The Climate Wreckage of the Trump Administration

It's even worse than you think. My interview with Jillian Goodman of Heatmap.

Photo by National Interagency Fire Center

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In this week’s audio interview, I talk to Jillian Goodman, deputy editor of the climate news site Heatmap.news, about how climate policy in the Trump administration has exceeded everyone’s expectations — and not in a good way. You can listen to the audio here or on your podcast app (just search for The Cross Section and subscribe); a transcript is below.

Transcript:

Paul Waldman: Welcome to The Cross Section; I am your host, Paul Waldman. I had not intended that this podcast was just going to be on the theme of It’s Even Worse Than You Think, but that is where things keep ending up. So on that theme, today we are going to talk about what is going on with the Trump administration in regard to climate change and climate policy and what it portends for the present and the future.

Before the election happened, I don't know if other people were gripped by this impulse too, but as much as I know I was afraid of what was going to happen if Trump won and concerned about it, I also had a desire to kind of think, well, maybe it won't be so bad. Maybe there is some scenario under which things could work out maybe not so terribly. Maybe at the end of a Trump term that, we would have lost a little bit of ground on climate policy. But the things that the Biden administration did were so dramatic, especially with the Inflation Reduction Act, that perhaps they would be durable. And there is only so much damage Trump will be able to do. And also, maybe he just wouldn't care enough.

Sure, he is something of a climate denier. He has this weird thing about windmills where he thinks they're demonic and kill birds and give you cancer. And he talked a fair amount during the campaign about how much he hates electric vehicles. But it's not like it was immigration or tariffs, the things that he really cares about. So maybe he would just kind of let it alone. I think I even wrote a piece to that effect on Heatmap

That didn't turn out to be case. It is, in fact, even worse than you think. And that's what we're going to talk about today. So my guest is Jillian Goodman, who is the deputy editor of Heatmap and knows more about climate change and climate policy than any 10 people you know. So we are going to get deeply into that today. Jillian, welcome to the podcast.

Jillian Goodman: Thank you so much for having me, Paul. I'm chuffed to be here.

Paul Waldman: There's a lot of places we could start, but maybe the best one would be to talk about the Environmental Protection Agency and what is going on right now. If people have been following the news and maybe they have or maybe they haven't, there are a lot of things happening at the EPA. The new EPA administrator, Lee Zeldin is canceling regulations and laying people off and basically trying to reorient the whole agency away from its traditional mission of protecting the environment and toward something else.

And I want to talk specifically about the matter of this 20 billion dollars. Now, we'll get into the background of it in a moment, but if you've been following the news, you've seen that there has been a lawsuit over this. Basically what happened was, when the Inflation Reduction Act was passed in 2022, it had within it a lot of different kinds of funding for climate change, including something called the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, which was going to run through the EPA and provide billions of dollars for all kinds of climate projects. When the Trump administration took office, they decided they want to try to claw that money back. And that is what Zeldin has attempted to do to the tune of $20 billion.

The latest news is that this has been the subject of a lawsuit. The judge in the case has temporarily restrained the EPA from taking back the 20 billion. And now they are fighting in court over whether or not the EPA is going to be able to do that and even whether there's something criminal going on because that has been a charge that the Trump administration has raised, which is kind of ludicrous. We can get into that. Maybe we could start, Jillian, with you explaining to people exactly what the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund is and how it's supposed to work and what it's supposed to do.

Jillian Goodman: So you'll sometimes hear it referred to somewhat confusingly as a green bank. And that's because the idea is that this money would go to fund institutions that would in turn fund clean energy development projects, mostly for low income communities and disadvantaged communities, in the form of loans, would be returned in a sort of self-perpetuating virtuous cycle the way that banks do it.

They are not actually banks, though. The United States did not set up a federal green bank, which is one thing about the structure of this program that's always been quite confusing. The full program was $27 billion. $7 billion went to a program called Solar for All. $20 billion went to a handful of nonprofits that were actually coalitions of existing nonprofits. Basically, there's a lot of complexity involved in this program that I think has really been exploited by the Trump administration as a way to make it seem extremely nefarious. One of the points that Zeldin has made specifically related to the supposed criminality of this is that, These organizations are barely a year old and the Biden administration gave them billions of dollars. There's got to be something wrong here, right? Well, the reason they're so young is that they were purpose-built for this program. The US has never attempted anything like this before, and the constituent parts of these organizations have vast experience, decades of experience administering programs exactly like this. And so, the structure of these programs is based on existing structures, the way these programs were funded, which is also a key part of Zeldin’s accusations, which maybe we'll get into, was reached after a long deliberative process involving some of the organizations that would potentially be administering the money and the federal government that unfolded over the course of years.

