In his recent role as Chief Advisor for the Clean Energy Transition in the White House Office of Science and Technology, Costa Samaras helped roadmap the cleantech future laid out by Democrats’ legislative achievements. In this episode, he reflects on his experience and offers a clear-eyed view of where climate policy needs to go next.
Text transcript:
David Roberts
In 2021, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) created a new division devoted to the clean-energy transition. The number two guy in that division — later number one, when founding leader Sally Benson returned to MIT — was Costa Samaras, a longtime climate policy researcher out of Carnegie Mellon University and a beloved staple of energy Twitter.
While he was in the Biden administration, Samaras worked on a whole variety of projects exploring and roadmapping the technologies needed to hit US climate targets, both near- and long-term. He worked on Biden’s Net-Zero Game Changers Initiative and report as well as reports and roundtables on AI, crypto, fusion, transformers, and other nagging cleantech questions.
He had a front-row seat to the scale and transformative potential of the Democrats' legislative achievements, but he also saw what remains to be done. He's back at CMU now, running the university-wide clean-energy institute there, and he’s been thinking about what the next IRA might look like.
So I thought I'd call him up to chat about what he saw in the belly of the beast, what he has learned about moving technologies to scale, and what he would like to see in the next round of US climate policy.
All right then, with no further ado, Costa Samaras, welcome to Volts. Thank you for coming.
Costa Samaras
Such a pleasure to be with you, David.
David Roberts
Costa, you and I have been going back and forth in various ways for many years now in the greenosphere. And I noticed a couple of years ago, you sort of vanished from the socials, as they say. And I sort of had heard vaguely that you went into the administration, but just in the last couple of days emailing you about what you've been doing; it's sort of like you've been a bit of like a Zelig in the administration in terms of climate stuff. You've seen a lot of corners, a lot of areas studied, a lot of different subjects up there.
So the first thing, I guess I'd just like to hear from you is what you've been doing. What did you do in the administration, and what did you see?
Costa Samaras
Well, in the summer of 2021, I got extremely lucky to join the Biden-Harris administration as principal assistant director for energy and chief advisor for energy policy in one of the offices in the White House. This is the Office of Science and Technology Policy, or OSTP. And so I did that role for about a year and a half, and then I was promoted to the chief advisor for the clean energy transition in that office. So from summer of 2021 till the beginning of 2024, I was inside of the White House working with an amazing group of colleagues on what I hope, what we will discuss today, the most ambitious climate policy in history, David.
David Roberts
So you really saw it close up because for reasons folks, listeners are very familiar with at this point, this vehicle had to go through reconciliation, which meant that it couldn't really involve a lot of rule or regulation, regulatory changes or a lot of standards. So it was mostly just tech innovation policy, basically. Like, that's kind of what ended up surviving the gauntlet, and that's squarely where you were sitting. So I think people out in the world, the news about Biden's climate policy comes to them in sort of fragmented ways, and they hear a little bit here and a little bit there.
I think it is your belief, which I share, that people don't necessarily appreciate the comprehensiveness and the thoughtfulness and just the scale of what was accomplished. So before we get into what's next, maybe just talk a little bit about that, sort of like, from the insider's view, your impression of not just what came out, but sort of the approach to it.
Costa Samaras
Well, I want to give credit first to the colleagues in Congress who got this done and really the rest of the folks in the White House who are a little bit more closer to the day to day legislation to get it over the finish line. But if you take a step back and you think about climate policy up until this point, which generously, I think we could categorize as three PDFs in a trench coat.
David Roberts
Not that there's anything wrong with PDFs.
Costa Samaras
PDFs, I love a PDF. And not to take anything away, but I think all of us who've been kind of scarred from Waxman-Markey and all of the things that we tried to do before, and people been working very, very hard for a very long time to get stuff done. And to come out on the other end with the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act and also the CHIPS and Science Act with the slimmest of congressional majorities is really a miracle. I think that we take that for granted, that what we have now versus what we had before.
And I think also, I was looking through a bunch of your old posts, and I remember that you were hammering on about, "hey, we should electrify the postal service vehicles," right? Yes. All these things that you and me and everyone else had wanted to do for a long, long time, it was like "This is a good idea. We should do this." A lot of it's done, right. A lot of it actually got done. Post office vehicles, electric buses, transportation, rail investments. Passenger rail investments, public transit, like all kinds of things, and we can go through them one by one, is just like, "hey, we should do that."
I get a lot of times, folks on the Internet, it's like, when I was in the administration, it's like, "you all should do that." And I was like, "it's actually right there." Some of that is done, but I want to make sure it's very clear that we got so much more to do. But we can sit back and look back and say, "wow, did we just win for once?"
David Roberts
I know. It is so hilarious watching the left try to process a win. It's just like they just don't know how. They literally don't know how. And I mean that in a very concrete, like, way. Just the sort of mechanisms and the language and the behaviors that one would use upon succeeding are just like alien to the left. And so it's been like watching a child fumbling around with an unfamiliar toy or something.
Costa Samaras
Well, there's a danger of me just listing all the stuff, right? It's like, look at these list of bullet points, right? So now it's not three PDFs, it's 100 PDFs. But just like, at the margin, everybody can see themselves in the wins that came out of these bills. I mean, even before, if you remember, we were spending three to four billion dollars on clean energy R&D. Now, clean energy R&D got ramped up by a whole bunch, but just like one little program that I don't even know if anybody even knows that there's a three billion dollar program to electrify ports in the country.
David Roberts
Yeah, I just saw that the other day.
Costa Samaras
It's like one little thing. It's like, "Oh, we did that? Yeah." I mean, people are going to be breathing much cleaner air. There's going to be fewer asthma attacks, fewer heart attacks, fewer people going to the hospital, fewer people dying from just one little thing in a giant bill.
David Roberts
And that is specifically, like, that's a great example because it's really good on decarbonization and it's really good on economic and environmental justice. Like, it's a good thing to do for poor people, which tend to be the people living around those ports. So it was a dual win on two of the things that the democratic base most says they want.
