 Hi, I'm Lizzie O'Leary, and I wanted to thank everybody for joining us today. We're talking about the Biden administration's future agenda. Yeah, just a small topic, nothing big to rope in here. I host the Slate podcast, What Necks TBD, and we've a pretty jam-packed schedule. So I want to jump in and introduce everybody. After that, we're going to launch into how the administration can balance tackling the short-term crises that we are in the middle of right now, and some longer-term ones as well. And those are a lot of things that you may have seen identified in Future Tenses Future Agenda series. So I'm going to run through our panelists. First we have Charles Kenney with us. He is an economist and currently serves as Senior Fellow and the Director of Technology and Development at the Center for Global Development. And his latest book, The Plague Cycle, The Unending War Between Humanity and Infectious Disease, just came out. Good timing. I don't know. Terrible timing. Very important timing, I guess. He has also written for Bloomberg Business Week, the Wall Street Journal, Politico, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, The Guardian, CNN, lots of things. We are also joined by Sarah Morris. She is the Director of New America's Open Technology Institute, where she leads OTI Strategic Planning, Fundraising and Management, and prior to her role as Director, she led the program's efforts on issues including broadband access and adoption, online consumer protections and preserving the open internet. And finally, and actually we're going to start with him, we are joined by Sean Casten, Representative for Illinois' Sixth Congressional District. He is a scientist turned policymaker, has dedicated his life to fighting climate change. And in Congress, he serves on the House Financial Services Committee, the Science Space and Technology Committee, the Select Climate Crisis Committee, and his co-chair on the New Dems Climate Change Task Force. And he's got to actually head to a Financial Services Committee hearing in about 15 minutes. So I am going to start with him. Congressman, thank you so much for coming on. I know that climate change is your number one priority. We have already seen President Biden move to undo some of the Trump administration's climate policies. What would you like to see happen next? What's the number one thing on the top of your agenda? You know, I think I've been really encouraged that I think Biden has started by reframing the way we talk about climate change. Because so much of what we have to do is we have this narrative block. If climate change doesn't scare the ever living Bejesus out of you, you're not following the science well enough. But if we stop at that point, it becomes paralyzing and freezes action. And the flip side of that, and this is an end that I think people don't understand, but I've really been impressed by the appointments that Biden's made in the language, is that if you don't look at climate change and understand that this is a massively accretive economic opportunity, you also don't understand it well enough. Because everything that we do to lower CO2 emissions practically speaking replaces an old high marginal operating cost amortized asset with a new low marginal cost asset. If you buy an electric car, you stop paying for gas. If you put solar panels on your roof, you stop paying for electricity. If you inflate your house, you stop paying for heating. All those things are investments that can grow the economy. And the way that Biden has adopted a whole up government approach to it, the way he's been talking about it, putting people like Janet Yellen, talking about the greening of the Federal Reserve. We now have, I think, the opportunity to really change the, bring the public sort of reading level up to the level it needs to be. If we're going to address this challenge at anywhere near the speed we have to. Well, you identified two things that I am really interested in. Number one is the framing. The Biden administration has clearly put a good jobs framing on its climate policy. But the other thing is this question of, I don't know if apathy is the right word, but just how inexorable this problem seems. How do you think that can be conveyed to regular Americans that you don't have to wake up, read a depressing headline and just want to crawl back under the covers? Well, there are some things, and I realize I'm going to sort of, this is going to be slightly dodgy, but I just said, there are some things that you have to wait for public will. And there are some things that are scientifically complicated. You know, Fermilab is just outside of my district. Nobody sat around and said, we really shouldn't invest in a super collider until the average American understood quantum physics, right? And I would submit to you that probably the most impactful thing our country ever did for climate change was passed the 1992 Energy Policy Act in Furcorter 888. Those rules liberated energy markets caused us to increase the capacity of the nuclear fleet, caused us to install a whole lot of clean generation. In the last 20 years, the CO2 emissions associated with a megawatt hour of power generation in this country has fallen by over 25% and the price of power has fallen by 6%. The public didn't remotely understand that connection, but smart and lightened bureaucrats did. And you know, some of what I think Biden can do is messaging, as I said, but some other stuff. He's talked about getting rid of all the subsidies to the fossil fuel industry. The International Monetary Fund has kept it that we subsidize fossil fuels in this country to the tune of $650 billion a year. That's almost equal to our defense budget. Call it the, call it the Anne Rand, you know, economic free market act. Get rid of those subsidies. You will liberate markets. You will get all sorts of entrepreneurial activity happening. People might not understand it. People might see that as a fight. But the result will be to vastly rationalize the allocation of capital in this country. Well, that seems like a pretty big fight. I mean, I look at a district like yours, which is kind of a swing district. Do you think your voters, the kind of people who might not be sold on a greater good argument, could be sold on the argument that this is economically viable? Well, not only do I think that, I know it. Before getting to Congress, I spent 20 years running various clean energy companies. Right. I built about 80 projects. Every one of them was at least twice as fuel efficient as the