LoginThe view from inside DC, with Rep. Sean Casten
In this episode, I sit down with my old friend Sean Casten for a frank insider's take on the precarious state of clean energy policy amid our ongoing constitutional meltdown. We dive into the political knife fight over IRA tax credits (some Republicans support them), why transmission reform remains frustratingly partisan despite economic logic, and the fossil industry's fear of competition. Despite the dire political landscape, Casten makes a compelling case for why clean energy developers should keep building through the storm.
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Text transcript:
David Roberts
Hello, my lovelies. This is Volts for April 2, 2025, “The View from Inside DC with Representative Sean Casten." I'm your host, David Roberts. As I previewed here on the site a while back, on March 27th, Canary Media held a live event in Chicago. At that event, I interviewed Sean Casten, who has represented Illinois' 6th district, which is lower Chicago and some of the suburbs, in Congress since 2018.
Sean and I have known each other for a long time, and it was fascinating to get a frank insider's take on what's happening in DC right now. I think you will find it stimulating and provocative.
Two quick notes about the event. First, gosh, Chicago is gorgeous! As a lover of good architecture, my neck practically hurt from all the gawking. Second, a dozen paid Volts subscribers got free tickets to this event and I got to meet several of them — that's always a highlight for me. Great to see y'all there.
If you would like to get free tickets to events, along with other perks like access to mailbags and my undying gratitude, sign up as a paid subscriber to Volts over on volts.wtf. This pod is 100% listener-supported; I couldn't do any of it without y'all.
Now, on to the interview.
Thanks, everybody. Thanks for coming. So, Sean, we have been friends for a while, many, many years. Since before you were elected to Congress. And since you have been elected to Congress, not a single time have you texted me a single state secret. So, I thought we were buds. Now, I realize the bar is much higher for — anyway, of course, I had to make a Signal joke. All right, I want to start with some semi-specifics and then pull the camera out a little bit. So, let's just start here. Republicans in Congress are trying to hash out a budget bill, their first reconciliation bill.
Anybody who remembers the fights of the previous few years knows that a reconciliation bill has to be budget relevant and it has to balance out over the 10-year time horizon, meaning it has to raise as much money as it spends over the 10-year budget horizon. So, there's this question about the IRA tax credits. I think in the clean energy space, there has been a kind of fragile optimism about them because, as everyone surely knows by now, most of that money is going to red states. It's producing an enormous amount of economic activity in red states.
Any sane accounting of political incentives would mean that the Republicans in question would defend the IRA tax credits. But Trump wants to extend his mega tax cuts to the wealthy, and he's promised all sorts of Christmas tree nonsense, you know, no taxes on tips, et cetera, et cetera. So, he's promised a lot of money. So, they are going to be desperate for revenue. And a lot of people, I think, close to those circles believe that that crushing need for revenue, you know, there's $850 billion sitting there of IRA credits, that going after them is going to be inevitable, and they're going to have to do it.
So what's your take on that? Do you think the IRA credits will survive? And what is the political logic governing that decision?
Rep. Sean Casten
So, thank you for having me. For those of you who don't know, David and I first met when my cousin, who was working for Grist, said, "Would you consider writing for this place?" I said, "I'm not really a writer." He's like, "Yeah, we got a knitter for you." So, David polished up my prose for a number of years in a past life. So, it's really hard to predict because the Republican Party doesn't like itself. And so, you've got to understand that right now we're at a — we have not passed an appropriations bill, a full appropriations bill in the House, since Nancy Pelosi was the speaker.
So, we're basically funding at levels that were set. McCarthy couldn't get it done. He tried to use the debt ceiling as leverage. Biden masterfully outplayed McCarthy. Once it became clear that he was outplayed, the Republicans fired him. They brought in Johnson. Johnson then had to do the same thing with his continuing CR. So, they haven't passed anything because within their caucus, they don't have the votes. And all they've been able to do is with us. And of course, now they have a thinner margin. What's changed right now is that there were — I don't think I'm speaking out of turn to say — there are no Republicans in the House who respect or fear Mike Johnson.
There are many Republicans who respect, and all of them fear, Donald Trump. And so, when Trump starts calling and says, "I need you to do this," they were able to get votes on that last CR. The theory of the IRA, when we put it together, was that if we made sure that this was long on carrots and short on sticks, we'd have a political constituency to keep it. And that by structuring this to say we're going to provide differentially larger tax credits to people who are in energy transition communities, we didn't do that to be political.
We did it because shifting to clean energy is a huge wealth transfer from producers to consumers. Producers tend to be in red states, consumers tend to be in blue states. It's not universal, but we wanted to make sure that everybody felt like they were getting a win. And so, you've now got this — you would know the numbers, like a dozen House members who have said, "Don't take away the IRA credits —"
David Roberts
21.
Rep. Sean Casten
21. All right. Whether they stand strong or not remains to be seen. The way that I've been describing this whole budget process to people is, you sort of have to think of it like you've got a friend who says, "I've been spending too much on shoes. So, I decided to cut off one leg."
And you're like, "It's true. That's a way to save money on shoes. It's also insane." And so they're starting from this proposition that, like, "I want to give a $4.5 trillion tax cut and therefore I have to find a bunch of pay-fors." And so, like, you know, that's the Medicaid noise and everything else. What I would say that you all can do that's helpful is make noise in Republican districts because I've had some of my Republican colleagues who have come back and said, "We're really pushing the Republican senators not to pass something as bad as what we passed in the House because we're getting so much heat at home."
And so, you know, that heat has been breaking through. It's been mostly on Medicaid. The other place where I think the clean energy industry can be useful is that the IRA credits themselves have some bipartisan popularity. The things in the IRA that paid for the tax credits are very partisan. Funding the police, specifically the IRS, is a very partisan thing that generates a lot of money. So, when they defund the IRS, that creates a bigger hole. Giving Medicare the obligation to negotiate for pharmaceuticals so that we all save money on drugs. That's also very partisan.
And so, if they take that away, all of a sudden, it makes these holes bigger. So, I think the more — and these were the big pay-fors in the IRA. So, I think we help keep those clean energy credits there by making clear that we would also like to have competition in the pharmaceutical industry and we would like people to pay their fair share of taxes. So, push on all those fronts. They're helpful.
David Roberts
Yeah, and another thing that they're talking about, again, I never know how seriously to take anything these days, but another thing they're talking about doing is changing the baseline against which the budget is to make that $4.1 trillion vanish into thin air, and thus the hole is gone.
Rep. Sean Casten
This is what we refer to as "Craponomics" because Mike Crapo is the author of this idea. What Crapo is saying, I mean, this is so monumentally stupid. What he's saying is like — normally, when we score bills, you pass a law and the law says, "This law lasts for two years, this lasts for five years, for 10 years." The CBO says, "Okay, we're going to assume no change in law except the incremental law you're asking us to score. And then we go through and we calculate what the fiscal impact of that is." The Trump tax cuts are about to expire.
