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      A Republican 2024 Climate Strategy: More Drilling, Less Clean Energy

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      Project 2025, a conservative “battle plan” for the next Republican president, would stop attempts to cut the pollution that is heating the planet and encourage more emissions.During a summer of scorching heat that has broken records and forced Americans to confront the reality of climate change, conservatives are laying the groundwork for future Republican administration that would dismantle efforts to slow global warming.The move is part of a sweeping strategy dubbed Project 2025 that Paul Dans of the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank organizing the effort, has called a “battle plan” for the first 180 days of a future Republican presidency.The climate and energy provisions would be among the most severe swings away from current federal policies.The plan calls for shredding regulations to curb greenhouse gas pollution from cars, oil and gas wells and power plants, dismantling almost every clean energy program in the federal government and boosting the production of fossil fuels — the burning of which is the chief cause of planetary warming.The New York Times asked the leading Republican presidential candidates whether they support the Project 2025 strategy but none of the campaigns responded. Still, several of the architects are veterans of the Trump administration, and their recommendations match positions held by former President Donald J. Trump, the current front-runner for the 2024 Republican nomination.The $22 million project also includes personnel lists and a transition strategy in the event a Republican wins the 2024 election. The nearly 1,000-page plan, which would reshape the executive branch to place more power into the president’s hands, outlines changes for nearly every agency across the government.The Heritage Foundation worked on the plan with dozens of conservative groups ranging from the Heartland Institute, which has denied climate science, to the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which says “climate change does not endanger the survival of civilization or the habitability of the planet.”Mr. Dans said the Heritage Foundation delivered the blueprint to every Republican presidential hopeful. While polls have found that young Republicans are worried about global warming, Mr. Dans said the feedback he has received confirms the blueprint reflects where the majority of party leaders stand.“We have gotten very good reception from this,” he said. “This is a plotting of points of where the conservative movement sits at this time.”Paul Dans of the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank behind Project 2025, in April.Leigh Vogel for The New York TimesThere is a pronounced partisan split in the country when it comes to climate change, surveys have shown. An NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll conducted last month found that while 56 percent of respondents called climate change a major threat — including a majority of independents and nearly 90 percent of Democrats — about 70 percent of Republicans said global warming was either a minor threat or no threat at all.Project 2025 does not offer any proposals for curbing the greenhouse gas emissions that are dangerously heating the planet and which scientists have said must be sharply and quickly reduced to avoid the most catastrophic impacts.Asked what the country should do to combat climate change, Diana Furchtgott-Roth, director of the Heritage Foundation’s energy and climate center, said “I really hadn’t thought about it in those terms” and then offered that Americans should use more natural gas.Natural gas produces half the carbon dioxide emissions of coal when burned. But gas facilities frequently leak methane, a greenhouse gas that is much more powerful than carbon dioxide in the short term and has emerged as a growing concern among climate scientists.The blueprint said the next Republican president would help repeal the Inflation Reduction Act, the 2022 law that is offering $370 billion for wind, solar, nuclear, green hydrogen and electric vehicle technology, with most of the new investments taking place in Republican-led states.The plan calls for shuttering a Department of Energy office that has $400 billion in loan authority to help emerging green technologies. It would make it more difficult for solar, wind and other renewable power — the fastest growing energy source in the United States — to be added to the grid. Climate change would no longer be considered an issue worthy of discussion on the National Security Council, and allied nations would be encouraged to buy and use more fossil fuels rather than renewable energy.In July, Phoenix experienced a record-breaking streak of above-100-degree days. Ash Ponders for The New York TimesThe blueprint throws open the door to drilling inside the pristine Arctic wilderness, promises legal protections for energy companies that kill birds while extracting oil and gas and declares the federal government has an “obligation to develop vast oil and gas and coal resources” on America’s public lands.Notably, it also would restart a quest for something climate denialists have long considered their holy grail: reversal of a 2009 scientific finding at the Environmental Protection Agency that says carbon dioxide emissions are a danger to public health.Erasing that finding, conservatives have long believed, would essentially strip the federal government of the right to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from most sources.In interviews, Mr. Dans and three of the top authors of the report agreed that the climate is changing. But they insisted that scientists are debating the extent to which human activity is responsible.On the contrary, the overwhelming majority of climate scientists around the world agree that the burning of oil, gas and coal since the Industrial Age has led to an increase of the average global temperature of 1.2 degrees Celsius, or 2.2 degrees Fahrenheit.The plan calls on the government to stop trying to make automobiles more fuel efficient and to block states from adopting California’s stringent automobile pollution standards.Ms. Furchtgott-Roth said any measures the United States would take to cut carbon would be undermined by rising emissions in countries like China, currently the planet’s biggest polluter. It would be impossible to convince China, to cut its emissions, she said.Mandy Gunasekara was chief of staff at the E.P.A. during the Trump administration and considers herself the force behind Mr. Trump’s decision to withdraw the United States from the 2015 Paris climate accord. She led the section outlining plans for that agency, and said that regarding whether carbon emissions pose a danger to human health “there’s a misconception that any of the science is a settled issue.”The plan does not offer any proposals for curbing the greenhouse gas emissions that are dangerously heating the planet.Leigh Vogel for The New York TimesBernard L. McNamee is a former Trump administration official who has worked as an adviser to fossil fuel companies as well as for the Texas Public Policy Foundation, which spreads misinformation about climate change. He wrote the section of the strategy covering the Department of Energy, which said the national laboratories have been too focused on climate change and renewable energy. In an interview, Mr. McNamee said he believes the role of the agency is to make sure energy is affordable and reliable.Mr. Dans said a mandate of Project 2025 is to “investigate whether the dimensions of climate change exist and what can actually be done.” As for the influence of burning fossil fuels, he said, “I think the science is still out on that quite frankly.”In actuality, it is not.The top scientists in the United States concluded in an exhaustive study produced during the Trump administration that humans — the cars we drive, the power plants we operate, the forests we destroy — are to blame. “There is no convincing alternative explanation supported by the extent of the observational evidence,” scientists wrote.Climate advocates said the Republican strategy would take the country in the wrong direction even as heat waves, drought and wildfires worsen because of emissions.