In this episode, Rep. Mike Levin and I discuss the “Big Beautiful Bill” that raises energy bills, kills 830,000 jobs, and gifts China the next industrial revolution. We unpack the fossil-fuel cash behind the carnage, the paradox of red districts cutting their own subsidies, and the optimistic playbook — centered on transmission and real climate economics — for the next Democratic majority.
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David Roberts
Hey, hey, hey, everyone. This is Volts for June 20, 2025, "Representative Mike Levin reflects on the Republican budget bill." I'm your host, David Roberts. When I was in DC for the Canary Media event a few weeks ago, I had a chance to stop by the Rayburn House Office Building and chat with Representative Mike Levin, who represents California's 49th district.
Levin is a key figure in the Democratic caucus, often seen in the company of previous Volts guest Sean Casten, with whom he forms a kind of dynamic clean-energy duo. Together they are authors and sponsors of the Clean Electricity and Transmission Acceleration Act, which is the House Democrats’ comprehensive answer to the problem of permitting and building long-distance transmission. (I talked with them about the bill on the pod, early last year.)
They are hoping to reintroduce the bill next session when permitting negotiations start up again in earnest.
In the meantime, Levin is understandably disappointed by the dismal state of the Republican budget bill, and the cowardice of the many House Republicans who know full well that the bill will hurt their districts and voted for it anyway. We talked over that bill, the grim state of energy politics, and some reasons for optimism looking forward.
Mike Levin
Honored to have you here.
David Roberts
Awesome. Yeah, so I mean, I want to talk about the bill. I mean, in a sense, being in the minority in the House of Republicans is a thankless life, even relative to other democracies, really. The conventional wisdom going into this is: Johnson's got a one-vote majority, there's lots of IRA money flooding into red districts. There will be lots of people who want things, and because there's a one-vote majority, any one of them could sink the thing. So, Johnson will have to — either it'll be very, very difficult to do anything or he'll have to make a bunch of compromises.
That theory of the case turned out to be dramatically wrong. The bill was a total sledgehammer with very little nuance, and they all voted for it. So, I guess my first question is just, what was wrong about the political theory of the case? What did the conventional wisdom get wrong? What did everybody miss?
Mike Levin
Well, I think a lot of what I understood about politics before 2016 has been challenged, and even more so now than ever, because even with Trump 1.0, you did have a modicum of independence of certain members of the House and Senate Republican Conference. And now you have such a fealty among the rank and file members. Whether it's fear or whether it's a natural embrace of the policies, we can debate that — probably some of both. But just like you, I felt that the conventional rules, when you see what $320 billion go out the door and $250 billion of it go to the red districts, you would connect the dots and say, "Surely these members are self-interested enough where they're going to recognize the tremendous damage that gutting the bill would do, gutting the IRA would do."
And that ultimately wasn't enough of an impetus compared to the fear of not being seen as sufficiently loyal to Trump. And so, I would say that there was nothing incorrect in the analysis of the impact of the bill impacted the IRA on the red districts, on the red states, on the normal course of business that members of Congress want to do right by their constituents and their communities. But at the end of the day, they decided not to draw that line. And it's interesting to me, you know, the political oxygen on their side was around Medicaid to a certain degree and SALT.
And I think about, you know, those members that were open-minded and interested in working with us to at least improve the wind down of IRA, the Garbarinos and the Ciscomanis and the rest of them. At the end of the day, they decided to go with Trump, consequences be damned. And I know this has been discussed a lot in the context of Juan's district and Juan is a friend of mine, but he has the Lucid Motors plant out there in Casa Grande, Arizona, and that's a big job creator and a really important EV company and just didn't seem to move the needle enough in his mind to overcome the fear of voting against Trump. And I try not to be too judgmental of my colleagues. You know, I think that in the Senate there are some that are good friends.
John Curtis is a good friend of mine. I was just in touch with him the other day. He wrote, I thought, a very good op-ed in one of the Utah papers. But even in that op-ed, there was no red line. There was no statement to the effect of "I will not vote for the Big Ugly Bill." Big Beautiful, they call it. I say Big Ugly Bill. They will not vote for it unless these more, you know, draconian aspects are removed. Unless it, you know, doesn't kneecap the IRA provisions.
David Roberts
Well, a couple of House guys did say red line. Like a couple of them said the words "red line" in the newspaper and still voted for it. Who was it? One of them, maybe it was even Garbarino said "The EV tax credit is a red line for me," one of them was literally quoted.
Mike Levin
They said "red line?" So interesting. Yeah, we didn't know what happened, decided to be somewhere else.
David Roberts
But the one complication to that theory is that they were, for instance, going to put a provision in there to sell off national parks. And Ryan Zinke stepped forward and said, "I will not vote for this bill unless you take that out." And they took it out. So the dynamics seem to still exist. It seemed like the power was there if they wanted to exercise it.
Mike Levin
I actually give a great deal of credit to folks like Joe Neguse because during that 22-hour rules committee hearing, the knowledge and awareness of that provision were highlighted by Joe and I think there were a lot of members. Frankly, the way the bill was rolled out was disgraceful. But you know, in the dark of night, they are trying to read provision after provision. The Rules Committee gets in at one in the morning and they're trying to do all their homework all at once as they're hearing from members, as they're ultimately listening to members' amendments.
And you know, I give them great credit for highlighting that. I think that's one of the reasons it got fixed. I tried to go in there with an amendment to say "Nothing in this bill will raise your energy costs." Because the President ran — all those House and Senate Republicans ran on the idea last November, the idea that they're going to lower costs and this bill does the opposite of that. So I thought what I had was a fairly benign amendment. Virginia Fox disagreed. But at the end of the day, we do know from all independent analysis that this will raise energy costs substantially.
I think the number is $415 a month by 2035. And then there's a tremendous missed opportunity economically for districts all across this country. 830,000 jobs, a trillion dollars in lost private investment. I think there's something like $522 billion in money to be invested right now, today, that is on hold because of what the Republicans are doing. 62,000 jobs that aren't going to be filled today because of what the Republicans are doing. That's real-world consequences.
