Building Up in 2029: How to Make Green Statecraft Durable

Introduction by Todd N. Tucker

Three things can be true in 2026. First, the climate crisis is materially harming Americans, even as politicians, pundits, and philanthropists second-guess their prior commitments to addressing it. Second, policies to limit or reverse these damages are moving in the wrong direction, as the Trump administration’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) axed large swaths of the Biden administration’s climate-oriented Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). Third, somewhat ironically, the Trump administration has shown what an IRA 2.0 might look like, by both exposing the IRA’s vulnerabilities and breaking glass on new tools of economic statecraft that could be beneficial for green priorities in future governing moments in 2029 and beyond.

This first-of-its-kind, 17-essay collection brings together 19 scholars and practitioners to sketch out what a future governing agenda for climate could look like, post-DOGE. Its recommendations are rooted in the lessons of the past decade as well as the New Deal, married with other ideas that have worked at the subfederal or international level. The goal: making green statecraft more durable—and more supportive of a good life for all Americans¹—than what came before.

This introductory essay is divided into three sections. First, it explains why there are reasons to be bullish about this agenda: The climate problem is more necessary to address than ever, new policy tools can help the government address the problem more effectively, and the politics are more supportive than some pundits suggest. Second, it previews the agenda presented in this collection’s essays, divided into four sections on governing, planning, financing, and producing the next phase of the energy transition. Together, they constitute a slice of what a “Project 2029”–type effort for climate would look like, including adapting Donald Trump’s means to progressive ends.² I then conclude with observations about why green statecraft can help us solve structural problems (e.g., outsize power of finance and the courts) that narrower approaches like affordability or abundance cannot.

Reasons to Be Bullish About Future Climate Action

The policy studies literature has developed frameworks for understanding when policy change happens. Namely, action is more likely when multiple streams converge:

1. a problem is identified (a) that violates important social values, (b) for which government is seen as responsible for addressing, and (c) that is urgent or can otherwise command scarce policymaker attention;
2. a policy is available that is feasible to implement and address the problem; and
3. the politics is ripe for anti–status quo action.

Climate action is challenging under this framework, because the effects gradually accumulate (over a time span longer than presidential terms), and many of its most salient effects are felt in some places but not others.³ As recently as 2017, a leading social movement scholar argued that the issue was nearly impossible to organize around, given the US government’s bias against spending money and lack of grassroots infrastructure to advocate for emissions reduction.⁴ Indeed, this author remembers attending countless retreats over the 2000s and 2010s where climate organizations seemed to operate from a theory of change that put scientific and moral considerations over power-building.

What a difference a few years make. Between 2019 and 2022, the jobs-and-development-forward Green New Deal was introduced (buoyed by an unexpectedly favorable response by establishment politicians to an insurgent youth movement), proposals emerged from both political parties to enact industrial policies that had long been out of favor (in order to address the three c’s of COVID, China competition, and climate), and the US government committed hundreds of billions in spending to green innovation and jobs. Can this dynamic be recreated, or a new one emerge? While the 2019–22 period was special, there are good reasons to believe that the problem, policy, and politics could again converge.

State of the Problem: The Climate Crisis Is (Still) Hurting Americans

The last three years had the worst weather- and climate-related disasters in recent memory. From the record-breaking $61.2 billion damages of the LA wildfires to the deadly flash flooding in Texas Hill Country, the US now sees over two dozen billion-dollar-plus disasters a year, up from an average of nine in 1980.⁵ According to a recent estimate, US emissions between 1990 and 2020 have caused $10.2 trillion in damages—one-third of that on the US economy, and two-thirds on the rest of the world.