“This agenda would be laughable if the consequences of it weren’t so dire,” said Christy Goldfuss, chief policy impact officer for the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group.Republicans who have called for their party to accept climate change said they were disappointed by the blueprint and worried about the direction of the party.“I think its out-of-touch Beltway silliness and it’s not meeting Americans where they are,” said Sarah Hunt, president of the Joseph Rainey Center for Public Policy, which works with Republican state officials on energy needs.Firefighters battling the Agua Fire in Soledad Canyon near Agua Dulce, Calif., last month.David Swanson/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesShe called efforts to repeal the Inflation Reduction Act, which is pouring money and jobs overwhelmingly into red states, particularly impractical.“Obviously as conservatives we’re concerned about fiscal responsibility, but if you look at what Republican voters think, a lot of Republicans in red states show strong support for provisions of the I.R.A.,” Ms. Hunt said.Representative John Curtis, Republican of Utah, who launched a conservative climate caucus, called it “vital that Republicans engage in supporting good energy and climate policy.”Without directly commenting on the G.O.P. blueprint, Mr. Curtis said “I look forward to seeing the solutions put forward by the various presidential candidates and hope there is a robust debate of ideas to ensure we have reliable, affordable and clean energy.”Benji Backer, executive chairman and founder of the American Conservation Coalition, a group of young Republicans who want climate action, said he felt Project 2025 was wrongheaded.“If they were smart about this issue they would have taken approach that said ‘the Biden administration has done things in a way they don’t agree with but here’s our vision’,” he said. “Instead they remove it from being a priority.”He noted climate change is a real concern among young Republicans. By a nearly two-to-one margin, polls have found, Republicans aged 18 to 39 years old are more likely to agree that “human activity contributes a great deal to climate change,” and that the federal government has a role to play in curbing it.Of Project 2025, he said, “This sort of approach on climate is not acceptable to the next generation.” More

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      The Energy Transition Is Underway. Fossil Fuel Workers Could Be Left Behind.

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      The Biden administration is trying to increase renewable energy investments in distressed regions, but some are skeptical those measures would be enough to make up for job losses.Tiffany Berger spent more than a decade working at a coal-fired power plant in Coshocton County, Ohio, eventually becoming a unit operator making about $100,000 annually.But in 2020, American Electric Power shut down the plant, and Ms. Berger struggled to find a job nearby that offered a comparable salary. She sold her house, moved in with her parents and decided to help run their farm in Newcomerstown, Ohio, about 30 minutes away.They sell some of the corn, beans and beef they harvest, but it is only enough to keep the farm running. Ms. Berger, 39, started working part time at a local fertilizer and seed company last year, making just a third of what she used to earn. She said she had “never dreamed” the plant would close.“I thought I was set to retire from there,” Ms. Berger said. “It’s a power plant. I mean, everybody needs power.”The United States is undergoing a rapid shift away from fossil fuels as new battery factories, wind and solar projects, and other clean energy investments crop up across the country. An expansive climate law that Democrats passed last year could be even more effective than Biden administration officials had estimated at reducing fossil fuel emissions. While the transition is projected to create hundreds of thousands of clean energy jobs, it could be devastating for many workers and counties that have relied on coal, oil and gas for their economic stability. Estimates of the potential job losses in the coming years vary, but roughly 900,000 workers were directly employed by fossil fuel industries in 2022, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.The Biden administration is trying to mitigate the impact, mostly by providing additional tax advantages for renewable energy projects that are built in areas vulnerable to the energy transition. But some economists, climate researchers and union leaders said they are skeptical the initiatives will be enough. Beyond construction, wind and solar farms typically require few workers to operate, and new clean energy jobs might not necessarily offer comparable wages or align with the skills of laid-off workers.Coal plants have already been shutting down for years, and the nation’s coal production has fallen from its peak in the late 2000s. U.S. coal-fired generation capacity is projected to decline sharply to about 50 percent of current levels by 2030, according to the Energy Information Administration. About 41,000 workers remain in the coal mining industry, down from about 177,000 in the mid-1980s.The industry’s demise is a problem not just for its workers but also for the communities that have long relied on coal to power their tax revenue. The loss of revenue from mines, plants and workers can mean less money for schools, roads and law enforcement. A recent paper from the Aspen Institute found that from 1980 to 2019, regions exposed to the decline of coal saw long-run reductions in earnings and employment rates, greater uptake of Medicare and Medicaid benefits and substantial decreases in population, particularly among younger workers. That “leaves behind a population that is disproportionately old, sick and poor,” according to the paper.The Biden administration has promised to help those communities weather the impact, for both economic and political reasons. Failure to adequately help displaced workers could translate into the kind of populist backlash that hurt Democrats in the wake of globalization as companies shifted factories to China. Promises to restore coal jobs also helped Donald J. Trump clinch the 2016 election, securing him crucial votes in states like Pennsylvania.Federal officials have vowed to create jobs in hard-hit communities and ensure that displaced workers “benefit from the new clean energy economy” by offering developers billions in bonus tax credits to put renewable energy projects in regions dependent on fossil fuels.Tiffany Berger, who was laid off when the plant in Coshocton County was shut down, struggled to find work that offered a comparable salary. She moved in with her parents and decided to help run her family’s farm.Maddie McGarvey for The New York TimesIf new investments like solar farms or battery storage facilities are built in those regions, called “energy communities,” developers could get as much as 40 percent of a project’s cost covered. Businesses receiving credits for producing electricity from renewable sources could earn a 10 percent boost.The Inflation Reduction Act also set aside at least $4 billion in tax credits that could be used to build clean energy manufacturing facilities, among other projects, in regions with closed coal mines or plants, and it created a program that could guarantee up to $250 billion in loans to repurpose facilities like a shuttered power plant for clean energy uses.Brian Anderson, the executive director of the Biden administration’s interagency working group on energy communities, pointed to other federal initiatives, including increased funding for projects to reclaim abandoned mine lands and relief funds to revitalize coal communities.Still, he said that the efforts would not be enough, and that officials had limited funding to directly assist more communities.