Paul Waldman: The idea is that the money will kind of go through this downward chain, right? That it comes from the federal government and then it will go to this coalition of groups and then they will distribute it to individual groups. And eventually it will fund things like, let's say your town wants to give people rebates for buying heat pumps or, they want to have some kind of other climate friendly program. In the Solar For All program, which as you said is seven billion dollars in addition to the 20 billion dollars, that could be say your county wants to set up a community solar project.

Jillian Goodman: Right, so there are separate programs that were supposed to fund things like rebates for heat pumps. This is very specifically about projects that will return capital. There are a lot of grants, and there are a lot of money giveaways within the Inflation Reduction Act. But the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund was supposed to be seeding something. A grant is a one-way function. There’s entropy to grants. You give away the money and then the money is spent and you don't get it back. The Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund was supposed to come back. These entities were supposed to be sort of self-perpetuating and self-sustaining and function in the way that a bank does. That's how they differed from a lot of other parts of the Inflation Reduction Act and also what potentially made them so powerful. You could support the development of a community solar project, you could support the development of other, more localized clean energy in a way that would be healthy for the community and the way that that money would stay in the community for a long time.

Paul Waldman: And it's also supposed to leverage then private money too. That's a key part of this is that the government can put some money in and then that will attract private investment and you get a multiplier effect.

Jillian Goodman: Exactly. I don't have the number ready to hand, and so I don't want to say something that will be incorrect, but they were expecting that it would leverage multiples on that $20 billion in private investment.

Paul Waldman: Now I want to get your feeling about the nature of the complexities. You said this ends up being a pretty complicated program. And one result of that is that, as you said, that then leaves an opportunity for the Trump administration to come in and say, Oh, look at all these different people who were involved. There must be something nefarious going on. Like this is a slush fund and they're just giving out money to far left organizations and this must be shady. And that is enabled to a degree by the fact that it's kind of difficult to understand and it is complicated. But I also wonder if you think that there's another problem with that, that it just ends up slowing the whole process down because it's so complicated. I mean, after all, the IRA was passed in 2022. Here we are in 2025. By the time you get to Joe Biden leaving office and Donald Trump coming into office, the money hasn't actually gone out. It's been deposited at Citibank, which is another link in this chain that the government puts the money into an account at Citibank, a big bank, and then they then distribute it to these other groups who then distribute it to other groups. Do you think that that complexity of the design, when it was set out in the first place and the legislation was written, means that it just slows everything down to the point that that becomes its own problem, that people can't see the result of it in their communities, and that you run this risk that, three years later, the other party got elected and now they are really interested in destroying this program and this gives them the opportunity to do it?

Jillian Goodman: That's the hard thing about building physical things in general, right? And this has long been true of politics, is that you have to get something started in your first year in office if voters are going to be able to see it by the time you're running for re-election. This particular program, I don't feel like I am able to really talk about every single stage in the development of this program. However, I will say that, like the money going to Citibank, this is a thing that Lee Zeldin has talked about a lot. You know, when he was first starting to harp on the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, what he would say is, you know, they stashed this money away. We found this $20 billion. We found the $20 billion that the Biden administration tried to hide at Citibank.

In fact, putting that money at Citibank was the result of a long decision-making process. That part was not mandated by Congress, the structure of the program. The EPA did a whole study to determine the best way to administer this funding. And it was placed at Citibank under what's called a financial agency agreement, which other departments, many other government agencies have used. But this is a first for the EPA, which gives the government, and this has been, I believe it's like 100 to 200 years the government has been doing this with banks. It's a well-established structure. There's a lot of oversight, despite what Zeldin has claimed, about how the bank and the federal government interact with this. And yeah, so I think that a lot of the work that was done in another world could have helped to insulate these programs from political criticism, but really just the force and the volume, it's like fire dynamics that just sweep away everything in this path. And it's not just the flames, it's the wind that it creates. So I think that a lot of that slowness was down to trying to, as you were saying, make a durable policy, create a durable program, something that would be able to withstand criticism. I was not in the Biden administration, I was not involved in the setting up of these programs, so I have no actual knowledge to indicate, but I expect that they were not expecting such sweeping, forceful antagonism toward their policies as they have received.