Costa Samaras
And I will say on a day-to-day basis from the president and vice president on down. It was very clear that we were all focused on improving people's lives and making sure that nobody's left behind, and to reinvest in communities that have been overburdened by pollution. And I think that you've been saying this for a while; it's like climate change in the clean energy transition also happens to clean the air. It's like a bonus.
David Roberts
And as I've said, it's a little weird that that's the "also," since that's the majority of the effect on people's lives that people will be able to see and notice.
Costa Samaras
Yeah. And as the investments from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act start rolling out, people will start to feel that this is good. And I hope so because we're going to need more, right. To get all the way to zero, we're going to need more.
David Roberts
Yeah. This is a little bit of a side question, but you raise it so if you have any perspective on this. One of the critiques I hear sometimes about all the things that were accomplished is there's a million things. Like just the other day I was like, "oh, seven billion dollars for low-income solar." That alone is mind-boggling. And here I am, a professional who covered the development and passage of these bills, and still it's like almost, on an almost daily basis, I'm like, "oh, look, there's like more billions of dollars for more good stuff that I didn't even know about."
But one of the critiques you hear is that all these good things are happening and there hasn't been a commensurate sort of communications effort and consequently no one knows about it. And the more worrying thing is that even as these things start happening and people feel them happening, people aren't going to make the connection to Biden and policy because there's no one in their face pointing out that connection. I don't know if you want to get into the whole communications thing, but do you have any thoughts on that?
Costa Samaras
At the politics level, it really matters because people need to connect, that there were advocates that made this happen. The community basically said "climate is important," and then what the administration did is, "okay, here's the biggest things we've ever done." And so on the politics, I think it is important that there's a connection and everybody needs to be doing a better job in communicating those wins. But really, I'm out of the administration I can take a step back. It's like in the end, it's like people's lives are going to be better. Right. I keep coming back to that.
It's like, no matter who gets the credit — and to be fair, the Biden-Harris administration deserves the credit — but no matter who gets the credit, you know, somebody is going to not get sick because of pollution that is coming into their lungs, and people are going to have lower energy bills, and they can have some breathing room in their lives. And there'll be new community solar opportunities for people that own homes and rent homes and people who buy used EVs and buy new EVs and people who bike and people who walk. All the things that we said — imagine what we could do in the future with clean energy transition.
Those are starting to roll out.
David Roberts
Yeah. Well, that's why I want people to know so that we can do more. So the other weird thing I often hear from people on the left, broadly the climate left, is like somehow if you celebrate these massive things that happened, you are going to communicate that, "Oh, we did the job, it's done, we can cross that off and move on to other things." I don't know why people think that, but just based on what you see inside the administration, how clear-eyed are the people in the positions of power about not just the scale of what was done, but the scale of what remains?
Costa Samaras
Oh, very clear-eyed. One of the first things that I said when I got there is, while we were in the middle of the COVID response. And really the COVID response was all-consuming in that first year. And what I kind of gingerly tiptoed around, I said, "This COVID response thing that we're doing: we're going to have to take a similar effort on climate for the rest of our lives." And that was not met with a dismissal. It was like, "Yup, I understand we have things we got to get going on." And I think that that's representative about how many people are working on climate and energy across the administration because there's lots of stuff to get done.
And so I do think that there is a recognition that you have to celebrate wins. Why not? It feels good. Folks have worked hard and it's good to feel like we're getting somewhere, which we definitely are.
David Roberts
Yeah, I do not think bitterness and regret are the sole motivating forces in human life. I think people can appreciate and be happy about a win can be motivating too. So one of the things I've been impressed by out of the administration is the amount of sort of thought and study. Like, we pegged net zero by 2050 as our goal. And it's real easy to do that. It's real easy, like companies do it all the time, industries do it. It's real easy. It's far away. And you can just sort of say, "all right, that's done." But what I've been impressed with is there's been a lot of study and analysis of what that means, like what it concretely means, and you've been involved in some of that.
The sort of like, what do we need for 2050? So, let's get into that. You have been talking on Twitter and elsewhere about the need to start thinking about an IRA 2, or more, I guess, apropos since there are three uncles, CHIP, BIL and IRA, a new family of bills or a new round of industrial policy to finish the job. So, what, in your mind, are those, insofar as the community has left some things kind of as magic asterisks? Asterisks. Hate that word, as you say. What are those magic asterisks? What are the things? Because a lot of people will say like, "Oh, electricity is the easy part, transportation is the easy part."
What are the magic asterisks in your mind?
Costa Samaras
Well, before I get to that part, I want to talk about what we're doing now and how far we have to go. And I think about these in kind of three buckets. I don't know if you remember way back in the day we were having this, "Do we innovate or do we deploy?" That kind of consumed — remember, it was like a decade of my life gone.
David Roberts
I remember it unfondly. Yes.
Costa Samaras
And really the answer is, I know this is unsatisfying, but it's like, we're basically going to have to do both at full speed forever. And what BIL and IRA do is pull clean tech to market with policy and accelerate deployment. They also demonstrate some early deployment technology that not yet at commercial scale, like hydrogen hubs and DAC, direct air capture. And at the same time, we also now have to be accelerating all of the other stuff that we need to get to net zero. That may be at the earlier stage. Now, before folks come and get into my mentions, it's like the technology that we have right now is good and it works for most of the stuff that we need to get to net zero.
So we had to be deploying that like crazy. And we also have to be building and prototyping and experimenting with stuff that we know that we need in the 2030s and 2040s think what BIL and IRA do is.
David Roberts
Let me just throw it out there, that BIL is the infrastructure law in case anybody is not putting that together.
Costa Samaras
Yeah, Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act. What those two bills do is really like lay the groundwork for this decade of deployment. Now, what our job at Office of Science and Technology Policy was is to really think about that 2035 to 2050 time frame and what do we need to do to make things work? A million years ago, I was a civil engineer, and I kind of think about this like a project. And I was trying to come up with a good analogy, and I think about maybe the Olympics. And it's like, we're going to have the Olympics in Los Angeles, and by the time the Olympics open, we need dorms and facilities and stuff.
