 Come back to ThinkTech. There's Energy in America at 3 o'clock every other Wednesday, and we have this show with Lou Pooley-Reece. He's the president of EPRNC, Energy Policy Research Organization in Washington, D.C., and he is joining us from Washington, D.C., which is very special, because today is a very, what do we call it, federal government day. We've had the results of the runoffs in Georgia, and we've had a breach of the Capitol Building for the first time since 1812, make that 1814 part of the 1812 war, he told me. Lou, welcome back to your show. Lou Pooley-Nice to be here, Jay, and the title this evening is to understand how the Georgia Senate elections, which ties the Senate but actually effectively gives the Democrats control of the Senate, what it's going to do to energy and environment policy over the next few years. Before we talk about that, the sort of mundane stuff, we did have a little activity in Washington today. Every time someone is upset, they seem to want to come to my town and tear up the lawns and protest and do things, and so today, as you pointed out, we had a breach of the Capitol, really unusual, because it's a fairly well fortified building. This was, in fact, if you go on the Internet, you can see some character in Nancy Pelosi's office with his feet up on the table. Perfect. Perfect, yeah. And, you know, one of the things is, and today, I think, although President Trump did give a speech today, and he has been complaining incessantly that the election was stolen from him, actually, he might have some merit that the election quote unfair, but all elections are unfair, you know, both sides engage in some shenanigans, the press is sometimes very inequitable in the way they distribute its criticism and praise, but no one can doubt he brought out most of this stuff himself, and in fact, I think one of the interesting things about the Georgia elections is, I believe that it has, it will free the Republican party from Trump as a kingmaker. He has personally, he is personally responsible for losing these Senate races in the way he comported himself, in my opinion. And so before we talk about what this all means to energy and environment policy, I think it's necessary to go back and look a little bit at history and see what lessons there are in these kinds of things. And you know, in January of 1961, Vice President Richard Nixon had just lost a very tough election to Senator John Kennedy. And there was no doubt that in several states, there was some shenanigans on voter fraud, the kinds of very common things in Chicago, particularly, right? And there was what we had today, a vote counting of the electors, right, which is a very procedural process. Nobody ever. And Nixon was in the well of the Senate, right? And the 12th Amendment of the United States requires a joint session in Congress to open all the certificates and count them. And it's a very, it's a session loaded with a lot of pageantry people bringing, you know, they bringing the ballots and a special box. And and Nixon began the vote count because remember, he's as the vice president, he's president of the Senate, right? And when the tally was complete, Kennedy had received like 303 electoral votes and Nixon 2019 and Harry Bird 15. People forget that. But before joining the joint session, Nixon asked the speaker for permission to make a brief statement. And then he declared actually that his defeat, his opponents victory were an elegant example of the stability of our constitutional system and of the proud tradition of the American people and developing, respecting and honoring the institutions of self-government. Remember, this is one of the most vilified presidents of the Trump in American history, yet he had the good sense, the patriotic duty and the an understanding of his historic position and in, you know, his historic position as a defeated candidate on what needed to be done to demonstrate the transition of power is to take place peacefully. And in fact, Nixon, mostly would quite surprised after they finished this huge camp that goes on forever, the whole chamber actually erupted in a prolonged ovation. And Mike Mansfield himself commented that he'd never seen anyone handle such a loss with such dignity and his head held high. So we can even take lessons from Richard Nixon. That's my, you know, the takeaway from this little story. And why it's important for us to have leaders who understand, yes, we are kind of a tumultuous society, we have a lot of huge political differences. But we have to respect the institutions. That's all we have to hold on to. And so I am personally horrified by the breach of the Capitol. I just think this is just, this is just as bad as the riots. I mean, there's been no smashing the stores and stuff, but reaching the Capitol and engaging in this behavior is outrageous. And I hope eventually, these people will be prosecuted. So far, we're not, we haven't been prosecuting anybody in Washington for various crimes against private property, but maybe now we will do so. But one point to mention, in the case of Nixon, maybe he thought he saw into the future, thought later he would run again. And the grace that he exhibited on that day in 1961 paid him back. It served him well. Because if he had done something less gracious, or worse yet, if he had done something along the lines that Trump has been doing, his chances of running again would have been seriously diminished. Yes, I do think, I mean, I don't, we don't want to spend too much time on this. There is a group, a very substantial group of people in American society who feel alienated that the system is not working for