David Roberts
And killing the manufacturing tax credit. It's just, this is inexplicable to me. It is an explicit, repeated goal of the administration to stoke domestic manufacturing. It is what they say they want.
Mike Levin
I was shocked by how broad it was across the board. You know, we were hearing, I remember a few days before, phase out in 2031. Transferability, construction not going to impact certain sectors the same way. And it just didn't go down that way. And the way I think things happened is you had a group of people who are completely focused on Medicaid. So they took out FMAP and per capita caps, which were the two big ways they wanted to make even worse cuts to Medicaid. And they focused instead on what they call "work requirements" — it's more onerous than that. And then you had a lot of people that were focused on SALT. And I was in that bipartisan caucus working on trying to increase the SALT cap.
And actually, where they came out was not inconsistent with what I thought was reasonable, which was a forty thousand and a half million dollar income limit. Very consistent with our bipartisan discussions over the last number of years. But they put all their eggs in those two baskets. And that meant that at the end of the day, the House Freedom Caucus had to be able to extract something in return. And they went after the clean energy tax credits as something they could extract in return. They say the "green new scam" tax credits. So they needed a win and Mike Johnson needed a win to sell to the far right.
The clean energy tax credits became the scapegoat.
David Roberts
Yeah, I mean, I guess the lesson is not so much how this or that provision or this or that technology fares over there. It's just that in general, they don't care about that subject as much as we perhaps thought they did.
Mike Levin
They certainly don't care, insofar as wanting to do anything productive. But they do want to show that they're pushing back against what their base perceives as being some sort of, you know, outrageous agenda, when at the end of the day all we're asking for is to be able to accelerate the transition to a cleaner future, a more sustainable future, a more cost-effective future. And that's, I think, the huge disconnect there. The members, a lot of them know based on where the jobs, where the factories, where the economic development is occurring, they know that they're dead wrong when they go out there and say these things.
But it's catnip for their base, and it's sad. And you know, at the end of the day, I look at it as somebody who grew up in an area with smog alerts all the time, dealing with air pollution in Southern California, knowing that when the state took steps, we moved things in the right direction. My kids can now run around the track more than I used to without their lungs burning. I think all this is good; decarbonization, electrification is good, necessary, and important. And it's going to happen regardless of what my Republican friends do over the next couple of years here. Things are moving in that direction.
It's just a matter of whether we are going to make the smart investments so that America leads, or are we going to be using technologies that are developed in India, China, Europe in the coming decades? We're on the precipice of losing this industrial revolution, which I think would be an absolute travesty and totally preventable because we've got such great intellectual capital and all the rest right here.
David Roberts
I guess the disturbing thing is that, you know, they're voting in some way or another to kill jobs in their own district, to make the air dirtier in their own district. And they have to believe that those tangible consequences are not as bad as what they would say on Fox News about them. You know what I mean? That what the Fox News universe is more real to them in some sense politically than the real world.
Mike Levin
It's the Fox News universe, and it's also the fossil fuel industry. During the campaign, this has been discussed a lot, but Trump was at a meeting with all the oil executives and he said, "Give me a billion dollars for the campaign and you can do whatever the hell you want." Of all the promises that he's broken, that promise, he's more or less kept because the fossil fuel industry gave about 550 million to him and to other Republican campaigns. In turn, he really has done whatever the hell they wanted to do. We're now five months into this administration and it's already been the most anti-environment administration that I've seen.
And I'm deeply concerned. He's surpassing only himself, by the way, in being the least environmental president.
David Roberts
It's funny, you know, as you say, they're going after the energy stuff to get revenue, basically to say, "Hey, we're getting all the revenue we can to the Freedom Caucus people" except for they lowered royalty rates so that revenue and they killed the methane fee. So, we can do without that revenue. Medicaid is one thing.
Mike Levin
So, I thought Elon's arguments, by the time this airs, maybe there'll be plenty more developments between Elon and President Trump. But one of Elon's arguments straight through has been, "You can go ahead and end subsidies for electrification, just end it for the fossil fuel world as well." We've been subsidizing fossil fuels for well over a century and we subsidize every gallon of fuel that we buy. We subsidize every time industry extracts — I mean, this is constant subsidization. When I started in Congress, I had a very simple question for the Congressional Research Service. How many billions of dollars is it a year?
And they couldn't tell me with a straight answer, but they told me probably more than $20 billion a year. Realistically, more than that. What we're talking about for the clean energy industry is really a drop in the bucket for the initial capital expenditure that you need to build out the infrastructure to lower costs over time. This isn't rocket science. I know that it can be done cost-effectively because it's been done around the world cost-effectively. A number of us are going to try to go to COP later this year, COP30. We were just meeting with experts from Europe, from Asia, and from the international climate community.
And what they were saying is that today, China manufactures between 70 to 80% of EVs, 70% of wind turbines, 70 to 80% of solar panels. Again, the question for us is whether we want to destroy any opportunity that we have to compete with them, that we had to compete with the rest of the world. I think that President Biden's administration and the idea that you want to shift the manufacturing of clean energy to this country was the right thing to do. A shift in industrial policy was a big, bold initiative, but we were able to do it with the IIJA, the Infrastructure Law, with the IRA.
And in the case of those two laws, I'm proud of what the work product was. And we were so irresponsible to just have the thing funded with red ink. We actually tried to raise the revenues for those efforts. This I've seen a lot in my seven years doing this and a lot before, you know, evaluating, analyzing a lot of policy. And this is the most irresponsible and reckless bill that I think I've ever seen.
David Roberts
Well, it's funny. A lot of the House Republicans who voted for it now subsequently have been quoted in the newspaper saying, basically, "This bill is terrible. I sure hope the Senate fixes it."
Mike Levin
Which is a really lousy way to approach the job.