What Crapo is saying is we should assume that they're always there because that way, if we extend them, they don't have a positive score. It's insane, right? I mean, what I would encourage you to do is to call Mike Crapo, call Mike Johnson, and say, "How about we fire you and then you budget for your holidays next year on the assumption you still have a salary?" Because that's essentially what they're doing. I'm hoping the Parliamentarian says, "This is nonsense," but that game is going on in the Senate right now to create this entire fiction that you can blow holes in the economy and be scored as not hurting the economy.
David Roberts
I'll tell you, if the Parliamentarian says no, and they say, "Screw you, Parliamentarian, we're doing it anyway," there's going to be a lot of Democrats really mad about the stuff that the Parliamentarian stopped Democrats from doing.
Rep. Sean Casten
Well, yeah, I mean, there's also a weird thing that there are, I think, the bastion of Republicans who are truest to their principles and not bending are also the weirdest Republicans and they're the die-hard libertarians. The Thomas Massie's of the world, who has some really strange ideas, but he is uniquely amongst his caucus, he holds fast to those ideas. He has an intellectually coherent worldview, even if some of the ideas are weird. And so, some of those really strong — whatever you want to call them — libertarian fiscal hawks may prevent this from happening because they're smart enough to know that this is craponomics.
David Roberts
Right. So, slightly broader question. If this were a normal political moment and a Republican administration had taken over all three branches and you're in the minority, I would be sort of asking you like you're in the minority in the House. Being in the minority in the US House is like a uniquely thankless, kind of powerless position. But, I would be asking you like, you know, they have a very narrow majority. So, are there areas of cooperation where you can imagine sort of extracting something good out of this on, say, you know, people bring up permitting a lot or reforms to NEPA or stuff like that?
So, like, are you thinking that way, like, in the next two or four years? Are you thinking about coalitions you could put together? Are you thinking about things you could actually accomplish? It also feels a little weird thinking that way while there's a constitutional crisis unfolding around you, and it's like the dog in the fire — whatever the meme is. So, like, how do you split your brain like that? Is this just like panic, resist, fight, period, or are you still thinking about how to?
Rep. Sean Casten
So, you know, at the highest level, the reason I ran for Congress was energy and climate policy, and then there's the oath I took to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, which is consuming most of my time of late. You know, we've still got to break legislation. I just introduced a cap and trade bill last week that, you know, we don't expect to go somewhere, but we want to keep the marker and keep working with the outside groups and bring that legislation forward. I just brought in a bill on feebates for electric vehicles.
So, yes, we keep bringing these forward. But I think the area that should exist for bipartisanship, and historically has. If you ignore that the climate crisis is urgent but you want to work directionally, there are things you can do. You know, we did a Voluntary Apparel Labeling Act with Congresswoman Salazar from Florida that was like, could we get, like, a good government seal of approval that if you want to buy clothes that are sourced from low environmental impact chains that, like, you can go through and, like, address the issues of fast fashion. We've got a similar one on food.
It's voluntary, so we get Republicans on board. Maybe it creates a good housekeeping seal of approval. It's a good idea. It's very small bore. R&D generally is pretty bipartisan. The science committee works pretty well together, and that's good. We certainly need R&D. I sometimes get concerned that the deployment of clean energy is such a threat to the fossil industry world because it outcompetes it. That R&D sometimes is like, well, "I can say I'm doing something as long as I'm not deploying." And you want to make sure that you're not just doing R&D to put more stuff on a pipeline that isn't moving forward.
David Roberts
And they are laying waste to the scientific and R&D architecture.
Rep. Sean Casten
Now, you're getting partisan with your science talk. Physics...
David Roberts
I hate to drag physics into this.
Rep. Sean Casten
I mean, on the permitting side, not that you're asking to be my therapist here, but David Cicilline, who's no longer a member, gave me this great advice at the end of two terms ago. He said, "When you're in the majority, you love what you pass on the floor, but you have very little ability to influence it" because it's these big bills that have been moving for a while. And even if you have something you want to improve on, it's been led for a long time by someone who's a friend of yours and they're the chair of the committee and it's a little daintier. He said, "In the minority, the opposite of both of those are true and take advantage of it," you can work on big things, but you're going to hate what you pass on the floor. With that advice, Mike Levin and I took it on ourselves to do this huge transmission permitting reform bill that's become sort of the Democratic, I think we're up to like, I don't know, 100 Democratic co-sponsors that's become like the Democratic permitting package.
And I think it got referred to like five committees. And if we were in the minority, I'd be having to make sure that Frank Pallone on Energy and Commerce was okay, make sure Jared Huffman on Natural Resources was okay. I've got a little bit that's referred to our committee on Financial Services. When you're in the minority, it's like, well, this is just good things. And you know, Frank and Jared and Maxine are all delighted that we're putting this together so that we've got the vehicle. And so intellectually that's been, I think, kind of fun. What was hard when we brought that forward last term was because we'd really started that because at the end of the 117th Congress, we knew we had to do permitting reform.
And the only package we had was what Manchin was working on. And if you define, I know you have opinions on Mr. Manchin, if you define success by what the rightmost Democrat in the Senate will allow, you're way to the right of where the American people are because of the structure of the Senate. And so, that vehicle never really had any legs in the representative body in Congress. And so, we were like, we need a package that can move. The first bill that the Republicans introduced when they took the majority was their H.R. 1, which was substantially like the fossil provisions of the Manchin package, but with all the transmission taken out.
And you sort of had this immediate recognition that transmission is a partisan thing. Gas permitting is also a partisan thing going the other way. And there's this tension that because pushing for clean energy is pushing for cheap energy, and because the leadership of the Republican Party is almost entirely from the oil patch, it's really hard to get Republicans to support transmission reform. Even though you look at Iowa, the Iowa delegation should be — I mean, it's wind and ethanol, right? I mean, they should be loving this stuff. But Iowa bounces back and forth Democratic, Republican, which means that other than Grassley, there's not a lot of seniority in the Iowa delegation.
And so, they haven't been able to push back on that. And I'd like to believe someday that's not true. But at least for now, it's been big and meaty, but we've not been able to get Republicans really embracing transmission reform.
David Roberts
Well, this gets to another question I have, which is, as you say, the 21 Republicans signed this letter in support of the IRA. And there's always this sort of — I've always been told by various people over the years that, like, "Oh, there's actually, like, this sort of pool of support for good clean energy policy in the Republican caucus. They just can't poke their heads up. They just can't say anything. But, like, there's enough to work with over there." So I'm just like, "Well, where are they? Show me the votes." So, like, do you think their majority is narrow enough now that a block of clean energy supporting Republicans plus a block of clean energy supporting Democrats can actually push something over the finish line? Or is it like, Trump, can Trump just come in and, you know...