them. That the, that the acrimony, that is expressing, I think the level, I've never seen this level of people have said this many times. But actually, I think it's true. I've never seen this degree of political acrimony between the two parties in my, and I've been in Washington since the middle 1970s. And I've never seen anything like this. It's, it's just terrible. And I don't, I don't like a lot of the ideas that people come up on both sides of the aisle. But I'm used, I'm, you know, used to you're debating these issues on their merits. Publishing, publishing documents, talking about them and discussing them and then take taking your wounds and go home quietly. Don't you know, that's just the way it works. You can't always get your way. So do you think that Trump's departure will ameliorate that divisiveness? I think there's no doubt about that. And I also think, I mean, I don't know what some members of the Republican Party are up to. I'm not, I think they're making a huge mistake, but there's going to be a sort of come to Jesus sort of set of meetings in the coming couple of years. And I think there will, in many ways, this event today might purge the party of this kind of control Trump seems to have as a king. I mean, look, he is responsible for the loss in Georgia. He is responsible. He has to, you know, he handled that completely wrong. Well, I mean, he's been special in his own right, but he is also fomented all kinds of unrest and incompetence throughout the government. And I don't know if the ordinary schmo reacts the way I do, but I'll tell you this, you know, there have been times in my life when I have voted for Republican candidates. But I will never I'm telling you now on the record, I will never vote for another Republican candidate, as long as I live after what happened in the Trump period. You don't have to worry in Hawaii, no Republican candidate will ever win. Not with my vote ever. And not any national candidates either. Actually, I do think this is something to think about because I can't actually point to a half dozen dozen things Trump did that were actually very good for many of the people who are viewed who may be detested the most is a justice reform, particularly for black Americans, was an amazing achievement. It was a recognition and the justice reform and the and the and the opportunity for lots of people who were put in jail for long term for drug offenses and stuff. He should be given credit for that. And many black Americans do give him credit for that. Well, I give him credit for reform on the pardon in the pardon department. He has given obvious criminals pardons. And I'd like to suggest that he's going to do more of that before he's finished here. And so to the extent that he has demonstrated incompetence and what do I say complete complete violation of all the norms in so many other areas, I must say, Lou, I don't give him credit for anything. If he did anything that had a beneficial effect, it was a mistake. It was it was accidental. Well, yeah, so I do think there were many things having to do with, you know, the tax reform, the I was a really bad bill. Well, that just depends on your perspective. You have to look at the the economic growth we got out of that. Then there is the support for historically black colleges. The point is that all these presidents, even the worst of them, there are things they do that are positive. There are things they do that the regulatory reform, I would say there's a half dozen areas at least in which he had a positive contribution. But these were overwhelmed in my opinion, by his inability to take advice, his sort of narcissistic behavior, and his complete ignorance and maybe not ignorance, but this credit of all the traditional political norms that makes a complex system like the US work. That's my I'm not a I'm not a I don't suffer from Trump derangement syndrome. I don't I see him as who he is, but I do believe that the damage he has done is substantial. I do believe that it's incalculable, Lou. We're going to be paying a price for decades for the things he has done. He was the worst president this country has ever seen by far by multiples and eons far. And to the extent that anything he ever did work, that was in my view, it was completely accidental or coincidental, certain differences. But, you know, I think, you know, he's not going to rank high. I don't know if he's the worst, but he'll be close to it. I think it, but it's almost all style. You know, it's almost all style and abuse of the institutions. You know, I was with a bunch of Europeans right after Trump was elected. And they were just I was chairing a pretty big session in Germany in outside of Frankfurt and Cronenberg. And then Germans were just beside themselves. And I said, look, America has great institutions. And we have had all kinds of presidents, and we've gotten through it. And I think we're going to see here, well, we'll get through it again. We are going to get through it. It's going to be we're going to have a new president. Bobby won't take the press more than a couple of months before they decide they don't like him. But and we're going to, you know, we're going to have, but I think we're going to move more towards what we call regular order in Washington, which is we have a process, we go through it. We debate it. Things are decided. People fight about it in the press and they go home and try to, you know, throw the new guy in. It's a whole conversation. But I, but you know, I think that we've lost our way on a number of levels. Maybe just maybe, you know, Biden can do better. But the problem with Congress, the problem with the