David Roberts
Well, your own colleague Sean said when I interviewed him a month ago, I'll never forget it, "Nothing gets better in the Senate." That's kind of haunted me ever since.
Mike Levin
Things change in the Senate, but they don't often get better. I will say I'm hopeful that you do have people like John Curtis, and if John is listening, "Man, stand up for what you know to be right. Stand up for all those jobs in Utah. Stand up for a clean environment." Because he's a reasonable and thoughtful person. There are others as well.
David Roberts
Well, Tillis. Tillis is up about the credits. I mean, there's probably like five or six who have said something or other. But, you know, I interviewed Martin Heinrich last week at our event and I was asking about the same thing, and, you know, he's like, "Well, you know, the House members had power and they elected not to use it. You know, the members of the Senate have power, too, but I genuinely don't know if they're going to..." Like, again, we're sort of the same thing. Like, do the laws of politics still apply?
Mike Levin
The basic theory of the case has changed substantially under Trump, but I think Trump is an anomaly. I don't think that the basic fundamentals of members of Congress voting in their own economic interests, or the district's economic interests — maybe some are voting in their own personal economic interests, that's another story. But voting in the interests of their districts, that has held. And that has been, I think, by and large, a good thing for this country for decades. In every nascent industry, our investment in research and development, deployment of every new industrial revolution over the last 250 years, has worked out quite well for this country.
And this would be the first time that this country decides from the top on down — now it's one party making this decision — that we're going to let other countries eat our lunch. And that, to me, would be such a travesty. Of all the dumb things that this administration is doing, that might be the dumbest of them all, that and gutting funding for basic science and research.
David Roberts
Yeah, I talked to a friend whose theory is that the US oil and gas industry has sort of come to terms with the fact that they're on the way out globally, and their strategy now is just to wall off the US and sell as much in the US as they can until the very end. So, keep heat pumps out. So, are you, I mean, I don't know how much influence the House has, House members have over the Senate, but I don't know if you are pushing Senators to make particular changes.
Obviously, like, on the broad strokes, it's bad. It's going to be bad, but there are changes. There are changes in the fiat language, the timing, and the construction date, all that. Are there particular things that you are trying to push senators to change?
Mike Levin
Well, I don't know the internal machinations that my colleagues in the Senate are having. But, you know, they have the same interests, those like John Curtis that know the impact of these policies, they know the different levers and what might be possible. So, I don't want to get in front of any of those discussions. But I will say that it's all about predictability. It's all about the reassurance to the people developing those projects that if they actually expend the capital and start the planning and preparation, they can get shovels in the ground and have that predictable rate of return.
And the tax credits are a big part of that. Also, the transferability of those credits.
David Roberts
Why did they kill that? It seems like sadism. Like, I don't understand what the...
Mike Levin
I think that the Freedom Caucus said, "We want to just end all of it as soon as possible. End it yesterday. Anybody that's thinking about doing one of these projects, kill it in its tracks." It's so wrongheaded and backwards because it benefits their district. As I've said, 70, 80% of that money is going to the red districts. But in some ways, we're sort of in a post-truth Congress right now. And again, I think that this is an anomaly. I have to be able to go to bed at night thinking that it's an anomaly, that we're going to come back to some semblance of common sense and where truth, facts, and evidence actually matter for our institution.
This is a great institution. People come from all over the country. They vote and they voice the interests of their constituents. Then they turn right around, go back, and they listen to those constituents. One would hope that facts, evidence, what we're seeing and hearing from our constituents, still is worth something.
David Roberts
Well, another part of conventional political wisdom is that members of Congress are jealous of their own power and prerogatives. And it just looks to me, and the American people, that the whole institution is just, well, being worn down.
Mike Levin
Yeah, I mean, this is super personal to me as a member of the Appropriations Committee. The big reason I fought to want to be on the Appropriations Committee, which took me six years to get there, is fundamental to the Congress is the power of the purse, the ability for us to not only authorize programs but then appropriate the funds. And that's so important to our districts, it's so important to our constituents that we're able to fully fund the priorities that we have. And I'm on the Energy and Water Subcommittee. So, I have jurisdiction over things like the Department of Energy, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Bureau of Reclamation, the Army Corps of Engineers, all these different agencies.
And we sweat the details over making sure that the funding actually gets to where it needs to go. And I have now seen for the first time in recent history, and I've asked people who've been here a long time, like Marcy Kaptur is the ranking member of that subcommittee, who's been in Congress since the late 80s, longest serving woman in the history of Congress, and she has never seen anything like this either, which is a total abdication of the Appropriations Committee and the majority members of the committee to defer to the Office of Management and Budget and the President to do whatever they want to do, to cut whatever programs, cut whatever funding.
David Roberts
Defer to Elon Musk, who doesn't even have a — who isn't even anything.
Mike Levin
We see how well that worked out. But no, you're absolutely right.
David Roberts
But, you heard members of Congress were complimenting Elon Musk for going in illegally, basically hacking parts of budgets. And I was like, "But that's your job, you're complimenting him for stealing your job."
Mike Levin
Correct. And you know, if we wanted to look at a reasonable way to go about this, the Clinton administration in its first two years had the "Reinventing Government" initiative. That was a reasonable way, in consultation with the Congress, to figure out a path forward to reduce government spending or reduce waste, fraud, and abuse, which we all, I hope, want to reduce waste, fraud, and abuse in this institution. This was a "ready, fire, aim" approach where you put a bunch of 20-somethings in. And I saw it from a couple of angles. One, the National Nuclear Safety Administration going in and firing the people with the expertise built over decades of how to safely handle the nation's nuclear weapons.
David Roberts
Can you imagine, as a 22-year-old, having the — whatever that is — to say, "I think I get this better than you guys."
Mike Levin
It's at 22, you don't know any better. But the reality is, even my Republican friends realized how stupid that was and they went back channel to the Office of Legislative Affairs and said, "Hey, you got to hire these people back." Now, of course, they couldn't find their records, the personnel records, or their emails or their phones to be able to figure out how to contact them. The other is with the VA. It is insane to see what they're doing going after VA and you can really go down every single agency to see what this administration has done.