David Roberts
I don't know if this is the analogy you want. I mean, well, this is to make a substantive point. Almost any large scale project that America has tried to do recently, you know, sort of like this is legendarily slow, expensive, mired in bureaucracy. So I think that it actually is a dangerously good analogy, which is, can America do this big project better than it does subways or Olympics or transmission lines? Transmission lines are going to have to be part of it. But the analogy to a big project just makes me very nervous.
Costa Samaras
Well, funny that you should mention that, because my first job out of school was working for New York City subway system on the extension of a subway line that went from Times Square to West Midtown that the New York Times called, let me see, the "most expensive subway mile in history." Right. So in the end, you think about giant projects that we try to do here in the United States, the Big Dig, the subway extension, the Second Avenue subway, the Olympics. All of these have been fraught with different challenges for much different reasons, and we should be doing those much, much better, much faster and much cheaper.
But in the end, you walk around Boston and you're like, this is really nice.
David Roberts
Yeah, they love it.
Costa Samaras
It worked. And if you think about it from the other side of it is like, we need to get to that point with decarbonization. And this is how I was trying to frame out this theory of the case is like: maybe Olympics and megaprojects is the right example because decarbonization might be messy, and it might take longer than we want, and it may be more expensive than we want. We hope not, but we don't really have another choice, right? It's like we actually have to get to net zero GHG emissions, and the sooner we get there, the less cumulative CO2 emissions we put in the atmosphere.
But in the end, it's like we are going to have to manage that transition together as quickly as possible, as equitably, make it equitable and make it as cheap as possible. And so it's like, this is one reason what I've been thinking about this, like a megaproject, is we actually have to overproduce the amount of greenhouse gas emissions we are shooting for in order to get a net zero by 2050 target. And what I mean by that is, all of these pathways that folks model get us to "everything works out"; it's like, oh, nine things all happen at the same time.
And we have enough stuff and we have enough labor and no surprises and there's no storms.
David Roberts
And we build enough transmission lines, right?
Costa Samaras
Well, that's a different challenge. And so it's like, if we were actually doing this, we need to do this by this early part of the middle of the century. We would take an approach that is like what we call in construction. It's like building in contingencies. It's like, oh, well, we're going to have to build in a 20% schedule delay, right? So if I think about it from net zero, it's like, what does a 20% schedule delay by 2050 mean? It means that we should be shooting for 2045 or 2040, and then maybe we hit 2050.
David Roberts
You have described two, I think, sort of mental and ideological shifts in the carbon world. And I think one of them has taken and one of them hasn't yet. And so let me just quickly say what I mean. The one is, as you say, we used to have this innovation versus deployment argument for just years and years and years. And the answer, which I always thought was pretty obvious, is we do both. And more specifically, we deploy the heck out of what we've got now. And we use this coming decade to deploy what we've got now at huge scale and to research what we're going to need to deploy at huge scale in the 2035 and onward time frame, deploying your heart out and researching your heart out at the same time.
So that when we reach 2035 and the sort of next round of challenges arise, we'll be ready and we'll have stuff ready. I think that shift has taken. I think people get that now. Maybe I'm being optimistic, maybe I live in a bubble or whatever, but I feel like at least in the carbon world, among energy geeks, we get that. Like, we're running as fast as we can and we're preparing for the next leg of the race at the same time. All well and good. The second shift, which you're describing is one that I'm slightly obsessed with which is the shift from what — and tell me if you agree — the sort of economistic thinking that dominated the climate space from the 1990s to five years ago, which was all about optimizing, all about precision, all about, like, what is the exact carbon price to the cent that is going to produce the exact right amount of reductions, but not overproduce reductions because we don't want to waste any money. We're optimizing for just the exact right policy.
And I think people who are in it, like you have realized, like, the world is not like economists' spreadsheets. Lots of things don't work out. Lots of things come up. So you need to overdo it. You need to overbuild, over design, do more than you think might be necessary, build in a buffer, build in some resilience, that shift. I wonder if you think people have gotten that.
Costa Samaras
I think it's worthwhile academically to be like, "What is the optimal policy?" So you have some theoretical best outcome, right? But it was a while, I mean, even back in the kind of late 2000s, early 2010s, when we were talking about the carbon tax debate, and not everyone but folks would be like, well, we put a carbon tax in of $46 per ton, and the next year a coal plant with carbon capture and sequestration shows up and it's like, well, it actually takes like eight years to do that, or seven, whatever. And so there was always this disconnect between a price signal and physical reality in the short run.
Now, long run, whatever, those are the ways that we can guide better, more efficient decisions. But really policy making is about more than efficiency. It's efficiency, effectiveness, equity, and how well you could administrate something. And we're in a position now that we have to get the entire US and global economy down to zero greenhouse gas emissions in like 25 years. And under those conditions, you try to be as optimal as possible, but you kind of just do what you need to do to make it work. Under those equity, efficiency, administration and effectiveness rubric, it's like, there's no more like, well, according to my calculations, we have to do this exact thing because that's not how it works when you're building something.
You asked a long question a long time ago. It was like, tell me about innovation. And I want to just answer that. So the Office of Science and Technology Policy, we led this report with our colleagues around the White House and around the government, called US innovation to meet 2050 climate goals, assessing our initial R&D opportunities. And this really fills in that kind of, that back half of like, "Okay, after the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and after Inflation Reduction Act, what do we need? What do we do?" And the International Energy Agency has said for many years, and now they keep revising this downward a little bit, but it's still about 40% of the technologies that can contribute to net zero targets are in the demonstration or prototype phase.
David Roberts
Yes. Although I do think it is significant that it keeps getting revised downward.
Costa Samaras
100%. And the reason it gets revised downward is we're deploying and making things better. Right. So that's why the innovation versus deployment debate even back then was tiring, because we know that innovation comes from deployment and we know that it's not a linear path, it's a circle. And we can deploy, and learn something new. We can do some innovation and makes our deployment faster. And so, what we launched at the White House was the Net-Zero Game Changers Initiative that talked about new technologies and improved technologies, enabling technologies. But really, it was the first, what we call, multi-objective assessment of "What are the technologies that we need that could help us get to net zero, how far along are they and what do we do about it?"
