, when you look at some of the things that maybe didn't make it ultimately into the final laws, but were on the table in the initial conversations.
Russell Kenneth DeGraff:
That's right.
Cody Simms:
I'm glad you pulled us back from like, hey, how did this get unbundled into these three pieces of legislation? Because the act of pulling all of this together in the first place, I feel like, is part of the story that never really gets told. How do you actually create a multi hundred, multi thousand page piece of legislation with all of the nuance in there? It's mind-boggling to think about.
Russell Kenneth DeGraff:
You do it with the smartest people you can imagine, and that's your average Capitol Hill staffer in the right job and the right committee. And I got really privileged to work with a bunch of them whose intelligence and talents I'm still just in awe of every day, that they choose to give their service to the public is an honor that I was among them. They are brilliant scientists of their own with really good skills at determining the most important detector of all, which is the BS detector. And to be able to do that job in Congress requires a pace and a temerity that's just not human for many scientists.
I really respect my friends who have that background, like Mary Frances Repko, who worked with me in Sonny Hoarder's office for a long time and who's now the White House Deputy National Climate Advisor. Her expertise was just instrumental through all those years in the minority. So working with her and then with Trent, her replacement, who worked in the Obama White House and was quite talented himself. The committees were great. The most passionate ocean scientists who know how they can be effective is to learn politics and learn it and find it fun and do it and then become really good at it.
That's exciting for me was people who get turned on to the politics by doing more of it on the Hill.
Cody Simms:
Can you pick any provision in the bill and walk through a use case of who worked on it, what the inner workings were like to get to the actual legislative language?
Russell Kenneth DeGraff:
The one I always think about on this is solar canals. When you're negotiating a thing like this, I'm in a zoom room with the White House and my Senate counterparts and depending on the scope of the meeting, it's other people or it's just committees or it's just us. It's a lot if it's just the three of us, with me, Ali Zaidi, Adrian and/or Sean, I had seven different Schumer counterparts I was negotiating with on various parts of the bill. That's always a funny story. Depending on the parts of bill, I was negotiating with seven different people.
Here was Adrian and then there was Tim and John and Robert and a few others, so it was a bit of a mess depending on how these meetings were structured. But on some of them you're just negotiating a line item and you have only as much knowledge at that moment as what that line item says and the number attached to it, and I knew what it was for. But what we couldn't get our head around was that it was for not an incentive for solar canals, but it was the Department of Interior to actually buy them. He thought that they didn't need the incentive to do it.
It was struggling in a way to help them understand that we have canals that need solar panels and we would like to put them on them and you need to have a line item in the budget to be able to either pay for the PPA or the money to do it. I think we should just pay for the money to do it ourselves, and he goes, "oh. "And it was the most simple thing. You're just getting bogged down in all of the heavy intensive policy of what an item means and the things that could mean behind it, and there was a concern that Manchin was trying to prevent.
When we later asked Manchin, Manchin supported solar canals in the Department of Interior that connect to cover Department of Interior owned canals with solar panels because it was going to save a whole lot of water and create a whole lot of energy and it's better for federal government to own that as a resource than to pay a PPA and have a private outside seller. He wasn't against that. He just didn't understand what I was talking about because we were all so fried dealing with hugely complex programs for the last four hours of this meeting.
Cody Simms:
Now it sounds like this is getting into the actual negotiating it from the House to the Senate. This isn't defining what it would've been in the first place.
Russell Kenneth DeGraff:
That idea came from a member of Congress in a district. This is very important because he's got a lot of canals that are losing water, hemorrhaging water that the IRA was to jumpstart our government into figuring out how to do things on climate. That was the entire purpose of it. This was absolutely the job of Congress and the members of Congress too, the federal resources they had and make them green and to bring them along in this regenerative future. He knew the resource in his district that he needed was these canals covered with solar panels.
And by getting that enough federal investment started, Governor Newsom was able to follow on with that on their state-owned canals. Money's getting leveraged for private owners, some of the other private canals were doing it. It's going to happen and it really does take the federal government to get that started just on the projects it already owns. It is rocket science. It has to get done. It's the work of the Congress.
Cody Simms:
You said the solar canal idea came from a Congress person who had the problem in their jurisdiction and at some point they brought the idea to you and said, hey, this should be part of Inflation Reduction Act. Ultimately, are you coalescing all these different suggestions from all these different stakeholders?
Russell Kenneth DeGraff:
No. What a member like Jim Costa is doing is that he's talking to the speaker. Just to be very clear, if he's mentioning something to the speaker, I have to be aware of that. And she knew that I was fully on whatever he needed to get in this bill. There's just no doubt about that, but he's letting many other people know, including Laura Snyder and the entire team at the Natural Resources Committee because he's a senior member there and very well respected member there, and we were absolutely going to do whatever we could so that he could sell the actual real benefits beyond the headline benefits of the IRA.
He's got extra stuff that he can point to because he's got real need. This was identifying the real need and making sure that we fit that real need into this law.
Cody Simms:
Let's now move to what you were getting at, which was you've got this, you passed the House, you have a large piece of legislation, and now you got to work through a very tight, essentially 50-50 Senate to figure out what can become law, and there was a lot of pressure on, in particular, two senators at the time to support it, which would've been Joe Manchin and Kristen Sinema of Arizona. I remember hearing those names from the day the election happened after the Georgia runoffs. These two people are going to hold the keys to whether we can get climate legislation done or not.
Walk us through all of this. I can't even remember all the ups and downs and backs and forths. We don't have to go through every one of them, but there were certainly a few pivotal moments, I'm sure.
Russell Kenneth DeGraff:
Feel free to remind me of any too. I mean, I haven't gone over this period in quite a long time. In November of that year, we had just been waiting for a signal that we were on the right path. We had negotiated ourselves several different times into several different numbers, by that point. We had any number of different plans to be able to pick from. As a result of listening to her caucus, the speaker said, we're going to go with [inaudible 00:35:27] 3.5.
Cody Simms:
$3.5 trillion Build Back Better Act. Yeah, big one.
Russell Kenneth DeGraff:
Yeah. She went with the 3.5 and that was what we were going to go with. Our committees did the work to get those markups done. Those markups were Herculean. First of all, the multi committee process to get this done was unprecedented. This was the biggest reconciliation bill in congressional history, not just in terms of size, just in sort of scope. There just no other way to describe it. Most bills refer to just one or two committees. There's a couple things in there. It's five, six items. It's a 1,000-page bill. It might not be that weighty of text.