Even if emissions were radically curbed today, the prior ones already exist in the atmosphere: A child born in 2020 will see these historical emissions generate as much as $100 trillion in damages by the time they reach 80 years of age (i.e., the year 2100), assuming emissions are not removed. These estimates reflect only those impacts that are well measured in GDP, such as crop failure and lower productivity; other impacts like damages to health, loss of ecosystem function, and sea level rise could increase the numbers substantially, as would inclusion of future emissions.⁶

These costs will disproportionately fall on working people and others who cannot afford to shelter themselves. Recent studies show that the average person experiences nearly three months of health-threatening temperatures, which cause five million deaths a year.⁷ Many of these threats occur on the job: 70 percent of workers are exposed to extreme heat, causing over 22 million injuries. Younger men and those of lower socioeconomic status are particularly vulnerable, as are those in industries like construction, agriculture, fishing, forestry, firefighting and emergency services, transportation, and tourism.⁸ Increases in particulate matter from wildfires could cost Americans $608 billion annually in health damages, while warming trajectories could cause two weeks of poorer sleep for the average person. Other studies suggest an increase in intergroup and domestic violence as a result of stresses from temperature changes, while others suggest asylum applications could increase by 30 to 190 percent.⁹ Tick infestations are spreading throughout the US as a result of climate and landscape changes, causing food allergies, brain inflammation, and death—at a massive cost to the economy’s productivity.¹⁰

These challenges require government action. The United Nations estimates that $4 to $6 trillion a year is needed globally to transition to a clean energy economy, while other estimates put the number closer to $10 trillion.¹¹ If this were only a resource question, one might argue that the private sector could deliver all or most of the money. But, between the negative externalities that fossil fuel firms do not price in, the positive externalities that clean energy firms struggle to capture, the considerable coordination hurdles involved in getting innovation and supply chains to emerge in the right sequence, and the considerable distributional impacts of acting and failing to act, climate change is a cluster of overlapping market failures that the private sector has not and will not address.¹²

Moreover, how we address climate also has substantial implications for wealth inequality—one of the other major crises of our time. If the wealthiest 1 percent of the population financed and owned all clean energy infrastructure, their share of global wealth would go from 38.5 percent today to 46 percent by 2050. If, in contrast, that infrastructure were built by the public sector and financed by a wealth tax, the 1 percent’s share would go down to 26 percent.¹³

Mitigation, adaptation, and carbon removal require strong and capable states. A solution without government power isn’t a solution.

State of the Policy: A Larger Toolbox than Ever

The US began to make a dent in its climate impact with the trio of Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, and CHIPS and Science Act. The main policy tool was a suite of uncapped tax credits that was (compared with other countries) relatively automatic and easy for private investors and producers to take advantage of, and (compared with past US policies) designed to incentivize pro-labor and pro–economic development business practices.¹⁴ These acts triggered hundreds of billions of dollars of publicly and privately funded upsurge in clean energy construction and investment, making the US the envy of the world.¹⁵

These credits were paired with other innovations in governance. The Department of Energy transformed from an agency focused on nuclear research to the nation’s premier green bank and grantmaker. The Department of Commerce went from a sleepy agency to a major investor in semiconductors and the technology stack needed to “electrify everything.” The US Department of Agriculture and the Environmental Protection Agency’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund plowed billions into helping farms and households decarbonize. Even US trade policy began to be reorganized around a clean energy future.¹⁶

For all of its accomplishments, the Biden administration’s climate approach remained self-describedly “government-enabled and private sector-led.” While this rhetoric and approach undoubtedly helped gain votes in the evenly divided US Senate, it also had limitations that time would reveal. It put a lot of stock in the private sector anticipating supply chain needs, being able to make profits in an inflationary environment, and moving at a speed that would generate political rewards for politicians. Moreover, it didn’t resolve ways in which government itself gets in the way of speedy implementation through permitting and other bureaucratic hurdles.¹⁷ Finally, it underestimated the extent to which a highly motivated rollback strategy from Elon Musk, Russell Vought, and other Trump appointees could sabotage existing grants and loans (though these appointees in turn overestimated how much courts would go along with their plans).¹⁸

Enter an important and unexpected innovation of the second Trump administration: public equity stakes. One of the red lines in US policymaking over the last several decades has been the appearance or reality of policy being firm-specific. The role of government, in this line of thinking, is to set basic rules of the road that all firms have to follow, and let the market determine which firms succeed or fail. This approach has much to recommend it: Government may not have as high-quality information as the private sector has via price signals (so it could bet on the wrong firm), and there is a risk of corruption if policymakers exploit firm-specific policy to boost their own private wealth.