Paul Waldman: Obviously, hindsight is 20-20. But as you say, I think that there was a lot of care taken to try to insulate this policy and policies in many other departments and issue areas from criticism. I think that a lot of Democrats were really spooked by things like what happened with Solyndra. Now, folks may remember, the Obama administration expanded a loan program that would give loans to promising new green technology companies, and like any kind of venture capital endeavor, they assumed that some of them would fail, but hopefully there would be successes and it would be a good thing and it would spur technological growth and economic growth. And it was by any objective measure, a huge success. For instance, one of the small companies that they gave us a substantial loan to was Tesla. And they used that money that they got from the federal government to start building sedans when before they had just had this roadster that people liked. But it had a pretty small customer base. They started making sedans and they grew into a significant company and they paid their loan back and it was a big success.

But Solyndra was this company that made solar panels that it turned out could not withstand competition from cheap Chinese solar panels. And they went out of business and defaulted on the loan. And Republicans successfully turned that into a huge scandal, as though something nefarious had happened when in fact it was just an anticipated failure. They knew there were going to be some failures. And I think that that really scared a lot of Democrats, so that then you get to the Biden years, and they're trying to design policies like this one. And they really want to be incredibly careful not to do anything that's going to cause some kind of a scandal, which is perfectly reasonable and understandable. But the problem is that you can then run the risk that your policy design gets so cumbersome that it ends up just being really slow.

And in retrospect, we can now say, well, it's great to try to design things really carefully so that nothing will go wrong. But maybe time is also a really important variable and you need to make sure that you get this thing actually moving and producing things that people can see in the course of one presidential term. And we've seen this in other areas, too. I'm working on a piece about the broadband rollout that will come out soon, where you see a similar kind of problem that none of the money has actually gone out by the end of Joe Biden's term. That becomes its own political problem because one might say that if this $20 billion or some portion of it was actually building stuff in people's communities, then the new Trump administration would come in and they might be more reluctant to destroy it if it actually means taking something away from people rather than taking something away that they didn't even know that they were going to get.

And one of the things we've seen, the justification that Lee Zeldin and the Trump administration have offered for this is a video surreptitiously recorded by Project Veritas, which is this organization that basically runs stings on liberals. And they got a secret recording of an EPA official describing what the atmosphere was like after the election, but before Trump was inaugurated, basically saying that they were trying to get the money on this program and other kinds of programs out the door as soon as they could because they only had a couple of months left before they would all be leaving. And he used some kind of metaphor, he said it was like throwing gold bars off the Titanic. And Zeldin and the EPA have actually used that as evidence that there's something criminal going on. You know, it's just a metaphor. But in the court case that is trying to claw back the $20 billion, the judge said, okay, you have to show us some evidence that there's actually something, there's some kind of abuse or fraud going on, come back with evidence. And what the EPA came back with was this recording and some news articles in conservative news outlets. Like they don't actually have anything.

Jillian Goodman: Meanwhile, we also wrote articles to this same effect. We did a lot of coverage about how quickly in other areas the Biden administration was trying to move to get money out the door even before the election in anticipation of a possible Trump victory. There were other programs like the Loan Programs Office, which you were just talking about, which is the office that had funded Solyndra and Tesla and a lot of other successful companies. The Loan Programs Office finalized the acceleration in their activity in the final months of the Biden administration was huge, finalized, the number escapes me, but just a lot of loans and loan guarantees in those final months. The Biden administration, getting the money out the door for the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund was a huge piece of that. Getting the money out the door for, other sort of grant programs, carbon capture hubs was part of that as well. And so this was all happening out in the open. Reporters were reporting on it. And he was an EPA official, I believe he was like 25, spouting off, used an evocative phrase to describe something that was actually happening. It just wasn't illegal in any way. So I feel for the guy.

Paul Waldman: Obviously we don't know what the future of this is going to be. The court case could go either way. The question really comes down to whether or not the Trump administration has the authority to claw back this money or whether it's been appropriated and therefore it has to move forward. We just don't know. I mean, you can say, well, you would think that they passed a law that says that this is the money that we're appropriating, so they have to spend the money. But nothing is sure. We have a Supreme Court who said that Donald Trump gets to do all the crimes he wants. Who knows how they're going to rule.

Jillian Goodman: And not only was that money appropriated by Congress, it was obligated by the Environmental Protection Agency. And so basically you get to a point where the agency says this money is yours. And at that point, it's supposed to be yours. Like that's what the law says. And there are provisions in the law to allow that money to be clawed back in cases of fraud. And that's why the judge has said to the EPA and to Lee Zeldin, prove it in this case. Because if they can prove it, then clawing back the money is perfectly legal. If they can't, then it is not.