“We’re standing right at the cusp of potentially still leaving them behind again,” Mr. Anderson said.Phil Smith, the chief of staff at the United Mine Workers of America, said that the tax credits for manufacturers could help create more jobs but that $4 billion likely would not be enough to attract facilities to every region. He said he also hoped for more direct assistance for laid-off workers, but Congress did not fund those initiatives. “We think that’s still something that needs to be done,” Mr. Smith said.Gordon Hanson, the author of the Aspen Institute paper and a professor of urban policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, said he worried the federal government was relying too heavily on the tax credits, in part because companies would likely be more inclined to invest in growing areas. He urged federal officials to increase unemployment benefits to distressed regions and funding for work force development programs.Even with the bonus credit, clean energy investments might not reach the hardest-hit areas because a broad swath of regions meets the federal definition of an energy community, said Daniel Raimi, a fellow at Resources for the Future.“If the intention of that provision was to specifically provide an advantage to the hardest-hit fossil fuel communities, I don’t think it’s done that,” Mr. Raimi said.Local officials have had mixed reactions to the federal efforts. Steve Henry, the judge-executive of Webster County, Ky., said he believed they could bring renewable energy investments and help attract other industries to the region. The county experienced a significant drop in tax revenue after its last mine shut down in 2019, and it now employs fewer 911 dispatchers and deputy sheriffs because officials cannot offer more competitive wages.“I think we can recover,” he said. “But it’s going to be a long recovery.”Adam O’Nan, the judge-executive of Union County, Ky., which has one coal mine left, said he thought renewable energy would bring few jobs to the area, and he doubted that a manufacturing plant would be built because of the county’s inadequate infrastructure.“It’s kind of difficult to see how it reaches down into Union County at this point,” Mr. O’Nan said. “We’re best suited for coal at the moment.”Federal and state efforts so far have done little to help workers like James Ault, 42, who was employed at an oil refinery in Contra Costa County, Calif., for 14 years before he was laid off in 2020. To keep his family afloat, he depleted his pension and withdrew most of the money from his 401(k) early.In early 2022, he moved to Roseville, Calif., to work at a power plant, but he was laid off again after four months. He worked briefly as a meal delivery driver before landing a job in February at a nearby chemical manufacturer.He now makes $17 an hour less than he did at the refinery and is barely able to cover his mortgage. Still, he said he would not return to the oil industry.“With our push away from gasoline, I feel that I would be going into an industry that is kind of dying,” Mr. Ault said. More

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      How Utilities Use Money From Your Bills to Block Clean Energy

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      To avoid the worst impacts of climate change, we have to make two big transitions at once: First, we have to generate all of our electricity from clean sources, like wind turbines and solar panels, rather than power plants that run on coal and methane gas. Second, we have to retool nearly everything else that burns oil and gas — like cars, buses and furnaces that heat buildings — to run on that clean electricity.These changes are underway, but their speed and ultimate success depend greatly on one kind of company: the utilities that have monopolies to sell us electricity and gas.But around the country, utility companies are using their outsize political power to slow down the clean energy transition, and they are probably using your money to do it.State regulators are supposed to make sure that customers’ monthly utility bills cover only the cost of delivering electricity or gas and to set limits on how much utilities can profit. But large investor-owned utilities, with legions of lawyers to help them evade scrutiny, bake many of their political costs into rates right alongside their investments in electrical poles and wires. In doing so, they are conscripting their customers into an unknowing army of millions of small-dollar donors to prolong the era of dirty energy.Fortunately, Colorado, Connecticut and Maine passed laws this spring that prohibit utilities from charging customers for their lobbying, public relations spending and dues to political trade associations like the American Gas Association and the Edison Electric Institute. Regulators in Louisiana are considering similar policy changes. Every state in the country should follow those leads.These reforms are crucial because while all corporations in the United States can spend money on politics, in most cases, consumers who don’t approve can take their business elsewhere. Utilities — as regulated monopolies — have the unique ability to force customers to participate.It’s not that utilities aren’t interested in building and profiting from clean energy. Many are doing so, and the Inflation Reduction Act offers utilities extensive tax incentives to increase their investments in wind, solar and batteries. But that does not mean that utilities want others to do the same. They will support a clean energy transition only if it happens exclusively on their terms and at their pace — a stance at odds with the scope and urgency of the herculean task of decarbonizing our electric grid.Most electric utilities view distributed energy — technologies owned by customers that generate electricity in smaller amounts — as a threat to their business. They have tried for years to stop their customers in many states from investing in rooftop solar by rigging rates to make it less economically attractive. They’ve also funded opposition to policies that would speed clean energy.Florida Power & Light spent millions of dollars on political consultants who are accused of engineering a scheme to siphon votes to third-party ghost candidates, according to reporting by The Orlando Sentinel. The ghost candidates never campaigned, but their names appeared on ballots for competitive State Senate seats in an effort to spoil the chances of Democrats who had been critical of the utilities. One of the Democrats had repeatedly introduced legislation supportive of rooftop solar power, which Florida Power & Light has crusaded against for years, including writing legislation in 2021 that would have slowed its growth. “I want you to make his life a living hell,” the utility’s chief executive wrote in an internal email. The legislator lost by fewer than 40 votes. Florida Power & Light has denied wrongdoing in the ghost candidate scandal.Utilities also have also fought to cling to plants powered by fossil fuels as long as possible. In Ohio the utility FirstEnergy concealed $60 million in bribes through a web of dark-money groups to the political organization of the state’s speaker of the House. Before his conviction and sentencing for this instance of racketeering, he helped pass a law that secured a $1.3 billion ratepayer-funded bailout for FirstEnergy’s bankrupt nuclear and coal plants, gutted the state’s renewable energy and energy efficiency standards for utilities and