electric grid. And with one exception, we did a project at the Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration in La Crosse, Wisconsin, which was exactly as moral as it sounds. That's the only project of those 80 I built where the customer was driven because they cared about climate. In every other exception, my customers were greedy, which is fine. They liked the idea of saving money. And so if you, there's one role that we have to educate the public. There's another role that we have to say, let's meet people where they are. If you care about national security, let's talk about eliminating refugee crisis. If you care about balance of payments, let's talk about reducing imports of foreign oil. If you care about economic growth, let's talk about this huge opportunity to boost our labor productivity because it takes a lot less labor to make a megawatt hour of solar than a megawatt hour of coal, right? All of it does now. Yeah, it's always taken less labor. You know, if you put a solar panel on your roof, yes, it's always been capital intensive, but you never had to hire an ash handler. You never had to hire a fuel handler. You never had to hire a fuel buyer. You never had to hire high temperature pipe welders. You never hired an operator to run that panel. And so that transition is all economically similar. You just have to speak to people in the language that they understand. I want to actually let Charles hop in because you have mentioned a couple of things that track with thinking about economic inequality. And I know that Charles has thought about where global inequality and climate mitigation come together. Thank you. First of all, I'd like to say everything Congressman Cassidy said, I think is absolutely right that this has to be a sort of technology driven transformation in the United States and in rich countries. My small concern about a big concern for the for the world's poorest countries, you know, the low income countries of the world, home to about 700 million people that emit about half of what the United States alone emits. And you know, on a per capita basis, far less. These are countries that, you know, really haven't contributed much to the stock of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide. They are the ones that are most likely to suffer from the impacts of climate change. And I think that we really need to be careful about how we internationalize our response to climate change. So in particular, you know, various countries, including in the US, are considering the idea of a tax on carbon at the border. So, you know, if if countries produce goods and greenhouse gases are emitted, we tax those goods when they reach our border. I think you're doing that to countries that so desperately need to export more to grow some of the very poorest countries in the world. Again, haven't been responsible for the climate crisis. You know, that would be a tragedy. I think taking money from our very effective US aid projects that are providing aid medicines to these countries and putting it into mitigation projects would be a disaster. So I think that this is a really important global problem. It's a particularly important problem for those poorest countries. But those poorest countries shouldn't be made to pay twice, if you will, for climate, you know, both suffering the most harm, but also having to pay for pay for the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, which they're not largely responsible for. Congressman, do you think there's an awareness of that and of that tension in in sort of American policymakers thinking? There absolutely is an awareness. And I'd come back to what I said at the start, that we are we're very aware of the pain of climate change and we are less aware of the gain. And and the and I don't I completely agree with Charles. There's a real issue there. You know, what do you do if you're Indonesia and your economy depends on cutting down rainforest and building palm oil plantations? There's a challenge there. However, there is so much wealth that can be generated by this clean energy transition. Switzerland uses half as much energy per dollar of GDP as the United States does. That means that we could double our GDP with the same level of energy use or if you prefer, cut our energy use in half with with no pain in our economy, right? The now if we do that, we're going to create a bunch of wealth. And then I think we have a challenge to say, not how do we allocate the pain of this transition? But how do we equitably allocate the gains? I think there's a certain laziness that says a rising tide will lift all boats. The reality is, you know, we've gone through as a species two major energy transitions already. We transition from muscle power to mechanical power when we tap hydro and then we transition from mechanical power to electrical power. Both of those generated tremendous wealth. In both cases, that wealth was extremely unevenly distributed through the globe. And as we're going through this transition, which is going to be driven economically, right? When GM says they're going to stop making gasoline-powered cars, it's not because they've come to the light. It's because they've realized they have a business problem, right? How do we go through, and the analogy that I like to explain to my colleagues is I don't think anybody would say that the industrialization of agriculture was bad for the American consumer. But I think you would have to be just a horrible person not to recognize that the second half of Majo's life was pretty rough. And so how do we make sure that we embrace those gains of productivity and economic growth, but also recognize that just because the average is better doesn't mean everyone's better? Congress, before I let you go on, I know you've got to go in about a minute. There is such limited political oxygen on Capitol Hill right now. If there were one thing that you could bring to the fore, what would that be? Oh, it's hard not to get caught up in politics. I mean, the things that are ideal are you can't do without a filibuster. I think we're gonna find ways through reconciliation to make probably some major infrastructure investments, which will be pretty substantial. If I'm not limited by anything, get rid of the subsidies, get rid of the fossil fuel subsidies. And then while we're at it, let's pass HR one to get rid of some of the distortions in our politics because there's actually, I think there's vastly less partisanship and objection to doing the right thing among the American public than there is among the people who are elected to represent the American public. And that the difference between those two is basically because of gerrymandering and campaign finance. So if we fix those, I think we can be a more representative form of government that can give the people what they want and they deserve. Just a few small tweaks around the edges. I know you got to go. So I want to thank you for spending some time with us. