As he prepares to leave the White House, Ali Zaidi is sober about what's coming -- but says too much has already been built and invested for Donald Trump to undo it.
Joe Biden's climate legacy is already complicated. His administration helped pass two laws that put unprecedented funding toward clean energy, electric vehicles, and climate technology -- the most consequential climate legislation ever passed in the US. Since the start of his presidential race, the Biden administration has tried to frame climate change as an economic opportunity -- a kind of climate nationalism that attempts to use clean reindustrialization as a bridge across ideological divides.
Yet the administration has not left behind the old way of doing things. Oil and gas production has never been higher. Biden's approval of the controversial Willow oil drilling project in Alaska draws into question the country's commitment to a transition to clean energy while there is still money to be made in fossil fuels.
His biggest failure may be passing on the White House to a president who has promised to roll back climate policies and withdraw the US from the Paris Agreement, and who has selected for his closest advisers people with close links to the fossil fuel industry and in some cases outright climate denialists.
As President Biden's national climate adviser, Ali Zaidi helped shape much of the administration's climate policy. A long-term adviser to the president, Zaidi leads the White House Climate Policy Office, which was established by Biden in one of his first executive orders as president.
Zaidi sat down with WIRED to discuss Biden's climate legacy. The interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
WIRED: Let's start by jumping way forward in time to 2050 -- the deadline the US has set itself for reaching net-zero emissions. How do you think we'll perceive the Biden administration's role in that long journey?
Ali Zaidi: What we'll see is that in a number of sectors across our economy, this administration was the moment when we achieved escape velocity on a shift from polluting products to cleaner ones. You think about the transition that's taking place in vehicles, from internal combustion engines to strong hybrids, fully electric, hydrogen, fully sustainable aviation fuels. That is now on a secular trajectory. The destination is clear.
When history looks back at this moment, it'll look at areas like that. Or the electricity sector when in 2024, 96 percent of the new electricity we put onto the system was clean electricity, and we put more power on than we have in two decades. In other sectors it will reflect that we built the launchpad. Maybe we didn't get to escape velocity, but in areas like industrial decarbonization -- things like steel, cement, and aluminum -- we put together the tools that enabled that transformation to take place over the next several decades.
Historically -- and some of this still lingers -- some people view climate policies as asking them to give things up. It's why electric vehicle mandates and something like New York's ban on natural gas stoves are still divisive.