Rep. Sean Casten
So, you'll get different answers if you talk to different members. And, you know, I'd encourage you to talk to Scott Peters about this, because Scott Peters is very much of the opinion that he thinks there's a zone there. I'm not persuaded. Scott's a friend. I think it's one of these things where, like, because all of the push on the Republican side is saying, "We want to gut NEPA, we want to make it easier to build oil and gas assets," not because the US is demanding oil and gas.
Like, oil use in the US is the same now as it was 10 years ago. They want to build export terminals. That's a really different kind of conversation. Because if you build a gas export terminal, that means there's less gas in the United States, which means the price of natural gas goes up, which is really good if you're Chris Wright, Secretary of Energy, who's a gas producer. It's not good if you're an American consumer. And I've done the math; there are a lot more energy consumers in the United States than there are natural gas well developers. But that's sort of where the math sits.
And so, I think, like, the zone for bipartisanship isn't, "Well, let's figure out, like, what are the technologies that work in my district and yours?" It's like, "I'll give you a little bit of this if you say something mean about the gays." I don't know. I mean, this is a horrible metaphor, but I think it's the only way to understand it. Like, if I give you a dog turd and I coat it in chocolate, if I put enough chocolate on it, it tastes like chocolate.
We can have the conversation about how we might make a meal of dog turds and chocolate. But if you don't want to eat a turd, it's hard to find the zone to do that in energy policy.
David Roberts
Well, I'm going to remember that. In the normal world, Congress has the power of the purse, can decide where money goes and where it doesn't.
Rep. Sean Casten
We have for almost 250 years.
David Roberts
Yeah, it's a known thing. But now, for instance, a couple of days ago, I read a story that there's a memo circulating around the Energy Department encouraging the Energy Department to cut off funding specifically for the four hydrogen hubs in Democratic states, while maintaining the funding for the three in red states, which is just completely mask off, you know, illegal, unconstitutional. But also, just like, "The federal government is red and for red people and for red states and against —" You know what I mean? Which has always kind of been their deal, but it's just out in the open now.
But again, it's just, like, illegal and unconstitutional. And, you know, at a certain point, what do you do? What does anybody do? You know, like, the courts are going to probably rule that illegal. Like, they've ruled several of these things illegal, but we have not seen, to my knowledge, the Trump administration say, "Well, then, okay, we won't do that because the court says it's illegal." So, you know, I mean, there's no answer to this question, but, like, what do you do if they just don't obey the courts, if they just don't heed the court ruling?
Rep. Sean Casten
So, the first thing, and I don't want to be too historical and constitutional, but I think you have to understand this a little bit in the sense that we have always had a tension in our country of are we the United States or a united group of states? Read Thomas Paine, who said, "Our great title is Americans. Our lesser title varies with our place of origin. It's by our great title we're known abroad, and by our lesser title we're known at home." And he was saying that to try to get people to agree to ratify the Constitution because people were debating, "Am I an American or am I a Virginian or a New Yorker?"
That tension has always been there. And I say that because I think we need to bend over backwards for those of us who are in blue states who care about this stuff, to not fall into the same trap of saying, "Well, it's those backwards red staters, and I saw the sign in your yard, so I don't trust you." Like, we just have to resist that because it's so tempting to go down that path right now. What the Trump administration is doing is a violation of the Constitution because Congress has the power of the purse. It's a violation of the Impoundment Control Act that says that the executive branch cannot impound funds, which essentially ratifies that Congress has the power of the purse, but was passed in the wake of the Watergate scandals and Nixon to provide some very narrow exceptions.
It's a violation of the Rescission Control Act that says that you can't take congressionally approved funds and then choose to use them in ways other than Congress approved. We are the legislative branch because we legislate. They are the executive branch because they execute the laws we pass. And when they don't, we have an oversight function. On the other hand, every subpoena we apply, like Johnson and Thune, are refusing to do any oversight. And so, we are having to depend exclusively on the courts. We're winning, and I think we have won every court case that's been run where a decision has come, typically a temporary restraining order, and they'll be appealed and what have you.
Some cases have been deferred, some don't have standing. There will be a lot more coming as long as they keep going down this path. We in Congress are working both to use our outside voice to educate people on this. I just announced I'm going to go to a town hall in Dixon, Illinois, home of Ronald Reagan, which is going to be fun. Ronald Reagan's farewell speech: "The day we stop welcoming immigrants to our shores is the day we stop being Americans." Also a partisan dude. We've been working with a lot of outside groups because the legislative branch generally does not have standing in courts, because the Article I branch is not supposed to use the Article III branch to gang up on the Article II branch.
And that's appropriate. We shouldn't be able to do that, but so we have very limited ability to litigate this from Congress, but we are working with outside groups. If any of you have projects canceled, please contact our office or other offices, because we can connect you to who these outside groups are to make sure that you have your status there and can push through. Also, make some fights. And if there's any lawyers in the room, one of my big requests is we really need the bar associations to start flexing on this, because the fact that there are lawyers in Trumpland who are writing executive orders that clearly violate the Constitution, that clearly break the law, and then defending those actions in court, the judges are laughing them out.
But, I think there's really a role for the Bar Association to say, "This is disbarable." Like, "You don't get to just make up law. Yes, you work for your client, but you are to be constrained by the law as it's written." Why is there still a working lawyer who said that we're just going to invalidate birthright citizenship? That is insane. It's the plain text of the Constitution. I think all of us in civil society have a role to step up, because we are all in a constitutional crisis right now. And if all of us rise up, we're going to kick their ass.
If all of us sit around waiting for someone else to do it, we're going to get our ass kicked.
David Roberts
I mean, arguably, among the lawyers who have said straightforwardly unconstitutional things are Supreme Court justices, which are a little bit more difficult to get at.
Rep. Sean Casten
They were the ones who gutted Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment. If you recall, that was the Colorado case that said that if you engage in an act of insurrection against the United States, you cannot run for president.
David Roberts
I remember that one. I want to ask you some stuff about clean energy, but first, I feel obliged. I have a member of Congress on stage, and I just want to speak for the masses. A couple of questions, a specific one and then a general one. But I feel like there's an enormous amount of rage out there now, and I don't think it's only on the left or the base. Do you know what I mean? Like, this is how people are framing things. It's like the base is mad at Schumer. I don't think it's just the base.
I think there's enormous, widespread anger that these guys are stomping all over our system, destroying a country that took 250 years to build, and they're just meeting so little resistance. So, the specific question is, do you feel like Democrats in Congress, do you feel like their response to all this has been adequate?
Rep. Sean Casten
Until we are through this crisis? No. Like, by definition, right? I mean, adequate would suggest that our work is done. I think some are doing a better job rising to the moment than others. We are Democrats, which means that we don't march to a single drum very well. I actually think the rage is good in the sense that in 50 days, we've gone from apathy to fear to rage. Apathy doesn't lead to action. Fear doesn't lead to action. Rage leads to action.
David Roberts
Five stages of autocracy.