bailed out coal plants owned by other utilities. Audits showed that FirstEnergy used money collected from ratepayers in its scheme.Electric utilities have even opposed policies to hasten the development of desperately needed long-range transmission wires for clean energy, as NextEra Energy, Florida Power & Light’s parent company, spent millions to do in New England, where NextEra generates and sells power from oil and gas.And many utility conglomerates don’t just sell electricity; they also sell methane gas, a serious threat to decarbonization efforts. Many of those gas utilities are fighting tooth and nail against local communities’ efforts to electrify our buildings and using ratepayers’ money to do so. In California, SoCalGas, the nation’s largest gas distribution utility, has been caught illicitly and repeatedly misusing ratepayer money to fight cities’ building electrification plans. In New York the gas utility National Fuel reportedly made its customers pay for advocacy materials directing New Yorkers to oppose pro-electrification policies.The Colorado, Connecticut and Maine laws address these tactics by prohibiting utilities from charging customers for a suite of political activities. Other states and the federal government should go further in two ways:First, they should add mandatory enforcement provisions so that if utilities illegally charge customers for political activities, stiff and automatic fines would kick in.Second, policymakers should, at minimum, require that utilities disclose all political spending. The recently passed state laws won’t stop utilities from spending their profits on politics. The post-Citizens United campaign finance landscape makes it difficult to restrict such expenditures, but it does not protect companies’ ability to spend secretly, which is how utilities like FirstEnergy, Florida Power & Light and SoCalGas have attempted their most noxious influence campaigns.Utilities are too central to the clean energy transition to be allowed to dictate our energy and climate policies based on their profit motives. Limiting their influence gives us the best chance to move quickly and affordably to a safer and cleaner future.David Pomerantz is the executive director of the Energy and Policy Institute, a utility watchdog organization.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Jay Inslee Sees Greener Pastures Ahead

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      After nearly 30 years in elected office, Washington’s governor plans to shift his focus to climate solutions and clean energy, underscoring the need for “a sense of optimism and confidence.”Jay Inslee has been in elected office so long that he served in Congress during the tail end of the George H.W. Bush administration.On Monday Mr. Inslee, 72, announced that he would not seek a fourth term as Washington State’s governor, ending a nearly 30-year career in elected office. He went to Congress as a centrist Democrat and evolved into a fierce critic of the Iraq war and later of President Donald J. Trump. He will leave the State Capitol after the 2024 elections as one of America’s leading climate hawks.Mr. Inslee ran for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination by arguing that the country would have to radically reshape its relationship with fossil fuels and promote renewable energy. While Mr. Inslee’s candidacy never caught fire, his goals later became the blueprint for the climate spending in the Inflation Reduction Act, which President Biden signed into law last year.When I interviewed Mr. Inslee in 2017, he said the only other job he would want was to be the quarterback of his hometown Seattle Seahawks. When I reminded him of this as we spoke Monday afternoon, he replied, “Now I want to be the next goalie for the Seattle Kraken,” the city’s hockey team. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.Why did you make this decision now?There comes a time to pass the torch, and to everything there is a season, and for a variety of reasons, I decided it was the right season. But I’ve got another year and a half to put the pedal to the metal. My dad was a track coach, and he always said run through the tape, so I’ll be running through the tape. Have you spoken with President Biden about your decision?I have not, but he has a few other things on his mind, so I’m happy that he’s up and running in his race. I’m glad he’s in his race.How would you grade him on climate policy?I’ve never liked grades because I always thought it was a bit presumptuous, but I can just tell you I was so delighted at him pulling a rabbit out of the hat to get the Inflation Reduction Act through. Its prospects were so dim. And for him to get that $360 billion in clean energy investment is so pivotal for us to have even a fighting chance to deal with climate.I just came from an unveiling of the world’s largest commercial hydrogen fuel cell plane that represents a potential for sustainable aviation. Last week, I signed a permit for a solar farm in Yakima County. These are the things that his accomplishment is going to accelerate, and I could not be more excited about that. So, you know, there’s always things on siting and permitting that are contentious.You mentioned the siting and permitting. I take it you’re referring to his approving the Willow oil drilling project in Alaska. I imagine you don’t agree with his decisions on that front.I don’t, but he won the presidency, and I did not. So we should point that out.What’s your level of interest in serving in his administration at some point?It isn’t something I’ve thought about. I really am so focused on the next 20 months. I think he’s done a real crackerjack job as president. I’m glad he’s running. I feel good about him winning the next election. I just haven’t thought about what happens after this term of office, except it’s going to be involved in something that will push the climate agenda and the clean energy economic development. I’ll find some way to be productive in that realm.It sounds like you’d listen if the president were to call and talk to you about something.Of course I would listen, but it’s just not something that’s on my agenda to consider at the moment.We talked a lot when you were running for president about the urgency of the climate moment. Do you think the country and the planet are beyond a state of no return?One of the most important things we need to do at this moment is to establish a sense of optimism and confidence in what you might call a can-do attitude when it comes to the development of clean energy. It is necessary to keep people from the despair, which leads to inactivity and passivity. And the antidote for despair is action. It is also just healthy for us from a mental health standpoint.The rate of change is so dramatic that it legitimately should give us optimism in our ability to transform this economy much faster than we believe. In 2007, I said we’re going to be driving electric cars. People thought I was smoking the cheap stuff. Well, now we’re buying them so fast that production can’t even keep up.Obviously, we are going to be suffering some changes that to some degree are baked into the climatic system. But we don’t need to focus on despair, we need to focus on action and a can-do spirit. More

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      Biden Has Something He’d Like to Tell You