And yet, in a world of monopolies, oligopolies, and imperfect market competition, price signals may not be that reliable for the private sector either, and there are reasons to think that public service norms can make civil servants behave selflessly.¹⁹ More to the point, governments that are concerned about where and how goods and services are produced have an interest in not ceding too many consequential decisions completely over to the private sector, which in contemporary America has its own short-term profit biases.

Whether for these reasons or less strategic ones,²⁰ Trump’s Departments of Commerce, Defense, and Energy have embarked on a bold experiment in state capitalism—the academic term for greater state ownership and control over the means of production.²¹ The government has acquired tens of billions of dollars worth of shares in private companies, from rare earths to steel to quantum computing. Table 1 groups some of the interventions of the last few years, organized by their degree of ownership and control.

A few points are worth underlining here. First, while the Trump administration did not use climate rationale to justify these interventions, they represent important precedents for clean energy policymaking. Many of the companies produce minerals and goods that can help decarbonization. Moreover, some of the deals involve board seats that give the government eyes, ears, and voice on setting corporate priorities in a way that one-off grants do not (and with lower transaction costs than the latter). While this power can be bad in the wrong hands, it can be useful in the right ones. Future policymakers could use these levers to mandate faster decarbonization, recognizing labor unions, “buying American,” or banning stock buybacks (as the US did in the context of the MP Materials investment). The companies themselves recognize this in their securities filings (linked above), noting that government equity stakes create the potential that future governments will look to change deal terms or project priorities.

Second, equity investments are more budgetarily attractive for the taxpayer in the tight fiscal environment we are likely to see in 2029.²² While grants are one-way outlays from the public to the private sector, equity investments on the front end generate a stream of dividend payments from the private to the public sector on the backend—ensuring that the public shares in the upside. Moreover, if government sells its shares, it stands to make a further profit. From the company perspective, equity stakes can be attractive as a form of patient capital that does not force decisions solely on the basis of being able to service a loan. To the extent that, say, the manufacturing business requires significant capital outlays and may not make money as quickly as the double-digit returns of more speculative investments, patient government capital can make the world safe for more modest 5 percent returns.²³ Revisions to government budget rules can and should make it easier to “score” equity investments as the revenue generator they can be,²⁴ while guardrails can ensure government decision-making is not corrupted by these arrangements.

Third, the examples in Table 1 show that there can be trade-offs between how much ownership or control the public sector has. Since buying 10 percent of Intel in 2025 (upper right tile), the US has seen the value of its shares quintuple to over $50 billion. However, the government gave away virtually any formal say over how the company conducts its business, from getting rid of Joe Biden’s project milestones to forgoing board representation. In contrast, the US spent no money and will receive no return on its golden share in US Steel (lower left tile). However, it will have veto power over a dozen categories of corporate decisions. Likewise, there are many ways to structure deals to create formal leverage (releasing funding only after milestones are met, e.g. USA Rare Earths), non-equity influence (being a company’s sole or major buyer, e.g. MP Materials), or informal influence (pushing customers to the company, e.g. Sable Offshore). Indeed, even with no ownership or formal control (bottom row), Trump’s and Biden’s jawboning of companies forces them to stand up and take greater notice of how their actions are being perceived by the public and government.