Rep. Sean Casten
The action is sort of shooting in all directions right now. I joked with a group the other week. They were saying they were very upset with Schumer. I was upset with Schumer. And I reminded them that in 2017, 2018, when everyone was marching for women and marching for our lives, do you all remember how inspired you were by Chuck Schumer?
David Roberts
Remember that time Chuck Schumer inspired you?
Rep. Sean Casten
Don't get angry at him for changing, is all I'm saying. I think all of us, and I say this for myself, I have no political experience before running for Congress. In the course of three terms in Congress, just starting my fourth, I have been involved in half of the impeachments that have ever happened in our country, half of the attacks on the Capitol that have ever happened in our country, 100% of the evicted speakers that have ever happened in our country, and 20% of the evicted members of Congress that have ever happened in our country. You don't read a book that prepares you for this.
Right? There isn't a playbook that you go out to. You try to read history. You try to see what is the right way to respond to this. And at least, I find that the colleagues of mine who I think are getting the moment right are the ones who realize that this is sort of a Churchillian moment where you need to be standing up and saying, "Let's be very clear about what the stakes are. Let's be very clear about what the consequences are if we lose. And let's be very clear-eyed that I make no promises that if we fight, we will win. I only promise that if we don't fight, we will lose."
And like you've seen, I think our governor here has done a really good job of that sort of messaging, has been exceptional. It's a little harder to do that from the legislative branch because your profile's a little lower. You also don't have executive authority. Like, the governors can go out and say, "This is what we're going to do. And I've just passed a rule to do it, an executive order." The legislators say, "This is what I'm going to do. And if only I had the votes, I would do it."
So, it becomes we depend on our outside voice. But I think you're seeing some. I think Hakeem is getting better and better by the day at making it clear where this goes. And leaders are going to be forged in this moment. But it's scary. And that same sort of spectrum between fear and anger that you all feel here, we feel in our caucus every day. Some of our members are petrified, some of our members are violently angry. Some go back and forth from day to day, moment to moment. I mean, it's gotten to the point where none of us quite know how to say hello to each other anymore.
People walk up and say, "How are you doing?" — and so we'll have these conversations. People are like, "I really want to know how you're doing and let's sit down and talk," or "Let's just say something else, because we all know that that conversation is too long."
David Roberts
Well, this is a broader version of the same question. And I know I've known you long enough to know that you, like me, love a good grand theory. So, I would say it's not just Congress. I feel like there's a broader feeling that I have, and a lot of people have, that from the beginning of the Trump thing, it has been a continual shock how hollow and weak our elites are, our institutions, our norms, all this stuff we had faith in. All Trump had to do was come kick it and it just all fell down. There was no —
Just like, I don't even know how to capture it in words exactly. But it all was vapor. And so, there's just like this failure of courage, failure of will. Not just in Congress, but in the business community, you know what I mean? Like, local politicians. I would have thought when Trump first popped up that we would have stood up as, not as Democrats, but as America, as civil society, to say, "No, we don't do that." But we never did. There's just bending knee after bending knee. Hardly anyone. You know, we're seeing it in universities now.
And I mean, I don't even need to go down the list. Everybody knows. But just like, why was America so hollow? Did we like what happened? What is your grand theory of why there was so little resistance to all this?
Rep. Sean Casten
So, here's my grand theory. And most of this room's not going to like this. Just looking around. We have an executive branch that is violating the laws of the United States and ignoring the Constitution. They are selectively applying those laws in favor of their allies and against their adversaries. There's way too much apathy in society. Everybody who feels like they have something to lose if they stand up is sitting down, hoping that eventually someone with nothing left to lose will stand up and show them what leadership looks like. And I think all of us can recognize that everything I just said is true.
The only people in America who find that shocking and unprecedented are white people, right? And if you want to look at, like, what we need to do in these moments, and some of you have heard me tell this story before, but good stories deserve repeating. When I went down with the last trip across the Selma bridge with John Lewis before he died, and everybody knew this was going to be his last time. So all of these people came out of the woodwork. Jim Lawson was there, Bernie Lafayette, Ruby Bridges was out. And you're just with all these icons.
And I was sitting with Chuck Neblett, who was one of the Freedom Singers one morning, and we were sort of hearing all these stories. And I said, "So what gave the Martin Luther Kings and Rosa Parks the courage to stand up when they knew, they knew people who had been lynched for doing exactly what they just did? And what was it about their leadership skills that got people to follow them when they knew that they all knew people who had been lynched for doing what they were being asked to do?" And Chuck sort of paused and he goes — he was on a first-name basis with these people, so I'm just telling you what he said, and he goes, "Martin and Rosa were great people, but they didn't create this. The movement existed. And then you needed a leader. And there has never been a time in history when we have needed to create social change that the movement didn't come first. Once you have a movement, you need someone with a bullhorn but the movement comes first." And I said to him, "All right, so what created the movement?" And he said, "Look around this room with all these gray heads in here. Every one of us is Emmett Till's age."
And he said, "What created the movement was Mamie Till. And the fact that that was created at a point where a bunch of us who were young enough and foolish enough to think we can change the world, and I'm just going to go do this, and all of a sudden you had a movement." So we know what the playbook is, right? We saw what those giants in our history did and how they got it done. We saw that they never stopped fighting for America. They didn't move to their second house in Portugal. They kept fighting to make this country better.
They initiated action, and when that action got a result contrary to what they wanted, they changed the action. They didn't double down on it. There wasn't a grand strategy. There were a lot of tactics. And when a tactic worked, they applied that tactic in other places. And what's sad about your criticism of the elites is that it's not the first time that people with something to lose haven't stood up. It always works that way, right? It's a letter from a Birmingham jail kind of stuff, right? Silence of our friends.
David Roberts
The white moderate.
Rep. Sean Casten
Yeah, exactly. And, you know, I'm deeply sympathetic. I've met with university presidents who are saying, "Look, if I don't change the DEI rules on my webpage, then I'm going to have research grants cut off. And if we have those research grants cut off, I'm not going to be able to provide education to anybody. And so, better that I ride this through." And I get it, right? And how different is that from, like, you know, members of Congress saying, "I could stand up, but the Proud Boys just got released from jail and Liz Cheney's security detail got cut back. And if I stand up, I could lose, and I'm going to bring this on my family."
Like, I get all of that stuff, but why, as a society, do we always have to wait for someone like Mamie Till to say, "I just lost everything that I care about in this world and I'm sick of it. And goddammit, I'm going to stand up and fight." And then the rest of us say, "Well, thank you for your leadership. Let me follow you so I can call myself a leader." Right? And you have to go back to the civil rights era, right? The Parkland students. We had to have teenagers see kids next to them get shot before we had a serious conversation about gun control in this country.
Why did they have to lead that? Why did we desegregate schools with 6-year-old girls? Right. And it's beautiful that we did. Right. That's not in any way a criticism, but I think I would love this to be the first time that our elites lead the way. But we shouldn't pretend that there's a long history of that.
