America’s Energy Priorities Reconsidered

Guest

Dave Turk

Former Deputy Secretary, U.S. Department of Energy

Transcript

David Turk: For the world to solve climate change, the US needs to lead. If we are not leading both in terms of what we do domestically, but also in terms of what we do very pragmatically in cooperation with our allies, with our partners around the world, it’s just not going to get done. We are an innovation powerhouse or a clean energy powerhouse. We’re an energy powerhouse. We absolutely need to lead.

Jason Bordoff: The Biden administration took office with ambitious plans to accelerate America’s clean energy transition Over four years, it enacted major climate legislation, poured billions into new clean energy manufacturing, built partnerships with global allies on clean energy, and was faced with navigating a global energy crisis after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. So as Trump returns to office, what happens now? The clean energy transition is proving more complex than some expected with new challenges around affordability, security, and balancing climate goals with other economic priorities in this increasingly complex geopolitical landscape. How should we think about America’s energy policy going forward and how should we think about the legacy of the Biden Administration’s energy and climate agenda?

This is Columbia Energy Exchange, a weekly podcast from the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University. I’m Jason Boff today on the show, Dave Turk. Dave is part of our new class of distinguished visiting fellows here at the Center on Global Energy Policy. He recently completed his service as Deputy Secretary of Energy in the Biden administration, where he was the number two official and the Chief Operating Officer of the Department of Energy. Prior to this role, Dave served as deputy executive director of the International Energy Agency in Paris. During the Obama administration, he worked at the Department of Energy where he led the launch of mission innovation, a global effort to accelerate clean energy innovation. Dave joined me to discuss the Biden Administration’s energy policy, legacy and the challenges of balancing affordability, security, and climate goals. We explored recent headlines about the Trump administration’s approach to energy and climate, as well as the geopolitics of clean energy competition with China Energy security and the role of US leadership in global climate action. I hope you enjoy our conversation. Dave Turk, deputy Secretary of Energy and the Biden administration. Welcome to Columbia Energy Exchange and welcome to the Center on Global Energy Policy as our newest distinguished visiting fellow. It’s great to have you.

David Turk: Well, thanks Jason. As a big fan of the center for many, many years, it’s just a phenomenal, it’s just so terrific to be part of your team now.

Jason Bordoff: Yeah, it’s great to have you here and have you be part of the team in so many ways and excited to have this conversation. We’ve talked before, including at our big Global Energy Conference where you were a keynote speaker there. So much to talk about now,

David Turk: Which is coming up again,

Jason Bordoff: Which is coming up in April. We’re excited.

David Turk: Everybody pay attention.

Jason Bordoff: We’ll be there then

David Turk: This year’s will be the best ever. Right.

Jason Bordoff: Well, the year you spoke, of course,

David Turk: That was the best ever.

Jason Bordoff: You’ll speak again. We’ll get you on the back of my bicycle again, which there we go. Last time maybe I’ll just ask to start with a little bit of reflection and then we’ll talk about looking forward. But when you reflect back on four years and thank you for your service, I know those jobs are challenging and take a lot out of you, just talk a little bit, not just about what you’re most proud of, but what was most impactful. There’s a lot of things and then you try to get things done, some things play out the way you hoped. Some things get more attention in the media, then maybe they really make a difference. Some things maybe make more of a difference than we notice in the media. So when you look back on the Department of Energy’s record and the Biden administration, what were the most consequential things in your view, and what were things that you were kind of maybe disappointed you couldn’t make more progress on?

David Turk: Yeah, so overall, and now it’s been a few weeks since I was deputy secretary, so we’ll get more and more perspective as things get out a little bit further, further from here. I just feel incredible pride. I think we kicked ass and did an awful lot of good stuff and Secretary Granholm couldn’t have been better to work for and more inspirational to work for the team. We hired up not just the political appointees, but the phenomenal, and I really underscore phenomenal civil servants at the Department of Energy. You’ve worked with these folks for years and years, folks who are expert in their fields. It is just a phenomenal team and I felt like we were just making progress all over the place. I’d say especially in the last two years, once we got the inflation reduction Act and we knew all the tools that we had and then it was about execution and I think we executed on a whole range of fronts.

I think the thing I feel most proud about is all we did on domestic manufacturing, on industrial strategy and really living and breathing the clean energy transition in ways that we’ve never had the tools to do in our country, but seeing real success on that. So the fact that through our grants, through our loans, 950, almost a thousand new manufacturing facilities, new and expanded clean energy manufacturing facilities, communities all across the country, and I got to visit a lot of those communities, just phenomenal to see that impact. Seeing the momentum behind what we were doing on solar, on storage, on some of these clean energy technologies out there. It’s not to say that this is easy. I think that’s one of the lessons to be learned. Clean hydrogen is hard. Clean hydrogen is not easy to just have some tax incentives and have some grants and you’re done.

You need to execute on it. You need to have a strategy, you need to keep with it. And I think we’re right in the middle of working on the clean hydrogen side. I’d put a few other technologies in that bucket as well, but to see what we executed on, $108 billion of loans out the door in terms of conditional commitments, almost a hundred billion dollars of grant money that we got out the door to help communities all across the country. I spent a lot of time on the tax credits working with Treasury and John Pede and his team at the White House. I feel pride about how we navigated true to congressional intent, but also true to how do we really use these tax incentives to provide businesses the certainty, provide the incentives to do what’s in the US’ interest from a competition with China, from an industrial strategy, from living our values of making some real significant dents on the climate mitigation side of things too. So I feel like we executed, I really feel proud of the execution and the competence of what we did.

Jason Bordoff: I’m curious, when you look at what you perceive to be fair-minded criticism of the administration, what comes to mind and what resonates? You may have seen our friend Jason Furman’s, recent Peace and foreign Affairs that was met economic policy, not energy policy, although a little overlap being critical and saying there were parts of the Biden administration’s approach that were too inflationary, too much on the demand side, not enough on the supply side that pursued what was called industrial strategy at the sake of some free market economic principles and free trade. If you think about that from the energy policy standpoint, the inflation reduction Act, what was industrial strategy? What criticisms do you think are fair?

