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In this episode, Florida Rep. Kathy Castor, chair of the House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis, describes the committee’s ambitious goals and notable achievements over the past three years.(PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsIn 2019, in the wake of Democrats’ congressional victories, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced that she would be re-forming the Select Committee on the Climate Crisis, which had been disbanded by Republicans in the previous session. She appointed Florida Representative Kathy Castor as chair.At the time, the decision caused considerable controversy in the climate community. Climate activists were pushing for a more ambitious committee, with the power to write a full Green New Deal legislative package. Instead, the committee was to be an advisory body only, meant to do research and develop policy suggestions.History is littered with congressional committees that busily produce reports and whitepapers that no one reads. But the climate committee proved much more potent than that. Castor set about gathering testimony from hundreds of witnesses — scientists, policy wonks, and average citizens alike — and putting her expert staff to work translating their testimony into policy recommendations. But the recommendations did not simply decorate reports. The Democrats on the committee, and the Democrats educated by the committee's work, took those recommendations back to their own committees, where they found their way into a wide variety of bills. The bipartisan infrastructure bill, the CHIPS Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act contained numerous policies that originated in the climate committee.Altogether, hundreds of the recommendations made by the committee found their way into law — a crazy-high success rate for a committee with no real power. As the committee prepares to sunset — of course Republicans are disbanding it again — it has put out a final report, summarizing all its achievements and pointing to the work that remains to be done.I called Rep. Castor to get her thoughts on the committee's work, the achievements she is most proud of, and what progress she thinks can be made in the next two years.Alright, then. With no further ado, Representative Kathy Castor. Welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.Rep. Kathy CastorOh, I'm delighted to be here, David. Thank you.David RobertsSo just to start off, I'm assuming that the coming Republican majority is going to shut down the committee. Has this been explicitly stated yet, or is this just ... are we all assuming? Is that a valid assumption?Rep. Kathy CastorYeah, the ranking member, Garret Graves of Louisiana, did kind of spill the beans. The problem is, on the Republican side, the Speaker-to-be, Kevin McCarthy, does not quite have the votes yet. So that leaves everything in limbo getting organized for the new year. But, they've made it plain that the climate crisis is not a priority for them, and therefore the Select Committee on the Climate Crisis will not exist in the next Congress.David RobertsSo then it's been wrapped up. It's been a whirlwind three years, I guess, since you were placed in charge of this committee. Have you had a chance to kind of pause and step back and think about it all, or are you still kind of in a sprint til' the end of the term?Rep. Kathy CastorIt has been a sprint right til' the end, especially since the large appropriations package and the defense bill were not completed due to really foot-dragging of the US Senate. We have so much more left to do. I mean, we are thrilled that this was the most important Congress when it comes to clean energy and climate action and building more resilient, safer communities across the country. I mean, this was the Congress, the one that people inside and outside have been pressing for decades, frankly. But there's still so much more left to do. We're living in a climate emergency, and the world's top scientists tell us it is just urgent that we reduce climate pollution across the board. And now we have the tool. We passed a number of the tools, but implementation will be key, and that's what we're looking ahead towards.David RobertsI wanted to ask you, looking back on it, if you can cast your mind back to 2019, when you became chair and you had a majority in the House, but very narrow-split Senate, looking back, were you surprised by the productivity of this Congress? How did it perform, relative to your expectations from back in 2019?Rep. Kathy CastorGosh, it was yes, I think the the fact that we were able to accomplish so much when the United States Senate was divided 50-50 truly exceeded our expectations, but we really didn't have a choice. Policy could not wait any longer, while so many private actors, private sector, clean energy entrepreneurs, some utilities, some states and local communities are going gangbusters. The federal government and the Congress had not responded. So the stars finally aligned when we kind of knitted together pieces of the climate movement across the country, across the economy, and had the plan ready when President Biden was elected. But a 50-50 Senate, that was a roadblock. But looking back now, it's pretty impressive. The