The president also announced Friday that he is promoting Ali Zaidi to be his national climate adviser after serving as deputy assistant. Zaidi will replace Gina McCarthy, who is planning to leave her post Sept. 16.
The personnel changes mark an inflection point for the Biden administration as it shifts its focus from working with Congress to using its executive authority, flexing its diplomatic muscle and spending hundreds of billions in new federal funds to reach Biden’s climate goals.
“The United States is in a new phase of climate action,” Zaidi said by phone Friday. “For the first time in the United States, we have policy certainty around tax incentives and investments that is going to reach out a decade from now.”
Biden has pledged to cut U.S. greenhouse gas emissions at least in half by 2030, compared to 2005 levels. But a combination of current policies and the new climate law is likely to reduce the nation’s carbon output by roughly 40 percent by 2030, according to several independent analyses, so it will take additional regulations and other national, state and local policies to meet the president’s target.
The new appointment marks Podesta’s third White House stint. He served as Bill Clinton’s chief of staff and returned to government to help shore up Barack Obama’s environmental agenda. His influence extends well outside the West Wing, having founded the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, that has done extensive work on environmental issues.
In a separate phone interview Friday, Podesta said he took the job because he wanted to help enact climate policies he has championed that were included in the Inflation Reduction Act. His first day is Tuesday.
“I’ve been advocating for these investments for many years and was part of the effort to try to build a political coalition to get it done,” he said. “And I was excited, given the historic nature of what the president has achieved in getting this bill passed and getting these investments going, to ensure that it’s done in a way that really accelerates the transition to clean energy.”
Among the biggest challenges for Podesta will be guiding the Treasury Department and the Internal Revenue Service in ensuring clean energy tax incentives encourage high-wage jobs and benefit disadvantaged communities, as required under the new climate law.
“Those are design elements that the IRS is not as familiar with, and it’s going to take time to figure out how to implement those correctly,” said Christy Goldfuss, the vice president for energy and environment policy at the Center for American Progress, who worked with Podesta both at that think tank and in the Obama administration.
The government must also create from scratch several other new programs, such as a $27 billion initiative for “green banking” meant to plow money into clean-energy technologies.
Podesta also wants to make sure the administration avoids political pitfalls when rolling out the climate law. He joined the Obama administration as a senior counselor during his second term after the bungled rollout of the Affordable Care Act.
Success now is “going to take a huge effort by the federal government to get this going, get it going fast but get it going in a way that avoids waste and controversy,” Podesta said.
Yet meeting Biden’s climate targets will be hard without more help, according to John Larsen, a partner with the research firm Rhodium Group….
Read More: Biden reshuffles climate team, hiring John Podesta as Gina McCarthy exits