David Turk: So I think it is a fair criticism, at least in part on the rhetoric and the messaging and the handling of inflation. And nobody wants to pay more than they have to pay and have upward pressure on prices, whether it’s for eggs, whether it’s for energy, electricity, what you pay at the pump. It is just such a big, big part of our country’s competitiveness, economic opportunity, people having to pay their bills. And so a lot of that is broader market forces, global forces coming out of Covid, certainly with energy, Russia invading Ukraine and what that meant for oil, what that meant for natural gas, a lot of things outside of our control. I think from the energy side with the strategic petroleum reserve, the largest historic release from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, I think that had a real downward impact in terms of the peak on oil prices, not just in the US but globally.

I think that made a difference in using that tool in the tool belt. But what you find is you don’t have as many tools as you’d like to have in the tool belt. Even with a lot of these new IRA and bill tools, global oil prices is exactly a case in point. If the global supply and demand is out of whack and you have upward pressure on prices, you can do the strategic petroleum reserve, you can look at some other things, but even a government that’s as powerful as the United States government can’t just snap our fingers and inflationary pressure goes down. So I think we were slow to realize and appreciate that inflation just a transitory thing. It was something more systemic and something that needed to be dealt with. It felt like in real time that we didn’t do that as quickly as we should have and just make sure that we kept our eye on the ball on affordability, affordability, affordability. And I feel like on the energy side, we used the tools that we had in the tool belt, but inevitably that causes frustrations. There’s no doubt about it.

Jason Bordoff: I wanted to say it like a big picture and then come to a few specific issues, but since you mentioned the SBR, I’m just curious. I was one of the people who was a little bit critical, only insofar as there’s price management and then there’s emergency supply disruption and there’s an overlap between the two, but they’re not exactly the same thing. And so the idea is you had this Russian invasion of Ukraine, a spike in prices because of concerns of supply disruption. And then the largest release, I mean we served in the Obama administration, it was

David Turk: A lot.

Jason Bordoff: We did 30 million barrels of US release, and this was six or seven times that much, and there really wasn’t a Russian supply disruption. In retrospect, Russian oil supply was not disrupted. So do you think that you jumped the gun? Maybe.

David Turk: So I think the most important thing you said is in retrospect, you know what I mean? You’ve been in these chairs in these situations when you’re worked in the White House and elsewhere, Jason, you just don’t know when you’re living it. If this is the early signs of a big disruption and if you don’t move quickly, then you don’t have the opportunity to deal with that disruption. You don’t want to wait until there’s a global crisis and stocks are plummeting and there’s a major catastrophe in order to do something. If you could have done something a few weeks earlier, a few months earlier, that would’ve blunted it and would’ve helped alleviate all that pain. Now it’s all Monday morning quarterbacking. It’s all 2040 hindsight. But I feel like coming out of Covid, which was already a big whack to the energy systems, we have to think about that kind of context.

And then Russian invading Ukraine, and especially in those early days, we had no idea, I shouldn’t say we had no idea. We had a lot of smart people working and analyzing about what could happen to oil markets, what could happen to economies. There was a lot of uncertainty bans there going forward in terms of how much supply hump disruption, what happens, what are the secondary effects, what are the tertiary effects, what does China do? Does China do this or that, et cetera, et cetera. So I think it was very prudent and wise and smart, and I think what we did with the SPR in retrospect was the right move to do at the right time. Even if you could have said after the fact, oh, there really wasn’t a huge supply disruption. Did we need to do that much? I think it actually ended up playing a pretty significant role, not just in the US economy, but it’s a global oil market. So the US having the largest strategic petroleum reserve, and we didn’t just do it ourselves. We worked with some allies and had conversations even with members beyond the International Energy Agency about how we could work together in this space. So I would rather err on the side of protecting supply, protecting our economy, trying to have some of that downward pressure on prices as opposed to waiting too long.

Jason Bordoff: Yeah, I mean the thing is you can only do that so many times. You got to refill it,

David Turk: And that’s why I’m hoping the new secretary, secretary Wright, and he’s talked about this is the need to continue. What we were doing is refilling, right? When you’re able to refill, you need to refill so you have that tool.

Jason Bordoff: Just stepping back again, so now we’re in this moment, we’ll come to the Trump administration in a second. It’s certainly true of the Trump administration, but it’s broader, right? I was just at the Munich Security Conference and you have conversations with European officials and the conversation starts with affordability and economic competitiveness. There’s a crisis of confidence in Europe now about their competitiveness and energy prices is part of that, obviously not all of it. So there’s a moment where our other friends, Dan Jurgen and Peter Za, and

David Turk: I just read their piece.

Jason Bordoff: It turns out the energy transition’s hard and frankly harder than I think some on the environmental movement. It was portrayed to be that it was win-win, win and it would lower costs and save everyone money, and it was great jobs, and there’s truth to some of that, but it turns out it’s hard and there is some cost to it. And so now we’re using words like realism and pragmatism and reset, and I want to ask you where that goes because we were kind of remembering, again, in a way that could be healthy, but could also lead us to a place where people forget climate is a problem, a pretty serious one. All of our energy policy goals, security and affordability and reliability and energy for development in lower income countries and hopefully sustainability and decarbonization. Let’s not forget that for sure. So if we are in a moment of reset, what do you think it looks like to reset? Where do we go from here? If you were whenever that, I dunno how many years it’ll be till you’re back in government again, but yeah, what do you think? Is that sort of continuing where Biden left off or what should be done differently in this moment of reset to make sure we’re addressing all of our energy policy goals that we need to?