And so like any big government PDF, there's 37 technologies in here. It's like, "Hey, we should do all these things" and you can't do everything all at once. And we were able to prioritize a bunch, but really it was kind of laid out across transportation and electricity and industry and buildings and agriculture, carbon removal. It was like all this stuff that it's like, "Hey, we should have very low or zero carbon heavy-duty vehicles," for example. We actually don't have that solved yet.
David Roberts
Yeah.
Costa Samaras
And we should have big investments in understanding the way that we deal with our power grid at the grid edge, the virtual power plants. And so this assessment, we looked at obviously the climate environment part, but also justice and equity and how that could help with jobs and also how it could help with security and reliability. And we published this report that basically laid out not a roadmap but a menu of opportunities and ways to think about the future — from that 2030s to 2050 timeline of what we actually have to be investing in.
You had asked a little bit about what's left. There's plenty of stuff left.
David Roberts
Can I ask a general question about what's left before we get into some of the specifics, which is, I think the sort of conventional wisdom is, the stuff we've done so far is, you don't want to say easy to decarbonize right. Because there's all sorts of very practical social and political barriers, but the stuff we know how to do and have the technology for. And then the sort of conventional wisdom is that what's left the back half is the difficult to decarbonize sectors that are hazier, and we don't know how to do it. And so what's your sort of, like, global sense of the back half?
Do you think it's going to be more difficult or do you think it's going to play out like the first half in that when we do the research, we find things, and when we deploy, we learn things, and it turns out to not be as hard as we think? Just what's your sort of global sense of the difficulty of the back half?
Costa Samaras
Well, I think that we made, the community, in the 2000s and 2010s, made a mistake in framing this "easy to decarbonize", "hard to decarbonize" world because it was like, "Oh, we're going to start with electricity and then we're going to do buildings and then transportation and then industry." And so what that did is basically leave industry to now, right? And it also turns out, like, electricity is not that easy.
David Roberts
Nothing's easy.
Costa Samaras
It's like the easy one is still got some challenges. We're making amazing progress, but it's like in a world that needs to get to zero fast, we need to be thinking about not what we can put off till later. Like later is now. Right? And later was then, but now then is now. I'm sorry.
David Roberts
I guess to rephrase this, one way of looking at this would be we did the low hanging fruit and everything else is going to be slower and harder and more expensive and more difficult than that low hanging fruit.
Costa Samaras
I don't know if I agree with that. I think that just like there are bad surprises, like, "Oh, this didn't work out" like cellulosic ethanol. Right. That's a bad surprise. Do you remember that?
David Roberts
We kind of remember it. Well, no, I spent the 2000s, like everybody else, obsessed with it.
Costa Samaras
And folks were like, "Hey, we should try this and see if it works." And it largely hasn't achieved the level of technological advancement that we once thought. Right. And so that's kind of a bad surprise. But maybe there's a good surprise. And really, just like batteries on the grid, has really blown my mind. And I don't know if you remember, it was like, "Yeah, we're probably going to have some batteries and trucks. They're going to provide some frequency regulation at the margin." And really before the Biden-Harris administration, there was almost no battery energy storage on the grid.
And now it's like Hoover dams, 16 Hoover dams worth of batteries on the grid in a few years. And so sometimes it's like — and actually, even in the current US long-term strategy that was published in 2021, there wasn't a big emphasis on grid battery storage just because it just wasn't competitive. And those types of good surprises are really what gets me excited about things that we think are hard.
David Roberts
Now, that's the point I try to make when I talk about the hot rocks, which I do frequently, this whole sort of decarbonizing industrial heat, like, "Well, yeah, it's difficult until a bunch of people went and looked into it and then they found out, oh, you could just heat up rocks," which is not super difficult or super complicated even. There's just not been a ton of attention to a lot of these things yet, I think.
Costa Samaras
Yeah. And this is really where I think is needed next. So you asked a little bit about what should go in the Inflation Reduction Act 2.
David Roberts
Yeah, I want to nail you down. I want you to give me like a top three concrete items that you would like to see in an IRA 2.
Costa Samaras
So one of the things that we need immediately is to make sure that electrification works. And that means more efficiency, it means more transmission distribution, and it means more sources of clean generation. And in the very near term, I mean, like this summer, what do we need right now? What do we need next year? I think it's what I called Virtual Power Plants for America. There was a DOE Liftoff Report that — liftoff.doe.gov — on virtual power plants. This is basically using all of the things that the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law enable: distributed energy resources, electric vehicles, smart appliances, using those as sources of headroom in a system where we're trying to drive electrification through.
So the first item for an IRA 2 is make it easy and make it cheap for utilities everywhere to employ virtual power plants and make it good for customers to do it, too.
David Roberts
It's not super obvious to me what federal policy would do that. Something I feel fuzzy about on, and this is, I think applies to some of the other things we need, too, which is not super clear what lever the federal government has to move that. What does that mean? What would the feds do to make it cheaper and easier to do a virtual power plant?
Costa Samaras
Well, first you might provide additional incentives both to the customer and to the utilities for integrating these. I mean, the federal government's opportunities, especially in a spending bill — so this is why I'm a little bit hesitant to talk about IRA 2 versus climate policy 2. An IRA 2 has to be a spending bill or tax bill.
David Roberts
Yes.
Costa Samaras
And a broader climate bill can do other stuff, and executive orders can do other stuff. And really, I mean, I would love to see the federal utility, Tennessee Valley Authority and Oak Ridge National Lab, and others basically demonstrate, like, "Here's how a virtual power plant works. Everybody's stuff is cheaper, right?" That's one thing that is possible within the federal framework, but it's really, it's just like making all of the regulatory lineup with FERC, making all of the opportunities for utilities and customers to take advantage of this. There are some federal levers for a VPP for America.