They canceled scores of contracts, and the 20-something engineer was just quoted as saying, "Well, I wouldn't actually recommend that you follow my code." It's like he brings up the episode of The Office when Steve Carell sees the GPS is going to drive him into the lake. So, he drives into the lake. He said, "Well, the GPS made me do it." So, this young man didn't actually think anybody was going to follow this code, but then they did. Then, they cut all the programs arbitrarily. And of course, the AI had a hallucination into saying programs that were $35,000 were $35 million. It's insane.
David Roberts
Yeah, it's hard to know what's going on. Let me ask you about a couple of energy-specific things. So, one of the big X factors that has entered the energy world recently is AI, the need for data centers, just the need for lots more electricity really quickly. And that's kind of shaken everybody up. It's brought a new voice in that wants new electricity that isn't "greens" or, but I mean, it's companies with big money to bring to the table. One of the things Elon said in his tweets before, he said all the rest of it and the rest of it got all the attention.
But the interesting original thing he said was that if you are killing solar, there's no power source that can grow fast enough to meet AI demand than solar. And I think, like Republicans, have it in their head that there's some essential intrinsic mismatch between solar and wind and data centers. So the one doesn't apply to the latter. So, do you feel like your colleagues have a good understanding of that dynamic? Just the fact that if you want fast power — nuclear's slow, gas is, the gas supply chain is choked out to 2030.
Mike Levin
Coal's not going to get us there.
David Roberts
Like, if you want it fast, it's wind and solar, or virtual power plants, or something like that. Do they get that?
Mike Levin
No, the short answer is no. So, we had every month the Library of Congress, assuming the Library of Congress hasn't been taken over by new people, we do a monthly dinner. And one of the speakers was Eric Schmidt, who wrote a book called Genesis about AI. And he brought up this whole data center point and he made a similar point that you're making. But the Republicans in the room, somebody had asked a question, you know, if we had to undermine our climate goals in order to meet the demand for AI, and you know, Schmidt's answer was, basically, you shouldn't have to undermine your climate goals, but that the trade-off would in fact be worth it because AI will in fact solve the climate crisis in his view.
So, I thought it was a very interesting discussion, but the basic premise that is fed by the American Petroleum Institute, lots of other people, that the only way forward is with good old all-American dirty fossil fuels and all this other stuff is a pipe dream and you're never going to be able to achieve any sort of scale. And the reality is that it's just not so. If you look at any of the independent analyses out there, I lean a lot on Jesse Jenkins' work at Princeton or any of the work out of Stanford and the Doerr School. We desperately need to dramatically increase the amount of wind, solar, and everything else too, by the way.
Maybe not coal, but we need lots and lots of electricity to meet these new demands for things like AI and decentralized finance, which are increasingly becoming a big part of our world. And we also need a major upgrade to our transmission infrastructure.
David Roberts
Yeah, I was going to ask about that too. It is part of the same, kind of, part of the same discussion. And it seems like somehow the Republican Party has found its way into opposing new transmission. How?
Mike Levin
I don't get it.
David Roberts
What's the dynamic there? Do they think that they're defending fossil fuels by doing that?
Mike Levin
Yeah, if you see a transmission line as a threat to your fossil fuel job, that creates a false dichotomy. But that seed has been planted by the fossil fuel executives and by the industry and by the lobbyists, frankly. I think the other dynamic that I worry about, Ezra Klein, Derek Thompson wrote a great book, Abundance. I've read it, I thought it was excellent, and I marked it up. And one of the passages I marked up basically is that we cannot undermine the solutions that we need for climate, that we have to build lots of stuff.
But any trade-off, and a trade-off is very difficult — I'm paraphrasing here — any trade-off here is very difficult, but a trade-off that undermines our progress on climate is not a trade-off worth making. And so their point is, we need to build more transmission and that we have to do it as quickly as we can. But also, and I spoke with them, I said, "My concern is that Republicans will embrace that lexicon and use abundance as an excuse to build a fossil fuel infrastructure."
David Roberts
You're not the only one worried about that.
Mike Levin
It's just the same. I worry when I hear about we need transmission modernization and it's under the guise of permitting reform that we're going to do lots of stuff for the oil and gas industry and maybe throw a bone to transmission when the real problem is transmission. The other premise I reject is that you have to fundamentally undermine decades of bedrock environmental law in order to build transmission. I think we need to streamline, modernize, you can call it all of that. But my experience tells me that there are other factors at play, too. When we've gone and built clean energy projects, there are a whole host of things, everything from your local statutes on the books, your local community opposition, your state interconnection policy.
So, it used to take years and years to get a simple project through in the state of California, but it wasn't because of CEQA or NEPA, often. It was because of the antiquated interconnection queue. So, I was part of a group way back when to try to improve that. But then, I had this crazy idea to run for Congress. So, I'm not boots on the ground there anymore, but for me, that's as big of an issue.
David Roberts
So you don't think the provision in the bill where you just pay, just pay to get past the whole thing, you don't think that's the reform we need?
Mike Levin
You can call it what it is. Well, it's the reform if you just want to, you know, run afoul of our environment and build whatever you want, wherever you want, consequences be damned. And yeah, it'll lead to building stuff, but it'll also lead to a whole lot of problems with public health and safety. And there's got to be a balance.
David Roberts
Did you support the bill in the previous session? People differ about why it didn't make it over the finish line, but the permitting sort of agreement. Were you on board with that?
Mike Levin
If the finished product had come to the House, I would have voted for the compromise. There were certainly parts of it I didn't like, but the transmission provisions that they finally landed on, and you know, we were involved to the extent we could be involved over on this side, I thought were quite good, quite constructed. You know, obviously Barrasso could not come to an agreement with Manchin and the whole thing died just before Senator Manchin left. I hope that we can pick up the pieces of that and move in a constructive way. But that doesn't mean giving away the farm to the fossil fuel industry so we can get, you know, one or two things on transmission.