This was just enormous.
Cody Simms:
What I'm hearing you say, Russell, is, boy, there's so much attention on getting this thing through the Senate, but please don't discount the amount of work that the House had to do to get it passed in the first place.
Russell Kenneth DeGraff:
But understand this though, if the House gets it wrong and we publish a product that generates a point of order in the Senate, the entire thing is dead and we lost our chance. So we not only have to get every single word right, and this is a Senate process anyway, the only thing we're saving ourselves is time in the Senate. For the House, we can pass any bill with 218. I don't need this headache. For me, I'm doing this to get the bill faster through the Senate. We have to stick the landing. The House has to deliver a product that cannot generate a point of order.
And one of them is that we can't raise issues that are in the committee's jurisdictions outside of the scope of the bill and the president and the speaker and Leader Schumer had made the joint decision to not include the Armed Services Committee and the Foreign Relations Committee in these reconciliation instructions. And that limited us in what we could do in some key ways, like international climate finance and I think the necessary work of redoing our military on climate.
I think that they absolutely are needing of a special supplemental to build the transformer factory that we absolutely need. Because if our military needs transformers, they should be the first in line to get them, and I want to build them a factory to do that, and that's something that you can do with the Defense Production Act. We attempted to do that in the IRA. I don't know if there was enough money to be able to do that, ultimately. There's a lot of things like that that if we're going to ever solve these supply chain problems, the military is actually the way to do it, especially when there's demand there from them to do it.
That was a great example of a back and forth that the Senate and I had. It was absolutely a Senate idea coming from some of our progressive members to do the DPA and we were able to work on an agreement to be able to do just that, to solve both electrical supply chain issues and heat pumps. So then the multi committee process, they have to get their committee members to support this bill and do all the work there to get these multi-day markups in some cases, because the NC market lasted two days, then the bill comes to the floor and then we just wait.
We don't learn anything new. We just knew that we need to get this out of the House.
Cody Simms:
The floor in the House?
Russell Kenneth DeGraff:
That's right.
Cody Simms:
And so you pass the House.
Russell Kenneth DeGraff:
Oh, gosh. Well, actually let's even take a step back. We were only able to get to the rule before we got to the COP that year. The speaker would love to have been able to take this law to go to the COP, and this is where it's really essential to pass laws sooner.
Cody Simms:
John Kerry had just been given this big important role. He was going to show up being the new face of America under the Biden administration, look at all the progress we're making, and yet we didn't have legislation, if I remember.
Russell Kenneth DeGraff:
At the COP two years prior, Speaker Pelosi was asked to give a speech to developed nations and island nations that were going to suffer the most as a result of climate change. I'll never forget getting asked that she should give a speech for that because of course, obviously yes. But you're paralyzed as a deer in headlights because the weightiness of the scope of that moment, you have to deliver obviously with the determination that we weren't going to be able to deliver in that bill, but we would do so as much as we could in the ESOPs bill, the state foreign ops bill later in the Congress, the spending bills that we would do as much as we could there.
But let's be clear, woefully inadequate to the commitment that we owe the world, that the Biden administration and the Harris administration, I'm sure, will do the same to follow on with the work that they were able to do and called for at the time. The speech she gave was so important for us as a country too, to hear. I know what she was doing. She was absolutely helping make sure the country understood we are going to act on climate. We had that in our office as our guide star. 1.5 was always our guide star. We are not settling for the worst of the worst here.
Everything else flowed from that initial guide star. When you lose the chance to sell the bill at the COP, it gets as little attention as I hoped it would get. And then of course, by the time that you get to Egypt, no one cares, you're old news, the law is done and now the buyer's remorse from the rest of the world has set in and they weren't able to do anything for them.
Cody Simms:
To be fair, the US at least had rejoined the Paris Agreement at that point, so there was something.
Russell Kenneth DeGraff:
Absolutely. And our missions were, by the way, brilliant. They were well staffed before. I think they were very well staffed during the Democratic administrations. That third trip to Egypt, though remember, was just days after the attack on Paul Pelosi's life. All of us were in shell shock. I mean, first of all, the 12 years of that job was just an intense 12 years of anybody's life. What we went through, my colleagues in that office, I can't figure out how to describe it. Everyone worked so hard. I just hate that their experiences on Capitol Hill are marred with being part of this horrible shitty day.
The day that January 6th happened, the day that Paul Pelosi got attacked, and then you see your friends make fun of them. It's so painful. Mr. Pelosi is an amazing man, and so I'm just so thrilled that he's in great shape and has been able to make a recovery. I can't say enough about how happy I am and that the speaker is still able to be in her public life without worry about her husband and her family. And I hope that all members of Congress are able to maintain their safety. It is worth the work, but it's not worth that kind of sacrifice.
And we all went through a lot, and that happened right before the COP. I know I didn't do my best work during that COP because I was still in shell shock. The negotiation of the Build Back Better Act on the tax stuff, I should have said this at the outset. Catherine Mojay in our office, in the speaker's office was the tax guru. Without Catherine Mojay, we would not have an amazing tax law in the final IRA. She did an enormous amount of work to get the Senate finance product in a shape that could pass the House. I just have so much respect for her.
We talked all the time on the clean energy work. We had to be simpatico on everything. I did not know the aracanedy and the insanity of the tax code. That is not my job. We either agreed very quickly on everything or we got there as a result of the kind of conversations that you miss because you've had them for so long with people on such a regular basis and then all of a sudden January 2nd, the Congress goes sigh and you die. The end. I'm packing in my office on Christmas Eve. I haven't talked to her. We text a little bit. We talked daily for years.
Cody Simms:
This is the end of 2022 after the midterms you're talking about?
Russell Kenneth DeGraff:
Yeah.
Yin Lu:
Hey everyone, I'm Yin, a partner at MCJ Collective, here to take a quick minute to tell you about our MCJ membership community, which is born out of a collective thirst for peer-to-peer learning and doing that goes beyond just listening to the podcast. We started in 2019 and have grown to thousands of members globally. Each week, we're inspired by people who join with different backgrounds and points of view. What we all share is a deep curiosity to learn and a bias to action around ways to accelerate solutions to climate change.
Some awesome initiatives have come out of the community. A number of founding teams have met, several nonprofits have been established and a bunch of hiring has been done. Many early stage investments have been made as well as ongoing events and programming like monthly women in climate meetups, idea jam sessions for early stage founders, climate book club, art workshops and more. Whether you've been in the climate space for a while or just embarking on your journey, having a community to support you is important.