David Roberts
Yeah, yeah. Well, a similar question looking longer term, I mean, if that's even possible these days, but sort of like, I think there's a common feeling in the Democratic Party that aside from the sort of immediate crisis, Democrats are in kind of a longer-term problem. So, I think the way it's usually phrased is they sort of captured the managerial class, the educated upper class, and they're losing, in the last election, they're losing, they shifted their own way in a lot of blue urban areas. Black people, Hispanic people, minorities are moving away. And I think there's this larger sort of identity crisis.
I mean, I don't know that I've ever been alive when the Democrats were not in some form of identity crisis, but they're back in it. And, sort of, as far as I can tell, the conventional wisdom in the caucus, at least among the sort of caucus moderates, is the way out of this is to tamp down what we say about social issues and talk more about freaking egg prices, talk more about kitchen table issues. Which is why you have the surreal sort of spectacle of Chuck Schumer, like the "everything is fine" dog, tweeting about egg prices as people are being disappeared off the street. So, that's not satisfying. But what is, what is the way back for Democrats?
Rep. Sean Casten
Have you ever seen the American people so aroused? Got got to stop making fun of our leader... So, I don't want to sound Pollyannish, but let me be a little bit more optimistic about the moment we're in. Every single democracy in the world that had elections in 2024, the incumbent party was voted out. This was because we had global inflation. I think that is a pithier explanation of what happened in 2024 than anything else, in part because that explains in the United States why the Republicans lost seats in the House as the majority party and we lost the White House and the Senate.
The people voted against the party in power in every single case. And the Democrats in the United States lost less vote share than every other incumbent party in every other country in the world that had elections in 2024. We did way better than the Tories. If you're angry about inflation, blame the Tories. And I say that because I think a part of the groups that Democrats historically did well with, we lost some vote share. It wasn't highly educated, rich white college people who were doing fine. It tended to be groups that are sort of more economically vulnerable and the inflation pinched harder.
And that's not saying we should take anything for granted. Those are real issues. But, I do think we ought to not over-connect a very anomalous global inflationary moment to that. To your point about where the moderates are, I just point out that in 2018, which wasn't that long ago, the average House seat moved almost 10 points to the left. We had the biggest freshman class since Watergate. Yours truly came in, was part of this group that flipped seats. Of those of us who flipped seats in that cycle, the average person we beat had won by 15 points two years earlier.
That was 40 seats. So, like, that was only six years ago. Right? I mean, there's an ability to move quickly.
David Roberts
And there was a special election just last week, which Dems won.
Rep. Sean Casten
But I would also point out that in 2018, every vulnerable Democrat, the Kurt Schraders of the world in Washington, the Collin Petersons in Minnesota, they all won. But we didn't run on traitorism. And I think you have to have a motivated base that does the work to persuade the middle, because it never works the other way. The last thing that I think a lot of us are really struggling with is one of the most interesting polling things that I saw recently was among people who get their news from conventional news sources, including Fox — Fox, New York Times, CNN, MSNBC.
People who want to get their news from people who are in the news business in some fashion, that cohort overwhelmingly voted for Democrats. Among people who get their news from non-conventional sources, YouTube, TikTok, Joe Rogan, that group overwhelmingly voted for Republicans. There's a debate going on: does that mean we should be going out and doing Barstool Sports or whatever else and doing those things? Or is that really something more about the moment we're in? Because if you're getting your news from YouTube, you're not actually looking for news, you're just stumbling on it. And trying to flood that zone with content is hard.
And I think it's a larger story about, what do you do with a — how do we survive in a society where we've just become very atomized and in many ways disenchanted? I mean, I think there's a fascinating conversation which is wildly off topic, but like, you know, the Deaton stuff about, you know, what happens to young men who are not seeing their prospects growing. And I'm not trying to say like, let's all, you know, "Woe is me, you know, white men." But like white men are getting left behind. I'm like, what is the — setting aside whether or not society owes them something?
Somebody who is disconnected from society is hard to grab back. Right? And how do we bring back sort of the — I love that line in the Atlantic recently about like, "Families teach us love, tribes teach us loyalty, and the village teaches us tolerance." We're losing those village moments.
David Roberts
Yeah, we're losing villages. Like, hardly anybody's a part of a village anymore. Just a little factoid to reinforce what you just said. Boomers. The biggest swing leftward among any demographic was among boomers, the much-maligned boomers, because they're the ones still reading newspapers. They're the only ones still reading newspapers.
Rep. Sean Casten
And also, as a cohort, they were less vulnerable to inflation.
David Roberts
Yeah, true, true. Okay, well, let's talk about, let's shift back to clean energy. So, I mean, investors, entrepreneurs, people who are involved in this space at all are, I think, everybody's just confused by what's happening, what's going to do like clearly a lot of grants are going to vanish. Maybe the IRA credits are going to vanish. Maybe there's going to be a giant recession, a tariff-driven recession. And I've seen a lot of talk about people just sort of pulling out of this area and banks are throwing their net zero commitments overboard and everybody's taking the whole — again, back to the elites.
They just seem to be sort of like trying to do the Homer-into-the-bushes thing on climate. Obviously, we don't want that, but how should people who are in this space think about the next two years, the next four years, think about how to navigate this environment?
Rep. Sean Casten
Here's my hope. And I say this as a guy who spent more time as an energy developer than I ever spent as a member of Congress. Energy markets always bounce up and down. The regulatory environment waxes and wanes over time. And if you're developing a clean energy project, you have, in the best of times, a one to two-year period to get your permits, get your construction in place, get all your site plans done, have your engineering, a one to two-year period to build, and another six months to 12 months after that to get everything commissioned and ironed out.
Which means that the course of that project is going to run through a couple of political cycles. That means that everybody who has ever tried to develop a project when markets were really good has gone before an investment committee. And the investment committee has said, "You're assuming the current conditions are going to last forever. That's not right. Put in a more normalized scenario and then we'll decide whether to approve this project." My suggestion is, if the investment committee can do the opposite side of that right now, because these conditions will not last forever. I'm not saying to go do charity, right?
"But how many people are sitting there saying, "I have a private equity fund that wants a 15% return and I can only do 10% projects?" There are a lot of people who love getting a 10% return on their money, especially when Trump is tanking the stock market. That would be a pretty good thing. But it doesn't work in the structure of year three of a private equity fund that's looking for a liquidity event and doesn't know where their opportunities are. I'm not saying that's not hard, but I think particularly for the LPs upstream, finding some ways to get some capital that's got sort of patience appropriate for the moment, still like good diligence and all the rest of that stuff, but a little bit more of a risk appetite."
My pitch, if I was wearing my developer hat, is that everything that the Trump administration is doing is designed to raise the price of energy, and they're not putting it that way. But you have to understand that coal use in the United States is down 50% in the last decade. Oil use is flat. Natural gas used to grow with GDP. Now it's only growing about half the rate of GDP. All of those industries would be dead but for the fact that they've pivoted to exports. They've lost market share because you all have done so well. The fastest-growing vehicle class is electric vehicles.
