Solar and wind energy costs have been coming down for decades. Why aren’t they replacing fossil fuels faster?
There are a lot of subsidies for oil and gas, things like tax breaks and access to markets. That’s partly because there’s a lot of volatility in the oil and gas markets. Fossil fuels are raw materials that have to be extracted and processed. Wind and solar energy are different. The only costs associated with them are technological. WIRED readers should be familiar with the idea that technology gets better and cheaper every year. That’s not true about fossil fuels. The techniques we use to withdraw them might get better every year, but the price has actually risen over time. If you take away subsidies from fossil fuels, wind and solar are actually cheaper.
You believe businesses can provide solutions to climate change but only with the right government policies. Is that era over?
Well, most of the energy regulation in the US comes from the state level, which lets states like California pursue more ambitious emissions regulations. It also lets states with lots of renewable energy coordinate to share it when needed, but federal regulations would help more.
The issue is going to be, to an extent, what the new administration will do to subsidize fossil fuels—how they can make dirtier fuel, which is more expensive, more attractive. Maybe that means leasing public lands at low prices. But the only thing they can really do to ensure long-term drilling is put in infrastructure, like pipelines.
Do you think there is any chance for Trump to not be awful for climate?
[Long pause.] I don’t think there’s any chance that Trump is going to step up and do the right thing out of the conviction that it’s the right thing to do. But, you know, you can’t really say what’s going to happen, because the world does tend to surprise us. If you didn’t learn that in 2016, then you weren’t paying attention.
Can California’s politicians really create a bulwark against Trump?
The administration has said they’re going to go after their political opponents. California embodies that opponent. Taking money away from health care, in the form of the Medicaid expansion—that would be more than $15 billion from California’s budget. Consider that the state’s general fund budget is about $120 billion. They are also going after cities that resist their deportation efforts. They’re talking about withholding money from schools. This is gigantic and very, very threatening. If you talk about trying to stand up as best we can for the people of California, and by doing so put forward a different image of what the true values of Americans are, just be aware, it ain’t cheap. My point is, this is not a theoretical problem for us.
How potent is the state’s ability to resist?
Financing that opposition will be tricky. First, the California budget is leveraged really highly to the personal income and capital gains of the richest Californians. That means it is super volatile, because incomes go up and down much more often than property values, which is how most states finance themselves. What’s worse is that the budget is also highly leveraged to the stock market. So when tech companies are going public and things are happening, then that income for the employees who benefit gets taxed in California like regular income. If there are no tech IPOs, the tech sector isn’t doing well, so there aren’t a lot of stock profits—equity profits—from those companies, and that hits the revenue line of the California state budget [claps loudly] super hard. You may have also noticed that we have had a bull market for the past six years.
In January, in an op-ed for The Sacramento Bee, you wrote about creating “the broadest coalition possible, one that embraces our shared values and delivers on the promise of a better future for all Americans.” You even echo Obama’s “Let’s get to work.”
Maybe he stole that from me!
Well, it reads like you are a guy getting ready to run for office.
[Slaps table.] Well, our mission statement is: “Act politically to prevent climate disaster and promote prosperity for every American.” So are we broadening our message? That’s always been our message. Whatever I do, and I honestly don’t know what it is, will be consistent with that effort.
*Nick Stockton (@stocktonsays) is a staff writer on the science desk at *WIRED.
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