David Roberts
Well, I think the sort of abundance of take on this is that if you just make everything easier, clean will win.
Mike Levin
Yeah. Okay, well, stop subsidizing fossil fuels. Fossil fuels already have it easier. Right. All we've asked — so I've been here seven years — all I've ever wanted is to level the playing field. To the extent you give clean and renewable a subsidy or a tax credit or whatever it may be, it's still going to be less than what we give to that conventional energy. And that hasn't changed. And in fact, now it's worse than it's ever been. There's no acknowledgment of that, by the way, from many of my Republican colleagues. You know, it's really, it's become so politicized and so polarized and a lot of it has to do with the right-wing media ecosystem as well.
David Roberts
Yeah, I sort of assumed they would demonize EVs eventually, but it was weird how it went down. It was weird to have Elon in there in the middle of their sort of coalition. So, it's kind of scrambled the dynamics a little bit. But it seems like they've gotten there now where they've more or less aligned against EVs.
Mike Levin
"Well, I always refer — so years ago, my neighbor, he replaced a Hummer with a Tesla. And he told me, and he's a very conservative guy. I wouldn't say he's MAGA because I wouldn't criticize him like that. But a very Republican, very conservative guy. And he said, "I just want you to know I got this car because it's fast and it's cool." And I said, "That's huge!" Because I've been following EVs in my lifetime, the EV won. In college, I wrote my senior thesis on the Partnership for the New Generation of Vehicles, which was the Gore effort to try to get the big three to build an 80 mile per gallon car.
And so, I've been at this for a while, thinking about this, and we've been behind for decades. We've been behind. The Prius obviously was a huge advance for hybrid technology and Tesla made a huge leap. But if you look at where we are competitively right now, certainly GM and Ford are not where they need to be. The Ultium platform's out there, but it has significant challenges in both market adoption. And the conversion to NACS charging is really important too. Tesla's won out on that. So in California, the train left the station, right?
David Roberts
They just yanked your waiver.
Mike Levin
Well, let's talk about that. Do you have time for a prop? I have to show you something. Okay, your audience can't see this, but this is a picture of Governor Ronald Reagan and members of the California state legislature from 1967. This is President Reagan or Governor Reagan, then Governor Reagan, creating the California Air Resources Board. It was 1967, preceding the federal Clean Air Act by three years. And then Nixon was president, Reagan was Governor. We wanted a waiver in California because we had massive problems with smog that required us to go further than the federal standards set in the Clean Air Act.
And what you had in the decades since is, you had Republican governors, Schwarzenegger being, I think, most notable. They passed AB 32, the biggest state initiative maybe ever for climate. You had Democratic governors like Brown, Newsom, or Davis, all of them committed to this goal that California was going to clean up its act. And what we did was an incredible success story. You had 35 air districts deal with stationary source pollution, and then you had CARB set very aggressive standards to deal with mobile source pollution. And it worked. When I was in high school and I ran around the track, one lap after I start, my lungs would burn.
Two laps, the lungs would really burn. The point being is that we had smog alerts all the time. You had people with all kinds of respiratory conditions and cancers. Every year, you get the report card from the American Lung Association, and we were really struggling and we're still in non-attainment today. But absent what CARB has done and what the air districts have done, it would have been a complete disaster. And I think we ultimately here in Washington DC should learn from that example, not try to kneecap California. And if you really care about California, you care about our future, you care about children, you care about the type of state, the type of country that they're going to grow up in, you should care that we're not going to just allow polluters to run roughshod so they can make a few extra bucks.
David Roberts
Did you see what the Commerce Committee did? I think today or yesterday in the Senate, they are — I didn't read enough about it to get into the details, but basically, they are trying now to kneecap CAFE standards overall, not even for California, across the board, CAFE standards. So, let me ask you about the car companies because everybody demonizes the oil and gas companies for good reason. But what is up with the car companies? To me, rationally, the global shift to EVs, it's happening. It's obvious. China's ahead, we're behind. And every little bit that we protect ourselves from competition, we just enable ourselves to fall further behind.
And killing CAFE standards and killing the waiver, it all seems designed to shelter an industry that's falling farther and farther behind. Why aren't they better? Why don't they want, you know what I mean? Why are they still like...? Obama saved their bacon. And they turned around and stabbed him in the back. Not a couple of years later, they just over and over again take the worst route. Do you have any analysis of the car companies, why they're so short-sighted?
Mike Levin
Yeah, it's not so homogeneous. I think you have startup companies like Lucid, like Rivian. You know, Lucid of course is backed by the Saudis, but you know, Rivian is Orange County based and production out in Arizona, I think, along with Lucid. But you know, you have a lot of really interesting and innovative companies out there. I think that the legacy automakers are slow to adapt. Whenever I've heard Mary Barra at GM, I think she's trying to operate in good faith and understand where to skate to where the puck is going to be. And if there is a market pull, California being the largest market in the United States, there's a market pull towards EVs, towards plug-in hybrids, whatever it may be, then they're going to follow that direction.
And by and large, they are trying. I thought that I have an old Chevy Volt, which was that original Obama —
David Roberts
I have a Bolt, the full electric one.
Mike Levin
And you know, now you've got the Equinox and the Blazer, and you know there'll be scores more of these vehicles. For, if nothing else, for the California market, we still have roughly 1 in 40 car sales going electric. And we'll see what Governor Newsom decides to do with regard to picking up, if in fact, the EV tax credits are gutted, which is what the Republicans want to do. To what extent would California pick up the slack? And you know, I know Newsom originally said "the whole thing," but that's going to be tough given the budget deficit that we're running in California.
David Roberts
He says a lot of things. Well, this is the demand pull thing. Like, we just also bought an Ioniq. We're now a dual EV household. And my Ioniq was built in Georgia. Built in Buddy Carter's district.