Efficiency has come through. The surge in solar, the surge in wind. We now generate more power on any given day from non-hydro renewables than we do from coal, which is insane. That coal was 50% of the mix a decade ago. Right. So, what you've got within the people, the Doug Burgums, the Chris Wrights, within the Trump White House, is people saying, "I can't compete in this market. Markets scare me because I am so mediocre as an individual. It's the same reason DEI scares me. I don't want to compete in a deep talent pool." I think I stole that from you.
"So, what we want to do is make sure that you raise the price of gas, which you can do by building more LNG export terminals. So, we suck it out of the United States. Don't approve transmission because if you approve transmission, then we'll connect cheap wind from Iowa into more expensive power markets. And I don't want to not be able to run my gas power plant if all of a sudden the market's flooded with $30 power." It's going to be a very anti-competitive period that's going to push up the price of power and it's going to suck.
But, if at the end of that period, you're sitting there saying, "I own assets that are always going to be cash flow positive and they're now the assets that are sitting there and ready to run." I just think there's a huge put option that you could have if you deploy the capital now. And if you deploy the capital now, none of that crap they want to build is going to get built because none of that stuff would be built in a competitive market. There is not a single solar developer who goes to bed every night saying, "I better check and see what the power price is tomorrow because it might not make sense for me to run." Every single coal plant in America, every single gas plant in America has a full-time employee who is sitting at that plant, if they're playing spot markets saying, "I'm looking at my gas, I'm looking at my power, I'm trying to figure out whether to dispatch tomorrow." Right? So we know how to kick their ass. Just deploy.
David Roberts
Deploy, deploy, deploy. Yes, the big issue in the energy world right now, or there's a bunch of big issues, but one of the most fundamental changes I think in the last couple of years, one that is I think serving as a forcing mechanism to push a lot of change, maybe good and bad, are these data centers. You know, the rise of AI, etc., all these data centers are coming online. And you know, so people are now like the projections are just, there's a lot of wild-haired projections, 2x, 3x total grid capacity we're going to need. There are some areas, some regions where these data centers are already the majority of a utility's load which is a weird inversion of any historical relationship between utilities and their loads.
And so, in a sense, it seems good because they want electricity, they mostly want clean electricity, and they have giant sacks of money. So, you know, never mind climate, there's a lot of money flooding into building more energy infrastructure. But then there's also a lot of shenanigans whereby data centers can trick other customers into paying for the infrastructure they need. There's a lot of potential for shenanigans just because they're so big and powerful. So, I just wonder if you have a thought on how legislators and how utilities ought to be thinking about data centers, ought to be thinking about that whole thing.
Rep. Sean Casten
So, I'd sort of expand beyond data centers. You've got, like, I think, three big macro trends that are pushing up electric load. The electrification of vehicles is real. Like, the total fuel we use for transportation is, to a first approximation, about the same as the amount of energy we use for power generation, order of magnitude. They're pretty close. So, vehicle electrification is a huge pull. The data centers, and Trump may stop this, but at least under Biden, there was a huge rush of reshoring of manufacturing that was bringing a lot of this back. You had these three trends that were pushing load up.
Every utility is out there right now with big load forecasts, data centers being part of the driver for that. Keep in mind that regulated utilities make money by getting capital installed in their rate base. And they make big money by having load growth that exceeds what was in their forecast because they got a rate that was set on an assumption of a certain load, and if they get above that. If a utility says they're looking at 6% load growth, they've got more in the forecast if they're looking out for their shareholders. So when they're all saying that, assume there's a lot of load growth coming. I think there's a real challenge that is starting to happen among the state utility regulators when you've got this huge slug of capital. What was it?
When were we scared about the utility death spiral? Remember all the utility load? That was like a decade ago. It wasn't that long ago. Right. That load was going to fall and it was all running away. And there was no growth after the 2008 recession. It's gone, like night and day from there. But because we had such flat load for a long time, we had downward pressure on prices because all these old plants were being amortized and could limp along and you didn't have to pay for the capital anymore, no matter what you build now. If you're building it in a regulated context, if you're shutting down a plant where all the capital was amortized, whether you're building a new solar plant or a new nuclear plant or a new gas plant.
There's a bunch of capital that's going to go in. I think there's going to be a real political problem for a lot of state utility regulators who are elected, who are saying, "I don't want to be the person who approved all these rate increases," but they don't really have a lot of choice because otherwise it's a reliability play. Again, if I was still in my developer shoes, I'd be running around to a lot of NARUC meetings and saying, "How about if you guys start doing some competitive solicitations for power purchase agreements from the clean guys?" It may be more than what you'd pay with the regulated utility, but you'll cover your butts and say, "I went out to market, I got three bids. This was the lowest bid."
I think there could be some interesting development opportunities within a state-regulated context. If you're going out and building a clean energy project, saying, "Look, Trump's not going to give us good markets, but if you can get me a nice, attractive long-term PPA, I can build a lot of good stuff."
David Roberts
There's a similar worry about big hydrogen projects coming online. Similar in that they would, even if they use clean energy, just take huge swaths of clean energy from other people. So then, they're, you know, that would be compensated for by dirty energy. So, the way we solved for that in the hydrogen subsidies was we told the hydrogen projects that they had to bring their own, they had to build their own clean energy, they had to supply their own. Bring your own new clean energy, Beyonce.
Do you think something like that would be right for data centers? Or is that kind of too extreme? Would that slow things down too much or is that a reasonable ask?
Rep. Sean Casten
Look, I think the idea that anybody who needs electricity as an input would like to sacrifice the 3, 4, 5 nines reliability of the grid for an on-site power plant and not still have the grid as a backup, that to me, I just don't see industrials wanting to make that trade. I think it's an interesting theory, but I've tried to make that sale. It never goes well. I mean, the most reliable power plant in the world has two weeks of scheduled maintenance every year. That ain't 5 nines.
David Roberts
Behind the meter energy parks where they're satisfying all their own needs, all that? You don't buy that trend?
Rep. Sean Casten
Just as a statistical matter, there's no way you're going to build enough generators with enough independent failure modes to have a source of power that's as reliable as the thousands of generators we have on the grid around the country and the thousands of redundant wires. I mean, the US electric grid is an amazing, remarkable thing. And can you do things internally to supplement that? Absolutely. But when you're trying to drive up reliability for your facility, you put in UPS battery backup systems, you put in on-site generation that can run when the grid goes down and black start and ride through and all that stuff.
But you don't cut your tie to the grid, right?
David Roberts
All right. Well, we're supposed to stop and take questions, but I just wanted to throw out one final question. Are you going to take a run at Dick Durbin's seat next year?