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      Gail Collins: Well, Bret it looks like Joe Biden will be announcing his re-election bid this week.Bret Stephens: Proving my prediction from last week dead wrong.Gail: I know you disagree with him on many issues, particularly relating to the economy.But given the likely Republican presidential candidates, any chance you’ll actually be able to avoid voting for him?Bret: Arghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. Probably not.It says something about the state of the Republican Party that the two current front-runners — let’s call them Don Caligula and Ron Torquemada — are nonstarters for a voter like me. And I’m a guy who believes in low taxes, a strong military, broken-windows policing, entitlement reform, a border wall and school choice. That’s the Nikki Haley side of the party — now reduced to single digits of the G.O.P. base.Gail: Sorry about Haley’s failure to take flight. I know you were rooting for her.Bret: Well, I’m still holding out hopes — increasingly faint though they are.On the other hand, I really, really wish Biden weren’t running, for all the reasons we’ve discussed. He’s just not a convincing candidate. And for all the talk of Donald Trump being unelectable in the general election, we’ve heard those predictions before. All it might take is a recession — which is probably coming — for swing voters to care a lot less about abortion rights in Florida or the Jan. 6 attempted coup than they will about jobs and the economy.Aren’t you a wee bit nervous?Gail: Nervous? Just because we’re talking about a presidential election in which one of the two major parties nominates either a loony ex-president drowning in legal problems or a deeply unappealing, extremely right-wing enemy of Disney World?Bret: It’s a game of Russian roulette, played with three bullets in the six-shooter.Gail: As for the Democrats, I’ve already told you I think 80 is too old to be planning another presidential campaign. And Biden has been around so long, it’s hard to make anything he talks about doing sound exciting.But what you’re worried about — a popular reaction against a bad economy — would be a problem for anybody in the party.Bret: True, but Amy Klobuchar or Gretchen Whitmer or some other plausible nominee can’t be accused of owning the economy the way Biden can.Gail: Biden certainly has negatives. But Trump has a lot more — all way more dire. And even if Ron DeSantis weren’t a terrible campaigner, I can’t see him winning over the electorate with his past plans to torpedo Medicare.Bret: You’re probably right about DeSantis, who seems too obsessed trying to slay Mickey and Minnie to appeal to regular voters outside Florida. As for Trump, this is a strange thing to say, but: The guy has demon energy. You know the movie “Cocaine Bear”? Trump is “Diet Coke Cujo,” if you get my Stephen King reference.Gail: Yeah, he’s never boring. Sigh. But we’ll see how energetic he looks when he’s defending himself for falsifying business records, and all the other investigations that await him.Alas, we’ll be conversing about this for a very long time, Bret. On the more immediate horizon, there’s the Fox-Dominion settlement. Tell me your thoughts.Bret: I am sorry we didn’t get to watch Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham and the rest of the gang of cynical, lying, repulsive and wretched propagandists squirm under oath in courtroom testimony. Would have paid money just to see that.But, realistically speaking, it’s probably the best possible result. $787.5 million is rich vindication for Dominion. It’s the closest Fox will ever come to admitting guilt. And it spares us the possibility of an appeals process that might have ended with the Supreme Court revisiting the strict libel standards of Times v. Sullivan and potentially limiting the freedom of the press.Gail: Yeah, for all my daydreams about Fox celebrities having to get up in court and apologize to the nation, in the real world this is probably the best you can get while protecting all the rights of a free press.Bret: The good news, Gail, is that Dominion still has suits pending against Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, Newsmax and Mike Lindell, the MyPillow Guy, along with a few others. And there’s also the pending Smartmatic suit against Fox, too.Having fun, making bank and doing good at the expense of creeps has got to be the greatest joy adults can have in a boardroom.But we mentioned the Supreme Court. Any thoughts on the mifepristone ruling, staying the lower court’s ban on the abortion pill? I’m relieved, of course, that the court will allow the pill to remain on the market.Gail: Well, this is the nice thing about a democracy. You have the powers that be suddenly realizing the public is totally not on their side. So they fudge a little, dodge a little and quietly backtrack.Bret: It’ll be some irony if Republicans come to rue last year’s Dobbs decision for making them unelectable in all but the reddest parts of the country — and Democrats come to celebrate it for helping them cement a long-term majority that eventually changes the composition of the court so that abortion rights are restored.Gail: But we’re still a long way from living in a country where every woman has the right to control her own body when it comes to reproduction issues.Bret: As the dissents from Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito in the mifepristone ruling make clear ….Gail: I’ve always wanted to see state lawmakers from both sides get together on a package of reforms that would couple abortion rights with easily available, easily affordable health and counseling services for poor pregnant women.Along, of course, with high quality child care for low-income working mothers. Ahem.Bret: Gail, would it shock you to know that I don’t disagree with anything you just said? Of course, child care won’t solve the root of so many of our problems, which is the near-destruction of stable two-parent families in too many poor households. But that’s a disaster whose cure lies beyond a government’s ability to solve.Gail: Wow — government support for high-quality early education? I think I’m hearing a major change of heart. If so, gonna buy a very nice bottle of wine for dinner tonight and drink a toast to you.Bret: I tend to soften in your presence.Gail: Awww. Well, go on — back to the issues of the day.Bret: Speaking of disasters, your thoughts on Biden’s E.P.A. rule controlling emissions from power plants?Gail: A worthy effort to protect future generations from environmental disaster, and of course the Republicans hate it.Bret: There should be a better way of saving the planet than by using administrative means to impose high costs on industry that will inevitably be passed along to consumers in the form of higher energy prices — which also hit poorer people harder — while setting wildly unrealistic target dates for an energy transition.Notice that I’m saying this and I still will probably have no choice but to vote for Biden. Unbelievable.Gail: Our colleague Jim Tankersley wrote a great analysis about the ongoing crisis over raising the debt limit, which has got to get done this spring. And how more than half of the Republicans’ 320-page version of a debt limit bill is actually about removing clean energy restrictions.Bret: I’d need to see the fine print before making a judgment, but a lot of what passes for “clean energy,” like biofuels, is really a dirty-energy, big government, big business boondoggle. As for the debt limit, it wouldn’t be a bad thing if Biden showed any willingness to meet Republicans halfway on spending cuts and work requirements for able-bodied adults taking federal subsidies.Gail: Bret, the debt limit is — something responsible people take care of without creating a political crisis with demands they’ll never achieve.But hey, that’s a mean way to end our talk. You’re always great about telling me about something new you’ve just read. Go ahead.Bret: Gail, I have to recommend Katie Hafner’s smart and humane obituary on Richard Riordan, the last Republican mayor of Los Angeles and a man who brought calm good sense to a city reeling from riots and racial strife. Riordan was a warts-and-all kind of guy, who cracked some dumb jokes that would have probably been politically fatal in our cancel-culture age. But he also brought common sense and a strong work ethic to his job and embodied a Republican pragmatism that we could sorely use today. He was the last of nine children born to an Irish Catholic family — California is better because his parents were persistent.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Here’s What the Other Republican Candidates Should Say to Trump