If you want to learn more, head over to mcjcollective.com and click on the members tab at the top. Thanks and enjoy the rest of the show.
Cody Simms:
Let's reset the stage. So as I had led off with, the US had passed trillions upon trillions of dollars of COVID relief. Then the election happened in 2020, we had a Democratic president, Democratic House, Democratic Senate, 50-50 with Vice President Kamala Harris being the tie-breaking vote in the Senate. All the work you just talked about, the House passes this $3.5 trillion Build Back Better Act that includes all of these climate provisions, all these tax code, tax credits that we now know as part of the IRA, but IRA didn't exist yet.
And then at some point, I believe Senator Joe Manchin says, this is too expensive. That's my understanding of what happened. Bring us to that point.
Russell Kenneth DeGraff:
There's two things that you have to happen post a bill passing. You still have to sell it, and that's where a whole other team of all these offices comes together, which is now that the bill's done, you got to sell it. And so the comms teams and all of the people who are beginning to start talking about it, you get the bill ready to go to the floor, but part of that is to get the bill ready to be sold to people after it's done. So then my work is working with all the teams to put together those materials in a way that's cohesive and the policy actually is right and is using language like pollution instead of emissions.
Because I don't think that we should ever talk about emissions at all in any context that's not scientific research papers. We should talk about pollution. Everything's pollution.
Cody Simms:
You had lived through 2008 to 2010 where Democrats had this majority and you said time was of the essence. There's time value to getting this stuff done. You got to get it done quickly because you can't ever take for granted anything. And here we are in a Senate where it's quite literally 50-50 and you have to have all 50 senators on board to get this thing done.
Russell Kenneth DeGraff:
So then you get to the bill has to clear the Senate parliamentarian. There's a lot of things I would say to Adam McKay, but the one thing that I would tell him is because he's still mad about the IRA, that the Senate did not fire the Senate parliamentarian.
Cody Simms:
Adam McKay being a filmmaker who made the movie Don't Look Up.
Russell Kenneth DeGraff:
He badmouthed the IRA and then Dave Roberts brought him onto his show and did an interview about him and he ended up saying great things about the climate sections. He faulted Senate Democrats for not firing the Senate parliamentarian. In his ignorance, he just doesn't understand that the Senate parliamentarian had cancer during that and the idea that they were going to fire a cancer patient because of a ruling that she might make was just preposterous. It's just not going to happen. They were never going to fire someone based on a ruling they were going to make who was dealing with a life medical issue.
And so having some humility and understanding that their institutional prerogative to keep their staff of their choice was going to limit the Congress in what they were going to do. They made that decision. Ultimately, the Biden administration was able to deliver $35 insulin without needing the Senate parliamentarian to be able to deliver that item. I don't know why Adam McKay is still really hung up on that. But she had to clear our bill because it had to be the point of order and there was a question over Superfund.
It always happens because Superfund is referred to the Armed Services Committee and this bill was not. We were confident that we would be able to feed back that challenge. But this is where somebody who's brilliant, like Mary Francis Repko was able to come in at her job at running the Senate EPW committee at the time, her and her amazing staff of folks, many of whom worked on many of the clean energy laws that we've enacted in our lifetime and bills that we passed in our previous years, were able to take all of the arguments that Republicans had.
That's even much further down, but they had to clear this first threshold first with the bill passed the point of order. And without Mary Francis, there's brilliant people who could've done it, but she was absolutely the one that I wanted to be in that job. She and the committee rocked it, and they were able to prove that their language was sufficient and fine. Then it's the wait. In that time, we're negotiating with the Senate, with the White House on a still regular basis. The problem when you're trying to negotiate with these two senators in particular-
PART 2 OF 4 ENDS [00:48:04]
Cody Simms:
Manchin and Sinema.
Russell Kenneth DeGraff:
... Manchin and Sinema, in this particular case, it was a bit like negotiating with a balloon and trying to squeeze a balloon. And when you squeeze a balloon on one side, it just gets bigger on the other. It's hard to hold equally in both sides. The other one had things that they wanted in the bill, the other one couldn't do. It was all over the place. You couldn't square that negotiation. We just couldn't figure out how to get the both on the same thing for the longest time.
Cody Simms:
How much is this the Senate's job versus the House's job? Are you in this living it day to day every day? You're on the House side, you're working for the speaker, but now it's past the House. It has to get through the Senate. What's your role of involvement in that?
Russell Kenneth DeGraff:
The speaker would want me to make sure that I'm doing everything I can to encourage the Senate to get to its deal as quickly as possible. I mean, there's no doubt. It's difficult to see what I could really do to get those two over the finish line other than continuing to engage with them about what are the sticking points or the things that are in there. And on Sinema's issues, she didn't have the issues with the climate work. She supported the climate work. The problem was that she was willing to live with a lower number, and that wasn't helpful. I would've liked for her to have been able to ask for a bigger number. That would've been nice. She didn't do that. That's fine. That's the decision she made. They got to the number they got to.
She was finally able to get the deal that they needed to get, and I just defend what the committees were able to get done to fix the rest of the remaining issues after what was the result of the initial Manchin-Schumer IRA, which to Senator Manchin's absolutely enormous credit, was an incredibly strong effort. That I'm just so grateful he was able to listen to so many of the needs of our members of the House and the agencies who needed these new resources to be able to tackle climate in some pretty powerful and transformative ways using ideas that have been discussed on this show and bringing all those things to the table to make what became the Inflation Reduction Act, the biggest whole of government effort of almost any kind in our history. It's hard to think about how many different other kind of initiatives that we've taken on the government-wide basis to rethink how you're doing something on this other topic. We did that for the post office. We did that for every single agency.
Cody Simms:
You just said you're grateful to Senator Manchin for doing that. He was the person who initially blocked your bill Build Back Better from getting through the Senate. What caused ultimately him to become the person who then brought the Inflation Reduction Act to the floor? There's a whole bunch of negotiations that happened there, including in the interim, the passage of the bipartisan infrastructure law and the passage of the CHIPS Act. How did he all of a sudden go from blocker to champion of this legislation?
Russell Kenneth DeGraff:
The way that this worked for that period of time, CHIPS was the other thing that took way too long to negotiate. It took the House it's time to get the bill together by June.
Cody Simms:
For folks who don't follow this every day, CHIPS basically being the law that is trying to drive semiconductor manufacturing back onshore in the United States, as I understand it.