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much. Wish we had another three hours here, but I appreciate what you guys do. Thank you. Thank you. Charles and Sarah, I know that we are going to try to tackle a lot in the remaining time here. And I actually want to start with sort of this idea of trying to make policy in a crisis, in a crisis that is consuming so much time and energy and lives. Do you think, and Sarah, I guess I'll throw it to you in terms of tech and then Charles, we can talk about public health a little bit and climate. Do you think there's room to do that? I mean, obviously there are thousands of people engaged on these issues. And yet legislation moves slowly in Washington. That's a great question, Lizzie. One thing I will observe is that the pandemic and the crisis that we're in has really laid bare a lot of the critical technology issues that OTI and my colleagues at other organizations have been calling out and pushing for solutions to for decades or more. And the connectivity crisis that we're in right now, it is completely exacerbating and being exacerbated by the challenges that we're seeing in mitigating the pandemic. It truly is now a public health crisis to not have equitable access to robust and affordable internet. And so in some ways, I don't wanna say that the pandemic is opening political opportunities, but it is certainly elevating the severity of some of these problems in a way that hadn't always been the case before. And so yes, legislation can move slowly. We're hopeful that in this new administration, things will move less slowly. And we've already seen really significant progress through the emergency broadband benefit that was passed in late 2020 as part of the most recent stimulus package or COVID relief package. And so we're hopeful. And there's also a lot that federal agencies can do. The FCC, the FTC, Department of Justice, there's a role that the government in its entirety can play in helping to address many of the problems and challenges that we see as immediate in the forefront. The Biden administration has talked about another $10 billion for sort of cybersecurity infrastructure. And I'm thinking about how that might be applied to some of the failures we've seen, for example, with vaccine signups and the kind of idea of putting more public technologists to work. Where does that money need to go most critically? Well, I mean, we really do need to solve this connectivity crisis first and foremost. And I think that that will help ameliorate some of the equity concerns that we're seeing in how people access vaccine signups, for example. And so there are a lot of underlying challenges as well. But I think, and as President Biden has made clear in both the campaign and his remarks as president, we have to get people connected right now. Charles, you wrote this kind of fascinatingly timed book and there are a number of things in there that I think are really interesting in meeting the excerpts, but one thing is the sort of international way of thinking about infectious disease and the mitigation of that. In terms of what the Biden administration can do right now, how much of it is domestic and how much of it needs to be working with international partners, particularly as we see, for example, these frightening variants pop up in different places? Thanks, and I think one of the best things that the president did on day one was rejoining the World Health Organization. And that's because we learn every day how much this is a global crisis. We can't shut down our borders tight enough. We shouldn't want to shut down our borders tight enough to stop variants moving around the planet when we are in a situation ourselves of a pandemic that's so out of control. It's countries where the pandemic is out of control like it is here that are producing the new variants. It's not New Zealand, it's not Taiwan. They're coming up in South Africa, they're coming up in the UK of places where there are far, far too many people suffering from this terrible disease and that shows it's a global problem. And as you say, it's particularly a global problem because if these new variants, if they keep on developing and one turns out to be resistant to current vaccines, we'll probably be able to catch up with the vaccines, but it'll take time and extend the massive economic and social cost of this pandemic for longer. So clearly we need global responses. And I guess I'd say two things about the global response we've seen. It's probably been close to the best we've ever seen and it's just horribly insufficient. So on the plus side, we have seen these vaccines be developed in record time. And there has been some sort of international effort to make sure that vaccines get in the hands of every country, not just the richest countries at the same time, where nearly 95% of the vaccination that's actually happened today has happened in rich countries and we're not moving fast enough. So on the one hand, yay, planet, we're doing a lot better than we did against the Black Death. On the other hand, we really should be doing so much better than we are. And I hope that the Biden administration takes these lessons and pushes them for the end of this pandemic and to slow down on stop the next pandemic. So not least at the moment, we're in an incredible state of ignorance about how fast we can roll out these vaccines. And in part that's because all the contracts behind them are private. Now, that's incredible that the research behind these vaccines was largely done in publicly funded or public institutions. The development of the vaccines themselves and the testing was nearly all paid for by the government. The vaccines themselves are being paid for by governments worldwide. This is classic public interest stuff. And yet the contracts involved are kept private and those have information on who's paying, what for delivery, when, where, how much, what conditions attached are they saying in these contracts? You may only provide vaccines to us. So there's a huge amount of information in these contracts that we should all know, we need to know in order to do a