David Turk: Yeah, I guess I would say is even though the pendulum swings back and forth, I think it’s important for people who are rigorous in their analysis to not go too far one way or another and to keep our eye on the ball and to do the hard analysis of what’s required going forward. There are two things that I would completely agree with Dan Jurgen’s piece and others as well. The energy transition is hard. Anyone who thought fundamentally transforming how we create deliver energy in a few decade period of time when energy is such a foundation of everything that we do in our modern society and to do that in a few decades and it’s going to be easy. It’s just crazy. And I don’t know if too many people who are hardcore energy nerds and really appreciate how enormous the energy system of today is and how complicated it is and how ingrained it is in our society and everything that we do would’ve said the energy transition was easy.

But I do think that there was some people who, because the impetus to do something on climate was so strong and because the science was telling us we needed to move so quickly, I think there was some wishful thinking or frankly people not doing as much homework as they needed to. So there’s absolutely no doubt. It is hard. There’s also no doubt, and this experience over the last four years certainly ingrained in me, you have to do affordability. You have to do reliability, resilience, security, and you have to do sustainability. You just have to do all of them. And it’s not easy. It’s hard to do all of them. There may be certain policies or certainly technologies that are no-brainers and achieve all of them, but you’re going to have some trade-offs. You’re going to have some trade-offs as well. The part where I have to say the Jurgen piece, and Dan’s a good friend of mine for many years and respect a lot of the phenomenal work he’s done, especially in the energy security space for years and years.

His conclusion, I think his conclusionary sentence was, well, we have to be pragmatic. I’ve been a pragmatist my whole life. I come from a small town in Illinois, small town Midwest pragmatism. But what that can’t mean is, oh, climate’s too hard and screw it. We don’t even need to worry about that. It’s too hard. Let’s just let global market dynamics do what market dynamics are going to do. If we develop some clean technologies that hurt, that help us in the climate effort, great, but let’s just see how it all plays out. To me, that’s completely unacceptable. The climate science. The climate science was the climate science the day after Trump took over is the same as the day before Trump took over. And so those of us who’ve actually read the climate science and tried to educate on our, it is alarmist to say the least.

And so the question I would ask from people who are pragmatic, is it 2.5 degrees Celsius world, an increase of that temperature? Okay, is it three and a half? Is it four? Is it five? Like you’d look at the analysis of what our world looks like under those scenarios, the economic costs of it, the human misery, costs of it, et cetera, et cetera. So I think there’s a way to both be real world, but be very ambitious to say yes, we have to have affordability, we have to have security, and we have to have sustainability and not just to bury our heads in the sand and pretend that there’s not a climate problem, there is a climate problem, there’s an extreme climate problem. I think based on the analysis that I’ve looked at, we got to take that head on and we have to have strategies.

And if there are trade-offs, let’s have that open debate and let’s have that discussion about what the trade-offs are out there. Let’s also be super smart about policy and other kinds of things that can give us affordability, give us sustainability, give us security as well. And I think there’s a lot of smart policy and ways about going after that. But what I worry a little bit right now is with the pendulum so far to one direction, people are going to say, screw it, affordability, sure, security, sure, but we don’t need to worry about the sustainability. We don’t need to worry about the climate. And that is just a disaster. That is irresponsible in my opinion.

Jason Bordoff: Yeah, well I wrote that recently. Something pretty similar. A moment of reset runs a risk of, well, it can go in two directions. One is where you just say, this climate thing is really hard and so let’s put that on the back burner or a reset where you say, let’s make sure we’re achieving all of our energy policy goals and we acknowledge some of this is harder than maybe we realized and we got to figure out how to do a lot of hard things at the same time. Because being pragmatic to your point, does need to mean that there’s a cost to not doing something about climate change.

David Turk: Well, and the part I get really nervous about is there’s a lot of vested interests in the traditional energy economy. Who wouldn’t mind if policymakers don’t really focus on sustainability too much, they make more money that way. It’s more certainty for their investment climate, et cetera, et cetera. It’s not everybody in the industry, but I think there’s a way to have a real honest conversation. And if the trade-offs that they would make is security is so much more important than everything else and that has to be the thing that focuses on everything, well then I’d ask the question, can you also try to get as much sustainability and affordability as you possibly can and what are the real trade-offs and have that honest conversation, but it can’t just be an excuse for not dealing with the sustainability and the climate equation. And I think that’s shortsighted, it’s foolhardy, it’s irresponsible, and it’s just not what adults should do when you have real problems. It’s not in our spirit of our government. If we have problems we’ve taken head on and deal with them.

Jason Bordoff: So let me ask you about what the new administration is doing sort of in that spirit. I dunno if you listened to it. I listened to Secretary Chris Wright’s speech to the DOE staff when he came in. It’s actually a lot in the speech I agreed with. I think what I didn’t agree with is what he didn’t say, which was what you just said, which is the importance of bringing greenhouse gas emissions down much faster than we are today. That has to be part of the mix of energy policy goals too. But when you look at what’s happening in the Trump administration, I’m curious what things you might agree with and maybe this will be a pretty pronuclear administration and try to get permitting reform done and try to modernize the grid, which was the focus of his national energy emergency order. And then again, there’s a lot of things that make headlines like you can now drill off the coast of Virginia maybe if you want, but I’m not sure how much of a difference that makes. So when you look at what’s actually happening, what matters the most? If you’re worried about climate black backsliding, what are the things this administration’s doing that are most worrisome or most consequential interview?