A lot of that is going to be run through the states and through public utility commissions. And this is where the podcast gets super boring, which is like, we need state capacity in public utility commissions.
David Roberts
State capacity? Public utility commissions? What, boring? What are you talking about?
Costa Samaras
So it's like the road to electrification runs through public utility commissions, and we should be investing in those like we invest in any other part of our state and local governments to deliver the types of services that people want.
David Roberts
Indeed, indeed. I have an interesting podcast coming on that later this year with some interesting news for people. There's just a little preview.
Costa Samaras
Oh, exciting. I'm looking forward to it. So the second thing, transmission is already played out. It's like everybody knows we need transmission. I think it's more than that. I think everywhere there's a wire, we need to be investing in it. And so transmission, distribution, and all of our management at the edge of the grid needs a giant Grid New Deal.
David Roberts
Got a pod coming up on that, too. Not to use this as a preview reel, but I got a really cool podcast coming up on that stuff.
Costa Samaras
Exciting. I mean, if you think about it, we're trying to drive decarbonization through largely nearly all third party or private infrastructure and the distribution system, and we cannot let that — it's not in anybody's interest to let the cost of decarbonization fall to the most vulnerable. And the cost of the distribution system cannot continue to rise as we drive 30, 40, 50, 70% of US energy demand through electrification. So I think that climate policy 2 is a Grid New Deal and then climate policy 3 is — 3A and 3B, if you allow me. So 3A is like industrial heat production, tax credit, or other opportunities just to get the cheapest low hanging fruit in the industrial sector, electrified and decarbonized beyond what's already existing in Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act.
And then 3B is something that I've been kind of hammering on about, is like, we have about 0.6 gigatons in the agricultural sector. Have you ever — the Internet has broken my brain, so, you know that meme of like somebody starts drawing a horse and it's like, really good. And at the end it's like, it's terrible.
David Roberts
Yes. I know exactly where you're going with this because the Internet has broken my brain, too.
Costa Samaras
So it's like the folks who are working in climate-smart agriculture are doing a great job, and they're working really hard. But really, in the end, there's kind of like a shrug. It's like, "Well, we'll get it reduced some."
David Roberts
Yeah, that's all I ever hear is like a little bit of different kind of crop cover or a different kind of tilling, which all sounds good to me, but none of it sounds like really getting to zero. Right? I mean, you just have zero floating out there.
Costa Samaras
Yeah, and that's really where it's like, we would really go big on climate-smart agriculture and agriculture innovation. And there's lots of opportunities to do that. And I just think that it's something where we're like, "Oh, yeah, I guess we'll do that later."
David Roberts
Yeah, that's the one that nobody really wants to — like, it's not particularly fun. Right? I mean, like, energy is kind of fun, but agriculture just seems like a big grinding, difficult.
Costa Samaras
I don't know. I mean, food is good. Like, food is fun. So, like, Richard Waite and Alex Rudy at WRI proposed this fertilizer efficiency standard and low carbon fertilizer program. So I think that the ag sector can start to learn from what we've been doing in the energy sector.
David Roberts
Yeah, yeah.
Costa Samaras
And instead of just like, "we're going to make this 9% better," it's like, "actually, here's a whole bunch of pathways to get down to zero."
David Roberts
Right.
Costa Samaras
And so I think that we need a kind of a big, clean agriculture and nature-based solutions innovation program as part of IRA 2. So you asked me for three; I gave you four, but that's Washington for you.
David Roberts
I'll give you 3A and 3B. I'm a devotee of the outline format. Well, those are interesting. I noticed you left off aviation. How do you think about aviation?
Costa Samaras
Aviation is something that gets a lot of attention because it's poised to grow. Right? And so there's some estimates, and I was trying to actually get this sourced, but I've seen some estimates it's like 80% of the world hasn't been on a flight. And it's not that much of US emissions, but it's poised to grow. And again, we kind of don't have a zero carbon solution right now. We have some opportunities with sustainable aviation fuel. We have some opportunities with electrifying short haul flights and thinking about hydrogen for longer flights. There are some folks who want to do electrofuels.
So I do think there are incentives in the existing policies that we have that make this better, but those I don't think get us all the way to zero. So really what I was trying to do in the government is celebrate what we have now. But then ask this question, "Show me the math if this gets us to zero in 2050." And if it's not, that's okay. Let's go build that math right now. And I think aircraft is definitely one of them. We just don't have a zero carbon solution that is at a price right now that folks would be willing to pay.
David Roberts
Well, I'm sure you, like me, hear 1000 Internet commenters screaming in the background right now demanding that I ask you, what about flying less or more broadly? Do you think it is ever the federal government's job to try to change behaviors to reduce consumption? Like, this comes up with beef too, right? Aviation and beef, I feel like, are the two real examples where most consumption is by wealthy people in wealthy countries. It's going to grow and it's a problem that could be like, there are alternatives. Like you can get people around in other ways and you can eat other things.
You could try to push behavior change. How do you feel about that route?
Costa Samaras
I think that the policy opportunities here are to make the clean pathway the easiest. And so for flights, for example, I will note — because this is something that I've been hammering on about — it, like Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, makes the largest investment in passenger rail since the creation of Amtrak 50 years ago, including a bunch of high-speed rail stuff. And so there's lots of hubs around the United States that could be connected with high-speed rail that would make it much more enjoyable to travel than taking a flight. And so that is the easiest way for mode shifting, is to get those things built and make it easy for folks to do that.
And in the same way, when we talk about mode shifting out of vehicles, opportunities for everyone to have safe and affordable housing in places where they have employment and leisure opportunities — that's a climate policy. And so I think that we've also, I guess my IRA 2, 3C, would be building housing like the climate matters and doing it efficiently, but also doing it in a way that provides enough so that we're living in an era of abundance than scarcity.
David Roberts
But like many of these remaining challenges, the federal government's control over that is indirect I would say.
Costa Samaras
There are some levers and some of them were blocked by Congress.
David Roberts
Oh, really?
Costa Samaras
There's also ways to address infrastructure funding around opportunities for housing that is near transit, for example. Now is the time for climate world to be designing: what do we want next? What are the good ideas that get the tonnes to zero while making life better for everybody?