To be sure, equity stakes are neither necessary nor sufficient for a robust climate agenda. But their new availability shows that the Overton window is rapidly shifting on the US government’s tool kit. To wit, in June 2026, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and the Trump administration embraced the idea of taxing AI companies through a takeover of shares for a new sovereign wealth fund. If AI turns out to be a bubble, the idea won’t cost the government anything. If the industry finds a viable revenue model, the plan could generate trillions of dollars for climate and other priorities²⁵—multiples larger than the IRA without having to spend a dime of taxpayer money. This is an example of how policies on AI, defense, and China competition can provide numerous vehicles for the “what” for climate action. The “how” can be provided by old tools like grants, loans, taxation, and regulation, alongside more novel tools like sovereign wealth funds, public factories, international carbon clubs, and climate macroeconomic planning.

The climate problem is real and increasingly felt, and the policy solutions are within reach.

State of the Politics: Better than the Hot Takes Suggest

So the climate problem is real and increasingly felt, and the policy solutions are within reach: But are both swimming against insurmountable political hurdles?

Some would say yes. In the wake of the 2024 election, when Democrats lost all seven swing states to the climate change–denying Donald Trump, there were understandable calls to ask whether progressives had done—or talked—too much about climate. Some questioned why politicians should put climate high in the policy queue in the future if some of the advocacy groups that demand action did not unambiguously cheer on the IRA and reward its architects.²⁶ This was put most forcefully by the Searchlight Institute, who wrote, “How to talk about climate change: don’t.”²⁷ This idea appears to be resonating with other gatekeepers: Philanthropists have cut back or failed to step up climate funding in the face of Trump’s threats,²⁸ and news teams focused on climate reporting are shuttering.²⁹ There is even a name emerging for those that embrace a quiet or “not at all” strategy: “climate hushers.”³⁰

Yet the data show that addressing climate change in a responsible way remains highly popular with Americans, and that progressives have perhaps the biggest issue advantage on the topic. Renewable energy is not only the cheapest but also the most popular form of energy. Moreover, since Trump has been in office, the share of adults that think the president should do more to address climate change has increased—from 54 to 59 percent nationally, becoming the majority opinion in all but three highly fossil-dependent states. In contrast, majorities in 18 states in 2023 did not rate climate change as a should-be presidential priority.³¹ In more recent polling, University of California researchers found that—while climate ranked as a low-priority issue for most voters—those voters that rank it as a voting issue are much more likely to favor than oppose climate action, by a 56 to 11 percent margin. This gap widens even further if it is restricted to voters that are persuadable to voting for progressive candidates (66 to 8 percent). Moreover, the scholars found no evidence that emphasizing climate cost votes.³²

Moreover, to the extent that long-term climate investments failed to have immediate-term political payoffs in 2024, this was not because the policies were unpopular (they were popular) but because they were insufficiently attributed back to the national lawmakers who approved the funds (as opposed to on-the-ground governors, often in red states, disbursing the funds).³³ The reluctance of federal officials to actually campaign on climate investments likely compounded this disconnect.³⁴ While this is certainly a policy design, execution, and communications challenge, it is not an insurmountable one. Moreover, it is actually a good thing for climate policy to once again be bipartisan, whether at the state or federal level. Thanks to quiet lobbying from industry and Republican lawmakers, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) preserved a surprising amount of Biden’s subsidies for clean energy technologies and products, and federal budget watchdogs now expect spending to be multiples higher than the original estimates for the IRA. As of this writing, it appears about half of the grants obligated during the Biden years have actually been paid out—not good, but not apocalyptic either.³⁵ Rationalizing and putting some structure around these credits and the equity stakes above represent something that might even be advanced in divided government during 2027.

Another way to think about the political window: Are competitive candidates for higher office still talking about climate, and, if so, how? Here are climate-specific messages or pledges from candidates in the most competitive US Senate races. These are anonymized and are not endorsements:

In short, far from appearing like a toxic “c-word,” climate, energy costs, and related jobs appear to be commitments that candidates want to highlight.