better global response and those contracts are remaining private. So for next time, one of the many things I'd ask for along with the strongly WHO and so on is pre-agreement that tests for information on what the microbe looks like for all of the vaccine research and delivery. All of that, the global agreement is it's in the public domain from the start. It seems too simplistic to lay the blame for a lot of those issues just at the feet of the Trump administration because certainly we can say that and posit that their response was abysmal. But at the same time, you have places like New York where I live, which has Wadsworth laboratory, really the best public health laboratory in the country. And yet there have been so many stumbles in, I guess, the pipeline of testing, contact tracing, getting the vaccines out as you're talking about. And I guess I wonder, how can we still be so bad at this given that every country and these multinational organizations in every state has run drill after drill after drill and yet we've come to the real thing and it seems terrible. It is sad. I mean, early on in the pandemic, President Trump held up this map of the world in which the United States was pink or blue. I can't remember what color it was, but basically saying, hey, look, if you look at the international exercises, they suggest we're in the best place globally, we're number one in terms of our pandemic response capability. You have nothing to worry about people. And it's true, independent experts have come together and said, yeah, the United States is well prepared for the pandemic. The World Health Organization did a similar exercise and came to a similar result. As it turned out, I think there was somewhat of sort of preparing for the last outbreak, if you will. If COVID-19 had looked like Ebola, I think the United States would have responded as well as it did last time. It would have been a non-issue in the United States. COVID-19 looks nothing like Ebola. And it turns out that the capacities you need in this case are very different. And it's interesting to look at the countries that have done well against COVID-19. They're largely in East Asia and we think one reason why is because they'd had a reasonably recent experience with the SARS epidemic, which spread there far more than it did in the rest of the world. And one of the things they put in place was really good test and tracing regimes, which sort of brings back what Sarah was talking about earlier. I think, you know, it turns out we were well prepared against some pandemics and not others. And I guess for next time, what we need to make sure is we don't just run one war game and see how we do against a pandemic that looks a bit like Ebola or that looks a bit like COVID-19. We run 50 of the darn things. And, you know, are we prepared against a pandemic whatever it might look like? And not just United States, but every other country and not just every other country, but international organizations like the World Health Organization. And then we figure out what we need to make those organizations make countries have the capacity to be able to respond much better, much faster. Sarah, I know that OTI has thought about a lot of this stuff and there are a couple of threads I want to dig into. One of them was a statistic that actually struck me in one of the future agenda series articles, which is half of the federal IT workforce is either over average federal retirement age of 61 or will be within the next 10 years. So as you're thinking these big transformative thoughts about expanding technological access and sort of marrying tech and public health, how do you do that without a robust federal workforce or a federal workforce that relies very heavily on contractors in the technology sector? Well, I mean, we saw in the Obama Biden administration a really robust digital services crew core. And I think that's one way to link people centered problem solving with technical solutions or non-technical solutions depending on what the needs may be. And I think, we have some opportunities to kind of put these implementation questions into action. So for example, with the emergency broadband benefit that I mentioned earlier, I just want to emphasize how important this, it's a $50 a month subsidy for internet access for the duration of the pandemic. Previously, we have had the Lifeline program which is administered by the FCC which provides a $10, a $9.25 a month subsidy and has been embroiled in a number of challenges under the PI administration as they continue to walk back advances that we made in ensuring that that program could be used for internet access as well. So having this emergency broadband benefit will be really critical in getting currently unconnected or underconnected households online. And we know from OTI's research and others that cost continues to be the largest barrier to internet access in the United States and our research or cost of connectivity research which we updated last summer demonstrated a real affordability for monthly internet service for households in this country is $68 a month. And that's with the promotional benefits that goes up to an average of $84 a month when the promotions expire. And so we need to take steps now to mitigate that affordability crisis. Now, EBB, the emergency broadband benefit is well situated to do that but we have to stick the landing when it comes to actually administering that program. And I think that will be critical in guiding us in how we administer other internet and broadband related benefits in the future whether it's through Lifeline or elsewhere but also in thinking about how we administer federal benefits writ large. And I think that's where we really need to take a hard look at the systems in place to get people connected. We need to make sure people have connectivity to access these digital tools and also make sure that those digital tools really work for people. And my colleague in the public interest technology program at New America, when you practice labs they're doing lots of work in this context to really figure out strong solutions to these problems. I talked to Hannah Schenck about some of this on my show recently. And one of the things that I think the pandemic and certainly that the vaccine signup rollout has shown us is frankly, the professional class and more well off Americans are experiencing government services in a way that perhaps they didn't before and that low income Americans are very familiar with say a mobile dropdown window that doesn't work or