David Roberts
Right. Let me ask you about a few futuristic items that you had occasion to look into more closely in the White House that are of interest to the future of energy. One is crypto, bitcoin, whatever the hell they're calling it, the extraordinary rise of power consumption in crypto. You led a report on that, an investigation into that. What did that find? Is there a solution to that?
Costa Samaras
So there was an executive order on ensuring the responsible development of digital assets, and I, with my team led a report on what is the climate and energy implications of cryptocurrency in the United States. And really what we found — first of all, I will say for you, David, and for the United States of America, I went and listened to every crypto podcast that I could get my hands on. Like "coin dude 1997" comments because I wanted to learn.
David Roberts
Truly, you deserve some hazard pay for that.
Costa Samaras
Yeah. And most of it was not helpful, but there was. I will say the one thing that should be recognized in the crypto sector is that 5% of those folks who are working in there are actually like real energy professionals who are turning electricity to money. Like they know what they're doing. It's easy to dunk on the Internet folks who, again, I will say most of it was not helpful, but there are real folks who know how to run businesses and know how to turn electricity into money. And what that report found was that crypto in the United States uses like one to two percent of US electricity.
Similarly, it's like 25 to 50 million metric tons of CO2 per year in the United States. Now, those estimates have some uncertainty around them, and maybe they're a little lower, maybe a little higher, but at least it's an order of magnitude around what the challenge is. Really in the US, which constitutes a lot of the global crypto activity, it's more of a local challenge right now than a climate challenge, in that there's the possibility of local crypto asset miners raising power demand and spiking electricity rates, or there's noise that comes from these mining rigs that happens in communities. So what we said is, look, we should understand this challenge and make sure that these are not making people's electricity more expensive or causing local emissions or making noise.
And also just have an understanding really, in the broader digitalization. I think that's where I come back to this is like turning electricity into money is something that we've been doing for a long time. It just happens that crypto does it very efficiently, but AI also does this very, very efficiently.
David Roberts
Yeah, I was going to ask about AI. I mean, I guess depending on how you think the future is going to go, I think it's probably the case that AI is going to be the bigger power demand in the end since it seems to require extraordinary amounts of power to do the things it's doing. And every, you know, they just seem to be stampeding into pushing it everywhere. So I guess in the simplest sense, you could just say, well, we just got to decarbonize the grid. So that's decarbonized, too. But I just wonder if you ever think that the federal government should have any hand or any role in trying to — I mean, does it ever, is it ever the right role of the federal government to say, "we don't want so much of this," or like, "we would like to grow this at a slow, deliberate pace" despite the market's wishes?
Or is the federal government just there to react to whatever the private market does and try to handle it as best they can?
Costa Samaras
Well, again, there was another executive order on AI, and I and my colleagues worked on this one and made sure that there was a need to understand how AI affects the grid, how AI affects the climate, how AI affects permitting and how AI affects transportation. Because I think in the broader sense, in the discussion around AI that we're having now, it's very, very important pieces around truth and trust and democracy, things that are very important. But what I'm kind of jumping up in the background doing is saying that ethical AI needs principles for climate safe AI. And I think that there is a policy role for that.
There's also a private and nonprofit role for that; is that we need to make sure as AI rolls out and be — I mean, AI is just a tool like anything else — and as it rolls out, that it's not cooking the climate and it's also making people's lives better and that it's enabling the type of energy system that we need for the future. And I'll also note, it's like, both for crypto and for data centers. In the last ten years, there were lots of projections. It's like, look how much electricity that data centers are going to use.
Look how much electricity that crypto is going to use. And those have not come to bear because of the way that the innovation and efficiency has happened.
David Roberts
Very familiar story there.
Costa Samaras
Right, but I actually don't know if this, like, we don't know if AI is going to follow that same, like, "oh, it's actually not a problem" trajectory.
David Roberts
Right.
Costa Samaras
And it's worth just making sure that we don't make a mistake and have to clean it up. The history of the 20th century development in the United States is like, "oops, sorry." So how do we make sure that we not do that? And that's where there's a big role for innovation and the government to be working together.
David Roberts
Do you think? Here's just, I'll ask you to make a sweeping judgment on AI and passing here in the spot, but do you think that AI will contribute more to greenhouse gas reductions through what it enables than it will produce in terms of energy demand?
Costa Samaras
Yeah, so you're saying —
David Roberts
It's going to enable a lot of smart technologies that reduce emissions, right. It's going to enable better dispatch on the grid, or enable better mining. It's going to enable a lot of efficiencies and a lot of things that I think will reduce greenhouse gases just doing things more intelligently and efficiently. AI is going to help with that, but then it's also going to require a bunch of electricity, which will produce a bunch of greenhouse gases. So I'm curious how those two balance out in your head. Do you think it's going to contribute more to decarbonization?
Costa Samaras
I think it's going to be ultimately net positive for the climate, and here's why: it's like, if we don't have a zero carbon electricity system — the most easiest thing we said was to decarbonize — the game is over. And what AI and what other digitization does is requires competition for new generations. So I'm not dismissing that part. It's like we need massive efficiency, and we need to make sure that load growth from digitization doesn't eat the world and doesn't take up resources — I mean, there's only so many solar projects that you can be running at one time and so many good sites.
It is a finite, ultimate resource in the near term of how much new renewables we can bring online a year. And if we're doing that to make amazing cat videos, as much as I love those, then that is a challenge for ultimate decarbonization. But in the end, it's like in 2035 and 2040, if the carbon intensity of the electricity system is above 100 to 150 grams per kWh, we did bad, right?
David Roberts
We're toast regardless.
Costa Samaras
So it's like, we have to be doing this all at the same time. This is why — it's like unsatisfying for the kind of optimizer. It's like, well, no, we actually have to decarbonize industrial supply chains and manufacturing and transportation and electricity all at the same time.