David Turk: So I’ve had a chance to talk to Secretary Wright a few times and real credit for him for stepping up and serving his country, right? Anybody willing to take some time and serve their country I think should be applauded. And so I certainly applaud his public, his willingness to serve in the public interest. Maybe two things that have been really disappointing for me so far in this administration. One is the Doge Musk assault on the personnel piece, freezing funds, the chaos and confusion and disruption all across the board. There is no doubt governments should always improve. There should be a spotlight on government. We should hold our leaders, our civil servants to the highest levels of accountability going forward. There should be scrutiny on what’s going on to make sure it’s in the best interest. It’s being done efficiently, it’s the right areas to focus on, but to come in before doing any homework whatsoever before actually understanding what these departments do, and as I understand it from the public reporting, a lot of this is Musk himself and relatively young junior folks from various of his companies just going in and gutting the personnel and a lot of these incredibly important government agencies, including the Department of Energy, gutting personnel in a way that I’ve got a lot of friends still in the Department of Energy, I respect the public service.

A lot of these folks could be earning a whole lot more money in the private sector and they’ve decided to serve their country and they are very willing and eager and interested in serving whoever’s elected president. They may have their own private beliefs, but a lot of the civil servants and the best traditions will serve whoever’s

Jason Bordoff: And remind people listening. How many people work at DOE?

David Turk: So it’s about 110, 115,000 total. That

Jason Bordoff: And the vast majority, I would imagine, I mean some people don’t realize most of what the energy department is is nuclear weapons and nuclear energy and our national lab system.

David Turk: That’s right. That’s right. So it’s everything from nuclear weapons to science innovation in our 17 national labs, and then there’s a part of it that’s energy, energy, but it’s a big diverse department. So just a couple examples of what this chaos, this confusion, this lack of doing things the right way. Again, in my opinion, it takes so long to build a morale in an organization. It takes so long to build a culture of empowerment. These are important missions, right? Having nuclear weapons that are safe, sustainable going forward, that protect us, that provide the deterrent. Getting people to get into this line of work is incredibly challenging and we spent a lot of time the last four years trying to get our new generation of folks who are going to be in this business in some cases for decades. So what Musk did is they did this thing with probationary employees.

Probationary employees doesn’t mean that you did something wrong and you’re on probation. It just means you haven’t been there for more than a year or two. Some of those are younger colleagues, but some of those are people who’ve served in the military and this is a mid-career move. It just happens to mean that they’ve only been working in the department for a year or two. They just summarily dismissed hundreds and hundreds, thousands of those folks, including about 190 in the nuclear weapons part of the Department of Energy. They didn’t do their homework. They didn’t know, oh, wait a minute, nuclear weapons is pretty important. We shouldn’t just get rid of all this expertise. To their credit, once there was a media uproar about it and several people spoke up, they ended within a 24 hour period of time of only firing 26 instead of 190.

Folks, do your homework first. Do your homework before you cause chaos and confusion. The government is different than just a private company. If a company like Twitter goes belly up, someone else takes their place, but if you screw up the Department of Energy, you screw up nuclear weapons, that’s a pretty big deal. So do your homework first. And I don’t put that on Chris Wright, secretary Wright and the adult political leadership at the Department of Energy. That’s really the Doge letting kids run around with a bunch of arrogance and not knowing what they’re doing. That’s the personnel piece. The other part is they just froze everything. Again, do your homework. If there’s certain programs that you don’t like with our loan program, department’s, loan program or grant funding, do your homework. Figure out what those are instead of disrupting literally everything and you know how important it is for investors, for companies to have certainty like the last thing they want is chaos and confusion.

We want companies to invest in the us. We want companies to invest in the US to bring our prices down and affordability to have resilience, to have competition with China. You upset all of that when you have this funding freeze and then you have to turn the spigot back on really slowly and it’s uncertain if you’re going to get your funding or you’re not going to get your funding even though it’s already been promised by the government. It’s just a half-ass way to do things and I think it’s causing our country near term challenges, but I think it’s causing real challenges to the credibility going forward.

Jason Bordoff: There’s a lot of things that have been announced. Executive orders on day one, lift the pause on LNG exports. We’ll come back to that. Open up the offshore to leasing the risk to parts of the IRA the loan program office make. It’s easier to get permits for oil drilling or pipelines now and go down the list. Which things do you think will matter the most? If you have an outlook in your head for what clean energy deployment and greenhouse gas emission reductions are today, if you think that outlook is worse now than it was before, what things make the biggest difference in that outlook?

David Turk: So I think the fact that we’ve had so much chaos and confusion, it’s less the executive orders. It’s less the things that Secretary Wright and others have done in the department. It’s that broader Doge, Elon Musk kind of effort. I think that’s been the biggest news of the first month, first month and a half, and that causes real damage. It causes damage to your workforce. It hollows out your workforce. It hollows out your credibility with industry going forward, and I think we’re going to see repercussions of that. I’d like to think we deserve in America and the United States of America a competent government, an efficient government going forward. We shouldn’t have chaos, we shouldn’t have incompetence, we shouldn’t have the kinds of things that we’ve seen over the last five, six weeks. It just is not the way things should be run. Along those lines, what are the implications from the policy, things that have been done, the EOS and other kinds of things.

Certainly the rhetoric on climate has been incredibly disappointing. Going to our earlier part of our conversation, like you said with Secretary Wright’s speech to the Department of Energy employees and a lot of other things. He said, he cares about energy poverty. I care about energy poverty. We should all care about energy poverty for folks here in the US but folks around the world as well. If you don’t have access to energy that’s affordable, that’s reliable, like how are you going to make a living in this economy that we’re in domestically and nationally and internationally? And so I’ve got a lot of sympathy, empathy, and respect for his focus on energy poverty. What I’ve seen though in Secretary Wright, and we’ll see if this changes over time, is his complete dismissal that we need to do anything on climate. The way someone told me who I respect a lot is he’s not a climate, a climate action denialist.