Russell Kenneth DeGraff:
Let me redefine it for you. It's well more than that. It was a fundamental bill reshaping how we do our science policy in the country, how we fund science investment in our country. Combining the Energy Act of 2020 and the IRA CHIPS and Science is the third leg of that stool that has completely reinvented the Department of Energy and made dramatic improvements to that department as well as the things that the CHIPS and Science Act did to reform the Commerce department and focusing on supply chains.
That bill also is going to make sure that our federal investments across sciences are going to be invested in solutions, not just technologies that can be part of a solution, but solutions that are designed with multi-disciplines in the very beginning. As you start intentionally about solving problems, cross-disciplinary so that you build technology that serves a purpose rather than figuring out a use for something that you've just built. And it's a different mindset than what we've typically funded and we created a new body of the National Science Foundation to be able to do it. And I think it's important to talk about on a show like this because there's so many different resources that people should be looking for as a result of that law and that the TIP Directorate, the technology and innovation and partnerships Directorate at the NSF is designed to be able to come up with coherent, cohesive solutions from multi-stakeholder processes that are designed to solve society's biggest problems.
It's why you got into science in the first place. It's really neat, and so I have to sell the work that that committee and the science committee staff did to build that law into an amazing vehicle. The Senate passed its bill really quick because they were handed something by a university that didn't work for the rest of the university community. There's just no way around it. It got some senators really excited and that's a great thing, but the work product, it was called USICA and the Competitiveness Act. It was one of those perfect deals that looks good in one chamber and just has zero purchase in the other. The other one that comes to mind is the 2020 era Murkowski-Cantwell energy law thing that they were pushing back in the 2017, 2018, 2020 range that just had zero will in the House.
Nobody saw that that deal was worth anything. D's and R's, but because of the jurisdictions in the Senate, it made sense for them. And it was just like that was here where there's no way the House could ever do this. We couldn't set the ground rules for the longest time because the Senate was insisting that we have tariffs in that it was a series of trade promotion things and labor could not support a law that had trade promotion authority, that had new tariffs' relief for these products. So we had a intractable problem from day one that took us many, many months from being able to even begin to start solving because ways and means was not able to begin. It really hamstrung us. So our committees are beginning to start doing the work of writing that bill too. And that's each of the committees, that's Energy and Commerce, that's Natural Resources and Science committee especially and even Oversight.
So they're doing that work and we're negotiating with the Senate in constructive ways, by the time you get to the end of that July. So we're doing that in the first year of getting our bill. We've passed the bill out of the House in June, I think is the rough timeframe. We get a bipartisan vote into the House that should be seen as something. Thank you to Adam Kinzinger for that work. We were proud to incorporate his very innovative supply chains work that I think would help make sure that current domestic chains who need to friend source things away from nations that of concern, they would've supported the Kinzinger provisions that we wanted to keep in the law that unfortunately he was not able to attract that there was Republican support for, but regardless, we had a bipartisan bill from that law and then we needed to negotiate the final package and that just took forever. Because the Senate was adamant that their tariffs get negotiated.
So then I think it is fair to say that by the time you get to the end of that July, the timing of the calendar is looking quite clear about what you can do in the rest of the time that you have remaining. And it becomes clear that if you're going to do reconciliation, it needs to happen in the next few weeks. But we really need to get this CHIPS and science bill done off the floor right now. And we are very close to an agreement, but we are not somehow there yet. We need to put our best efforts together and put a bill in the Senate that we know can pass the Senate.
Cody Simms:
And CHIPS was not a reconciliation bill, right? This needed full bipartisan support to get done. Is that correct?
Russell Kenneth DeGraff:
We needed 60 votes in the Senate. The Schumers put together the law based on their and ours best guess of where we were as a result of a negotiations with Republicans who had never signed off on anything. They got a great deal. We are happy with that deal. We are elated with that deal. They were able to get the Republicans they needed to be able to sign off and support it. When it came to the House, I know that Chairwoman Eddie Bernice Johnson was excited that she had done the rules committee meeting to sell the bill. The rules committee's amazing.
They have to write the rule on the bill before it goes to the House floor. So before every bill gets voted on, it's got one more stop and their Republicans can kill it with tons of amendments. Thankfully, we have enough members on our side to be able to overturn them. But it's still a fight and it's an interesting fight. And in that fight, Frank Lucas, the Republican ranking member, gave very passionate remarks about how this bill came together, which was as a result of bipartisan stakeholder engagement, listening to the people who are the ones producing the best science in the world and asking them what we should do to reform the National Science Foundation, which is the fundamental research all things come from.
It was a really powerful speech. It was a very nice testament to the work that he had delivered for the American people. I know she was devastated when hours later he had to come to her office and tell her that Kevin McCarthy had told him he had to oppose the bill or he would lose his chairmanship. And I know it hurt her again on the House floor when he spoke against the bill, thankfully he chose his words very carefully. I could see the pain on his face during that negotiation. It was very sad.
Still, I think it is important that he feels ownership of it that he does because he is an owner of that law and I'm glad to see that he has released statements since then that ensure that he is implementing it in completely good faith. I'm honored that he is proud of that law because it was absolutely written with things that were very important to him in mind because they were the right thing to do. That's how I treated that bill and that law in this moment when all of a sudden the IRA headache was still causing headaches. And Joe Manchin courageously decided to remove a headache from all of our heads and he killed whatever he was working on with Schumer. And that finally got Republicans to sign on the 10 needed votes to pass the CHIPS and Science Act to send it over to the House.
Cody Simms:
He killed at that point what was essentially the precursor to the Inflation Reduction Act. Which was the climate and energy provisions of the Build Back Better legislation that had passed the House originally. He publicly said, this is dead, and that got the CHIPS Act over the line with the remaining Republicans in the Senate.
Russell Kenneth DeGraff:
That was what ultimately did it.
Cody Simms:
He was persona non grata in Democratic social media at that point or climate media for sure, I would say.
Russell Kenneth DeGraff:
I have to give him immense amount of credit for being willing to suffer through that. Because I didn't know anything different. At the time, I didn't have any special knowledge. I was just convinced that he was going to get to an agreement at the end of the day. That this is exactly what I think this is. This is for our ability to deal with CHIPS and science at the moment, but I couldn't tell people that. I didn't want to give false hope. That's not my job either. It's just to make clear that the calendar still permits other time. I just never believed that anything in Politico is the final word. No matter what it is, things can always be changed depending on what that thing is. Some things are intractable and they're done. If there's room for another moment, there's a room for another moment. So I just was encouraging people who were on the worst break that there was still time and we were going to do everything we could to get to that agreement.