A final way to think about the political valence of climate is to look at whether the social movement activity of the next few years is likely to be friendly to transformative action on climate. Looking first to the left, one way of posing this question is whether the ground game politics of climate are ever going to be as good as they were in 2019–22. But that question exaggerates the objective strength of climate organizing in that period, and underestimates some new assets. In hindsight, establishment lawmakers saw a loosely organized youth movement as more of a threat, prize, and policy bulwark than was probably merited. Things look different today, when many of these activists have grown up, gotten organized, and can meaningfully dole out political punishment and rewards. The union-backed Working Families Party and Democratic Socialists for America are building a national footprint with over 700,000 members, are influencing key political races, and prominently embrace the same jobs-development-and-climate logic that propelled the Green New Deal.³⁶ They are not alone. Rural and blue-collar-oriented populists are gaining ground in other parts of the country, building on a growing rejection of the power of fossil, financial, tech, and other oligarchs.³⁷ In the center, “varieties of Abundance” are developing into a large and well-funded network of YIMBY organizations highly motivated by climate and competitiveness concerns.³⁸ All of the foregoing factions are investing energy in tackling the affordability problem, which is pushing the Overton window on acceptable market interventions around energy, from price controls to forcing data centers to build the grid.³⁹ On the right, young Republicans are significantly more likely to support clean energy and oppose fossil energy than their older counterparts, though there does not appear to be an organizational home for these views.⁴⁰

Thus, while no one can predict where the political winds will go, lawmakers and social movements are honing muscles that could be useful in a future climate moment. If fundamental democracy reform can be made a part of the climate movement’s project, then the favorable public opinion can be translated into policy outcomes.

Our Authors’ 2029 Green Statecraft Agenda

Last but not least, green statecraft means little if its impacts do not show up in factory floors and service centers around the country: We have to figure out how to produce it. This means figuring out the labor, natural resources, and capital needed to get the job done—which can be privately owned, privately operated, publicly owned, publicly operated, or some mix. All of the governing, planning, and financing strategies matter a lot for how effective this all is, as do the underlying class and macroeconomic growth dynamics of the country.

How to Govern It

K. Sabeel Rahman, former head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, argues for a Reconstruction project on par with other great episodes in US statebuilding, from the original namesake period in the 1860s–70s to the New Deal and Civil Rights eras. He calls for a two-step process, whereby the authoritarian and personalist tendencies of the Trump administration are rolled back and disempowered, while other new capacities are built up. For clean energy, this means being eyes-wide-open about how new surveillance technologies can target climate activists, and centralizing and professionalizing the one-off deals the administration has made in critical minerals and other sectors. He calls for less energy on trying to “Supreme Court–proof” regulations, and instead a greater willingness to confront that branch’s oligarchic power.                              

Timothy Meyer calls for a different kind of two-step approach, where a future administration would use Cold War authorities to combat the climate crisis through international carbon clubs and other measures, and then work with Congress to put guardrails on them going forward. He is concerned with an asymmetry whereby fossil-oriented presidencies use these powers to the hilt, while clean-oriented presidencies hold themselves back in the name of (no longer operative) norms. He finds that the worst of all worlds. While he notes how US courts have become biased against environmental regulation, he argues that time spent fighting the courts would be better spent rebuilding capacity in Congress to try to meet judges’ demand for more legislative direction.

Zooming out, Will Dobbs-Allsopp finds fault with the structure of Congress itself—namely a US Senate that disproportionately represents fossil-dependent states and minorities of the American population. Recounting how the IRA’s shape was distorted by the vote of a single senator from a fossil state, he predicts this will happen in future legislation as well, absent removal of counter-majoritarian chokeholds like the filibuster and an integration of climate strategy with the growing movement for fundamental democracy (and Senate) reform.