As I’ve looked through and tried to give a fair reading to Secretary Wright’s LinkedIn posts and other kinds of things that he’s done, he agrees that climate change is happening. He just completely dismisses that there’s any problem to that. In fact, there’s been some instances where he’s actually made the case that climate warming might be good or it’s so much better that we have climate warming than we have climate cooling. That’s not the question. The question is do we have dangerous amounts of CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions that are building up in our atmosphere that are going to cause economic harm that are going to cause human misery? All the science that I’ve seen, again fairly looking at that is pretty dire and pretty stark that we need to do something about this. It’s not an ideological thing, it’s just a pragmatic thing of we’ve got a really big problem in front of us. So I’m personally disappointed that he doesn’t accept the science. He doesn’t respect the science, he doesn’t feel like there’s a problem there, and if you don’t feel like there’s a problem there, then I worry about what flows from that

Jason Bordoff: Because the market isn’t going to figure this out

David Turk: Because the market’s not going to figure it out by itself, right? You got companies, they’re responsible to their shareholders. They’re doing what there should be to their shareholders and to their investors, and so that’s where if we’ve got an opportunity to deal with climate change, you need to have a government, you need to have governments around the world stepping up, putting in place. The kinds of incentives we did right with the inflation reduction act, the fact that we had the tax incentives, the grants, the loans, it was all done in to me a way that builds up our domestic economy that deals with affordability, right? A lot of the things in the inflation reduction act are actually deflationary, right? If we need to bring new electrons onto the grid, which we do with AI data centers and all the electricity demand growth, the last thing we want to do is take options off the table.

Even if you don’t care about climate at all, even if you don’t think we need to do anything about climate, we should be leaning into solar. We should be leaning the storage, we should be leaning the wind. We should be leaning into enhanced geothermal, nuclear, the full range of technologies just to keep prices as affordable as they possibly can be and to promote security. So the fact that there seems to be a knee jerk reaction against certain technologies, even if we need all technologies in order to help us achieve affordability, first and foremost just seems again, not coherent and risks what we need to do just on affordability and security, let alone what we need to do on the climate change front.

Jason Bordoff: Are there areas you’re optimistic progress in what you would define as progress will continue? I mentioned nuclear permitting reform, geothermal.

David Turk: Yeah, I think there is, and there certainly should be one. There are certain technologies that I think are no-brainers that really should be leaned into including in the clean firm power area. Enhanced geothermal is an area, is a technology that I’ve had a strong interest for several years. Secretary Wright is a board member of fbo, one of the most exciting enhanced geothermal companies out there. I’ve had a chance to say, get to know the VO folks and think that they’re doing great work and a lot of other geothermal if we could enhanced geothermal just means, as you know Jason, you drill deeper. You use horizontal drilling, you take advantage of the fracking technology that Secretary Wright knows based on the company that he’s run for many, many years. If we could have that be a 24 7 source of clean power, clean firm power with a small footprint on the surface, that’s golden. That’s huge. That’s a huge part of what could be our future going forward. If we can get small modular reactors or fusion reactors, if we can lean into those technologies, that could be a huge part.

Jason Bordoff: What does it mean just to say what does it mean to lean in? There’s so much focus on nuclear now and I don’t know, it’s really hard. So maybe we can do some reform of the NRC and make the permitting process easier, but if we really wanted to go big as a country on nuclear power, what would it take?

David Turk: Well, this is where I think having a department with the rigor, assuming you have the people there that actually are retained, you do the rigorous analysis to figure out, okay, the private sector is going to do this. Are there things the government can do in a very tailored and targeted kind of way in order to to move this technology along quicker than it would otherwise do? Enhanced geothermal is a perfect example. There’s a lot the government can do to do the resource mapping for geothermal. You need to have a pretty detailed assessment of the geology to know if this is the best geothermal site or is it over here? Is it over here? Should we try it here? Should we try it here? If you could do that mapping, if you can do that, it allows those geothermal companies not to have to try a bunch of different places, but just to try one or two.

It reduces their costs, increases their certainty for their investors, and you can go forward. And so there’s a lot that can be done on geothermal to de-risk. Along those lines, our colleague, Matt Bowen here at the center put out an interesting commentary just a few days ago on fission and nuclear and some ideas for the new administration to consider about what, again, thinking in a very disciplined way. I’m not one who thinks the government should do everything. In fact, what you should do is have a very rigorous analysis of what’s missing, what are the market failures and what does the government need to do? What can the government do in a very targeted, tailored way that you monitor and make sure you’re using efficiency, using resources efficiently to get those goals. And there’s a whole series of efforts and analysis that’s been done on the fission side of things.

We’ve got an advanced demo reactor program that’s going to try to get some of the new technologies out there to derisk those new technologies. There’s a huge, huge opportunity right now with AI and hyperscalers and we’re starting to see some of this happen where they want clean firm power, whether it’s enhanced geothermal or fission or even fusion. There’s partnerships that can happen. One of the biggest problems with SMR technology and nuclear fission is you just had a one-off here, one-off there. You need to build up that order book. You need to have an order book of 10 and 20, not just one and twos. How you get to the economies of scale to see if that technology is really going to take off.

Jason Bordoff: I mean what’s happening as in addition to the technologies you just said is a huge gas build out. And so one question, do you think we can or should or will see carbon capture technology maybe deployed faster because the hyper scales will put money behind it and maybe policy will be supportive.

David Turk: And we’ve got some grant money through the last few years that’s working on the CCOS. We’ve got the 45 Q tax incentive, which is a big deal, and there’s been discussion in Congress about whether that should be changed to make sure that that’s as impactful as it possibly can. I’m a firm believer, especially because we’ve got such pressing needs on affordability, on security and on sustainability, on the clean energy side of things, we should be really leaning in on a wide variety of technologies. Again, not in a try everything and hope something works, but in a very targeted discipline kind of way. But I think there’s a lot that can be done in the CCUS front going forward and there’s a phenomenal, as you know, a phenomenal CCUS team at the Department of Energy, including at the national labs. Lean in on that expertise. Don’t fire everybody. Lean in on that expertise, come up with a plan to see if we can really get that technology to scale and see if it’s going to work and if the price points can be achieved. If you can get direct air capture as well, it can be part of the solution in a whole variety of different kinds of ways.