And I remember using this on a couple people as a way to pull a couple people back from some really dark places during that time. And I remember saying this because I still believe this. I don't think Senator Manchin puts together the team that he puts together without wanting to get a climate law over the finish line. He knows who he hired. He hired some of the smartest team of people who could deliver Joe Manchin to climate law. That's a Venn diagram that is an interesting mix of people you can get in mainstream democratic politics. Not everybody can work for Joe Manchin.
And it takes a certain kind of person to do it and to excel at it. And they all did and they were brilliant. And they were really good at understanding the needs that House members had and were going to have and were able to defend those things because of their talents and their outreach in working with stakeholders and the House to be able to get a really remarkably strong effort once the moment that Senator Manchin was ready to turn his attention back to the IRA and get that deal over the finish line.
Cody Simms:
So the CHIPS Act passed and pretty shortly thereafter, he showed back up with the IRA. Am I remembering that correctly?
Russell Kenneth DeGraff:
That's right. I knew nothing officially. I just knew because you don't do that to the team of people over something like ego. You can make an argument that that was an argument in his mind. I think certainly some of the attacks on Ron Klain and the Franklin Foer book point to that direction for some. I don't know if I agree with that, but I have heard others say that. The idea that Congress is going to run around, the chair of the Energy Committee on anything either in his bailiwick or not is just preposterous. It had to be through him and it was going to be through him.
Cody Simms:
Incredible recap. All of that happened in a two-year period for the most part. I mean, I guess maybe a little bit before that in terms of preparing the original bill and the original Democratic platform.
Russell Kenneth DeGraff:
Yeah. There was a two-year period. And so I'm negotiating both of these laws at the same time, trying to enjoy some of it while it's also my August recess and not able to enjoy anything. Working a job that's at this point, almost a 20-hour job. In many days, I'm in meetings and not able to look at my email until 8 or 9 o'clock. 8 or 9 o'clock begins, I start my email, that goes until midnight. And I've been often doing email until 1 or 2:00 in the morning just to catch up from the day and then I need to go back to the sleep and do it again and be up for 8 A.M. morning or whatever. Thankfully, the Hill does work a little bit later than normal, but God knows I couldn't catch up on the end of the day until the end of the day. It's a constant work. These hours are just nuts and it's for months at a time and it's the worst months in the year. It's summer, it's June, July and August. I was working the entire time.
Cody Simms:
And then the midterms happened and obviously the Democrats lost the House at the midterms. Speaker Pelosi stepped down at that point. Where did that leave you?
Russell Kenneth DeGraff:
We passed the laws, but then I have this permitting headache to deal with because Joe Manchin wants his permitting law. A lot of other Democrats look at that law and think that it's not good. So my life is now sucked up with another crisis and I have the crisis of putting the end-of-the-year spending bill together, which in my job is helping again, the committees negotiate a package of changes that are on all the other topics that I have in the rest of... Including some of the climate because there's always more in there too in the annual spending bills. I'm negotiating the bill until the bill is passed to the House and onto the Senate so that we can go out of the session for the end of the year, which we do on December 23rd. And I have to come in on Christmas Eve to close out my office because we have to close out. And I move out of D.C., that night, Christmas Eve night, and I wake up with an ear infection that morning, Christmas the morning that explodes and I lose my hearing for six weeks.
Cody Simms:
Oh, my goodness.
Russell Kenneth DeGraff:
I broke my knee in September and that's been debilitating. I was teaching in Nashville at the Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator at the law school. That's been debilitating. I just had my fourth surgery two weeks ago and I will get through this. I will recover, but I am not there yet. I have been in frankly debilitating pain and a limp for the last year. I have not been able to travel like I wanted. I have not been able to do any of the things that I've been wanting to do and that's been hard.
Cody Simms:
What is it that you would like to be doing?
Russell Kenneth DeGraff:
I'm excited about helping people solve problems. The last thing I did a few months ago is I helped Stanford make sure that the FCC's net neutrality rules didn't have any loopholes. That was a scary one. They passed some great rules now. And so that was the last thing I worked on. If anybody has any ideas for other problems, I can help them solve, I'm always open to help them.
Cody Simms:
And you've been doing some work with the Harvard Kennedy School too, I believe.
Russell Kenneth DeGraff:
Yeah, I've been here at the Shorenstein Center for the last semester working on the big paper, helping you to translate the kinds of things that we did in Congress to everyday voters. And that's been a great semester, that ends, so my schedule opens up in the fall. I do have something I can't announce yet about some things I'll be doing in the fall, but I'll also be having, depending on when this launches, a new platform that will help people be able to understand how they can take advantage of the benefits of the IRA and CHIPS and Science Act themselves using their home energy data. It's the green button data that they can download from their local utility and they can then use that to learn how they can save money on better things for their house.
Cody Simms:
Amazing. So leaning into helping with residential decarbonization, helping homeowners get cheaper energy and hopefully cleaner energy as they go about their daily lives.
Russell Kenneth DeGraff:
That's exactly right. I'm excited about it. Kind of crazy if I end up building it in the next couple of weeks, because I would like to.
Cody Simms:
There's nothing else going on in the world right now. Why not?
Russell Kenneth DeGraff:
No one has really done much with green button data in a long time. I think it's an interesting way to reach people who are looking at making changes in their home energy life as a result of this law. So we'll see if that can get enough traction to make that work and otherwise, I've got some other things I'm working on that I'm really excited about.
Cody Simms:
You mentioned that the Inflation Reduction Act provisions, in some cases were slower to roll out or get implemented just because the House had flipped at that point and some people maybe weren't in the same jobs they were in. And so I'm curious, what do you think the next four years could be from a climate policy perspective if Democrats are able to get back to a position of being on offense from a policy perspective?
Russell Kenneth DeGraff:
Well, I think there's still unfinished business from the House Build Back Better law that needs to be resurfaced. I think you're going to see that happening all across that law because I think what Democrats are going to be able to say on the campaign trail is that Governor Walz did the state version of what the House passed and Built Back Better, which is a way to help solve all of the root causes of the biggest problems in American's lives. There are things in Build Back Better that we need to meet that need. We've definitely learned some things since then. So we can absolutely include... And if Senator Manchin's not on the table, there were things that we couldn't do even in the house version because of him that we would like to go back to, so we should actually go back to versions that the committees were discussing.