digital signups that are ineffective or broken. How does that get fixed? And how does that get fixed in a way that is not to borrow the knock on the Obama administration that is not beholden just to Silicon Valley that actually thinks about this from a robust public interest standpoint. I think we need a variety of voices in the room to your point about Silicon Valley. We don't just need people from Silicon Valley thinking about these problems. We need people with connections to the communities that we're trying to serve at the solutions table, right? And I think this is something that, I credit the Biden administration in its, I commend the Biden administration in its efforts to create an administration that reflects the country. And I think that that is a important first step in populating the administration with people who are able to come to these problems with lived experiences that can help move us towards solutions that work for everyone and not just the white professional class. So step one I think is getting the right people at the table. I think another important thing to think about is that it's not always the technology that's gonna solve the problems. We may need to start getting people, humans, out into neighborhoods and communities to administer the vaccine and to focus as much on a public relations campaign as we do in a trust building campaign as we are on, like getting the technology exactly right. Though we do also need to make sure that the technology is something that works not just for, I mean, I've seen this in on Twitter among my technology policy advocacy colleagues. A lot of them are actually like writings, or not a lot of them, I've seen people who have written scripts to constantly refresh and look for vaccination time so that they can help their parents get access to the vaccine. Like we need a different solution than that for sure. And so yeah, so it's gonna take lots of perspectives at the table, particularly from the folks who are being disproportionately affected, low income, black and brown communities by the lack of equitable access to the vaccines, for that problem specifically. But we also need to think holistically about the problem and really identify where the pressure points are that we need to unlock to really move forward. And my colleague Hannah Schenke and others are doing amazing work in this regard. Charles, I see you nodding very vigorously, listening to Sarah, and I'm sort of wondering something. You wrote a book prior to this one called Getting Better, and it's sort of the idea that the world should be optimistic about where we are, like global development is succeeding. Are you still an optimist? I mean, how do you marry those two ideas in your mind given A, what you've just written about, but be everything that's all around us? So apologies for stepping away from the camera for a second. I had managed to lock myself in the basement with a dog who was starting to, well, there was gonna be howling, put it that way. The average American spends on their dog, and I'm sure I do, a lot more than $1.90 a day. And there are still sort of 700 million people worldwide who are living on that for everything every day. But that number used to be higher, and actually as a proportion of the planet, it's now around 10%. It was closer to 80, 90%, 150, 200 years ago. By the way, the COVID-19 crisis will be the first time in decades that it bounced up again. And it is a real tragedy that it's gonna put tens of millions of people, if not hundreds of millions, back into the most extreme poverty worldwide. So is it hard to be optimistic about the last year? Yes, I don't think anybody can say that the last year was the best year in history. And I sort of fairly regularly during the aughts and the 2010s would say, it's better than it was last year. Obviously not true of 2020. And I hope 2021 will be better than 2020, but I doubt very much it'll be better than 2019. So, and I think we are in a terrible place. The positive spin, if you will, is that the step backwards in poverty reduction will bring us back to about 2015. That's the speed of the progress we were making. The step backwards in global health might be a couple of years more than that. That was the speed of progress we were making in global health. And there is no reason at all to think we can't get back to that in a year or so. And we should, but still, we should right now be in the point of learning lessons about how to avoid such a tragic stop and reversal right now. And I do think the kind of technologies that Sarah is talking about and not just important in the United States, they're important worldwide, maybe not universal broadband for everybody yet, but at least universal access to mobile phone technology. We're about sort of 5% to 10% away from the world as a whole being under the mobile footprint. And that allows you to do all sorts of wonderful things and developing countries are actually leading in some of those wonderful things. So, if you look at the percentage of people in some developing countries that have access to mobile finance, for example, it's higher than it is in the United States. And that's been a really powerful tool during the pandemic. Being able to get money to people universally in a country is a pandemic control technique. You can't expect people to stay at home and follow lockdown regulations if they will not be able to survive doing that. If you... In rich countries or poor. Sorry? In rich countries or in poor countries. In rich countries or poor. So, if you can get the money, if you can give them some source of living that doesn't involve them having to go off to work, that is a pandemic control technique. And the countries that had broader access to mobile finance were able to roll out that kind of program better. So, and get information to them faster. And in some of them roll out better or worse tracking technologies as well. So, I think the agenda that Sarah is working on is definitely part of a global agenda and there's sort of good news on it. I said sort of maybe five to 10% of people aren't on the mobile footprint. Obviously 25 years ago, hardly anybody was worldwide. And so we've seen immense progress. I think one of the things that would come out of this crisis is we ought to get that last five or 10% under the mobile footprint to make sure that it's pretty much universal. Now, being under the footprint of a signal doesn't mean you have a phone. But usually if you're under the signal, you're somewhere near somebody with a phone. So it's at least a first