Rep. Sean Casten
Dick Durbin has not announced his retirement. I find myself, and maybe it's often been said, that the battles between Democrats and Republicans in Congress pale next to the battles between the House and the Senate. And I would love to see a Senate that is committed to fixing itself. But the Senate as an institution is just totally broken.
David Roberts
Amen.
Rep. Sean Casten
I mean, can anybody name a time that a bill left the House and got better in the Senate? Right. Like, we sent them the Affordable Care Act, and then they stripped out the, you know, they made it non-universal because we only had 59 of 100 votes.
David Roberts
Curse Joe Lieberman's name now and forever.
Rep. Sean Casten
Yes, yes. We had Build Back Better, and it became the IRA. Crazy, insane statistic that should make you violently angry: In 2022, we passed the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act that made lynching a federal crime. Bobby Rush from Illinois had been carrying that bill for his whole career. Bobby Rush did not write the first draft of that bill. He picked it up from one of his predecessors. So, I went back and looked at the history. The first time the House passed a bill to make lynching a federal crime was in 1922. Emmett Till had to be born, lynched, die, create the civil rights era before the Senate could break cloture and decide it was worth taking the time to vote on whether or not lynching is bad.
And I'm not ducking your question. I'm just saying I find myself thinking about the Senate saying, "I wish that someone in the Senate would say, 'We have to fix these damn rules.'" I'm not sure I want to be that person, but I would like someone to do that. And if someone wants to say to me, "Go run for Senate and in exchange we will put you in charge of our rules," I will run through that door.
David Roberts
Yes, if your answer otherwise is like, "Who would want to be in that institution?" I totally get that. But let's take questions.
First Audience Question
Yeah, Dave Kraft, Nuclear Energy Information Service. I'm glad you brought the transmission up because that's what I wanted to talk about tonight. But before that, I want to thank you for six years of climate advocacy. You have just been stellar, and I appreciate that very much. I've been following H.R.6747, and as you pointed out, it didn't go anywhere. But my follow-up to that is, how do you keep it visible until sanity returns to Congress? And are there things that could be done, let's say, at the state level or in other arenas that would keep it elevated and maybe move it along, for example, governor's associations?
There's a plethora of transmission bills at the state levels. Are there pieces of that bill that you put out that could be incorporated into the state-level actions to keep it moving?
Rep. Sean Casten
Yes, to some degree. I think the challenge in general with transmission is that we have this bizarre federal states rights issue where, in many cases, I think the states actually can do a lot more than the Feds can do until they get into things that are ISO/RTO jurisdictional. Like most of the ideas we've got in that bill, the things that are really the bottlenecks are how do we deal with interregional planning. The regions are fine. The states have done an okay job of that. Order 1000 did that. But the interregional stuff, which is really a federal question, has to get resolved.
States have done a great job. I think more states could do it, performance-based rate making to get the incentives right. Because I think a lot of the challenge with transmission is that too often the party who has the right to block the project has an economic disincentive to allow the project. States, I think, have oftentimes more tools than the Feds do to craft rates and rate of return calculations in ways that can align the interests, the economic, economic interests of the parties in better ways. But the interregional, the cross-state stuff really has to be done at the federal level.
Second Audience Question
Thank you so much. My name is Ann. I do geothermal policy advocacy. You both have done incredible work on geothermal. So, thank you for your leadership. My question is around the political context we've been discussing. There's still a huge need to move innovation forward because the climate timeline does not change based on the political timeline. And, I'd love to hear your thoughts on how we can build and maintain bipartisan support for emerging energy innovations like geothermal or other similar technologies.
Rep. Sean Casten
This is going to sound like a cop-out of an answer. Just go be successful. And I say that because no one has as much power in Washington as someone who has something to lose. It's really hard to build a constituency around a regulatory reform that's going to make the world safer for entrepreneurs who haven't had their entrepreneurial idea yet. It's also really hard to put a rule in place that's going to expose incumbents to entrepreneurial competition. And I think you've seen with the surge in solar and wind, those technologies were ready for primetime a decade before they really started being deployed.
But, you needed to get them out there, you needed the business models. And now, all of a sudden, you've got people in all these communities who depend on the manufacturing, who depend on the jobs, who depend on all these various bits and pieces, and they're now jealously defending that they don't want to lose what they've got. Right? So, I realize it's a cop-out of an answer, but having spent a lot of time trying to persuade people to do this. And I guess I've had some successes, not had as many as I deserve, certainly.
David Roberts
Who among us?
Rep. Sean Casten
I know, I know. But it's just much easier when people say, "Well, there's a bunch of people who are in my district who are making noise about this and they just took me to a ribbon cutting." Then, "There's this interesting person in a lab who I think you'd like to meet." Right. And when you do succeed, don't turn your back on the entrepreneurs who are going to come up and kick your ass because they got a better idea than you had too. Because we need all that to keep happening.
David Roberts
And I would just throw in once again, these big data centers, these big hyperscalers need, need more electricity, want more electricity. They want it to be clean, they need it to be steady, always on. So, geothermal is right in their sweet spot and they have a lot to lose. They have big sacks of money. So, you know what I mean? So again, that's like a forcing mechanism that if you can draft on some of that momentum, you know, do it.
Rep. Sean Casten
I'll say, look at things like Europe is so often so far ahead of us. I was in Denmark last year and they had all of these little district energy off in coal plants that they're retrofitting to either geothermal where they can, or they still want to do the district energies. They need something that's got a good thermal source and take a trip to Denmark. The people are lovely, the country's beautiful. But also, I think giving you a sense of things that expanding your zone of what's actually possible with a little bit of organization.
David Roberts
Yeah, sorry to keep answering this question over and over again. You said geothermal, what did you expect? Another, I think, push, another forcing mechanism is a lot of communities want to electrify. Cold climate communities, if they just electrify through heat pumps, are going to end up with mind-boggling winter peaks that are very difficult to meet. One way to solve that equation is shallow geothermal district heating and ground source heat pumps. So again, there are interested parties ready to go for this. I can't promise that we'll answer every question four times.
Third Audience Question
Hi there, Melanie Nutter. Thank you for the conversation and insights tonight. Really interesting. I'm curious what you think cities and counties can be doing right now to continue to advance clean energy and climate action, considering what's happening at the federal level and now that there's going to be a lot less resources for cities to take action. So, I'm curious what they can be doing right now.
Rep. Sean Casten
So, the first thing is going on my highfalutin civil rights era fight. No, I'm serious. There are a lot of cities and towns that have contracts with the federal government for payments from the IRA where you're meeting milestones. And if the federal government breaks the law, take them to court, sue them, just don't give up. They are counting on people being afraid of being individually picked off. And if we all stand up collectively, they can't pick us all off. So that's my first thing of just like fight to keep what you've got and fight for US law and keep pushing forward.
And beyond that, I don't know. David, you may have some. You probably think more about the city side of these equations than I do.