There's a whole bunch of ideas on cutting room floors that I think deserve to go back and be considered. And I know many of you are doing the work right now to determine exactly what those pieces are so that we can be prepared as soon as we are ready, so that we can be ready from day one. But I understand that work is happening. I don't exactly know. But I know our committees are doing that work in the time that they have able to survive whatever the day-to-day light mirrors that they're living with too. I won't say more of the same as an insult. It's just the same processes as a successful one and deserves to be revised and extended. And many things probably need additional resources to meet the initial need that we knew was there in the first place. All of the coastal restoration money we know will get eaten up immediately.
There's no end to the number of restoration projects that we need to do to be able to create more carbon sinks in our country, right? There's just almost no end to them. So that will improve communities, property values lives and safety. These are all wins that we can deliver. That can only happen as a result of a Democratic House and a Democratic Senate, or in the case of a Senate with a member who is willing to caucus with a party. They don't have to be Democrats in this case, so they can be anybody, and as long as you have 50 and the Vice President, you can do some big changes.
Cody Simms:
The way I see it is the message could be as simple as, look, nobody wants wildfires. Nobody wants more extreme tornadoes. Nobody wants more damaging hurricanes. How do we pass legislation that prevents those from happening, but also reinforces our neighborhoods and communities when those do happen to allow us to recover faster? I mean, it seems like leaning into that messaging potentially rather than climate change or different wonky terms might speak to more people more broadly.
Russell Kenneth DeGraff:
No doubt. I don't talk about climate a lot in those kinds of settings for that reason. Our members know how to talk about the damage that we're already paying. The cost of inaction is inherent in the work that our members talked about. The current cost burden that we are all seeing in front of us, reminding and connecting to that and the public health is how our members talk about climate. And I've been really impressed and proud of that, and that's a result of a messaging discipline that Speaker Pelosi insisted upon. [inaudible 01:11:18] just insisted upon.
Cody Simms:
I've spoken to people in my family and friends and in my circles who are already dealing with some of these issues when it comes to insurance. And their ability to either continue to maintain the home insurance they have or not have their premiums go up like crazy or have their deductibles go up like crazy. People are starting to feel these issues in their day-to-day lives in a way that you might've heard people five years ago or even more recently talking about things like gas prices and whatnot. The price of insurance is becoming a real issue and it is caused by climate change without having to necessarily say climate change.
Russell Kenneth DeGraff:
I think about so many homes that are wildfire impacted or potentially wildfire impacted. And one of the things...
Fire impacted, or potential wildfire impacted, and one of the things you learn doing the kind of research that you do as a citizen, you listen to shows, you listen to podcasts and they're relevant because you want to learn something about it. There's all these recommendations to have your home fire safe. They are all useless unless you do all of them. You have to do every single one. We should be doing whatever we can to get as many of those homes off of big gridlines that are going to cause fires that destroy forests. Those areas, in cases, need to remove transmission, getting them on a solar and bigger battery packs to be able to handle more micro grids. More micro grids would be great for so many of these fire prone, risk areas. There's no end to the kinds of things that you can do when you start thinking about how government can help solve people's problems from the climate. We can actually build potentially homes that are resilient no matter where they are. You can't do that without having either the knowledge or the investments to be able to do it.
PART 3 OF 4 ENDS [01:12:04]
Cody Simms:
Russell, I'm curious. You mentioned obviously you've been dealing with some health ailments and you mentioned some of the work you've been doing with Vanderbilt and Stanford and the Harvard Kennedy school. I'm curious though, to hear your reflections over the last two months from a national politics perspective. We all saw President Biden at the debate. Obviously there was originally an undercurrent and then a growing swell seeking to replace him at the top of the ticket within the Democratic Party. Just, we're recording today the day Governor Walz in Minnesota has been chosen as the Vice Presidential candidate. Walk us through everything that has happened and your observations having lived in the lion's den of politics in the US for the last good chunk of your life, and did things play out the way you thought they would or have you been surprised at where we are today?
Russell Kenneth DeGraff:
President Biden was an amazing president during the years that I got to work with him. I can't say enough about those two years. He had the best team imaginable. The Obama folks were fine, were great, but they didn't actually coordinate with Capitol Hill that well. I remember a lot of times, there were a lot of angry phone calls. I never had that problem with the Biden White House.
Cody Simms:
Biden ran on that, right? He is like, "Hey, I've been in the senate for so long, I know how to get stuff done." That was his whole message.
Russell Kenneth DeGraff:
I'll just say that they hired the people that you want in every job and I was just really lucky to deal with partners who were above board, brilliant and who knew the power of the job and the position they had and were set to make the most of it, and so in each of these conversations and even when there were actual legitimately knocked down-drag out arguments, it was always with respect and understanding about where we all were. The president chose an important team. It was incumbent he do so because having climate go bad would've been devastating to our ability to pass anything future in climate ever. There was a sense that if this failed we might not get another chance. People don't remember that, and in fact, we never had this chance until January 6th. It took the morning of January 6th to understand that we won the Jon Ossoff. Georgia Citizens voted Jon Ossoff into office, that's what enabled all of this in the first place. We got here as a result of a miracle.
My day that day was screwed up dealing with the overjoy of people and friends of mine calling me and crying about what's happening to other friends of mine in an office that I've sat around many dozens of times behind a speaker who's now hiding for her life in a room where friends of mine are. Do you send them a text or an email to say you care about them, you want them to be safe. Is that going to be a distraction message that causes them their life? A horrible situation for all of us to have been in. I'll never forget the times of the people calling me that day who were just so sad because they wanted to be so happy, and I just told them that we will be happy at some point and just to keep thinking about that and that meant that we had to deliver, and we didn't deliver until really like the last possible minute in August of the next year. It's a long time, and then I still had to suffer through the rest of the year to get to where we got and I still really haven't really had a break since then in a way that I've had my health intact.
I'm so thrilled of the work and to see it out there and to see what the president was able to do it because he absolutely deserved the chance to be able to continue to deliver the work that he had done at the level that he had performed at in the time that he had done. I think he made the decision that that was harder after the debate, and so I've just been grateful that Speaker Pelosi has been in her position to be able to help the party understand what the other options might be and I'm glad that we landed with Vice President Harris.