Jason Bordoff: The focus on AI and energy really obviously picked up toward the end of your term as deputy secretary. I’m just curious your thoughts about where that issue stands now, how much energy this will actually take, is that over-hyped? What are the policy priorities and how powerful can AI be as a tool to help deal with some of the problems in the energy sector including sustainability, but reliability, security, energy efficiency?

David Turk: So on the last part, first, our colleague David Sando and some great folks at the center I was just actually sitting down with, David has done some really detailed analysis on the positive of what AI can do on the climate mitigation side of things. There’s a second edition of that analysis that’s been done by a whole cast of characters who are real experts in this space looking at what AI can do in the power sector and transportation. I encourage everybody to take a look at that. I think it’s the best thing that I’ve seen out there in terms of what AI’s positive impact can be going forward. There’s no doubt that AI and hyperscalers energy use will increase. They have been increasing, but especially given how successful some of the chat GPT and some of the other tools are out there, I think it all starts to me with rigorous analysis like let’s really try to figure out where the trends are going and be honest about the uncertainty bands.

The best piece of analysis there that I’d point folks to is Lawrence Berkeley National Lab has been tracking the energy use of data centers AI for many, many years and decades. Very bottom up analysis. It’s not just talking to, it’s not just thinking about what the vibe is out there, what people are talking about out there. It’s like where are the chips being ordered? What’s the amount of chips that can be produced, Nvidia chips and otherwise? And it’s a pretty rigorous analysis. It’s got a lot of uncertainty about it. It had uncertainty even as we were doing analysis over the last year. So I remember meeting with the team probably about a year ago and they had one estimate of where AI’s use was going to be going to 2030, and then just in the span of six months, that increased pretty significantly where it will end up being, I think there’s still a lot of uncertainty out there with the latest news of the Chinese company that is doing AI cheaper with less chips.

Maybe we won’t need as much data centers where we won’t meet as much raw compute power as we thought we might need. That said, the competitiveness of this industry, the incentives on the Microsofts and Googles and open AIS and others, the metas to compete and to put a lot of money into this space, I think it’s an increased significant increase. It’s just a matter of whether it’s this steep or this steep going forward on that. And we should be prepared and we should think about how to partner with those companies, many of whom have incredibly aggressive clean energy targets. How can we use that interest to advance enhanced geothermal, to advance nuclear, to advance virtual power plants? There’s so much great work, great analysis, great experimentation going on right now with virtual power plants and smart demand response. We can get a lot more out of our grids. Why wouldn’t we want to be efficient with our grids and match supply and demand in a much smarter kind of way going forward. And so that’s an area I think in particular that needs a lot more focus.

Jason Bordoff: You mentioned China and I just wanted to ask you about how you think about national security issues in the energy sector and in the energy transition. There was an article in foreign Affairs by Dan Dresner a couple of months ago, I think with the title, like how everything became national Security and National Security became everything. And the question is when this is across both sides of the aisle, the view now that China is an adversary and a dominant Chinese position in important parts of the energy sector is a problem. And of course we’re heavily dependent on China for huge parts of the energy supply chain from critical mineral refining and processing to batteries and EVs and solar panels and all the rest. And what I heard from the outside was a lot of different justifications for why that needed to be changed. It was jobs in the United States, it was John Podesta gave a speech at our conference about the carbon intensity of Chinese production and then there’s national security. It’s a national security risk if China produces a lot of something and there is a tension there with wanting things to be as cheap as possible, but also addressing however we define those national security risks. That’s kind of a broad question, but I was wondering if you could tell me how you think about sitting in rooms, probably rooms where cell phones we’re not allowed, talking about national security issues and also about how we accelerate a faster transition and make sure we have energy security. What’s the smart way to think about that tension?

David Turk: Yeah, so I spent a lot of time this last four years as you’ve had earlier in your career, Jason sitting in rooms where you can’t take cell phones in and I don’t think there was an issue or a country certainly that we talk about more than China obviously talking a lot about Russia and I thought Russia was an adversarial, well, maybe that’s changing at least in terms of the president, the way the president’s viewing things, but not to be too flip on that point, but a lot of discussion on China and trying to think through, just as you said, the national security implications, the economic security implications. I think it is wholly appropriate for us to capture the economic benefits from clean energy in our country. If the US wants to create solar PV and EVs and have the supply chain benefits from these clean energy technologies, I think it is perfectly within the right of our country a right of other country to develop that domestic industry.

I also think it’s an incredibly durable way to ensure political support for those efforts going forward, right? If a huge part of the economic growth of our country right now, clean energy jobs, at least when we left office, were growing at twice the rate that the jobs were growing in the country more generally. If you can have that kind of clean energy job growth communities, 950 new manufacturing facilities, new and expanded clean energy manufacturing facilities, literally all across the country, in fact 80, 70% of those in red states and red districts, that is a way I think to have some durability of the kind of support that you need to in order to tackle climate change but also have the economic competitiveness going forward in a durable, durable kind of way. So I think it’s perfectly appropriate and also a firm believer, and I think the team here at the center has been doing some great work on the intersection of climate and trade.

If you as a country are getting your own act together, our emissions are somewhere between 11 to 13% depending on how you added up greenhouse gas emissions around the world. If we’re getting our own act together, the criticism then is, well, it’s only 11 13%, what about the rest of the world? What I would say to that is as we clean up our act more and more, it’s perfectly appropriate for us to expect our trading partners to also clean up their acts and for us to use carbon border adjustments or other mechanisms to say, Hey, we’re not going to import your dirty product. We’re going to insist that you have the same environmental standards, the same greenhouse gas emission standards as we have going forward. I think that’s perfectly appropriate and I think it’s especially appropriate with a country like China. If China’s going to produce a bunch of EVs and solar PV and other things, they’re going to use a lot of coal energy to produce it.