David Roberts
Yeah. So when you were in the White House, you did some work on transformers, which are a hot topic in climate world right now. There's transformers — for listeners who don't know: they take high voltage electricity from the grid and lower the voltage and feed it into distribution systems. Some transformers do that. There are other transformers do things. But they're basically electricity infrastructure, and we're very short on them. And every manufacturer is producing at full scale, and they were still very short on them. So I'm curious, A, what you learned about the transformer shortage? Because this is all in service of decarbonizing the grid.
Right. Which is in service of everything else. A, what you found out about transformers, and B, whether you learned anything that you think is applicable in general to the kind of supply chain questions that we're going to face as we're trying to do this.
Costa Samaras
So, transformers basically allow you to use electricity in your house. There's electricity on the wires outside. When it comes into your home, the voltage has to go lower so that you can use it on your computers. It steps it down to use it on the stuff in your home. These are fairly old technology. It's not that complicated. But without it, you've got nothing. There is no electrification. There's no nothing. There's no refrigeration, right? And so what happened under COVID is a bunch of the factories had some challenges with supply chain. A bunch of the factories had challenges with labor.
And then as the kind of demand started picking up and there were supply chain shortages for different types of materials, the demand for transformers started to go really high, and the supply basically didn't increase. And so the market was not reacting to high prices and very long lead times. Ultimately, and we can get into it and I did a big thread about this over on the Internet, but it's basically, it's like: there's uncertainty in the supply chain of what type of steel these transformer manufacturers are going to use. There's uncertainty in, "well, I don't want to ramp up production now and then have way more capacity than I need later."
And then there's also uncertainty around a Department of Energy transformer efficiency rule that's currently under consideration. And so all of these things kind of compounded at once and made this industry basically say like, "hey, I'm just going to ride out this period of high prices without adding much more capacity." Now, some is coming online now, but really this gets to the end of the boring part of decarbonization and the boring part of industrial strategy. It's the materials and the stuff that we're going to need for expanded electrification requires understanding and partnership with the government so that the transition is not messy, because once the transition starts to get messy, it's over.
And it's really, it's like there's a hurricane and folks can't get transformers to redo the lines. The backlash against electrification and the backlash against decarbonization is only like one not related but opportune thing that folks are going to pounce on away from being delayed. And so we need transformers.
David Roberts
So I guess the question is, are transformers unique in some way? Is this an odd anomaly or is this indicative of supply chain problems that we can foresee happening as we decarbonize to 2050?
Costa Samaras
This happens to be a unique kind of confluence of lots of different factors around labor, supply chain and regulatory and market that the market alone has not solved, or at least is not solving in the near term. I think that we should be paying attention just like we pay attention to critical minerals and critical materials — there are critical parts of the US infrastructure supply chain that will need to have a broader understanding by policymakers to make sure that there's availability in increasing demand. And if you remember, it's like lots of efficiency and LED lighting took off and a bunch of other structural factors in the US economy has kept US electricity load growth basically flat for a decade.
And so now it's like, people are starting to use electricity again. The utilities are like, "Wait!" You know, it's almost weird. It's like, this isn't how you all make money, like, why aren't you ready for this, like, why aren't you putting this into your integrated resource plans? It's like —
David Roberts
Don't get me started.
Costa Samaras
The IRA has teed up all of this electrification for utilities to say, "Wait, we can actually make more money by doing electrification." To me, again, this is a challenge. It's like, this is the proverbial, like, dollars are on the ground, why aren't they picking it up? And so we have to understand non market factors and sociotechnical systems and all the stuff that academics talk about. It's like, actually, it doesn't always work when the price signal shows up and then the market responds. In some cases, there's friction and there's asymmetric incentives and there's information gaps. I mean, all the things that we know happen, happen, right?
And to me, we need a utility sector that is like, "We understand that the government wants to electrify lots of stuff because it's good for climate. We are going to respond. And it's going to be good for our workforce and it's going to be good for our communities, it's going to be good for the climate." I believe that that world is possible.
David Roberts
A world of good utilities. You really are a utopian. We're running out of time. But I wanted to ask about one other future thing, which is of great interest to a lot of people that you also did some work on, which is fusion. How are they thinking about fusion up there in the White House? Because I know out here in the wild there are folks who will say, we're going to get to fusion, and when we get to fusion, that will solve all the problems and everything else is noise. You did some fusion work. Was that your conclusion?
Costa Samaras
So first I will say fusion is awesome. It's creating a star on Earth. In science land, it's wild, right? It's like we are going to harvest, make the energy of a star and put it in a machine and —
David Roberts
And boil water with it.
Costa Samaras
That's one pathway. But you know what? I like hot water, right? Yeah, I like hot water.
David Roberts
Steam is handy.
Costa Samaras
I like steam. I like cold drinks. Fusion is a cool technology that maybe doesn't play in this near term round of like, we actually have to get deployment ramped up for 2050. But the world continues after 2050. And we should be doing cool stuff and doing cool science because it's important for humanity. And so my boss at the time, Sally Benson, and I and our colleague Rachel Reolfi in White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, we led the first White House summit on fusion energy. We developed with the rest of the White House the president's bold decadal vision on fusion energy.
There's like $6 billion in private investment around fusion because folks want to; they see this opportunity to do something with near limitless fuel. Now, there's different pathways and much different and much smaller amounts of radioactive waste than traditional fission power, nuclear power. And really it's an opportunity to do cool science that ultimately hopefully works out for humanity and for the climate. It's indicative of kind of all of the innovation versus deployment debate is like there's no way, no how that we are going to wait till 2050 or whenever. Maybe it's 2032. I'm hoping it's the end of the decade that fusion shows up.
David Roberts
Really? You think that's a live possibility?
Costa Samaras
That would be at the outside edge of possibility. I think that there is a decent chance that it works in our lifetime. I think that there is a somewhat chance that it works in the next 10 to 20 years. But you know what? Even if it doesn't get there, by doing R&D about it, this is what government R&D is supposed to do. It's like we learn about new science and maybe new pathways in other material shows up in superconducting magnets or other computing technologies. We can do science for science's sake and good things can happen and we don't really know what will happen yet.
