Breaking America's Energy Policy Gridlock - Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University SIPA

Guest

Heidi Heitkamp

Director, Institute of Politics, University of Chicago; Former US Senator, North Dakota

Transcript

Heidi Heitkamp: We need a nonpartisan, not bipartisan, but a nonpartisan energy plan for this country. It’s just as important as being nonpartisan in our national security and I don’t see it. And if I were in Congress, this would be a major focus for me and I would just take the barbs and the arrows that come with being source agnostic. As I like to say

Bill Loveless: Across America, energy policy is often driven by short-term politics over long-term planning. Despite record breaking US oil production in recent years, partisan battles continue over fossil fuels and climate action states like North Dakota illustrate this tension perfectly rich in both oil and wind resources. They navigate between traditional energy production and renewable development, but nationwide critical energy infrastructure faces roadblocks from pipeline stalled by local opposition to transmission lines needed for clean energy expansion. So what will it take to develop a non-partisan national energy strategy? How do we balance immediate economic needs with climate goals and as electricity demands grow while the power grid faces new challenges, what will it take to develop an energy strategy beyond the politics of four year election cycles?

This is Columbia Energy Exchange, a weekly podcast from the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University. I’m Bill Loveless. Today on the show, Heidi Heitkamp. Heidi served as a US Senator from North Dakota from 2013 to 2019, becoming the first woman elected to represent the state in that chamber. During her Senate tenure, she worked across potty lines on energy issues, including legislation that lifted the ban on US oil exports under the Obama administration. Before her time in the Senate, he camp served as North Dakota’s Attorney General and state tax Commissioner. Today she is director of the University of Chicago Institute of Politics and works with the University’s Institute for Climate and Sustainable Growth. I spoke with Heidi about the realities of energy production under different administrations, the challenges of building critical infrastructure and how we might craft more enduring energy policies that serve both economic and environmental goals. Here’s our conversation, Heidi Amp. Welcome back to Columbia Energy Exchange.

Heidi Heitkamp: It’s been a while since you and I have visited Bill. I think we did one of these when I was still in office.

Bill Loveless: Well, we did one even more recently and I’m going to remind you of that. It was back in January, 2021.

Heidi Heitkamp: That’s not very recent.

Bill Loveless: Well, Joe Biden had just been inaugurated and his Democratic party controlled both houses of Congress. All I’ve got to say right now is how times have changed.

Heidi Heitkamp: Isn’t that something?

Bill Loveless: Yeah, a lot has happened in that time and a lot has implications for so many issues including for energy. I’m looking back to that period, 2021 Biden was signing executive orders at a fast clip. You cautioned me. Then I went back and listened to our conversation. You cautioned me not to make too much of that. You said policy driven by politics isn’t permanent. You need a broad bipartisan agreement for stronger results. Do you still believe that today amid so many executive orders on energy and other matters by President Trump?

Heidi Heitkamp: I believe it more than ever. I think that what’s been happening recently is Proofpoint, that I was right.

Bill Loveless: Yeah, so much, so much has happened in that time. I want to talk about what’s happening today in terms of the politics and the President Trump’s approach and all of that. But while we’re talking about 2021 and Biden and all, do you think the Biden overplayed his hand on climate change? On the one hand, he signed the biggest climate bill in US history, but could he have done things more effectively?

Heidi Heitkamp: I think he could have maybe found more bipartisan support, but I think for a lot of his constituency, which is the people who say, yeah, if you do anything with natural gas, you’re doing it with the devil. I think he leaned too far into a constituency that is not willing to compromise. That in many ways has, I wouldn’t say a distorted because that’ll get me in trouble, but I would say a different perspective on where we are in this country in terms of energy and the energy needs, and it is the crowd that always lets perfect be the enemy of good. And I think that was a challenge. Now what’s interesting is that when you look at the Inflation Reduction Act, which you just referred to, the Inflation Reduction Act actually has a lot of bipartisan support. It didn’t get bipartisan votes, but a lot of the investment in the Inflation Reduction Act has actually gone to red districts, red states, places like North Dakota, and there’s been a lot of caution in Congress.

Trump I think wanted to say, I’m going to come in and just wipe it off the face of the earth. And when you get 21 Republican congressmen saying, we’re going to stand with the IRA and you have Speaker Johnson saying, yeah, well, I think we need a scalpel and not a sledgehammer or as I would say metaphorically a chainsaw, I think you’re seeing that there may be some opportunity to have more permanency as it relates to the inflation reduction act, and certainly that won’t make everybody happy because what’s going to get kept is going to be those things that deal with carbon capture sequestration and utilization. And so it’s going to be interesting.

Bill Loveless: Yeah, I mean, do you think Biden could have done things more effectively? You mentioned this sort of bipartisan support, at least on the ground in terms of where a lot of these tax credits and other advantages of the inflation reduction Act when many of them went to red States as you mentioned. But could he have done things more effectively? Could his administration done things more effectively or for that matter, Democrats in the United States Congress done things more effectively to sell that back when he was in office?