And if the carbon emissions in those products are so much more intensive than they are in the us, we should absolutely protect ourselves and make sure that we’re doing it and getting the jobs domestically, but also having an even playing field. I also think there’s a way to do carbon border adjustments that works with developing countries and appreciating and understanding that developing countries who per capita emission rates are so much lower than developed countries, there should be a way to deal with different levels of development as you’re putting carbon border adjustments on and making it in a durable way. And I know those discussions are happening right now.

Jason Bordoff: I’m curious, a lot of people in the environmental communities sort of celebrated Biden’s election partly because of his promised to end oil and gas development on public lands and waters, and as we know, oil and gas production rose throughout the course of the Biden

David Turk: Administration, highest ever when we left office,

Jason Bordoff: Was that a failure to implement a certain policy? Did views change after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine? And what is the right way to think about the role of domestic oil and gas supply to achieve what we talked about before, which is multiple energy policy goals at the same time, affordability, security, and transition?

David Turk: Yeah, so I’d say a couple things. One is the government is not omnipotent. The government can’t do everything. I know a lot of times presidents get blamed for stuff that they have no control over or sometimes they get rewarded for stuff that they have no control over as well. Most of the oil and gas production that happens in the US is on private land or state, state land. Some of it of course is on federal land, especially offshore along those lines. And so the federal government does have some tools, but it’s really the market and it’s really market forces that determine how much oil we are producing, how much the private sector is producing in our country, and if prices are higher, there’s going to be a bigger signal for more market creation with unconventional oil and gas. And if the prices are lower, you’re going to see some real challenge in that investment market.

And I think that’s what we’ve seen for years and years through the Biden administration, but before that as well. And so it’s a lot of private sector decision making that impacts it. It’s also true that coming out of Covid with the WAC and supply and demand, we had a time, if you remember Jason early on in Covid where we actually had too much supply and not enough demand, and we had negative oil prices for a little while, first time we’d ever seen that. And then once we had supply come roaring back when the economy came roaring back and the demand, or sorry, the demand had increase and the supply wasn’t there, then we had a real challenge there and prices were going up already and then Russia invades Ukraine and you throw the whole, because Russia’s such a big player in global oil markets, you had a real disruption on that space.

And so I think it was right and appropriate to try to take some interventions to deal with that immediate challenge, not just in the US but what we did with our natural gas in Europe as well, which was a real lifesaver for Europe. I listened to the recent podcast with Ann Sophie and others, and there’s some real challenges in Europe we got to keep our eye on right now going into the summer and the filling up the stocks and going into next winter. But I think we need to think about not just the near term on LNG and natural gas, but think about the medium and long term and where are the price points? Where’s the demand coming from? Is it coming at a certain price point that supply can actually make a profit off of and really do some rigorous analysis there as

Jason Bordoff: Well? Well, you just did a year of rigorous analysis on this highly publicized pause on LNG exports. So how would you characterize what that analysis showed? And I guess, I dunno if this is a fair question, if you were still there and you had to decide based on that analysis whether to give additional permits, what should the government be doing?

David Turk: Yeah, I think one thing that really underscored to me on the LNG side is how much we’ve already authorized in terms of exports. And I keep going back, I testified a couple of times in Congress on this and spent a lot of time over the last year on this, but I think really appreciating the fact that we’ve already authorized up to a half of our natural gas production to already be exported. Now we don’t export that much yet, but there’s these authorizations that are already sitting out there that investment decisions could be made on at that point. So I would sort of start at that,

Jason Bordoff: And a lot of those authorizations probably are not for economically viable projects.

David Turk: They may not end up,

Jason Bordoff: Some of them are for sure

David Turk: Panning out and even some of the projects that are closer to coming to fruition, there’s a lot of discussion debate right now about whether we’re going to have in the medium term, five years, seven years more supply than there’s demand and there’re going to be money to be made in that LNG market going forward. And we’re starting to see that play out. The International Energy Agency did some really interesting analysis in their, we owe 2024 on that issue and really exploring how much money you need to make if you’re an LNG exporter in the US or elsewhere versus how much, especially where the growth markets are, developing markets, developing economies, how much they’re willing to pay for gas. There’s a pretty significant delta price there that I think the folks, the investors and others are really looking at very closely. So it’s an open question to me about how much of these near term decisions actually come to financial close or get pushed to the right or get canceled as well.

So a lot of it’s the economics kind of piece to it. I think it was right to do the analysis that we did exploring the whole range of issues. If we export more and more, what does that do to domestic price? What does that do to the competitiveness? Right now we have competitiveness, a competitive advantage in the US in that we pay a lot less for natural gas than they do in Europe and they do in Asia right now. That is one of the reasons we’re more competitive in global markets for certain industries. Do we want to give that up? Do we want to have domestic consumers pay more for natural gas and not just pay more? And you guys picked up on this in the previous podcast too. I’m really glad Ann Sophie focused on this. The volatility piece right now, our prices for natural gas are so much more stable than in Europe and other parts of the world. If you had a truly global gas market, like we have a global oil market, what you’re basically doing is importing volatility right now, we’re protected from that volatility. Do we want to import that volatility and have another globally traded commodity that can determine whether we go into recession or not? I think that’s a real question that policymakers should take a look at and really think through what’s the regime, what’s the approach for making these decisions going forward?

Jason Bordoff: We’ve spent most of the time, and we need you to have you on a couple of times while you’re here talking about energy policy in what is, I think around 12% of global emissions. And you’ve spent a lot of time, and not just at DOE, but in your prior role at the IA and elsewhere thinking about the rest. And so I just wanted to ask you to talk a little bit about US international energy and climate policy and what is working, what you would do differently when you think about de-risking and mobilizing capital for clean energy and emerging and developing economies. When you think about the international climate negotiation process, is that the right place to focus our efforts or do we make more progress in a competitive lens than we do in a cooperative lens? What did Biden administration get right? And what do you think future administrations maybe should be doing differently when we look at the challenge of rapidly growing economies that will and should and need to use more energy than they are today?