Mike Levin
Yeah.
David Roberts
Do they — they don't seem to get — but I just wonder, like behind the scenes, do they get that it's not just manufacturing subsidies that are going to... You need demand. The demand pulls the other side of the, you know, the consumer side subsidies, the demand pull is what's bringing all that manufacturing to their districts. Do they understand that?
Mike Levin
I think they... Well, I can't speak for everyone, but I think that, you know, Buddy Carter understands that the EV tax credit and the incentives that Kia/Hyundai were given in order to build that plant in Georgia were very important for his district and for his state. Buddy's my friend, so I'm not going to criticize. But I think at the end of the day, everybody has to make that final analysis, that cost-benefit analysis of the benefits to their district, economic and otherwise, versus the costs. And, I had a very cynical political science professor who once said, "The only thing members of Congress care about" — this is way back when I was a student — "is getting elected and reelected."
"Not the most important, not the main thing, the only thing." I don't think that's true. All these years later, I probably wouldn't be so adamant that we decarbonize if that were the case. I would be more willing to just let sleeping dogs lie. But we've incurred millions and millions of dollars in independent expenditure from the fossil fuel industry against me over the years, and we keep on trucking because at the end of the day, I think that clean air, clean water, and the future of our country, and for me, for my kids, your kids, grandkids, everybody, it's so critically important that we just can't give up the fight.
And trying to frame it in economic terms so that the average person can understand, I think, is critically important. And it doesn't always show up on polls. So, if you talk about climate in terms of, you know, the rising sea levels or extreme weather events, that's not going to do as well on polls. But if you talk about it in terms of the economy, I think that's encompassed in our overall importance that we give to the economy. And people knowing that this bill is going to raise their energy prices is pretty bad. It's bad. Just like it's going to take away health care from millions of Americans or take food out of the mouths of people who really need it.
Raising your energy bills at a time when 80 million Americans can't afford their energy bills now is a really bad look.
David Roberts
And while you're also raising the price of all their consumer goods with tariffs.
Mike Levin
Yep.
David Roberts
I want to ask you something, since you're from California. This is a subject that is very near and dear to my heart and a lot of my listeners, but it doesn't get a lot of national attention, which is the overlap between decarbonization and sort of urban land use density, multimodal transportation, etcetera, all this. This is a very hot thing in California. They rarely talk about it at the national level. And insofar as there's anything in this bill, it just nukes everything. All the money that was going to anything other than highways, basically, is getting nuked.
So, like, Republicans are just, I think, aligned more or less officially against density, against all that stuff. But how do you see that connection? Because it's a very heated point of contention in California. There are multiple bills. They just passed a TOD bill and the CEQA reform bill is somewhere getting along. But a) do you also see that connection? Are you interested in those issues?
Mike Levin
Oh, absolutely.
David Roberts
And do you see any dawning awareness, even on the Dem side in Congress, that that's an important piece of the decarbonization puzzle?
Mike Levin
Well, first, shout out to my friend, Buffy Wicks, who is doing a fine job.
David Roberts
Trying to get her on the pod.
Mike Levin
I can help with that. But, you know, the way I see it, it's a red state versus blue state thing, and the blue state Republicans are not willing to stand up and advocate for policies they know will be important for our states. I don't see it as much more complicated than that. So, we're all products of our experience, and in the case of lawmakers, we're products, hopefully, of going back to our districts and listening to a lot of people and doing events and understanding and moving pieces. And for me, that means a major effort around multimodal transportation.
I have the second busiest rail corridor in the United States, connecting San Diego and LA. It's constantly at risk of falling into the ocean. We have, you know, constant discussions around YIMBYism and around Transit Oriented Development. I personally want to see a lot more of our, you know, vacant parking lots that are adjacent to transit become decent, affordable housing units for people.
David Roberts
We just did parking reform in Washington.
Mike Levin
There you go. There you go. I think it can happen. You know, you have to have forethought at the local level and at the state level, and then hope that the feds don't, you know, undermine the effort. But you're right. When we were developing the IIJA, the infrastructure bill, there was a whole lot of effort that we as Californians, because we, you know, we're 42 strong as the Democrats, the California Democratic delegation. So we had lots of discussions with, you know, then Chairman Peter DeFazio and with our friends who were on the TNI committee and with the Biden administration.
I think that resulted in some really good policies and necessary funding. It got politicized. The administration, the Trump administration 2.0, thinks anything the Biden folks did was wrong just by virtue of them having done it. And this is an order of magnitude worse than I experienced during Trump 1.0, where there were still people in Trump 1.0 that acknowledged that things that Obama had done, that the administration had done, made sense. And there is now this blanket rejection, to a degree maybe unprecedented in American history, of a prior — they're literally going after the prior administration saying that they were signing the auto pen.
Right. So, there is just this reflexive disdain for anything that the Biden folks may have done. "Oh, they brought $321 billion of investment, of which 80% went to the red districts. Well, it must be bad because Biden did it."
David Roberts
Or, if you just make a Democrat sad, that in and of itself is a policy.
Mike Levin
It makes me sad when they cut their nose to spite their face. This hurts all of America. Again, you know, 30 years from now we're using Chinese and Indian technology that should have and could have been developed here, but for the fact that we gutted funding for the universities for the research, development, deployment, and gutted all the funding that would have jump-started clean energy.
David Roberts
Well, speaking of clean energy and speaking of oil and gas, their influence, there's been a lot of discussion lately. You know, wind and solar have grown so fast and the whole clean energy industry has grown so fast. My sort of analogy is it's like one of those kids that grows up to be 7ft tall. For the first 12 years of their life, they're just kind of gawky because their limbs are too long. It's almost like they've gotten so big so fast and not quite coordinated yet. What's your sense? Are they throwing their weight around?
Do you know what I mean? Are they exercising the influence that they could or do? Do you think they need to be better organized, better led, better lobby? Like, are they getting stuff out of Congress commensurate with their size and importance?