president is that everybody's interested in in gratifying himself. Trump was only, you know, a symptom of that. And McConnell was only a symptom. We've been doing it for a long time where self interest rules. And I think we've got to go back to Mr. Smith goes to Washington with the sole notion of serving the country and the people. So I would suggest your listeners read Majority Leader McConnell's speech today, which was very much in keeping with the Nixon tradition about this transfer of power, complete repudiation of what Trump was trying to do and adherence to the importance of our democratic institution. So I don't blank, you know, these people are, you need to think these people are political animals. They're politicians. And you can't don't fall in love with them, but they're not as bad as we think they are. They're never as good as people say they are, but they're never really as bad as we think. They they they are balancing a lot of interest from their own constituencies, from their own political bases. And out of that comes a comes a unique sort of American solution to a lot of problems. Well, you know, I haven't seen this speech from McConnell, but I'll assume and I will I'll take a look at it, but I but I will see it. Let me let me add, though, that even assuming it was the most beautiful, you know, patriotic, kindly statement of high principles, I would add that it is much too little and much too late because he has been sucking up to Trump the whole time. He has done horrible, horrendous things for as long as they've been together. And I give him no credit at all for some some, you know, fancy high-minded words at the very end. Much too little, much too late. He's a bum. Yeah, well, I mean, it just depends. You know, I guess I've been in Washington too long, but I have a very complex view of these guys on both sides of the aisle. And I would rarely make that kind of judgment on any of them. And except perhaps Trump, you know, in the sense, you know, I just think it's, you know, it is the nature of American politics in many ways. And you know, when I tell even I tell this to my kids, look, he's just the president. It's not like these guys are father or somebody who should be remotely important in your life. Don't personalize politics. Don't personalize all this stuff. It's too, it'll give you an ulcer. You're in control of your own life. These guys are not controlling your life. Well, let me, let me, let me say that my conclusion and the conclusion of some of the others who speak on think tech has been that, you know, sooner or later, one way or the other, the combination of Trump and McConnell will get us. They will come to us. They will visit us. They will make us suffer. Now, and some people have already had that experience. Other people have not. Other people don't like to think about it. But I would like to ask you that question, you know, in three months or six months or nine months into the Biden administration and ask you what you think about the long shadow that they have cast across our future and see if your answer is still the same. Let me say I've had plenty of criticisms of Trump and I will have plenty criticisms of Biden, but I will not have the same personal opinion about it. Okay. I believe that Biden will engage in a lot of wacky ideas, but I believe deep down he is a decent person. He is a decent man. I'm convinced he will promulgate a series of wacky policies. And by the way, I have not seen any president not do that. Okay. We're going to have to continue our discussions on this. I hope you remember this discussion so I can hold you to it. All right. I don't have to worry. Who's ever president, they're going to do stuff that just because. Okay. Let's go to our case in chief, Lou. Our case in chief has to do with the elections in Georgia. As you know, last night in Georgia, and actually I was quite surprised. I realized that they lost one of the Senate seats. As you know, there was a runoff election for both the six-year term and also a replacement term. All the candidates in my view were sort of weak. I don't know this guy Ossoff has never done anything that I can tell his whole career. And Warnock had a kind of a checkered history as a kind of fiery, a firebrand pastor. But I think Purdue and Laughler were not that strong candidates either. In any case, the Democrats won. They now have, we now have a Senate starting on January 20th, which will have 50 Democrats and 50 Republicans. And in that particular system, Vice President, which is Kamala Harris, will be able to break the tie. This means that Charles Chuck Schumer from New York, who's very much concerned about a primary challenging challenge from AOC in this Cortez, Ocasio Cortez, will become the new speaker of the new majority leader of the Senate, excuse me. And all the committee chairs will be chaired by Democrats. That's the Energy Committee and the Environment Committee. Now, the Senate has a lot of peculiar rules. And the question is how will that play out in this new session? And I think we've identified four things that these election means in terms of energy and environment policy. One, there's probably going to be less room between the two parties for energy policy consensus, right? There's going to be less likely they're going to reach. There's less stuff they're going to agree on, right? Then, you know, Democrats, I mean, you know, the Democrats might not forgive or forget objections in the past, but basically, the acrimony and partnership is not and partisanship is just not going away. In fact, I've never seen the acrimony, I've heard. Second, when it comes to green fuels in 