David Turk: So there’s no doubt in my mind, having worked in the US government, having worked for an international organization, having been around this space for quite a few years and worked with a lot of countries around the world for the world to solve climate change, the US needs to lead. If we are not leading both in terms of what we do domestically, but also in terms of what we do very pragmatically in cooperation with our allies, with our partners around the world, it’s just not going to get done. We are an innovation powerhouse or a clean energy powerhouse. We’re an energy powerhouse. We absolutely need to lead. And so I get really worried about not having that leadership instead of the US leaning in the US leaning out. It’s just not going to get it done, certainly at the pace and scale that needs to get done.

I think what we were seeing, especially the reaction to the IRA and the bill was really interesting, the bipartisan infrastructure legislation, this historic legislation, the biggest climate legislation ever to pass the Congress ever to pass anywhere in any country is we finally had a competitive competition’s, a very powerful motivator, and we had a competitive virtuous cycle forming where the US puts a bunch of money into incentives, well thought through tax incentives, grant programs, loan programs we’re leaning in on that front. I think it put a lot of pressure on Europe, put a lot of pressure elsewhere to up their games as well, and to be attractive for that kind of clean energy investment in their own countries. They didn’t want their companies all coming to the us. It was the most attractive investment climate. They wanted that investment in their own countries as well. So I think that virtuous cycle as opposed to us going around twisting each other’s arms and saying, Hey, can you do a little bit more?

Do a little bit more. We all have responsibility. We all should be stepping up through the Paris process and nationally determined contributions. But the real world I think works on competition and incentives. And so to have a virtuous cycle where if you want to compete and you want to have your own domestic industries on clean energy, if you want to have the investment in your own country, you’ve got to have the incentives. You’ve got to have the certainty of investment, you’ve got to have all the other things that are necessary to have that investment climate. And I think we were seeing that virtuous cycle. Unfortunately, I think the Trump administration breaks that virtuous cycle in a way that I think is incredibly damaging for our own country and our own national interests. But from the world stepping up going forward, I also think then it’s a perfectly appropriate, again, thinking of incentives, of using things like carbon border adjustments as well.

If we clean up our act, our 12%, and we clean that up perfectly appropriate to hold China accountable and say, we’re not going to import things from China. I’d much rather have tariffs that are based off of a much larger carbon front and print of much larger carbon intensity from Chinese goods as opposed to just tariffs coming out of thin air from Trump’s head with no substance or rigor behind him as well. So I think there’s a really interesting, it’s not a Pollyannish way that we can solve climate change, the virtuous cycle of competition as well as these incentives to get everybody to do what they need to be doing. And we should all demand that of each other. I won’t take any, we shouldn’t have to apologize for that

Jason Bordoff: So much more to talk about, but fortunately we, you’re here full time now, so we have many more times to talk. It’s a thank you for your service again, and it’s a privilege to have you as part of, we got a lot of big issues to think about and work on and address, and so we’re lucky to have you here helping us do that. If you mentioned you listened to the last podcast with Ira, and so we’re not shy with opinions, including her opinions about things we were just talking about like the LNG study. So it’s going to be great to have you as part of the team and work through these issues together. Dave Turk, thanks for being with us today.

David Turk: Well, thanks Jason. And one of the reasons I’m so excited to be part of this team is for that rigor and to respectfully challenge each other. You know what I mean? We should all carry some humility. As much as you’ve been an expert in this space for so long, I’ve been in this space for quite some time. It’s great to have others who have different opinions, questioning your own assumptions and having that rigorous debate, how you actually get the kind of rigorous policy options, the solutions, the actionable solutions we need going forward. So hopefully we can not only have that at the Columbia Center here, but in our country and around the world in a very actionable kind of real world way.

Jason Bordoff: Yeah. We need a little more of that engagement with opinions you might disagree with, respectfully, evidence-based all around the country.

David Turk: Absolutely.

Jason Bordoff: Thanks, Dave. Great to talk to you.

David Turk: Thanks, Jason.

Jason Bordoff: Thank you again, Dave Turk, and thank you for listening to this week’s episode of Columbia Energy Exchange. The show is brought to you by the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University. The show’s hosted by me, Jason Bordoff and by Bill Loveless. The show is produced by Erin Hardick and MC O’Connor from Latitude Studios. Additional support from Caroline Pittman, John Elkind, and Kyu Lee. Sean Marquand engineered the show. For more information about the podcast or the Center on Global Energy policy, please visit us online at energypolicy.columbia.edu or follow us on social media @ColumbiaUEnergy. And please, if you feel inclined, give us a rating on Apple Podcasts, it really helps us out. Thanks again for listening. We’ll see you next week.

The Biden administration took office with ambitious plans to accelerate America’s clean energy transition. Over four years, it enacted major climate legislation, poured billions into new clean energy manufacturing, built partnerships with global allies on clean energy, and navigated a global energy crisis after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

With President Trump’s return to office, what happens now?

The clean energy transition is proving to be more complex than some expected, with challenges around affordability, security, and balancing climate goals with other economic priorities. In this increasingly challenging geopolitical landscape, how should we think about America’s energy policy going forward? And how should we think about the legacy of the Biden administration’s energy agenda?

This week host Jason Bordoff talks with David Turk about the Biden administration’s energy policy legacy and the challenges of balancing affordability, security, and climate goals.

David is a distinguished visiting fellow at the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University SIPA. He recently completed his service as deputy secretary of energy in the Biden administration, where he was the number-two official and chief operating officer at the Department of Energy. Prior to this role, David served as deputy executive director of the International Energy Agency. During the Obama administration, he worked at the Department of Energy, where he led the launch of Mission Innovation – a global effort to enhance clean energy innovation.

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