Mike Levin
Well, I think there's a lot of catch-up that needs to be played for the clean energy industry to try to make up for decades of activity from the fossil fuel industry. It's going to take time and it's going to take a lot of effort, and it really is a nascent industry in a lot of ways. I first knew that I wanted to be in the clean energy industry when I read a book by Ron Pernick and Clint Wilder. And I bring that up because I just saw Clint last week. It's called The Clean Tech Revolution.
And I read it when I graduated from law school in 2005. Here we are 20 years later and we really did see a clean tech revolution in a lot of ways. I was a very minuscule part of it. Along with my friend Sean Casten, we ran, we were the first two to run on that as our actual background. Even though the consultants told us, "Don't run on clean energy, don't do it, say you're a small business person, say anything other than clean energy." But not only did we run, but we won on the topic. And then we got here and we were put in place on that select committee for climate that Speaker Pelosi assembled.
And then, we made a big impact with the biggest climate bill ever, the IRA. And it would have been bigger still, but for Joe Manchin and a handful of others narrowing its scope. I bring all that up because we've done enormously well in 20 years. When I first got to Congress, we were told, "You can't get a climate bill across." And they were still looking at what had happened with Waxman-Markey and with the BTU back in the 90s. So they were saying, "You can't do it. It's impossible." Just like in California. I remember being told, "You want to do a 33% renewable portfolio standard. That's insane. You can't do that!"
But, you know, it's iterative. We build on the progress, we learn from the mistakes, we improve the communication, and we move forward.
David Roberts
I think just you and Sean coming into the House delegation probably raised the average energy literacy of the caucus quite a bit in and of itself. But do you think, like, relative to when you entered Congress, do you feel like the Democratic caucus is more energy literate?
Mike Levin
I think they were more literate than you think before. I think there were a whole lot of people around here who knew quite a lot. I look at my friend Jerry McNerney, for example. He's now in the state legislature. It's tough because there are very few people like you that want to cover what we do. And so, in the general consciousness, a lot of that work gets done, but it doesn't get covered. So, I would say there are very smart people now, but I also would say there are very smart people then, some of whom I knew and some of whom I did not.
But obviously, overall, the effort did not succeed the way that people were hoping until the IRA finally broke through and succeeded. And to a lesser extent, the Infrastructure Law had all sorts of important provisions as well. But you needed the stars to align. You needed a president, you needed a House and a Senate, all of whom were fully invested in tackling this challenge. I give enormous credit to Speaker Pelosi for believing in people like me and Sean, empowering us, putting us on important committees, and, you know, giving us an opportunity to be successful relatively early in our congressional careers.
David Roberts
Well, if Dems retake the house in 2026?
Mike Levin
I like this question.
David Roberts
What if I say "when"?
Mike Levin
Even better. I'm knocking on this table right here.
David Roberts
When Dems retake the House in 2026, it'll still be a divided Congress. What can be done? And are you making plans, thinking about it?
Mike Levin
Well, I think that scenario would offer an opportunity to work on an actual transmission deal, not some giveaway permitting deal.
David Roberts
So, bring permitting reform back. Bipartisan permitting.
Mike Levin
Yeah, I don't think this Congress is the right time to move forward on a deal that's 90% tilted towards the fossil fuel industry. And I think that's probably what it would take to get to "Yes," in this environment. I could be wrong. I'm not a closed-minded person. I try not to be. But I think in this environment.
David Roberts
Well, the recent evidence is —
Mike Levin
Overwhelmingly, everything that we work so hard to achieve on climate energy policy is being gutted left and right. It's a wholesale giveaway of our public lands and pay-to-play. I mean, it's just terrible. So, I don't think right now is very ripe for a deal. But, I do think if we took the House, we would have the leverage necessary to get that 90/10 deal back to a 50/50 reasonable deal. And I think that's a deal we should take because I saw what happened when we had the trifecta. I saw what happened with Manchin-Barrasso.
There is a deal to be had, and I'm one of those pragmatic enough. If Donald Trump signs it into law and wants to take a victory lap, go for it.
David Roberts
Well, let me try to bait you into saying something controversial then. Speaking of the abundance people, one of their critiques is that the groups, the interest groups on the left, are pulling the caucus farther left than the public. And one of the ways this played out was a lot of the left environmental groups oppose that permitting deal and presumably would oppose a similar permitting deal. Would you think the left green groups have become unproductive in their purity tests and whatnot? I mean, do you agree with that critique that they are not — that they're dragging you away from bipartisan deals?
Mike Levin
I would say two things. First of all, the people that you just referenced, who are talking about a lot of these things, are themselves interest groups with their own agendas, their own boards of directors, and funding sources.
David Roberts
No one thinks they're an interest group.
Mike Levin
The other is, I don't think you can just paint that broad brush over "the groups." So, I think that you've got very pragmatic groups that are focused on results and you know, want to make sure that we have good outcomes. You have others that want to impede progress. And I'm interested in partnering with anybody that wants to actually get results that we can be proud of down the road. I hope that would incorporate some of those people that you just referenced to criticize the traditional environmental groups.
But, I'm not going to just be one to advocate for a deal, to say, "we got a deal." That actually increases emissions rather than reduces them. The Manchin-Barrasso bill, before we saw the transmission part of it, I saw it as a way to dramatically increase emissions from things like LNG exports, to dramatically increase oil and gas pipelines. And until I saw the transmission piece was actually there in a way that made sense to me. It was very surprising, to be honest with you, because I think right before seeing the thing, I said, "Well, I don't know if there's anything I could support that is going to come from this.
Then, I saw the finished product and it was better than I expected, and it was maybe worse than Barrasso expected. We couldn't get it across the line, unfortunately. But, we've got to be aiming for a deal that we can be proud of, not just one to say we did it.
David Roberts
Yeah, I mean, if you talk to people who actually struggle with NEPA a lot, one of the things they say that would help a lot is just a lot more state capacity, a lot more people to do those reviews, and somehow that never... Well, like, the Barrassos of the world are never like, "Let's hire a lot more government bureaucrats to hurry this process up."