Kamala is fantastic. She'll be an incredible president. I know that she talks extensively about making sure that the house passed Build Back Better is the starting place of where we began and then we go back to the past and then we do more and we do better. So I'm excited that she'll be the top of the ticket and just can't wait to run through walls for Tim Walz, who I worked with in the house who's just an incredible man. He was the high school football coach of his team who brought them to the state championships at the same time he was the president of the Gay-Straight Alliance for his kids. In the late 90s, years after Don't Ask, Don't Tell in the Defensive Marriage Act. True heroism. We're seeing him and the work that he did on the Veterans Committee over the years, the leadership that he got, I remember I worked with Patty who was very close, it was just at the time and the bills that they were putting out were absolutely the top demands of all of the veteran service organizations, every single year he was doing everything he could to get them over the finish line under a Trump presidency for many of those years, and so I just have the utmost respect for Tim Walz.
It's just going to be an incredible ticket to be able to... that anybody should be able to talk about, and that's what I'm excited to talk about now too, which is that if you found any of this interesting, it is incumbent upon you to do something about it. If you have any nervous energy about this election at all, it is really up to you to do something about it and that is to please donate your time and your money in three different ways. I need three shifts. You've got to knock doors. Democrats are out there and they do not know that we have passed any of these transformative climate things. They will know, young people will know if they know that this has happened for their future.
You have a knowledge basis far beyond many voters. It is incumbent upon you to share it with them on either a phone bank or a door knocking experience if you happen to live in a swing state or swing district, in a district that might not be, I mean please find swing districts in the state near you and go and travel to them. It could not be more urgent that you find a swing district in your community and do a couple shifts. You're not good at anything until you do it three times, so I need you to do it three times, and you go out with a friend your first time. They're going to tell you who you're going to talk to. You're going to learn what you need to say, do it with somebody the first few times and then do it. It's the only way that we can help people understand what has happened and what is at stake. It is the most important thing that you can do between now and November.
Cody Simms:
You may not know this, but in the 2020 cycle, I co-founded a group called Climate Changemakers, which is all about helping to bring people together for collective action, originally around electoral events like this election, we originally formed to support candidates for the Senate in 2020 and to do phone banking, to do letter writing campaigns, to do door knocking and all of that, and Climate Changemakers is still up and running and very active today and is an organizing home base around climate action for this cycle. So check it out everybody, climatechangemakers.org.
Russell Kenneth DeGraff:
So here's the thing. My message is three, you have to do three, because you're only going to do them for three, but because it's Tim Walz on the ticket too and he's done a climate law in Minnesota that's really, really good. You need to do two more, so you have to do five. You have to do five shifts. Please. We got to win the house.
Cody Simms:
If folks have the ability to travel somewhere, where should they travel and go put themselves to work? Anyone who has actual time to go into a swing district or a swing state right now?
Russell Kenneth DeGraff:
I think the first list to look up is the DCCC red to blue list. That is a list that the Democratic House coordinating campaign puts together. dccc.org and look up for red to blue, find where the nearest one is, see if you like the candidate. They will have the list of all the members who are poised in a position who are doing the right things, that in a year when we have a really big year, if they're doing the right things to see that we should be able to win these. The real battleground seats for us to expand our map. Frontline districts, if you are aware of a frontline district, that is one that we're trying to hold. Some of them are harder than others and so don't ignore that list if there's one close to you, and especially if you're in that one, stay home and help if you need to, depending on that race. We can talk about it. Email me. I'll help you find the right race for you and those are the two places to start. Same for the Senate. The DSCC has their list of their challengers or their pickups too. Jon Tester, by the way, salt of the earth, what an amazing senator would be ashamed to lose either one of them, so absolutely support any calls going into them as well. We've got to keep both chambers. There's no doubt about it.
Cody Simms:
We started off part of our conversation talking about when you are on the majority and you're on offense and you can get legislation done, and when you're in a minority and you're on defense and you're defending, and we talked about that mostly from the lens of the early 20 teens and defending the Affordable Care Act from a healthcare perspective, what is actually at risk of all of the climate legislation that you successfully passed over the last few years if the Democrats are to fall out of power in this cycle?
Russell Kenneth DeGraff:
So thankfully, a lot of money's out the door. The solar canals are on their way to getting salt and saving water in California. There's a lot of those things that are already spent and accounted for, but the biggest game changers are the things that have not yet gone out, when some of that's the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund and the EPA and a lot of those dollars have not gone out yet. All these agencies are trying to get the responsible money out as quickly as possible, but I would be very worried about programs that have authorities that were intended to run for many years beyond. The incredibly innovative work that we did in reconciliation to improve the Loan Program Office comes to mind. In particular, a Republican administration just closes that office for four years.
Cody Simms:
They're not required to make loans every year? They're funded to have that, but they're not required to actually make the loans, as an example?
Russell Kenneth DeGraff:
I believe that they will make the argument that they have the impounding privilege to be able to prevent them from issuing anything like that.
Cody Simms:
I guess easy enough to say none of the things we're looking at qualify according to our new loan underwriting standards potentially.
Russell Kenneth DeGraff:
Which is Project 2025. They're going to use Project 2025 to apply those standards to anything that the federal government currently does, and they will not do those things that are not in Project 2025. If they have enough to have a trifecta, they certainly will not. That's fiction if you think that they're going to keep those in a trifecta. If President Harris has a Republican Congress to deal with, especially both chambers, there will be cuts. She will not keep that law intact. She cannot as a president. The forces to her to get anything else on anything else will be coming at climate in some way. There will have to be things that she will have to kill in order to save anything else in other places.
Cody Simms:
It becomes a negotiating chip for some other thing that is critical, foreign aid, whatever it may be I guess.
Russell Kenneth DeGraff:
I will always work with Republicans on anything that they want to work on that we can agree on. Always, and I will do whatever I can to prioritize that over anything else I'm doing because that results in durable policy in Washington. I wish it was more durable. I think the Clean Air Act in 1990 should have been treated more durably considering it passed with 400 votes to 20, and Republicans backtracked on that one immediately after it started working, and I wish that Republicans would be good faith actors on the climate. The problem is that there actually are several in the Senate and there's probably one or two in the Senate, one or two in the House that legitimately are.
I actually believe that George Santos was somebody that you could have potentially gotten on a climate change bill. He was a fraudster, so he deserved to go anyway. There's always going to be a couple of people in that party who are going to be really good, but it's never enough to build a consensus, much less the 10 that you need to actually become a good faith, credible actor and build something durable and lasting that works and in that absence, we have to ensure as many democratic chambers as we can. We have to have all three in order to pass any of these things.