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      Bret Stephens: Hi, Gail. I know you’re keen to handicap — figuratively, but maybe also literally — the emerging field of Republican presidential hopefuls. First Donald Trump, now Nikki Haley, and soon, possibly, her fellow Palmetto State Republican, Senator Tim Scott. That’s on top of probable runs by Ron DeSantis, Mike Pompeo, Mike Pence, and possibly Brian Kemp of Georgia, Glenn Youngkin of Virginia, Kristi Noem of South Dakota and Chris Christie of … New Jersey.Who worries you the most — or repels you the least?Gail Collins: Well gee, Bret. Have to admit I have a tad of sympathy for Mike Pence, and maybe Brian Kemp, since they at least had the backbone to stand up for the idea that, um, this is a democracy where the winners of elections … win.Bret: With you on Kemp, who successfully fended off two election deniers: Trump and Stacey Abrams. Can’t say I feel much sympathy for Pence. You don’t get bonus points for doing the most basic part of your job, much less for standing up for democracy and the rule of law at the last possible minute.Gail: All of them are more or less opposed to abortion and sensible gun regulation, and many of them are in favor of tax cuts for the rich that would cut back on resources for the needy. And given Haley’s first campaign week, I’d predict that as we go along, all of them will be veering off to Crazy Town in order to compete with Trump.Hey, why are we worried about what I think? You’re in charge of Republicans. Tell me — which of these folks would you vote for against Joe Biden?Bret: A lot will depend on who is, or isn’t, willing to bend the knee to Trump. I’m waiting for one of them to say something along the following lines:“Donald, Republicans placed their faith in you when it seemed as if, for all of your flaws, you could still be a gust of fresh air for our party and the country. You turned out to be a Category 5 hurricane, leaving a wake of political destruction everywhere you went ….”Gail: Loving this scenario …Bret: “You destroyed our majority in the House of Representatives in 2018. You destroyed our hold on the White House in 2020. Your reckless, stupid, un-American and transparently false claims about the election helped cost us Georgia’s two Senate seats in 2021. Your garbage taste in primary candidates, based pretty much entirely on their willingness to suck up to you and regurgitate your lies, cost us the Senate again in the midterms along with the governorship of Arizona. You shame us with your dinner invitations to antisemites like Kanye West. And your petulant attacks on fellow Republicans — usually the ones who stand a chance of winning a general election — keep playing into the hands of Democrats.”Gail: Keep going!Bret: “Other than your usual lackeys, not to mention Lindsey Graham, there’s not a single Republican who has worked closely with you who has a good word to say about you in private, though some of them still flatter you in public. If, heaven forbid, you’re the Republican nominee next year, you’ll only be guaranteeing Joe Biden and Kamala Harris a second term. You’re a loser, Donald: a sore loser, a serial loser, a selfish loser. You’re the biggest loser — except, of course, when it comes to your waistline. As was once said to Neville Chamberlain after he had put Britain in mortal danger, so I say to you: ‘In the name of God, go.’”I’ll struggle to vote for a candidate who can’t say something along these lines. If they can’t stand up to a bully in their own house, how can we expect them to stand up to Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping?Gail: I believe I am hearing that you’re going to vote for Joe Biden.Bret: Hmm. Hopefully not. Most of my policy instincts are pretty much in line with people like Haley, Youngkin, Christie and even DeSantis, at least on his good days. I probably just won’t vote if no Republican can pass the decency test.Gail: Also trying to imagine the things that might happen on the Biden front that might reduce your openness to the Democratic option. Privately thinking: presidential health problems and Kamala Harris. But too early to talk about that now.Bret: Is it? OK, go on ….Gail: If we’re going to talk health, let’s go back to Senator John Fetterman, now hospitalized with depression. It seems at this point as if breaking in as a new senator and recovering from a stroke is too much of a to-do list. I remember recently, when we were on this topic, you were way more worried than I was about his condition. Did you have some advance knowledge he was in trouble or just a well-educated guess?Bret: Maybe a little bit of advance knowledge, plus personal experience. My father had a cerebral hemorrhage when he was 53, the same age Fetterman is now. He recovered physically but, like many survivors of brain injuries, suffered a crushing depression that was out of character with his sunny temperament. The book that helped him get through it was William Styron’s memoir of his own depression, “Darkness Visible.” The good news for my dad, who lived for 21 years after the hemorrhage, was that the darkness eventually lifted and he went on to better years, as I sincerely hope will be the case for the senator.Gail: Of course. Also hoping this will publicize the importance of getting professional treatment when depression strikes.Bret: Gail, returning to the Biden presidency again, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office just reported that the federal government will take on nearly $19 trillion in new debt over the next decade. Doesn’t that, er, alarm you?Gail: Sure, and I hear it as a clarion call for tax reform — raising rates on the people who can afford to pay more. Don’t see any reason, for instance, that someone making a million dollars a year is only paying Social Security tax on the first $160,200.I suspect you’re hearing a somewhat different trumpet.Bret: Just a tad different!First thing, we need to turbocharge economic growth so that the debt will be a smaller fraction of the overall economy. Top of my list would be immigration reform to ease labor shortages and regulatory reform to make life easier for small businesses, like doing away with needless permitting requirements. Second, spending restraint, particularly when it comes to dumb subsidies like the ones for ethanol or tax credits for buying Teslas. Third, entitlement reform by way of gradually pushing up the retirement age for today’s younger workers.What am I missing — I mean, other than one or two screws?Gail: Bret, I have never accused you of a screw shortage, although there are some issues on which I’ve suggested some tightening might be nice.Bret: My mother says the same.Gail: We’re in agreement on opening the door to more immigration, so let’s move on to the rest, one by one.Reducing permit requirements for new businesses — you’d certainly be able to come up with some examples of overregulation there, but I’ll bet if somebody decides your neighborhood would be a good place to open a distillery in an old warehouse, you’d want to make sure there were some serious controls in place.Bret: Only for quality ingredients, flavor, complexity, age and smoothness.Gail: Tax credits for electric vehicles help move the country away from carbon-emitting gas guzzlers, and that’s great for the environment. Yeah, I wish it didn’t mean more money for Elon Musk, but if we want to eliminate all laws that benefit irritating rich guys, there’d be a lot of better places to start.Bret: On your earlier point, Gail, do you know you are supposed to complete a 250-hour training program to become a licensed manicurist in New York? That’s the kind of enterprise-defeating regulation I had in