step. And I don't actually think it would be very expensive. And actually, if there was one thing that I had hoped Samantha Power might do when she gets to USAID, thinking about that problem would be fairly high up on my list. Okay, but I wanna push you a little bit on that because if we look at, for example, what we're seeing in India right now, yes, there is very broad mobile penetration and you have a lot of people, getting information on their phones. But at the same time, they are currently at the mercy of the Modi government that is saying, I'm shutting down the internet in all these different places. Yes, absolutely. Technology allows for better outcomes, but sometimes allows for much worse outcomes too. And it does depend on leadership as well. I accept that. I will say that the Modi government for all its many faults actually has done a slightly better job than its predecessors when it comes to things like rolling out better ways to subsidize natural gas canisters which are a clean cooking mechanism for the poor, for example. So I agree their overall record, especially on privacy and human rights is terrible, but they have actually used these technologies sometimes to do some things that are better. Sarah, I heard Charles mention the sort of like hope that Samantha Power would do certain things at USAID and I kind of wonder, I always wonder when I talk to people like each of you if you had 15 minutes to make your case for some specific thing, the bugaboo that lives in your mind that would be a transformative policy that you get the president's here, you get the vice president's here, whoever's here you want, what would it be? I mean, there's so many, right, Lizzie? I know, we got a good one. We are work spans. I've been focusing a lot on the affordability crisis because that is like laid bare by the pandemic. I think we desperately need to move the needle on comprehensive data privacy legislation which is something that has been stagnated for years. And I think when we talk about a role, we haven't even really talked about tech companies and the implications of their role in the pandemic and we're getting to the point where we're pivot to audience questions, but we really need some guardrails on this internet industry that is based on monetizing our clicks and likes and engagements and which is having all of these knock-on effects, whether it's misinformation, whether it's extremist speech that is proliferating because that's what gets clicks and likes. And so, we have a lot of concrete steps we've laid out and I will be clear that the FCC in, I think commissioner Rosen or now acting chair, Rosen-Wurzels Sixth Day on the job has already responded to a petition that we have elevating an issue that we had flagged for former chairman Pi that he sat on for 10 months to try to allow schools and libraries to have some flexibility with how they can use their E-rate support to connect students beyond classroom walls since not everyone's in-person schooling right now. So to be clear, folks within this administration are already taking steps forward and so that gives me hope. But I think we have some real opportunities legislatively to think about some of the problems that we've been flagging for years and really start to move the ball forward constructively and with thoughtful solutions that reflect a wide range of stakeholders. Would you like to see a national data privacy law like California's but for everyone? So there are challenges with California's data privacy law. We have laid out principles in conjunction with other organizations. We have done a lot of work on data privacy in the context of internet service providers when the internet service providers were classified under Title II and subject to section 222 of the Communications Act. So we're eager to sort of get folks to the table and to start to have some real conversations about what that legislation would look like. Strong protections are important. There are a few things that we think that California got right and got wrong. Just to jump in, can I? Yeah. I'm excited and nervous about the US passing data privacy federal legislation this year. India, you mentioned earlier, Lizzie, India is likely to do it too, we think. And that makes it a really interesting year to sort of revisit globally the European data privacy led to the GDPR, you know, sort of about my colleague, Mike Pisa tells me about 60 countries worldwide have already kind of basically taken the GDPR model and tried to apply it. And it doesn't necessarily work in developing countries because it is immensely expensive and immensely complex but because they want to have sort of access to European markets, if you will, they are following GDPR. So I'm really hoping we see this year sort of more international effort, you know, the US coming together with Europe but also with developing countries to come up with data privacy regulations that kind of work for everybody. I mean, after all, it is a worldwide web. It is a worldwide web and yet we have these sort of American tech giants. I mean, one of the things that I have been really focused on and interested in is how you take American companies that tend to default to an American model of free speech and sort of embrace that, have that in their DNA and have them work in different places and, you know, for their interest to be profitable in different places, that's obviously what they want to do. It makes for some particularly weird policymaking inside those companies but it also makes those companies kind of the arbiter of who says what which obviously as we've seen is deeply problematic. I guess I wonder for both of you, where you see the future of that speech debate going? Is it some sort of tweaking of CDA section 230? Is it the growth of things like Facebook's oversight board? Is it paying content moderators better so that humans aren't just constantly bombarded with terrible things that they have to sift through? You know, this seems to be the problem that comes up in any conversation about tech policy is what to do and who should do it? I mean, I can start and let Charles kind of broaden the lens to the international context. Yeah, I mean, in the United States we have this thing called the First Amendment and the longstanding commitment to free expression that other countries have as well this is like baked in our constitutional DNA. So, you know, there are limits on what, for example, the federal government can do in terms of telling companies how they should moderate content online. And, you know, we