Cody Simms:
Why is climate change a political issue in the first place?
Russell Kenneth DeGraff:
Well, it does require us to consider externalities of our past behavior. Anything that makes us confront the reality of the truth of what we have been doing is controversial, which is why to come back to what we talked about at the beginning, why it is so important that I think that people on this issue choose actions that are affirming, that bring people together, that leave them better for having done the action than worse, because it is so challenging to get all of these things done. The number of bank shots that you have to make to get that law over that finish line daily, you can't really do everything yourself. You can only make bank shots in a lot of cases to get balls into the goal. You're always angling around a defender, trying to block a ball from getting into the goal.
You got to kiss it off the glass. You got to figure out how a way to make a spin off the backboard knowing it's going to hit the rim before it goes in. You got to do it because it's got to get around the person around you. I don't think you should do that in ways that alienate people because these issues are so hard as they are, that it's going to require enough that we need to be making as easy as possible for people. I don't know that we're doing it, but we need to be making it easier both for voting, both in the democracy side and on the better home energy citizens to their pocketbooks.
Cody Simms:
Given all the bank shots that you've learned how to shoot, if you could go back to yourself when you were first coming up in the Congress, what would you tell yourself?
Russell Kenneth DeGraff:
Read more. I was really effective when I could devote time into immersing myself into as much as I possibly could on a topic to be able to ask the right questions in a meeting. There was never enough time. I wish I could have had the benefit of AI or generative AI at the time. Writing first drafts was just so hard. Having that now would be just a game changer for me.
Cody Simms:
Well, isn't it something to think about how, whoever comes into office in six months, how different the technology world underneath them is going to be compared to just when you were there two years ago?
Russell Kenneth DeGraff:
I really loved working with the Hill staff that I got to spend a lot of that time with last year. I didn't have a job, so I was just free talking to people and had so much time with some of the folks who had asked for me to call, and there are some incredible staff. I'll tell you, Jeffrey's staff is brilliant. I am just so excited to turn it over to them and Josephine.
Cody Simms:
Hakeem Jeffries the minority leader in the house. Yeah?
Russell Kenneth DeGraff:
Absolutely. Josephine for the one future Congress has just been fantastic and has had to deal with the same permitting issues and dealing with the minority, a very challenging minority and had a whole lot of floor votes to do it. I'm very grateful.
Cody Simms:
Well, I think that's a good way to end with that word, grateful, because I am incredibly grateful, not just for you taking a extremely long amount of time today to have a conversation with me about all of your lived experience, but grateful for all of the service that you've given, grateful for putting all of this work, this legislation that all of us talk about all of the time, and how influential it is, not just for today in our current economy, but for the future of where we're going, to get clean energy to be the de facto policy of the United States of America and all the work that you're doing around all of that, in addition to the other things that you work on that we talked about from net neutrality to healthcare, to you name it.
I'm glad you were able to come on and share your experience and truly, it's very eye-opening to me to understand how many unsung heroes I guess are out there doing the work that you've been doing, including yourself and the work that you have done that all of us are so dependent on. So thank you for that, Russell.
Russell Kenneth DeGraff:
Thank you for that. I really appreciate it, and thanks for the work on the healthcare. The healthcare work was so fascinating because I worked on autism issues and that law and making sure that that law was fair to people with autism. Previous laws in Congress had not been fair to people with autism, and that was something that was very important to me, and it was a very proud moment to be able to work on. I have really been blessed with some incredible experiences working with all of the staff and the Pelosi team in the house. I'm just so grateful. The one thing I didn't say that I should have said at one point, working for the speaker and wanting to get that bill done, at no point did I ever lose sight of every House staffer's real goal, which is to eliminate the Senate, to get rid of it. It is a terrible institution. It's undemocratic, it's anti-American but we will always work to do whatever we can to work with them to get, as long as they're going to have to be around in our constitution or whatever, we're going to do what we can to work with them.
Cody Simms:
You're saying that just because of the representation issues or explain more about the Senate?
Russell Kenneth DeGraff:
The Senate's where everything good goes to die. The rules make it very hard to get our country to reach reasonable compromise and make an effective law. I think you can make a durable, bipartisan law without 10 votes, but they have not been able to figure out a way to do that yet. I think there's a way to do that, but the Senate deserves a chance. If they want to eliminate filibuster, that's absolutely their right. They should totally do it. That will absolutely improve the way that things function in the Senate, no doubt, but I think there's also even ways to keep the filibuster in and to prevent it from being used in dilatory ways that prevent good bills from dying, and return us back to a de facto 51 first seat threshold. Your cloture time, you move on. But most of us House staffers would always prefer to just abolish the darn thing.
Cody Simms:
It doesn't seem like the filibuster is going away anytime soon. If it didn't happen recently, it feels hard to see it happening.
Russell Kenneth DeGraff:
All of these things are changeable with the right Senate. If you're still able to get 51 votes in the Senate, we'll see who those 51 votes are. You might have the votes to be able to change or reform it. You only need 51 votes to change the rules at the beginning of the Congress. You could do it with 51. We just never had 51. We never had managed it.
Cody Simms:
Russell, anything else you wanted to share? Anything else we should wrap up with?
Russell Kenneth DeGraff:
No, just thanks for giving me the chance to share some fun stories about this law and all of the fun laws that I got to work on over the past few years.
Cody Simms:
Well, thanks again. I really appreciate you taking the time to join us.
Russell Kenneth DeGraff:
Until next time.
Jason Jacobs:
Thanks again for joining us on My Climate Journey podcast.
Cody Simms:
At MCJ Collective, we're all about powering collective innovation for climate solutions by breaking down silos and unleashing problem-solving capacity.
Jason Jacobs:
If you'd like to learn more about MCJ Collective, visit us at mcjollective.com, and if you have a guest suggestion, let us know that via Twitter at MCJPod.
Yin Lu:
For weekly climate op-eds, jobs, community events, and investment announcements from our MCJ Venture funds, be sure to subscribe to our newsletter on our website.
Cody Simms:
Thanks, and see you next episode.
Russell Kenneth DeGraff would like to thank the following colleagues for their help to put together the Inflation Reduction Act. Memories are imperfect, he is deeply sorry for any omissions.
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Crafting Landmark Climate Legislation with Russell Kenneth DeGraff

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