mind. As for electric vehicles, I can’t wait for someone to start fully tallying the environmental impact of, say, the lithium mines needed to produce their batteries. There’s just no such thing as “clean” energy.Gail: Of course you’re right that nothing is easy and we’re going to have to come back to energy issues a lot. But in the meantime, your suggestion for entitlement reform: It’s basically about raising the age for Social Security eligibility, right? Currently 67 for most workers, although you can qualify for a more modest package at 62. There’s nothing magic about 67, but I can think of a lot of jobs that’d be tough for people that age to keep doing.Bret: True.Gail: Looking out my window right now I see a bunch of guys climbing around the 12th story outside wall of an apartment building, refurbishing the stones and concrete so nothing falls down and bops a pedestrian. I’m sure some people in their late-60s would be great at the job, but I wouldn’t want them forced to take it on.Bret: Agree, and there’s no reason we can’t put together a reform of Social Security that allows people who make their living in physically demanding jobs to retire on the earlier side. It’s those of us who sit at desks most of the day whom I mainly have in mind.By the way, Gail, before we go, I can’t fail to mention the exceptional reporting by our news-side colleagues Jeremy Peters and Katie Robertson. It concerns the lawsuit against Fox News by Dominion Voting Systems, and what it has uncovered — namely, that people like Tucker Carlson and other talking heads at the network knew perfectly well that Trump’s claims of a stolen election were bunk, but tried their damnedest to sow doubts about the election anyway. There’s a word for that: vile. There ought to be a circle in hell for it, too.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      ‘Where’s My Flying Car?’ Is a Legitimate Question

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      In December, scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory announced that they had achieved on Earth what is commonplace within stars: They had fused hydrogen isotopes, releasing more energy in the reaction than was used in the ignition. The announcement came with enough caveats to make it clear that usable nuclear fusion remains, optimistically, decades away. But the fact that nuclear fusion will not change our energy system over the next year doesn’t mean it shouldn’t change our energy ambitions for the coming years.There are three goals a society can have for its energy usage. One is to use less. That is, arguably, the goal that took hold in the 1970s. “Reduce, reuse, recycle” is the key mantra here, with the much-ignored instruction to reduce coming first for a reason. Today, that ambition persists in the thinking of degrowthers and others who believe humanity courts calamity if we don’t respect our limits and discard fantasies of endless growth.The second goal is to use what we use now, but better. That is where modern climate policy has moved. The vision of decarbonization — now being pursued through policy, like last year’s Inflation Reduction Act — is to maintain roughly the energy patterns we have but shift to nonpolluting sources like wind and solar. Decarbonization at this speed and scale is so daunting a task that it is hard to look beyond it, to the third possible goal: a world of energy abundance.In his fascinating, frustrating book “Where Is My Flying Car?” J. Storrs Hall argues that we do not realize how much our diminished energy ambitions have cost us. Across the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, the energy humanity could harness grew at about 7 percent annually. Humanity’s compounding energetic force, he writes, powered “the optimism and constant improvement of life in the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century.”But starting around 1970, the curve flattened, particularly in rich countries, which began doing more with less. In 1979, for instance, Americans consumed about 10.8 kilowatts per person. In 2019 we consumed about 9.2 kilowatts a person. To a conservationist, this looks like progress, though not nearly enough, as a glance at CO2 emissions will confirm. To Hall, it was a civilizational catastrophe.His titular flying car stands in for all that we were promised in the mid-20th century but don’t yet have: flying cars, of course, but also lunar bases, nuclear rockets, atomic batteries, nanotechnology, undersea cities, affordable supersonic air travel and so on. Hall harvests these predictions and many more from midcentury sci-fi writers and prognosticators and sorts them according to their cost in energy. What he finds is that the marvels we did manage — the internet, smartphones, teleconferencing, Wikipedia, flat-screen televisions, streaming video and audio content, mRNA vaccines, rapidly advancing artificial intelligence, to name just a few — largely required relatively little energy and the marvels we missed would require masses of it.But they are possible. We’ve flown plenty of flying car prototypes over the decades. The water crises of the future could be solved by mass desalination. Supersonic air travel is a solved technological problem. Lunar bases lie well within the boundaries of possibility. The path that Richard Feynman, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, outlined for nanotechnology — build machines that are capable of building smaller machines that are capable of building smaller machines that are capable of, well, you get it — still seems plausible. What we need is energy — much, much more of it. But Hall thinks we’ve become an “ergophobic” society, which he defines as a society gripped by “the almost inexplicable belief that there is something wrong with using energy.”Here, Hall’s account drips with contempt for anyone who does not dive out of the way of today’s industrialists. He reaches back to old H.G. Wells stories to find the right metaphor for where our civilization went sideways, finding it in the feckless Eloi, a post-human race that collapsed into the comforts of abundance. The true conflict, he says, is not between the haves and the have-nots but between the doers and the do-nots. “The do-nots favor stagnation and are happy turning our civilization into a collective couch potato,” he writes. And in his view, the do-nots are winning.“Where Is My Flying Car?” is a work of what I’d call reactionary futurism. It loves the progress technology can bring; it can’t stand the soft, flabby humans who stand in the future’s way. There is nothing inexplicable about why country after country sought energy conservation or why it remains an aim. A partial list would include poisoned rivers and streams, smog-choked cities, the jagged edge of climate change and ongoing mass extinction and the geopolitical costs of being hooked on oil from Saudi Arabia and gas from Russia.Hall gives all this short shrift, describing climate change as “a hangnail, not a hangman” (for whom, one wants to ask), and focusing on the villainy of lawyers and regulators and hippies. He laments how the advent of nuclear weapons made war so costly that it “short-circuited the evolutionary process,” in which “a society that slid into inefficient cultural or governmental practices was likely to be promptly conquered by the baron next door.”Hall’s sociopolitical theories are as flimsy as his technical analyses are careful. His book would imply that countries with shallow public sectors would race ahead of their statist peers in innovation and that nations threatened by violent neighbors would be better governed and more technologically advanced than, say, the United States.Among his central arguments is that government funding and attention paradoxically impedes the technologies it’s meant to help, but — curiously for a book about energy — he has little to say about the astonishing progress in solar, wind and battery power