can debate whether that's a good thing or a bad thing, but that's sort of the reality. With, you know, with some wiggle room around the some give around the edges. But what we have been focused on is really pushing companies and pushing the government to require companies to be more transparent about their content moderation practices so that we know what's happening, why these decisions are being made and we can help to shape those practices in better directions. Now, I want to step back for a minute if this was an easy problem to solve, right? If there was some policy lever that if we just pulled, the internet would be a much nicer, less chaotic, or, you know, like toxic place in a lot of respects. Sure, we could pull that lever without violating free expression norms in the country, like, yes, let's do it. But one, this isn't an easy problem to solve. And every time you pull a policy lever in one context, it affects behavior and companies in other contexts. And so we want to make sure that we're really getting it right when it comes to putting policies into place that define the contours of what effective content moderation looks like. We had, you know, sometimes we have to reevaluate. We had pushed for a public exemption for policymakers or elected officials urging companies to not take down content, but rather flag and obscure that content because there's a free expression interest in knowing that a politician is lying or otherwise violating the norms and practices of a company's policies. What we saw with the de-platforming of former President Trump was a situation where that was simply not a workable solution when the former president was inciting immediate violence and immediate violence was, in fact, happening at the Capitol. And we supported the platforms to decide to actually remove Trump off of their platform. So it's complicated. I think we could spend an entire hour just talking about section 230 and the landmines that existed modifications there. We tend to take a cautious approach to making any changes to the statute because we think that the liability protections that it provides are actually really important to how the internet has worked and continues to work. But we are at the table in those conversations and trying to figure out what it means to move forward as the internet evolves and as these problems online evolve. So I'm a huge fan of Wikipedia and Wikipedia tells me that, you know, section 230 is really important to them continuing. So I think I'm broadly in line with Sarah and definitely I am delighted that, you know, places like OTII are really thinking about this issue in depth in a way that I certainly haven't. It becomes even more complicated when privacy standards are so different worldwide. I mean, just to take one example, in Norway, if you want to know about your neighbor's tax return, you can look it up online. I doubt the United States is about to introduce that. I mean, privacy standards sort of vary within and between issues and countries in a way that does make this incredibly complicated. I just, you know, my only plea would be because there are these huge spillover effects of legislation like GDPR, like what might happen in the States this year, that at least, you know, those voices are at the table during the discussion. Do you think from what you've seen so far, Sarah, that that is the way the Biden administration will approach things? I mean, after all, he did sort of pop off in his New York Times editorial board interview and say, yeah, get rid of it. In reference to section 230, you know, was that just Biden during the campaign and we're going to have a sort of broader more people at the table approach now? You know, I think that's one where we have to see, we haven't heard much on section 230 since that one sort of one-off remark. And I'm hopeful that we see in the Biden administration opportunities to convene a variety of stakeholders and to really think about the complexities of these problems and the need for complexity and the solutions. And I think that's really important. And it's something that we were missing, in a large part in the prior administration. There was a lot of like reflexive political, we need to get rid of 230 because we don't like the way that Twitter is moderating its content. Well, that's not how this works. And the proposed changes that the push at the FCC to get the FCC engaged on section 230 would not have led to the outcomes that people were hoping for. And so pulling back a little bit on the political rhetoric and really coming to the table and trying to figure out what the right solutions are, I think it's something that we're hoping to see in this administration. Do you think that's possible? I mean, after all, we have been through such a bruising few years politically. And even though you might think with one party controlling Congress and the White House that things would be smoother, those margins are very small. And you heard Representative Kaston talk about reconciliation, things are not easy on the Hill. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of work to do for sure. And we have been engaging with policymakers. We filed a statement on the record on the PACT Act, for example. So I don't think that it's all just, I don't think it's all politically fraud. I think that there are going to be opportunities to move the ball forward on key policy issues. Now, will there be bumps in the road? Of course, I'm sure, with the slim margins in Congress, it means that ideas can get traction quickly and could end up passing. And so there's a level of continued engagement, I think that's necessary. So we're certainly, OTI is certainly willing to continue that engagement in 2021 and beyond. Charles, I'm gonna toss a question to you that we got from the audience. Asking sort of what extent the Biden administration will be able to advance global governance on climate change in line with the Paris Agreement, especially related to financial markets and to carbon taxes. Which kinds of global institutions will be leveraged? It's a tough time for global institutions. I hope we see the World Health Organization get more power and more finances, had a flat budget for the last 20, 30 years, I think. But when it comes to climate in particular, of course, Paris was in a way a snatching, not defeat from the jaws of defeat. It wasn't a binding agreement. It didn't involve a global carbon tax or a global price on carbon. And I don't think the situation has changed that much that all of a sudden just because we have