2022, the Democrats will probably have an upper hand, right? And if you think about it, McConnell will lose his chair and what we're going to have is a very thin Republican minority and it could serve a check on their green agenda for one place only. Senator Manchin from West Virginia is not going to vote for Waco green ideas. He's from West Virginia. People depend on coal and oil and gas in West Virginia. And so everything that happens is going to require all 51 Democrats to vote for the provision, right? Now, with there is something in U.S. law under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act and the Energy Policy and Conservation Act and other provisions held by the president in which he could declare a climate emergency under the National Emergencies Act, right? So Biden could try to supersede a lot of the traditional legislative powers of the Senate and by executive order declared emergencies act. But actually and this, you know, we did this in the Korean War where we intervened in energy production and manufacturing under the Defense Production Act. So I think Biden has this authority. He could he could execute it. With the authority under the what is it emerge a climate emergency act? Well, there's no such thing as a climate emergency act. He had to pull user legislation. The International Emergency Economics Powers Act or the Energy Policy and Conservation Act or, you know, the Outer Continental Shells Act. He could try to halt U.S. oil production in some parts of the country. My personal view is that Biden is too centrist to invoke these kind of far-reaching presidential emergency powers and he will not use this to advance his climate agenda. In addition, if you look at the people he's selected, they're not really bomb-throwing radicals, right? Former EPA Agency Administrator Gina McCarthy who's the sort of domestic climates are. She's a kind of, you know, traditional technician rather than progressive politician like Washington State government and climate hawk Jay Inslee who wanted that job, right? And so I think here we're going to see a lot of movement on the margin. I think we're going to see a push for more electric cars. But Biden's also going to be very sensitive to the issue. Well, if you have a, if you ban electric cars, if you try to do that, what happens to people that can't afford electric cars? Because they're too expensive. They're going to have to address, I don't, it's hard for me to think that Biden will not be sensitive to it. And then the other issue that's very important, I think, is the filibuster, right? Now, for people in the audience that don't know about this, the filibuster is really a parliamentary, a legislative mechanism requires de facto 60 votes, right? Essentially a Senate supermajority for most laws, not all, not all laws, right? It was broken by Harry Reid, the former Democratic majority leader, and further broken by McCombs for the Senate, for the Supreme Court. So, what the interesting thing about this is both Senators Manchin and Bernie Sanders are Senate institutionalists and they want to keep the filibuster. So, I'm not really thinking that they're going to break the filibuster to make the U.S., Puerto Rico, and the Solomon Islands states. I just don't see that happening, probably. And I think, and probably takes a constitutional amendment for the District of Columbia. And the other interesting thing about all this is that someone like Manchin, who's kind of a swing vote, if he said, well, maybe he should just switch to the Republican Party, but I don't think Manchin will do that because he is sitting in the most important catbird seat in the Senate. If they want to do anything, they're going to have to work it out with Joe Manchin. And I don't think he's ever, ever experienced such attention. So, as we go forward for this, and you know, and we're, this acrimony hasn't gone away. There's, you could see lots of things happening. In fact, you might see a national clean energy standard. It's a viable thing. You might see multi-billion-billion-dollar transition accelerating stimulus spending on renewables and electric vehicles. So, we are going to be entering a really interesting period in the energy transition and the U.S. role in that. Well, from what you say, I gather that we can say that 50 Republicans and 50 Democrats with a Democratic, what president of the Senate in the front of Kamala Harris, that should give the Democrats the edge. But you cannot assume that the Democrats will all vote for a given initiative. So, it's not as simple as saying all Democrats plus Kamala Harris will vote for everything that comes up from the Democrats. No, but they definitely do the procedural things, right, the committee chairman and all these things. So, I think, but I couldn't agree with you more. And at one level, maybe they can take this lemon and make lemonade out of it because there are lots of Republicans that are interested in climate, maybe not the same level, the same approach, different tactics, and perhaps they can put some grand bargains together to get on the gradient, so to speak, and make some progress in important areas. So, respecting that Biden has, you know, kind of a mandate because he's promised it to go green at least to some extent. And there are people in, you know, the Congress who want them to do that and, you know, are criticizing if we're not doing it enough in his appointments, recognizing all that, and recognizing the problem we just described with the 50-50 Senate, what's your advice to him about how he should conduct himself in terms of, you know, maintaining the relationships and also effectuating good