Zooming in, Sara Meyers notes that how staffing works inside agencies tasked within agencies is equally important as the big picture constitutional questions. As chief of staff to the Department of Commerce’s CHIPS Office, she had a front-row seat to an experiment in hiring and managing a federal workforce where merit and skill were cultivated and rewarded. From aligning executives’ incentives with the productivity of their workforce to adequately funding administrative expenses to building a strong organizational culture, Meyers lays out dos and don’ts for rebuilding faith in government, including its ability to address existential challenges.

How to Plan It

Heather Boushey and Noah Kaufman, alums of the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers, note that a major constraint on bureaucracies fulfilling their mission is veto points from within, including economists and their use of outmoded economic models and cost-benefit analysis. They note how Biden opened the door to greater use of nonquantifiable benefits and costs in macroeconomic and regulatory projections, but failed to make such exercises mandatory on agencies—while Trump abandoned the effort altogether. This creates an opening for future administrations to rethink the behind-the-scenes forecasting work to be more climate action–forcing rather than climate action–stopping, and to have federally produced economic research be more credible.

Madison Condon envisions a new National Climate Service, which would combine data produced by agencies like NASA with ground-level engineering expertise. Noting some successful precedents in states like California and Connecticut, as well as the dangers of too much reliance on private proprietary data, she sees great potential for a new federal “public option” for data that can help states and localities plan for climate shocks. By going beyond highly aggregated average data on weather patterns and focusing more on the potential for localized extremes around (say) fragile dam infrastructure, Condon shows how “trusting the science” can be more than a professional class mantra and offer tangible benefits to people in their daily lives.

Rohan Sandhu shows how overreliance on federal decision-making is itself part of the instability problem in climate policy. Calling for a new centrifugal approach to the clean energy transition, he shows the value of funding and empowering the existing (but underappreciated and underrecognized) stock of place-based agencies in states and localities. This decentralized strategy can ensure that energy investments are well matched to the workforces and populations they are serving, which vary significantly in how ready they are to make these developmental leaps.

Striking a similar vein, Shelley Welton notes that public utility law already provides a powerful mandate and set of planning tools for driving decarbonization below the federal level. She tells the history of how this mode of regulation developed in the US as a form of control over monopolies, creating spaces of state capacity that are not always legible to experts from other countries with more centralized power systems. While today often co-opted by fossil interests, repurposed utilities could speed up grid buildout, derisk investments in nuclear and other clean power sources, and balance the distribution of costs of the transition on everyday ratepayers.

How to Finance It

Satyam Khanna, one of the architects of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, argues for a much nimbler federal financing strategy for the energy transition. He notes that government has become less tolerant of risk than private venture capital companies—even though the former is spared the need to make profits. Khanna also notes that the Biden approach of emphasizing the supply side of clean energy required lots of paperwork and process, whereas more future focus on the demand side (“if you build it, we will buy it”) could be less cumbersome while sending clearer market signals.

Saule Omarova makes the case for one particular type of financial institution: a US sovereign wealth fund. She notes that these entities are increasingly common around the world, account for a growing share of new US domestic investments, and have bipartisan interest domestically. Omarova points out that sovereign funds like her proposed National Investment Authority solve two interlinked problems: replacing private capital’s short-termist, high return orientation with patient public management toward clean transition priorities, and freeing a source of public money from the constraints of the congressional appropriations cycle or of a narrower public agency’s preferred financial instrument (loans, grants, etc.).

Lenore Palladino zooms in on a particular type of instrument that a sovereign wealth fund might hold and manage: public equity stakes. She notes that the Obama administration took shares in auto companies in a temporary manner (thus missing an opportunity to push decarbonization), and the Trump administration is doing the same in critical minerals in a more open-ended manner. To ensure these stakes serve the public interest going forward, Palladino recommends a series of guardrails and design decisions, including the timing of when the public earns returns on its investment and whether dollars come with board seats.