bipartisan bills that we were able to pass into law.David RobertsYeah, my expectations are so low, naturally, that I was quite pleasantly surprised. So let's talk about a little bit about what I think is one of the most striking features of this last few years, which has been a crazy time. But I wrote a piece back in, I think it was 2019 or 2020, about the climate movement kind of splintered apart after Waxman-Markey back in 2008, 2009, and was kind of just fractured and drifting up through, I would say probably like 2018. And then, of course, I've been writing about these processes, whereby groups are talking to one another, and there's been just this intensive policy discussion and activity.And the left seem to sort of pull together around a policy vision, which I sort of characterized as standards, investments, and justice: SIJ. I tried to get SIJ to catch on, but it never quite did. But then your committee comes along, you consult with hundreds of people. You get testimony from hundreds of people. And that's kind of that shared vision is more or less what you came around to. And for all the chaos of the ensuing years and all the sort of ups and downs and roller coaster of it, there was remarkably little, I thought, conflict within the Democratic Party or within the left about policy specifics.There seemed to be a weird sort of policy consensus that kind of held firm. Did that strike you too, especially relative to like, 2008, 2009, when, you know, whether you supported cap and trade or not was this, you know, this absolute marker of your purity or your intentions and all this, you know, all the very vicious policy fights back then? I thought there was a strange amount of consensus around policy this time around. Did you find that as well?Rep. Kathy CastorI'm glad that we made it look easy, because it wasn't. And it really started with Speaker Pelosi's vision coming back in tackling the climate crisis, there's nothing like having a professional committee, staff of experts. Some of the other committee chairs in the Congress, they protect their turf, their jurisdiction, but she understood that solutions to the climate crisis cut across all jurisdictions and they needed to be knitted together. So having Ana Unruh Collin serve as our staff director, a brilliant, knowledgeable scientist, but policy guru. And then Alison Cassady is our deputy, who had served under Chairman Waxman, went through EPA after a report and now is helping Codesta in the White House get all of these clean energy and resiliency policies done. Fatima Maud, great on transmission in the power sector. Samantha Medlock, who understood that the climate we have to prepare and adapt, so another professional. So there's nothing like having a team that is in place, ready to listen.David RobertsMost of them, veterans of the Waxman-Markey fight. So, had seen how things could go, I think, and went in, determined to make them go differently this time.Rep. Kathy CastorYou're absolutely right. And what I learned watching Speaker Pelosi and just kind of growing up as a policy nerd myself, is that from the very get-go, you have to listen. You have to listen and learn. And that's what we set out to do right off the bat; listen to farmers who were hungry for climate solutions because their crops and livestock being impacted, scientists, folks in the clean tech sector, the innovators. We needed to understand what the modern solutions were. The environmental justice community, who had felt so left out of discussions on solutions, on clean energy and technology for many years, and we set out to do that, held a number of those listening sessions, but put out a request for information asking for the climate solutions across the country.And at that time, we also Hal Harvey and the folks at Energy Innovation gave us a kind of set-the-table tutorial to really point us in the direction of what gets the biggest bang for the buck when we're talking about reducing climate pollution and clean energy. And then, before COVID came down, trying to go out across the country to listen, one of the first trips was to coastal South Carolina to look at the impacts of climate on ... and coming from the state of Florida, I understand very well the impacts of climate on a tourism economy and your economic wellbeing. But then out to Colorado, to the National Renewable Energy Lab, where we really tried to bring our Republican colleagues along with us, because durable policy oftentimes has to be bipartisan. And I think looking back on the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the CHIPS Act, everything we've done in the defense bills through the appropriations, they were bipartisan, and they will be more durable. The Inflation Reduction Act, not as bipartisan, but, boy, to have ten years of continuity of clean energy tax credits and energy efficiency across the economy will provide that certainty that our innovators need.David RobertsSo you put out this report in 2020, or not 2020. When did the big report come out? Was that earlier this year?Rep. Kathy CastorIt was 2020, David.David RobertsIt's all a blur.Rep. Kathy CastorI know. It does get blurred. And in fact, we were set to release it in March of 2020, and I remember very well talking to Speaker Pelosi and Leader Hoyer on the floor, and we