policy? So, I think there is a consensus in the U.S. and among the, you know, there's a lot of high wind states that are run by Republicans. People forget that, like that. You have no trouble to getting the Midwestern agricultural states to vote for wind subsidies. It's not a problem at all because a lot of wind blows there. So these politicians, all politics are local. They do that. And so they go ahead and these things are very much likely to be opportunities for compromise and consensus. And if I were Biden, I would spend some time thinking about, well, how should I think about America's energy security? The vast swath of oil and gas producers in Pennsylvania, Texas, Oklahoma, West Virginia, New Mexico. What should I do to not be too punitive for them so they can continue to be a major supplier to the world oil market? At the same time, get cooperation from them to accelerate renewable strategies in the power sector and other parts of the U.S. economy. So I suspect Biden is capable of figuring that out, whether he can cobble together a kind of compromise here. It certainly is not outside his DNA. He was in the Senate for 40 years. He's got to understand what needs to be done. Well, would you agree with me that we live in different times now? Those 40 years are interesting but not necessarily dispositive. We live in times when climate change is all the more threatening. We live in times when there's a generation of people coming up now who are insisting on dealing with climate change. Finally, you describe a country where everybody is out for protecting the interests of his jurisdiction. Of course, that's up till now the American way. But if you look at the world in general, if you look at the country in general, we really have to do something about energy so that we don't make climate change worse. Now, I grant you there are reasons to be careful about that, not to undermine our economy. But what about the notion of let's try to protect the country in general from the ravages of climate change? Let's try to protect the world and be a world leader in climate change. Although we don't necessarily have to cut out all the fossil fuels, we should take deliberate steps to reduce them. I mean, wouldn't that work? Well, in principle, it sounds like a reasonable approach. But the devil's in the details. There's a lot of and certainly something we can talk about in the future show. What are the elements of this energy transition that makes sense for us? It's a global problem. What we do is frankly, particularly on the local level, is not going to have a very big effect unless China, India, and the major economies in the Indo-Pacific region decide they want to do it. I mean, just think about it. When you talk to people, they talk about climate. They talk about energy. People forget about steel. You can't make anything without steel. All the wood in your fake background there needs a steel saw or a steel, some device to extrude plastic. Well, it takes a hundred tons of iron ore plus a highly dense energy source to produce a hundred tons of steel. Well, what's going to happen in India and China? They have enormous requirements for steel if they're going to continue to grow. And so, yes, I agree with you. We need to get on the gradient and do this. But we need a system that is less wishful and more thoughtful. Well, the thing is that today and now, these are historic times. Georgia runoff elections, that's historic. We could have been stuck with Mitch McConnell for another four. That would have been something bad. And then, you know, Trump lost the election, although he struggles and strains against that and organizes these skinheads to come and bust up the Capitol. The fact is they're out of the Capitol. They demonstrated who they are and I guess the police and whatever police forces were in Washington have demonstrated they had the ability to get them out of the Capitol. So so it's a historic day, Lou. And I want to ask one last question of you. What is your advice? What is your reaction? Why is it historic? What does it mean? What message do you want to leave with our viewers on this special day? So, I would say one thing to remember about first, your politics is very messy. But remember, we actually do have great institutions in the United States. And people don't like the outcomes of the courts often, but we do have and we have accomplished amazing things. And you can go through life seeing everything. I'm not a Pollyanna person, but the notion that this country and I forget about Trump, the notion that this country, the military, our scientists, produced a vaccine in nine months. I can't think anything more American than that. Right? I can't think of anything more American than that. Take a look at the number of bombers and fighter aircraft we made during World War II. I didn't think we still had that in us. The fact that we did this in nine months is an enormous achievement. And I understand everybody's been kind of coddled and complaining and nothing works. But this is an achievement. And you don't even have to give Trump credit for it. Give all the scientists at the FDA, the NIH, the researchers, the army, the army itself, which is handling the logistics. It's something all Americans should be very proud of. And that's the message for the new year. We are still a country with enormous innovative capacity. And we can take that innovative capacity and use it in a lot of different ways. Thank you, Lou. Lou Puliarisi, a fitting message on the new year. Happy new year to you, Lou. I look forward to more of our discussions going forward in these very interesting and challenging times. Aloha.