Turning to the international stage, Erin Graham looks at how the New Deal went global through the architecture of multilateral development banks, and how China is lapping the US on a similar energy effort now. She makes the case that the next administration must prioritize operationalizing some of the instincts embedded in Biden’s Foreign Policy for the Middle Class framework, including by putting climate finance on firmer post-DOGE footing and embedding the political economic strategy of green industrial policy in places with structural power in the global economy like the World Bank.

How to Produce It

Leah C. Stokes showcases one high-value decarbonization strategy: electrifying industrial heat. From paper to chemical to milk manufacturers, such processes have historically relied on fossil sources. Policy can incentivize utilities to use energy storage technologies that make energy affordable for manufacturers and households alike—boosting national competitiveness and improving health outcomes for Americans historically left behind.

Joel Dodge reaches back to the experience of the Roosevelt administration to show that industrial policy need not rely only on accommodations and nudges with private factory owners. The public sector can directly establish factories that it owns, operates, or both—using preemption powers to get around legal and procedural hurdles like permitting blockages. The scale of Chinese producers’ monopolization of certain clean energy inputs, and domestic shortages in key electrical grid components, create potential use cases for public producers (freed from undue profit pressures or the need to squeeze wages).

Council of Economic Advisers alumnus Jonas Nahm and Daniel Driscoll shift the focus from manufacturing to the services sector. They argue that an industrial strategy that prioritizes clean energy installation, construction, and software jobs over directly manufacturing clean energy inputs is more in keeping with what social scientists call the “growth model” of the United States. Nonetheless, they note that there are coalitional, national security, and other reasons that US policymakers may want to hedge their bets with a manufacturing focus that cuts against that growth model. Either way, they argue for an open-eyed examination of the trade-offs involved with either strategy.

Finally, Ted Fertik argues that past administrations have been too timid in their embrace of labor, which is not a sideshow but rather core to any productive process. He notes that there were reasons to be hopeful about Biden’s relative friendliness to labor unions, but that ultimately policymakers were more motivated by seeing companies accept public subsidies rather than be disciplined by either government or labor. Now, after a Trump administration that is actively trying to lock in a fossil equilibrium in our political economy, the next administration must use public leverage to force greater collaboration with organized labor as a way of institutionalizing a green feedback loop—with green jobs driving green ambition and vice versa.

Conclusion

The climate policy experimentation and ideation of the last decade have been instructive. Efforts to impose carbon taxes to reduce demand for fossil fuels ran headlong into political blind spots in an era of stagnant wages and cost anxieties.⁴⁸ The pivot to industrial policy laudably focused on the supply side and making clean energy cheaper, but did not do enough to boost state capacity and get government out of its own way on questions like permitting and grid interconnections.⁴⁹ The Abundance discourse identified underappreciated technocratic hurdles and too much reliance by environmentalists and others on litigation, but it didn’t poll well and lacked a comprehensive theory of power . . . until democratic socialists adopted the agenda and gave it one.⁵⁰ Populists homed in on weaknesses in all of these building efforts and showed that not-in-my-backyard(NIMBY)ism is alive and well when it comes to blocking energy-guzzling data centers. The affordability agenda became many advocates’ North Star, but it speaks to people as consumers of energy and other products, rather than full civic and economic subjects that care as much about income, dignity, and time. And neither NIMBYism nor the affordability agenda has much to say about the direction for (or what structural changes are needed to) our economy and democracy to confront the dislocations that await us from climate change, artificial intelligence, and geoeconomic reordering.

This is not a knock against any one of these projects: We are in an interregnum period where ideologies are in flux, and “thin-centered” projects like populism or abundance will eventually fade or be paired with deeper left or right-leaning worldviews.⁵¹

The essays in this collection are far from the final word on climate. They say little about the topics that currently consume the most oxygen in the debate, like permitting reform, the economically optimal phaseout of fossil fuels, or whether specific clean energy technologies still need subsidies. Our hope, however, is that they shed light on what kind of state we need to start building to get us through the climate challenges of the 2020s, 2030s, and beyond.