Paul Waldman: Maybe we'll move on to something equally depressing.

Jillian Goodman: There aren’t a lot of great options here.

Paul Waldman: No. There's been a lot of news recently about the fate of electric vehicles and what is going to happen in that area. And there are a lot of different things that the government has done and that the Biden administration did to promote electric vehicles. That has a lot of different components. Maybe you could talk a little bit about what those different components are, what it is that the that the government now is doing to try to promote that transition away from internal combustion vehicles to electric vehicles and what sort of things might be at risk over the next four years.

Jillian Goodman: So this is another area of policy where the Greenhouse Capital Reduction Fund is one entity with a lot of component parts that are very complicated. But a lot of these Biden climate policies intersect and interact in very specific ways. So for instance, with electric vehicles, you have incentives for purchasing them. There is a $7,500 tax credit that had existed before but was reinstated and expanded under the Inflation Reduction Act. If you buy or lease an electric vehicle, you can get up to $7,500 back on your taxes. There was also a provision in the Inflation Reduction Act that allowed you to claim that at the point of sale so you didn't have to wait until you filed your taxes the next year. That $7,500 came right off the top.

Then, in addition to that, there were incentives for manufacturing electric vehicles and electric vehicle components, including batteries and the making of all the chemicals that go into those batteries in the US. And that was very important because it supported the development of a domestic electric vehicle manufacturing industry. It let car makers like GM expand their production facilities in the United States to locate more of those facilities at home to create an industry that would be competitive with the rest of the world because China's electric vehicle industry has expanded dramatically and although I believe there's maybe one if any of those cars that are actually for sale in the US, they are for sale in Europe where our automakers also are trying to compete.

So both of those things together combined to support the development of an electric vehicle industry in the United States. You need both a bottom line on the part of carmakers that makes sense, and part of that bottom line is making sure you have customers to buy them, and so everyone was incentivized to produce electric vehicles. So basically all of that has come under attack on the part of the Trump administration because of, as you say, this sort of generalized antagonism toward electric vehicles.

Undoing that is actually more complicated than at least certain Trump officials want to make it sound. That tax credit was part of the Inflation Production Act, which means that it was congressionally mandated, which means that Congress will have to act to remove that. Ditto those tax credits to manufacturers. And so all of this has become part of the congressional budgeting process that is very long and ongoing. And we'll have to see what happens. Now, there are other aspects of that that are easier for the Trump administration to unwind. Back to Lee Zeldin, announced last week, I believe, the largest deregulatory action in history, undoing a lot of regulations that had been put in place by the Biden administration to cover things like emissions from power plants, but also emissions from vehicles. And these vehicle standards had been put in place by the Biden administration, had been tightened by the Biden administration to help, again, ensure the rollout of lower emission vehicles. The way the EPA announced this, the unwinding of these regulations, was as though it was a fait accompli, as though they were dead. In fact, they do have to go through another regulatory process for those to be completely unwound. And then you have things like the investment in electric vehicle chargers that also support adoption of electric vehicles, help allay range anxiety for people. So again, these policies interlock and in ways that seem not to be entirely understood.

Paul Waldman: And it's politically complicated. It's not as simple as Democrats want it and Republicans don't want it because one of the things that was smartly designed about some of these policies is that the Biden administration gave Republicans in Congress an interest in this. So with the beginning expansion of electric vehicles, what we've seen is a real kind of manufacturing renaissance, particularly in Republican areas of the country, especially in the South. There's a whole place called the “battery belt,” where there are all these new factories that are being built to produce batteries for EVs. And that partly happened because of the state tax policies and things like that. But it was certainly intentional on the part of the Biden administration that they wanted to give Republicans an interest in this because then that could enable it to survive. And as you say, it all kind of interlocks.

So you have, for instance, the $7,500 tax credit you get for buying an electric vehicle, but the only cars that are eligible for that have to be either mostly built in the US or North America, and their batteries have to be assembled here. And then over time, you're going to require more of the minerals for the batteries have to come from here. And what that does is it incentivizes then new production of batteries and new mining for those minerals. And the idea is that that tax credit that goes to individual consumers will then incentivize a manufacturing revival to meet that desire. And so the point is that not only do you give consumers then an interest in saying, hey, I like this tax credit, don't take it away, but you also have Republican members of Congress who have 2,000 people in their district who work at a battery plant or an auto plant that's making EVs.

