 The environmental movements is so fascinating to me because it's increasingly this coalition of, I guess, techno-optimists like yourself, but also basically anti-capitalist greens. And you've even penned a piece I'm gonna pull up here, speaking to that audience, it's in the Atlantic, what many progressives misunderstand about climate change. What is your message to that side of the environmentalist coalition? Yeah, I think it's really just about keeping our eye on the ball. And so I wrote that piece for the Atlantic based on what an environmental activist said in a Rolling Stone article that they didn't like certain climate solutions because certain large corporations like Exxon might benefit from carbon capture technology, or yeah, like Elon Musk with Tesla might benefit if we switched to electric vehicles. And the point of that piece I wrote in the Atlantic was really just taking the idea of climate change seriously as an emergency. And not even, it's not even debate like whether it is or isn't. Just like, if you assume it is, if you're the person in the environmental community who, activism community who says all the time that climate change is an emergency, then I wanna take that seriously. So what would that mean? What would that entail to treat it as an emergency? And in my experience, in my opinion, treating something like an emergency means keeping a laser focus on a mission that would actually solve that emergency and end the crisis. And so for global climate change, this is an emissions problem. And so we should be pretty agnostic about who we partner with, as long as that is something that actually benefits the climate and actually works towards solving the problem. And so I think I'm also pushing back against there's this term that some of the environmental actors who can be loved called like fake solutions, like those are fake solutions to the climate crisis. And I don't think they're really fake or real solutions. They're just our solutions or there aren't. So it's like a, is this a kind of return to the like the more technocratic idea of actually we're gonna literally like measure or create some sort of proxy or something to measure how much carbon is being put out and then do, I don't know, cap and trade or carbon credits or something like that because that's more of a agnostic, energy agnostic solution, something like nuclear under the right regulatory conditions might be able to compete on in that world versus the world we're in now where it's much more tax break and subsidy based. Yeah, so I think that's like, that's one version of this. That's definitely the one that vast majority of economists would endorse is some kind of, first best is carbon tax, a very close second best is cap and trade because there's basically economically equivalent depending on how they're designed. And then second and third best are things like subsidies. We also try to be quite politically pragmatic in our work at IFP in Washington, where we're working in Washington DC. And so as of now, and has been the case in recent decades, carbon taxes and similar programs are extremely politically unpopular and most elected officials are aware of this fact. And so anything that increases the cost of energy we saw over the last few years, the crisis over gas prices and how much that hurt the popularity of the incumbent president. And I think actually implementing those seems extremely unlikely. And I think that's the case where second best solutions like some of the subsidies we see for clean energy technologies make a lot of sense. And then Zach, you and I can talk more about like how we can implement those subsidies in a more efficient way that limits the downsides of picking winners and losers. But I think we're working within that bucket and we're probably not in a carbon tax world, unfortunately. I wanted to ask a slightly nerdy question from your Atlantic article. In the Atlantic, you write, some environmentalists are skeptical of geothermal energy which requires extensive drilling. Yet it has high potential as a source of clean baseload power with a small geographical footprint that can in theory be deployed anywhere in the world if you drill deep enough. One way to accelerate investment in geothermal energy would be to give this clean technology the same expedited permitting that oil and gas companies already receive for leases on federal land. Where is the opposition to that coming from? Like for my little libertarian heart clearing the path of regulations and treating a geothermal drilling company the same way he would treat other people in that space or other companies in that space. That's an obvious thing. Why do people oppose this? Yeah, so it says there's opposition on both sides and I wouldn't say that the majority of each party or each part of the coalition, but they're loud enough and this is a neglected under the radar issue of like how is geothermal versus oil and gas permitted under the National Environmental Policy Act? It's a very wonky question that doesn't get a lot of attention. But there's enough opposition to keep us in the current status quo and not let reform happen yet. And so on the left, the similarities and fracturing so even though geothermal is about capturing natural heat resources, using that to heat up water, turn it into steam, spin a turbine is that there's no fossil fuels in this process. The fact that involves fracturing into the earth makes a lot of more conservationists than I would say climate folks concerned. And so they're opposed often to things in terms of geothermal and I would add that the advantage that oil and gas has is they have a categorical exclusion for exploration projects on federal land, categorically excluded from NEPA, the National Environmental Policy Act. And a lot of the environmental communities just like they are across the board opposed to categorical exclusions. They just think any kind of carving out of the process, whether it's clean, is there solar, wind, geothermal, fossil fuels, obviously, like they just don't want to be carving out from that law because they view it as kind of sacrosanct. That's the left opposition. And the right opposition, I would say it's more just like oil and gas has the current advantage. And so they don't want to give subsidies to a new industry. And there's a lot of, on the right wing of the spectrum, there's skepticism around clean technology in general. And so they prefer to maintain the current status quo that favors oil and gas. Just really fast to follow up. You've written a little bit about how NEPA very much empowers people to stymie these different projects. It reminds me a little bit of our colleague, Chris Timbertsky, who's reporting on CEQA, which is weaponized by the NIMBs of California to stop all kinds of developments, but NEPA's much broader. And you write about how it gives enormous power to people to block innovative new projects. Could you just give us a sense of a few of the problems with that really fast? Yeah, so I think the key thing is for any large or medium-sized project, there are going to be some losers. Even if a project benefits 99% of the community, maybe one person who lives near a transmission line doesn't want the transmission line right next to their backyard. And like, I'm actually kind of somewhat sympathetic to that claim of like, that is a nuisance. That is a cost can be an eyesore for big infrastructure projects. But the key is these things need to be built somewhere. And we need to be doing projects that we can get as much consensus on as possible. We can't wait for 100% perfect consensus because you almost will never get that. And so when you have a tool like NEPA, and the key thing is that it allows people to sue the government if the environmental review was incomplete in any measure. By incomplete we mean, has it considered every potential environmental impact? And the way this law has evolved over the last 50 years is the term environment and impact have just been defined more and more and more broadly. And it's kind of this impossible problem to solve where like the documents are currently, you know, often more than a thousand pages long, but they can always be longer. There's always one more thing you didn't consider, right? And so it's a very low bar to clear in your lawsuit. You don't need to say that this harms the environment. You don't need to say that it's, you know, violates the Clean Water Act or the Clean Air Act, those substantive standards. You just need to say, you didn't consider this one potential impact. And then if you can prove that case in court, the court can issue an injunction against the project and stop it. They send the review back to the agency for another multi-year, you know, addendum to the original review. And that just stops it dead in the tracks. And then often the tactic here is delay, delay, delay. To just keep challenging it in court until the developer is like, I'm broke or the bank pulled my funding, I can't do this project anymore. That's funny. These are these like wonky environmentalist heckler speedos, essentially. You see this with Nipah, you see this with Nipah, and it's a story, you know, time and time again. And it seems like it's getting worse over time, not better. Yeah, it's absolutely reached a crisis point. And that's why you hear more and more about permitting reform in Washington DC. And like your colleague, it's also a state level issue because many states have their own environmental procedure laws. But I think the key thing for the audience to know is that we should be pretty positive about environmental substance laws like the Clean Air Act and Clean Water. They're not perfect, but when you have an objective standard of like, this is what your product is allowed to, you know, affect the air, affect the water. That's a much better standard than these procedural rules that say you have to comprehensively consider every potential impact. I think that's the kind of thing we need to get back towards and like this proceduralism has run amok at this point. Hey, thanks for watching that excerpt from our conversation with Alex Stapp of the Institute for Progress about Operation Warp Speed, the Trump administration plan to accelerate development of COVID-19 vaccines. If you liked it, you can watch the full interview right here or another clip right here.