Mike Levin
Now, it's the opposite. They want to, you know, end the agencies as we know them and replace everybody with AI and, you know, just consequences be damned. But you're absolutely right. Look, if we had, as a strong national agenda item, "Build transmission that we need for the next two centuries," we made that a top national priority. We put a "whole of government" — as we used to like to say, "a whole of government" effort into that. A Manhattan Project for all of us to be focused on. We get it done. We get it done. But there is a massive impediment, and the impediment is the fossil fuel industry and the $550 million.
That's so — I loved Ezra Klein's book. I think the world of him as a journalist. I listened to his podcast just like I listen to yours. I think that I'd like a part two about how we get around the money in politics and also how we get around things like, you know, when it comes to building transmission out, the interconnection, the local community challenges, you know, the NIMBYism, all that stuff. Because that's just as important, in my view, as NEPA or CEQA.
David Roberts
Yeah, I feel like one of the things that both books left out is that a lot of these rules, regulations, and bureaucratic cruft is not just stuff in the abstract. It is that they're under constant, withering attack by giants... you know, so if there's any crack in the law, if there's any loophole, if there's any room, it's going to get exploited. So that's how that stuff gets built over. It's a defensive thing. It's not just because they want to. Well, final question. And this is a broader thing so maybe you want to get into this, maybe you don't.
But one of the things that is, I don't think, actually, Ezra is necessarily taking this tack, but a lot of the people who have glommed on to the abundance thing, your Ritchie Torres and people like that, are saying, "Part of the Dems' road back into power and popularity is moderating on social issues." Basically, they're like, "We need to talk about government, talk about doing good things and basically back down a little, quiet down a little on all these cultural issues" that for some reason they think Democrats have prioritized. I always ask, "Why do you think we're talking about trans girls in high school sports?" Do you think Democrats dreamed that up and put that in the newspaper every day?
You think they're the ones who centered that? Like why do you think you're talking about this? But anyway, do you agree with that critique that a greater focus on government competence should be coupled with backing off somewhat on social issues?
Mike Levin
I think the reality is that the emphasis on social issues is as much a product of the media as it is anybody in Congress deciding actively to talk about those things. There are exceptions. I have colleagues that will talk about social issues all day. I'm not one of those. I'm focused on our economy, I'm focused on our environment. I'm focused on economic development, on winning the future. That's where my personal focus is. And talking a lot about the importance of caring for our veterans and things like that. The reality is that I don't like the fact that climate, energy, environment has sort of been put in that same bucket you should not talk about. So, because I see —
David Roberts
Or, is it that it's a cultural issue? As to whether you like critters or not is...
Mike Levin
Correct. So, we get one planet. Unless Elon figures out or Jeff Bezos figures out this Mars thing. We've got to do all we can to take care of it. And we know from the overwhelming scientific consensus what we need to do. And we've got to be up to the challenge. Our government right now is not up to the challenge. Our government right now is not even willing to acknowledge or accept basic science, whether it's on climate or on anything else for that matter. And that does a tremendous disservice to the entire world. The excuse that my friends on the other side have made, "Well, if China doesn't do it or India doesn't do it, then why should we be forced to do it?"
First of all, we need to lead by example. But second of all, if we continue down the path we're on, China, India, other countries will eat our lunch when it comes to clean energy.
David Roberts
Yeah, they're doing it. Out there doing it now. For years, it was like, "Why should we do it when China isn't?" And now, China just raced past us.
Mike Levin
70 to 80% of electric vehicles, of wind turbines, of solar panels are being manufactured in China. So, I think everybody needs to get their head out of their politics for a second and focus on actually having a livable economy for the next hundred years in this country and trying to actually win this huge industrial revolution that's still up for grabs. If we only have the foresight to embrace that change.
David Roberts
You think we could still catch up? You don't think China's lapped us to the point that it's... Because it feels like part of what the Republican Party is doing is like, "Well, China beat us on this stuff. Let's not do this stuff, let's do something else." You know what I mean? All the talk about the threat of China and "We got to stand up to China" and China beats us on this and they're like, "Well..."
Mike Levin
I am still a perhaps naive optimist in the capacity of this country that has done so well over the last 250 years to keep that spirit of innovation, of creativity. I still think we've got the best universities in the world. I still think we've got the best scientists in the world. I still think we've got the best entrepreneurs in the world. Part of that is also because we welcome people from all over the world because of freedom and opportunity here in this country. And we're losing our way in that regard, too. Those things are directly interrelated. So long as we maintain that "If you have a great idea, you want to start a business" or, you know, "You're that next brilliant Nobel laureate. You want to come to the United States of America because this is where it's at."
So long as that's the case, I think we can continue to lead. I'm not saying we're going to take over overnight. What Trump is doing, it's going to take four years to break a lot of stuff. It could take decades to build it back. But we do have an opportunity, I think, in 2027.
David Roberts
To "Build it back better" you might say.
Mike Levin
Well, I'm not going there. I'm not going there. But what I will say is, find areas of opportunity in the second and final two years of the second Trump term. God willing, we have a divided — we have the opportunity to actually have gavels again and have agency again. Hopefully, Hakeem Jeffries, the Speaker, reconstitutes the Select Committee on Climate and we're able to move the needle and then best position the opportunity for post-2028 and whatever happens there, hopefully with a competent, reasonable person in the White House who gets it, who understands that we've got to own the future. It's not only in our economic self-interest, it's in our national security self-interest as well.
David Roberts
Thank you for listening to Volts. It takes a village to make this podcast work. Shout out, especially, to my super producer, Kyle McDonald, who makes me and my guests sound smart every week. And it is all supported entirely by listeners like you. So, if you value conversations like this, please consider joining our community of paid subscribers at volts.wtf. Or, leaving a nice review, or telling a friend about Volts. Or all three. Thanks so much, and I'll see you next time.
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