And they're going to say to the Trump administration or to their congressional leadership, let's find other ways to attack the Biden climate agenda, but let's keep this one. Now that might not happen. We still don't know. And a big question mark in this is what President Trump himself feels, because a lot of this is up to his whims. There was a kind of a tiny moment in the campaign where he at one point said that, you know, I've been talking to Elon and he's telling me how great EVs are. And there was a little glimmer of hope like, maybe Elon Musk will convince him to stop trashing EVs and maybe keep the $7,500 tax credit. But we don't know.

Musk has said a couple of times in public that he thinks that if that tax credit goes away, it's fine with him because he believes that Tesla will survive it, but his competitors won't, that it will be much more damaging to GM, to Ford, to the other companies that are making EVs than it will to Tesla and people will still keep buying Teslas. Now that may not be true anymore, but we don't really know if Musk is going to say to him, don't worry about the $7,500 dollar tax credit, let's just keep that in place.

That's a big variable, and we don't know how much Trump really cares about this. Just the other day he did this event on the lawn of the White House where they brought a bunch of Teslas in and he was talking about how great they are. And Sean Hannity went on his show and told people that he was buying a Tesla and it's terrific, and it's this bizarre thing where you see these people who a month before would have been saying that only, stupid Berkeley hippies buy electric vehicles. They're out there telling people to buy electric vehicles and telling them how great electric vehicles are. Then you had Howard Lutnick, the Secretary of Commerce, go on TV and tell people to buy Tesla's stock, which is illegal, yes, of course, but also just mind-boggling. That comes in the context, obviously, of this huge anti-Tesla campaign. People are protesting at Tesla dealerships. Tesla's stock, I believe the high it hit after the election was $488 a share, something like that. And it's now down at $220, $230, $240 in that range. And the people who were involved in the campaign against Musk are hoping to make it basically just bottom out. Even at $200 a share. It's insanely overpriced given how much profits Tesla actually makes. But that's its whole own story.

The result of all this is that we just don't know what's going to happen. But the thing is, there was a recent study from Princeton that showed that if they do take away that subsidy, it would cut the number of electric vehicle sales by a couple of million. And you could have a really negative economic cascade, that all of the planned EV factories are, and battery factories that are haven't yet opened, but are, the planning is underway and they're looking to hire thousands and thousands of people, those would all not be needed if you dramatically cut the number of EVs people are going to buy, which would happen if you take away the subsidy. You might not even need the capacity for building batteries that we have right now. So you could have this really significant negative economic effect if you take away that subsidy. And so it's a big question mark, whether or not Republicans in Congress are going to do that. Nobody really knows.

Jillian Goodman: I will add, that study was led by Jesse Jenkins, is the co-host of Heatmap's own Shift Key podcast. He and our executive editor Robinson Meyer were talking about that very study in more detail on the podcast this week. So if your listeners, Paul, are interested in that particular study and want to know more, they can go right over to Shift Key and listen there.

Paul Waldman: It is a good episode. I was just listening to it this morning. All right. Well, maybe we could just, to, round out our tour of the wreckage, do you want to talk about what's happening at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration? Because that's another disaster.

Jillian Goodman: Yes, it is. And that has been hit by just sweeping layoffs. Nobody's actually sure quite how many. It's been tough to keep track. But I believe as many as 10 % of the people who worked for NOAA have been laid off. And people are talking about things like, eventually, 50% cuts and cutting its budget by 65%. And a lot of this is down to what the Trump administration says is that they foment climate anxiety. There are functions within NOAA that are specifically climate-related, but a lot of what it does are things that protect people very directly from things like hurricanes, drought, fires. Those are the most visible things that NOAA does, but there's a lot of research that happens within NOAA labs and offices as well, a lot of data collection that will now not happen simply because they don't have the personnel.

You've seen the Trump administration cancel leases for NOAA offices, including one for the office in Hawaii that publishes the data from the longest running carbon dioxide tracking study, I believe, in the world. And you've seen other offices express public anxiety about their ability to continue functioning. We had a story on Heatmap a few days ago by Jeva Lange that talked about the National Tsunami Warning Center. I've probably butchered the name, but this is a program administered by NOAA that tracks the development of tsunamis and warns people about those. think the title of the story was “Now would be a really bad time for the really big one,” which is the large earthquake that will almost certainly occur at some point in the Pacific Northwest. We don't know when, we can't know when, but when it does happen, you want people in those offices to be able to alert people in their homes to say you've got a big wave coming your way. And with these cuts, it's not clear that they'll be able to do that.