that’s been driven by public policy. He predicts that if solar and wind “prove actually usable on a large scale,” environmentalists would turn on them. “Their objections really have nothing to do with pollution, or radiation, or risk, or global warming,” he writes. “They are about keeping abundant, cheap energy out of the hands of ordinary people.”But on this branch of the multiverse, most every environmentalist group of note fought to pass the Inflation Reduction Act, which was really the Deploy Solar and Wind Everywhere and Invest in Every Energy Technology We Can Think of Act. And if they had their way, it would have been far bigger and far better funded.Indeed, the existence of Hall’s book is a challenge to its thesis. “Where Is My Flying Car?” is now distributed by Stripe Press, the publishing offshoot of the digital payment company Stripe, which was started by two Irish immigrants in California. That state is the home of the postmaterialist counterculture that Hall sees as the beating heart of Eloi politics, and there is little fear of a near-term invasion by Mexican forces. Even so, California has housed a remarkable series of technological advances and institutions over the past century, and it continues to do so. The fusion breakthrough, for instance, was made by government scientists working in, yes, Northern California. There is an interplay here that is far more complex than Hall’s theories admit.But Hall’s book is worth struggling with because he’s right about two big things. First, that the flattening of the energy curve was a moment of civilizational import and one worth revisiting. And second, that many in politics have abandoned any real vision of the long future. Too often, the right sees only the imagined glories of the past, and the left sees only the injustices of the present. The future exists in our politics mainly to give voice to our fears or urgency to our agendas. We’ve lost sight of the world that abundant, clean energy could make possible.The remarkable burst of prosperity and possibility that has defined the past few hundred years has been a story of energy. “Take any variable of human well-being — longevity, nutrition, income, mortality, overall population — and draw a graph of its value over time,” Charles Mann writes in “The Wizard and the Prophet.” “In almost every case it skitters along at a low level for thousands of years, then rises abruptly in the 18th and 19th centuries, as humans learn to wield the trapped solar power in coal, oil and natural gas.”Without energy, even material splendor has sharp limits. Mann notes that visitors to the Palace of Versailles in February 1695 marveled at the furs worn to dinners with the king and the ice that collected on the glassware. It was freezing in Versailles, and no amount of wealth could fix it. A hundred years later, Thomas Jefferson had a vast wine collection and library in Monticello and the forced labor of hundreds of slaves, but his ink still froze in his inkwells come winter.Today, heating is a solved problem for many. But not for all. There are few inequalities more fundamental than energy inequality. The demographer Hans Rosling had a striking way of framing this. In 2010 he argued that you could group humanity by the energy people had access to. At the time, roughly two billion people had little or no access to electricity and still cook food and heat water by fire. About three billion had access to enough electricity to power electric lights. An additional billion or so had the energy and wealth for labor-saving appliances like washing machines. It’s only the richest billion people who could afford to fly, and they — we — used around half of global energy.The first reason to want energy abundance is to make energy and the gifts it brings available to all. Rosling put this well, describing how his mother loaded the laundry and then took him to the library, how she used the time she’d once spent cleaning clothes to teach herself English. “This is the magic,” he said. “You load the laundry, and what do you get out of the machine? You get books.” There is no global aid strategy we could pursue that would do nearly as much as making energy radically cheaper, more reliable and more available.Then there is all we could do if we had the cheap, clean and abundant energy needed to do it. In a paper imagining “energy superabundance,” Austin Vernon and Eli Dourado sketch out some of the near-term possibilities. “Flights that take 15 hours on a 747 could happen in an hour on a point-to-point rocket,” they write. Vertical greenhouses could feed far more people, and desalination, which even now is a major contributor to water supplies in Singapore and Israel, would become affordable for poorer, populous nations that need new water sources most. Directly removing carbon dioxide from the air would become more plausible, giving us a path to reversing climate change over time.Vernon and Dourado’s definition of superabundance is fairly modest: They define it as every person on Earth having access to about twice the power Icelanders use annually. But what if fusion or other technologies give us energy that becomes functionally limitless? I enjoyed the way Benjamin Reinhardt, a self-proclaimed ergophile, rendered this kind of world, writing in the online journal Works in Progress:You could wake up in your house on the beautiful coast of an artificial island off the coast of South America. You’re always embarrassed at the cheap synthesized sand whenever guests visit, but people have always needed to sacrifice to afford space for a family. You say goodbye to yours and leave for work. On your commute, you do some work on a new way of making high-temperature superconductors. You’re a total dilettante but the combination of fixed-price for infinite compute and the new trend of inefficient but modular technology has created an inventor out of almost everybody. Soon enough, you reach the bottom of the Singaporean space elevator: Cheap space launches, the low cost of rail-gunning raw material into space and decreased material costs made the whole thing work out economically. Every time you see that impossibly thin cable stretching up, seemingly into nothingness, it boggles your mind — if that’s possible, what else is? You check out the new shipment of longevity drugs, which can only be synthesized in pristine zero-G conditions. Then you scoot off to a last-minute meet-up with friends in Tokyo.As you all enjoy dinner (made from ingredients grown in the same building and picked five minutes before cooking) a material scientist friend of a friend describes the latest in physics simulations. You bask in yet another serendipitous, in-person interaction, grateful for your cross-continental relationships. While you head home, you poke at your superconductor design a bit more. It’s a long shot, but it might give you the resources to pull yourself out of the bottom 25 percent, so that your kids can lead an even brighter life than you do. Things are good, you think, but they could be better.The fusion demonstration is a reminder not of what is inevitable but of what is possible. And it is not just fusion. The advance of wind and solar and battery technology remains a near miracle. The possibilities of advanced geothermal and hydrogen are thrilling. Smaller, modular nuclear reactors could make new miracles possible, like cars and planes that don’t need to be refueled or recharged. This is a world progressives, in particular, should want to hasten into existence. Clean, abundant energy is the foundation on which a more equal, just and humane world can be built.“In 100 or 200 years, everything will look radically different,” Melissa Lott, the director of research at Columbia’s Center on Global Energy Policy, told me. “Folks will look back and be blown away by how we used energy today. They’ll say, ‘Wait, you just burned it?’”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More