I do think that there is a pathway for fusion. The government is doing amazing work on it. There are milestone programs that are kind of ramping up and for the first time, it feels like there's a "there" there. I was at COP28 and we launched an international fusion partnership. And so it's like we can imagine a better world, right? It's like this is where I want to come back to. It's like we can celebrate all the awesome stuff that's in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act. We can do awesome science and do new innovations while also being very clear-eyed is like we actually have a giant climate problem; we have to get zero.
And we can do those things at the same time. And I am super excited about fusion and all these other magic asterisks, as we call them, because some of them are going to work and some of them won't, but none of them are going to work if we just sit on the sidelines and do nothing.
David Roberts
Do you have another dark horse technology that you think people aren't paying enough attention to now and might turn out to be a big deal?
Costa Samaras
This is a way more boring technology, but it's like reconductoring our transmission lines, just like hanging a different metal on transmission lines and getting double or almost double as much electricity through that. Without doing anything. And so the cost of that has to go down. The different types of technologies have to be advanced but it's like there's low hanging fruit that we think about the inefficiencies that we should be doing all the time, and then there's just like, new technologies that we have to advance and see how good they are and see if they can work.
David Roberts
So I guess I would conclude by asking, I love your optimism. I love your positive attitude. And you say, we can do these things. We can innovate while we're deploying, we can research. But the process you describe, and I think you'd agree to really work, has to be intensely iterative, i.e. we have to do a bunch of stuff, be open and sensitive to what is, isn't working, and then adjust our strategy accordingly. This, I think, is the flip side of the overabundance or overbuilding notion. Like, if you're going to do that, you have to be equally committed to sort of trimming the branches that don't work.
And I just, like, I look at the US federal government and nimble, responsive, able to shut down programs when they don't work — these are not descriptors that leap to mind. You know, based on seeing inside the beast, should I be more optimistic about our ability to do good policy then I am?
Costa Samaras
Yes. You know, what I saw every day in the White House and in the agencies was career professionals who get up every day, and work hard, and do their best to make people's lives better. I know that sounds cliche —
David Roberts
All of whom could be making much more money somewhere else.
Costa Samaras
Yeah. And there's folks who — absolutely. They are really committed to making sure that their corner of the government is working well and working efficiently, and they are really giving it their all. It was, frankly, inspiring every day to be seeing that. There were the political appointees, of course, that's their job, to come in and implement the president's policies. But there's a much bigger and much larger career government scientist, engineer, policy, budget, finance advocate.
David Roberts
The deep state, is what we call that, Costa. The deep state.
Costa Samaras
It was the deep state in that they cared.
David Roberts
Yes, the deep state is good, actually. This is the recurring theme.
Costa Samaras
I know that this is like veering into cliche kind of cheese territory, but it's like, I don't think that folks realize how hard the people in government are working to make people's lives better. So you asked if the government could be nimble; you remember that there was a giant algae research program that was happening in the Department of Energy that the government just shut down. Right. And so we have seen opportunities over time for good and bad where research programs have been sunset. But one of the things that I was trying to make sure we start thinking about is this kind of integrated engineering and deployment around the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act investments.
It's that we should have folks out at the hydrogen hubs and the direct air capture hubs and all the other investments that have been made, like collecting data, doing new innovations. The way that we get circular innovation embedded in the bloodstream of the US ecosystem is while we're deploying, we're coming up with new opportunities to fix stuff. It's like, "Oh, I wish I had a valve that did this." And it's like, you could send that back to ARPA-E or to DARPA or someplace else, like, "Oh, yeah, go make that valve." And so I think that we've done a lot of good in enabling nimble ecosystems to flourish in the government.
We're not all the way there yet. And I think in an IRA 2 situation, I would be doing more of let's learn as much as we can while we're deploying. And so it's not just learning by doing, it's like, "Oh, I built this one thing, I'm going to build it the next time and it'll be cheaper, faster, better." That is good. But it's also, it's like I'm building this thing and I'm running into a problem. I wish we could be innovating on the fly and designing a skunkworks program. It's like, "oh, fix this." And I think that there's opportunity to do rapid prototyping using the ARPA model to enable even better learning by doing as we move forward.
That's a little bit of like innovation, geek speak, but it's like we're putting all this money into deployment. We should benefit from it as well as on the innovation side.
David Roberts
Absolutely. And I will say, just to reinforce from the outside, things look real bad. And I think it's easy to see the dysfunction. It's easy to see things go wrong. It's easy to see stupid people saying stupid stuff. But I will say, almost without exception, everybody I talk to who goes into the federal or state bureaucracy to try to work on things like this comes away sounding starry-eyed, like you just really impressed, just really impressed with a bunch of people who care, working really hard. I wish that message could get out more. Like, there's a lot of good people in there working really hard to do good things.
Costa Samaras
There's a lot of cynicism, right? And there's a lot of reason to be cynical. I mean, there are lots of challenges that we have in the country right now, but I remain optimistic around the spirit of possibilities that is really enabled in the US and now global clean energy ecosystem. It's like people want to do something that matters in their lives, and decarbonization is the theme that is going to be with us for the rest of our careers. And folks are excited to help and build and grow that type of better future for everybody.
David Roberts
Awesome. Well, thanks so much for coming on, and thanks for all your work in the administration. And now you're back teaching, directing things, academizing for the time being?
Costa Samaras
Yeah, I'm super excited. I lead Carnegie Mellon's university-wide energy institute, the Scott Institute for Energy Innovation.
David Roberts
Oh, fun.
Costa Samaras
And we have a great team driving the innovation that we need to get to net zero from the outside.
David Roberts
You're a warrior on the side of good and right. So thanks again. Thanks for coming on.
Costa Samaras
I really, really appreciate it. Thank you so much.
David Roberts
Thank you for listening to the Volts podcast. It is ad-free, powered entirely by listeners like you. If you value conversations like this, please consider becoming a paid Volts subscriber at volts.wtf. Yes, that's volts.wtf. So that I can continue doing this work. Thank you so much, and I'll see you next time.
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