Paul Waldman: Well, telling people that a tsunami is coming is certainly going to increase climate anxiety.

Jillian Goodman: Well, you know, the thing is, it's not a climate story per se, it's more a geology story, but the way it relates is that it is related to this office that has been a target of the Trump administration. And this particular function of the office is not climate related at all, but it is very much public safety related. And it's under threat now because of this Trump administration vendetta against climate policy.

Paul Waldman: Yeah, and we've seen throughout the administration, one of the things that they've done is they've kind of done this language purge where not only are there things you can no longer say, but they're sort of searching through programs and grants and anything to see if there are any of a number of keywords that will get your grant canceled if they appear somewhere in the description, one of which is climate. But that has to do with entire offices and almost entire agencies. We're seeing that certainly in the climate area. We're seeing it in environmental justice. The EPA basically just closed its office of environmental justice and is laying off anybody who works on environmental justice. One of the things that we've seen, again, I started off saying like there you could have, six months ago, tried to kind of weave yourself a scenario where maybe it won't be so bad.

But one of the things we've seen throughout the administration, I think, is a feeling that they can go farther than they ever even thought they could. Basically the message that has been given is that to every conservative who is now working in the administration, wherever you thought the parameters were, don't worry about them anymore. You can fulfill your wildest fantasies when it comes to policy. You can cancel every program that you ever looked at and said, “Ech, I wish we weren't doing that.” And you can go farther than you ever imagined. And I think we're certainly seeing that on climate. And it may be that some of the effects won't show up for a year or five years or 10 years. But one of the lessons is, it's a lot easier to destroy things than it is to build things. And maybe we can finish up with your thoughts about that, about what it's going to take. Let's say a Democrat gets elected in 2028 and comes in and says, I want to rebuild the climate capacity of the United States government to try to not just even do what we were doing before in terms of trying to alleviate climate change, but maybe doing some more things. What would that look like and how long do you think it would take?

Jillian Goodman: As far as what it would look like, well, I guess the way I'm interpreting your question is what would it look like if it were done successfully? And that's the big political question, I think. The extent to which climate policy is unpopular, climate policy as such, and also EV policy, but things that create jobs, very popular. Things that are pro-manufacturing, very popular. And so towards the end of the Biden administration, towards the end of the Harris campaign, a thing that we were sort of incredulous about was that they were not doing more to promote the idea that their policies, the Inflation Reduction Act policies specifically, had promoted this manufacturing renaissance in the United States, which it did.

That seems to me like a very promising road to go down for a future person of any party who wants to run on climate issues, who wants to frame it around: This is the future of industry. This is a competitive issue. Other countries, especially China, are investing a lot in manufacturing green products. And if we want to compete, if we want to be as important on the world stage in the 21st century as we have been in the 20th century, we need to support the development of these industries on both the business side and the consumer side. So let's go, people. That seems like a winning message. But then again, I'm not a political strategist. I'm a journalist. We just write about it.

Paul Waldman: And that was a turn that Democrats took from earlier years where they basically said, we're not going to talk about sticks anymore. We're going to talk about carrots. That you can get more support not saying to people like, we're all going to die. And therefore we need to do things like put on a carbon tax, which means you're going to pay more. That no, we're just going to tell people like, there's a bright future awaiting us. And we're going to do things that give people jobs and give people cool new cars.

Jillian Goodman: And make your air cleaner and make your community safer and more beautiful and yeah, all of the above.

Paul Waldman: And that seems to be something that works. But that's also maybe that the policy is more complicated and difficult to implement. You know, you put a carbon tax on it. You know, we know how to put a tax on stuff. It's not that hard. But to create some kind of complex interlocking web of policies that will bring about a manufacturing renaissance, that's difficult. It takes time.

Jillian Goodman: We talk a lot during election season, every election season, about low-information voters. Even well-informed voters might not have heard of the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund unless they were working on climate issues prior to this “tossing the gold bars off the Titanic” moment. And so these are the complex workings of government. And insofar as they are complex, they are vulnerable. And so they will need strong rhetoric behind them. They will need a really strong case and a politician to really believe in them.

Paul Waldman: So the conclusion is, everything is terrible and it might not get better. No, we're not going to say that.

Jillian Goodman: That wouldn't be my takeaway. But it's not inaccurate.

Paul Waldman: Jillian Goodman is the deputy editor of Heatmap. Thank you so much for joining me and hopefully we can talk more of this as the horrors continue over the next few years.

Jillian Goodman: I hope for fewer horrors and more conversation.