clean energy transition

Hey Smarties! Make Me Smart is taking a little summer vacation this week. We’ll be back in your feeds soon. But for now, enjoy a rerun of one of our favorite episodes of the year so far.

To reach the Joe Biden administration’s goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050, the country’s energy infrastructure needs a massive overhaul, and fast.

But many communities are not on board with the idea of a massive wind or solar farm in their area. Some counties are banning renewable energy developments before the planning can even begin.

“All those wind turbines and solar panels, and then all the transmission lines that you need to build … it has a big footprint. And that creates lots of land-use conflicts,” said Ted Nordhaus, founder of The Breakthrough Institute.

On the show today, Nordhaus breaks down climate NIMBYism, the threat it poses to our green-energy economy and what it might take to keep the green transition moving forward.

In the News Fix: Work as we know it is changing. Many U.S. companies are already using ChatGPT in one way or another, and the artificial intelligence chatbot is replacing jobs. Plus, workers in Asia and Europe are going back to the office at much higher rates than American workers.

Then, we’ll hear from listeners about how later school start times have improved their family’s mornings, the debate about what to call mocktails, and why Americans keep eggs in the fridge.

Here’s everything we talked about today:

• • “Decarbonization and its Discontents” from The Breakthrough Institute

• • “Will NIMBYs sink new clean energy projects? The evidence says no – if developers listen to local concerns” from The Conversation

• • “The Environmentalists Undermining Environmentalism” from The Atlantic

• • “America needs a new environmentalism” from The Economist

• • “Should I Learn Coding as a Second Language?” from Wired

• • “1 in 4 companies have already replaced workers with ChatGPT” from Resume Builder

• • “As Americans Work From Home, Europeans and Asians Head Back to the Office” from The Wall Street Journal

• • “What’s happened to the lunch places in office neighborhoods?” from Marketplace

• • “Why do we refrigerate eggs and other countries don’t?” from the Egg Safety Center

What have you been wrong about lately? We want to hear your answer to the Make Me Smart question! Leave us a voice message at 508-U-B-SMART, and your submission may be featured in a future episode.

In August, Joe Biden signed into law the Inflation Reduction Act, which included $392 billion towards a new climate budget — the single largest investment in emissions reduction in U.S. history. The CHIPS and Science Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act bring that number up to around $450 billion. All of that spending is designed with one major objective in mind: to put the United States on a path to a decarbonized economy, with the goal of reaching net zero emissions by 2050.

Achieving that goal is perhaps the single most important challenge of our age. And so I wanted to dedicate a full episode to it. How big is the task of decarbonizing the U.S. economy? What do we actually need to do to get there? How does the I.R.A. help do that? And what are the biggest obstacles still standing in our way?

Jesse Jenkins is an assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Princeton University and leads the Princeton ZERO Lab. He was a lead author of the Net Zero America report, the most comprehensive attempt to map out the different pathways to decarbonization I’ve seen. He also leads the REPEAT Project, which has done some of the most in-depth modeling of how the Inflation Reduction Act and other climate policies could affect emissions.

As a result, this conversation ended up being the single clearest explanation I’ve heard of both the path to decarbonizing America and the impact the Biden administration’s climate bills could have on that effort. I learned a ton from this one, and I think you will too.

Book recommendations:

Making Climate Policy Work by Danny Cullenward and David G. Victor

“Sequencing to Ratchet Up Climate Policy Stringency” (academic paper) by Michael Pahle, Dallas Burtraw, Christian Flachsland, Nina Kelsey, Eric Biber, Jonas Meckling, Ottmar Edenhofer and John Zysman

How Solar Energy Became Cheap by Gregory F. Nemet

Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.

You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.

“The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Annie Galvin and Rogé Karma. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, Mary Marge Locker and Rollin Hu. Original music by Isaac Jones. Mixing by Carole Sabouraud and Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Special thanks to Kristin Lin and Kristina Samulewski.