a new administration, that's going to change. I do hope we see progress on a bunch of fronts though. I mean, for a start, the sort of agenda that the congressman was laying out earlier, it was a really hopeful agenda, not just for the United States, but for the planet. If the United States starts taxing carbon at the right levels and introducing all of these new technologies and so on, that has massive global ramifications, not just the lower carbon output from the United States, but the fact that those technologies will go global. So that makes me a bit happier. I hope also there is sort of more money for international endeavors around climate. And as I say, I hope it doesn't come at the cost of international endeavors around poverty reduction, but as long as it's new and additional money, a term invented by Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, back when she was in office, the idea of new and additional 100 billion for mitigation and adaptation worldwide, I think is very exciting. And if United States can put in its proportion of that, that would be great news. So I don't think we're in a new world where suddenly we're gonna have a strong international agreement around climate, but I do think we're in a new world where the hope that we really actually start taking this issue seriously at the national and global level is upon us. And actually the world will look a more positive place in terms of greenhouse gas emissions in a few years is really on the table. It is possible that we've already hit peak carbon dioxide emissions worldwide. It's not certain, but it's possible. And if so, that would be a first step towards getting us towards a stable climate and that would be fantastic news. How does one, how do we as a country then advance policies that are not whipsawed by the change in political administrations? Because if you even think about the first executive orders that President Biden signed, they were undoing a number of Trump executive orders. And when we are thinking about things that have footprints that extend out into generations, it seems so difficult to put those two things together, policies that are so politicized here and maybe will be ripped away in the next four or eight years. So back in the day, I was, I think, around 12 or 13 at the time, Ronald Reagan signed an international treaty that had gone through the Senate like 97 to three or something on chlorofluorocarbons and reducing the threat to the ozone layer, which worked. And we are not talking about a bunch of penguins with sunburn anymore because we've actually dealt with the ozone problem. And sorry, I shouldn't minimize it. I mean, it was gonna lead to millions of cases of cancer worldwide each year and amongst other horrible effects. But we dealt with that problem. We dealt with US leadership by partisan support in the Senate. Republicans, Democrats came together to pass an international treaty. We haven't seen much of that of late and I do think it leads to this problem, which is most of our international and a lot of our national policymaking is by executive order rather than by legislation and can be reversed. Sorry. If I could jump in, Lizzie, I would also posit a different theory here that I think sometimes what feels like whipsawing is actually incremental progress. So a couple of things I'd point to. The entire debate around broadband access, like the door has opened in the past year and the awareness of the problem has really become embedded in the psyche of the entire country and the world in part because of the pandemic but also because of the advocacy and grassroots organizing and campaigning that has been happening for years. And so we are making progress towards the problem. Is it at a fast enough speed? No. Did FCC Chairman Pye undo a lot of things that we saw as wins in the Chairman Wheeler at CC? Of course. And that gets to the second example I'd point to. And I know where everyone's tired of talking about net neutrality and this is a conversation that's inevitably gonna come back up during the Biden-Harris administration but there's a lot of talk about the back and forth. We have net neutrality rules and we don't. And when I describe the arc of net neutrality I actually describe it differently. We had increasingly over time bipartisan support for, or sorry, we had bipartisan support over time for increasingly strong net neutrality protections using various legal approaches some of which worked and some of which didn't work one of which did work. And I think we really actually moved the needle to understanding the value of an open internet and the need for guardrails from the FCC. Now, in actual like day-to-day policy, sure. Yeah, Chairman Pye undid the entire net neutrality order from 2015 and removed the FCC's role in overseeing internet service providers when they, because of lack of authority with Title II, but over time I think we're really seeing progress on these issues. And so I just wanna remind people to think about this as potentially a marathon and not a sprint but also to look for ways that we can move the needle and can get internet users stronger and better protections online. Thank you, Sarah, you're right. Even if in the case of international organizations and binding international treaties we're not going in the right direction. A heck of a lot of other stuff is and is sustainably in the areas you just talked about. I mean, also I was mentioning the days of Reagan, that was a time when the majority of white people polled said there shouldn't be interracial marriage. If you look at gay rights, so yes, lots of things are sustainably getting better in the policy realm. And I shouldn't allow my misery around international organizations to cloud me over much. But that is a good and optimistic, I think, note to end on. I really wanna thank both of you, Sarah Morris, Charles Kenney for this conversation. I feel like I could talk to you for a very long time and to also thank Representative Caston who was with us earlier. And I wanna thank Future Tense and New America for hosting us. And if you want more information you can actually follow this whole conversation and our speakers on Twitter. You can go to at Future Tense now and that shall give you a sense of how things are going. And you can actually check out the Future Agenda series. There are a lot of really interesting specific ideas in there that I think are fun to noodle over. So thank you to the audience and everybody stay safe, stay healthy and have fun on your various zooms. Thank you so much. Okay, bye.