said, okay, well, we won't be announcing it next week because of the COVID, but we'll be back in a month to do this. And it took a little longer, but it gave us time because the country was grappling with the murder of George Floyd. And we knew that, unlike Waxman-Markey, kind of technical solution to the climate crisis, that people across America were hungry for solutions that are much more cross-cutting and focused on equity and addressing the communities that have disproportionately carried the burden of pollution.So, that gave us time to kind of build up our environmental justice pieces of it. And the other thing that gave us momentum was the youth climate movement at that time. And thank goodness we have environmental advocates across America who know how to organize. And they organized, and we heard them. Our very first hearing was with youth climate leaders, so that they understood that we were truly listening to their pleas for action. And it's important to have those protests they were protesting in the Congress, and they need to continue to press policymakers. But we listened and really turned their passion into policy.David RobertsSo this report comes out in 2020 magisterial report, I would say extremely I wrote it up when it came out. I just thought it's extremely fleshed out in the report. There were 715 policy recommendations, and your recent sort of wrap-up report that just came out says, "Out of those, 436 passed to the House, and then 314 of them were signed into law." So I did the math: that's a 44% hit rate. You got to be feeling pretty good about that. I don't know what typical expert committees in Congress produce, but that seems like a remarkably high success rate for getting recommendations into policy.Were you surprised how much from that initial report, sort of, survived the sausage-making process and sort of came out the other end more or less unmolested?Rep. Kathy CastorYeah. We looked for every opportunity in every bill moving through the Congress to build in some of those policy recommendations into law. And for folks that want to look at that groundbreaking report at climatecrisis.house.gov, you'll see we had legislation in certain areas already drafted that was ready to go, and then we made other recommendations for the need for legislation and to their credit, members across the Congress took us up on our offer. We work very closely with each congressional committee. Almost, just about every committee had a piece of this.David RobertsYeah, I wanted to ask about the ... because the committee didn't have the power to write legislation. It's just an advisory committee, which I think makes it kind of even more remarkable how much of its recommendations became a law. But tell me a little bit about the process, whereby this sort of recommendations that began in an advisory committee made their way to lawmaking committees. What was the sort of process, whereby you kind of diffused your recommendations and tried to get them into things? It seemed to work remarkably well behind the scenes. I didn't read a lot of stories about sort of infighting or backbiting so it seemed like a weirdly rational policy-making process. Tell us a little bit about how these things made their way into policy.Rep. Kathy CastorWell, Speaker Pelosi was very wise to appoint to the Climate Crisis Committee a number of members who are steeped in climate policy and politics. For example, Jared Huffman from California who was an environmental lawyer. He also sits on the Transportation Committee and has kept a very keen eye on those policies. Plus, Sean Casten, a clean energy tech guy from the midwest who understands power markets very well. Suzanne Bonamici of Oregon who is a leader in oceans policy, Ocean Solicitors. Donald McEachin, who recently passed away, was kind of our moral conscience, and had crafted an Environmental Justice For All Act that we recommended, and a lot of the policies in equity sprung from that.So, for example, as Chairman Peter DeFazio and the Congress was crafting the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act that we also called the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. We had made recommendations for electrifying the transportation sector and doing it in a way that also built the bridge to workers and labor. And though it looked pretty easy looking back, I'll even say great. But these were very difficult discussions with auto makers, with auto workers, with members of Congress like a Debbie Dingell. But you had a Chairman DeFazio focused on this very important infrastructure law, something that President Biden ran on. So in the end, all of those taking, listening, and hammering out the compromises and policies in advance, we end up with an infrastructure law that includes $62 billion for the Department of Energy over five years to support clean energy transition and infrastructure upgrades, including the $7.5 billion to build the very first nationwide EV charging network.So, that had already been built into the Biden administration's goal of 500,000 public EV chargers, and a future where all Americans can have easy access to EV charging. But it also has those important — none of this happens unless we can build the batteries. So $3 billio…
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