David Roberts
Yes, I feel contractually obligated to do my little — I mean, one of the most powerful tools is reducing the amount of driving that people do. And the way to do that is density and bike paths and amenities and public transit. All that stuff is in state and city hands. And I think the climate community in general, as I've said on the pod many times, has sort of neglected that as a climate solution, probably because it's mostly composed of wealthy, elite suburbanites who drive everywhere. Right. So, like, yeah, pay attention to — there's tons you can do locally on local heat and local transportation policy.
Like, there's a ton to do locally. But I would start with that, like join the war on cars.
Rep. Sean Casten
I would also like to give a shout out to David, City of Seattle, Power and Light. The Bullitt Foundation has, I believe, the most efficient building in the world. When they did it, part of what they did was their mandate from their investors was they had to make it replicable. And so, they got Seattle Power and Light to change rules so that anybody who invests in end-use efficiency gets paid the same amount that the utility gets per megawatt of load generation, but they get on the reduction side multiplied by a line loss factor for all the cost that takes it to bring into cities.
For cities that have some control over municipal utilities, do some fun stuff with rates to really drive end-use efficiency up. Your citizens will love it because it saves them money, it helps them deploy technology, and there's plenty of precedent to do that in cities that have leaned in.
Forth Audience Question
Well, I now definitely want to ask you about the E-bike rebate, but I'm not going to. One of the things with the IRA, I work locally in helping connect people to electrification rebates. One of the things that we see is in Chicago, there's a lot of renters. There's not a lot of incentives for landlords to electrify. What do you think the federal government, state government, city government could do to change that math for landlords who really generally don't love spending money on making their tenants' lives better?
Rep. Sean Casten
We really struggled with that. And I would love to see a thoughtful lessons learned from the electrification incentives. A lot of the electrification centers were actually in the Infrastructure Bill, not the IRA. But we knew that this is a technology that works really well for people who own their own house and have an attached garage and can put a charger in. We put a lot of money and a lot of incentives to try to build out more chargers. The Biden administration got beat up because that money didn't go up. But it's also really hard to figure out where do those networks go?
How do you put them in? There's always the landlord split incentive problem is always out there. And I wouldn't say we throw up your hands, but I'm not sure I've seen — I don't know if you've seen, David, anybody who's really done a good sociological, political analysis of how do you break... I mean, we built gas stations, so somehow we did figure that out once upon a time. But what's the incentive to build the first gas station? Or what was the incentive for a gas station to start adding diesel if there weren't enough diesel cars on the road, but now all of a sudden people aren't going to drive.
How do you make those transitions at scale quickly? And I don't know that we've figured it out.
David Roberts
The one thing I would say on the question of multifamily dwellings, I think in some ways we overthink things because of this sort of like, I guess I'd call it the neoliberal hangover. We're all looking for the market tweak, right, that would make that happen. But another thing governments could do is just say that you have to do it. And that's what New York did. That's what New York City did. They said, "Big buildings, you have to reduce your energy use by law or you just get a bunch of big fines." And they did.
Like, that law has been wildly successful. It's sponsored thousands of big building retrofits in New York City. So, you know what I mean? Like, if you want it to happen, say, "We make laws, do it."
Rep. Sean Casten
Because we do have building codes.
David Roberts
Yeah, and there are building codes. All right, one more last question.
Fifth Audience Question
Thank you. So, given the bipartisan, generally speaking, nature of nuclear energy, is there appetite, room, possibility to advance the ball on that, given the current administration's stance on energy in general?
Rep. Sean Casten
All right, so now I'm going to — I've done a good job of being like the neoliberal centrist Dem. And you're the hippie here. I'm going to be the hippie now.
David Roberts
All hippies now.
Rep. Sean Casten
The countries that have successfully and consistently deployed nuclear are really, really socialist countries: China, Russia, France, because no one has ever managed to build nuclear plants on time or on budget. The United States was a big deployer of nuclear up until — there's this really interesting data that I was looking at for a hearing we were in a couple weeks ago. From the first nuclear plant in the US to Three Mile Island, it was about 10 years in terms of the first nuclear plant deployed. And we built about 50 gigawatts of nuclear in that decade. In the decade after Three Mile Island, we built another 50 gigawatts.
There was no slowdown in the rate of nuclear construction after that point. Almost 10 years later, it was like 12 years later, Public Service New Hampshire went bankrupt because their utility regulator said, "You can't keep passing along all the cost overruns from Seabrook." And the electric utility industry said, "I'm not building nuclear anymore because I could only build this when I knew that I could always pass the cost along to my customers. But if I have to compete, I'm not going to do it." That is not to say we shouldn't build nuclear, but I had this very funny conversation.
We had this bipartisan dinner one night of the Bipartisan Climate Caucus. Equal mix of Dems and R's. And we're all sitting there. And one of my colleagues came to me at the end. She said, "I had no idea. I'm so happy to hear that there are Democrats who support nuclear." And I said, "Well, you got me on your side. I said, I had no idea there were Republicans who support socialism." And I'm not saying that as a dirty word. I'm just saying that practically the thing that we did in the IRA to try to bring nuclear forward was not to mandate companies act against their interest, but to hugely juice the loan program office because the LPO had the potential to say, "Let's put some government money towards, whether it's SMRs or some other technology."
Because if we can put government money and bring a couple of these things forward and if, in fact, the theory is right, that we now have some technologies that can scale on time, on budget, then potentially five, 10 years down the road, you could see some private sector pull. But I just don't — I don't think we're in a moment right now where you're going to see any significant private sector pull. We'll have the odd Vogtle, but those are the exceptions that prove the rule. There's no appetite to build these projects that are not coming in on time or on budget right now.
David Roberts
Everybody knows Vogtle. The Georgia nuclear plant that shockingly went way over time, way over budget, like 8 billion to the tune of some enormous number of billions of dollars, all of which went straight to the ratepayers. So, Tim Echols, the head of the PUC in Georgia, has basically said publicly numerous times, like, "Incentives, whatever, we will never do this again unless the federal government guarantees it will cover the cost overruns, period, full stop." And, like, he's gone back and forth with Jigar Shah a few times. Jigar's like, "Well, what about all these incentives?" And Tim's like, "Nope, I want guarantees."
And it's basically like, you "go socialist or go home" with nuclear. They come together, as you're saying. You gotta have the one with the other. Any final words of wisdom for our clean energy?
Rep. Sean Casten
Go deploy, go win, build a bunch of stuff. And I'll take credit for it, but you gotta do the work.
David Roberts
Thanks. Thanks so much, Sean.
Thank you for listening to Volts. It takes a village to make this podcast work. Shout out, especially, to my super producer, Kyle McDonald, who makes me and my guests sound smart every week. And it is all supported entirely by listeners like you. So, if you value conversations like this, please consider joining our community of paid subscribers at volts.wtf. Or, leaving a nice review, or telling a friend about Volts. Or all three. Thanks so much, and I'll see you next time.