Heidi Heitkamp: I don’t think so. I think that this was going to be a hyperpartisan vote from the very beginning in part just because the place is broken and even if people have good common sense and say, Hey, these are good ideas and we do have a climate problem, there just is the hardcore that we will constantly say, it’s a hoax. We don’t need to be making this investment. I’m going to take this vote, but I sure will be at the ribbon cutting in my district when the project gets announced. And so I think it’s interesting because talking and I talk to people in the energy world quite a bit, and in fact Ernie Moniz was at the University of Chicago as my guest, and I asked him because he came after the election and he said, I think there’s so much momentum behind the work that was done.

It will carry through. I think we’re not seeing that unfortunately, but Sarah week is this week. I don’t know when this is coming out, but the readout that I’m getting from there is that there is not a serious retraction of a commitment from especially the larger energy companies who know that you can’t manage your company on four year intervals depending upon who the president is. You have to stay the course if you believe in the course that you’ve set. And so it’ll be interesting to see what comes out of that dialogue, what comes out of, we got a cr, if it passes, it’s going to kick the can down the road to September, then they’re actually going to have to come up with the budget. We’ll see what happens with the expenditures in the IRA.

Bill Loveless: Yeah, we all have an eye at these days on the CR that continuing the resolution. But speaking of Sara week, yeah, I mean the hall was packed with what, 7,200 people. It’s a big crowd, maybe bigger than it’s been in previous years, I’m not sure, but it was a celebration from what I’ve read from the oil and gas industry of the strong commitment from President Trump to promote that sector. I wonder when you say that you don’t see a lot of these big companies retreating. Do you think it’s that they will stay the cost when it comes to things that you mentioned like carbon capture and not so much on the green energy, the solar, the wind, the batteries?

Heidi Heitkamp: It is hard to say. I think that if you’re an international company, you don’t just look at what the politics are in North Dakota or in the United States. You look at globally, what’s your brand and what kind of hit is your brand going to take? I think that this get me in trouble too. The more sophisticated companies are being much more cautious about how they approach this period of time. Obviously the methane rule was disapproved in Congress. That’s no surprise. The question is when the gas industry is going around saying, we think we need to take care of our methane problem and then not supporting kind of the regulation, again, that creates an image problem with people who want to work with the natural gas companies. And so it’ll be interesting to see how this all shakes out. I mean, there may be exuberance right now, but honestly, Donald Trump has said that he wants to take the price of oil, cut it in half and cut your gas bill in half.

Let me tell you, at half of what they’re getting right now, which could be about $35, people aren’t going to drill for oil and gas. Maybe they’ll keep producing out of the wells that they have, but they aren’t going to make investments. And so I think there’s a lot of folks in the talking points present a very naive point of view where the reality behind all that is, as I like to say, it’s energy economy 1 0 1, and that means that you can’t be producing at a price point that won’t allow you to earn a profit. And they learned that when everybody went really all in on shale and promised a lot of production and promised that they were going to keep costs low, that didn’t happen. And it really soured investments. And so when oil prices went back up, a lot of profit taking as opposed to investment. And so I’m interested in seeing kind of the investment. What’s naive to me is if you have mature fields where you already have a lot of infrastructure to suggest that you’re going to go up in Alaska and the far reaches and drill for oil and gas and build infrastructure, those projects are a lot longer than four years. And pretty naive to think that the investment’s going to go in places where you take reputational challenges, but you also have huge infrastructure costs.

Bill Loveless: You’re from North Dakota, an oil producing state. How is the president’s aggressive oil and gas development plan playing among your former constituents?

Heidi Heitkamp: Well, I think people love it. They’re like, yeah, finally we have somebody. And honestly, when I say, okay, December, we had the highest amount of oil and gas of oil ever produced out of this country, so think about that. And gas prices were manageable for people coming off big highs after the pandemic and the spike in consumption. And so the mistake I think that Joe Biden made is that he didn’t tell the story of what happened to the oil and gas industry on his watch. He obviously didn’t like him, and I shouldn’t say he didn’t like him, but they didn’t feel like they had a voice in this administration, but it didn’t translate to a lot of curtailment of the development of oil and gas resources. And so if I had been Joe Biden, I’d say record oil prices or record oil production manageable, I think the wholesale price of gasoline was two something when Donald Trump became president.

That’s manageable for consumers. And so what’s the beef? And to suggest you’re going to open up areas of public lands, then there’s going to be a lot of people jumping up and down to bid on those leases. We’ll see, Trump says, I’m going to drill baby drill well, we are drill baby drilling right now. And are people going to drill in places where there’s not mature infrastructure especially? Hey, here’s another thing. 25% tariff on steel that has a huge consequence for the oil and gas industry, huge utilization of steel pipe in the drilling industry pipe to move the oil from one point to the other. This is a industry that’s heavily dependent on steel and a 25% tariff is going to add a dramatic tax to their drilling costs.

Bill Loveless: And cause this tariff threat comes and goes, right, it goes up and down it seems almost depending on the day. So who knows where it will be when we actually air our conversation, but nevertheless, it’s

Heidi Heitkamp: Been, it’s the damnedest thing. We got tariffs today, but not tomorrow, but not today, but not tomorrow. Anyone who thinks that that is the way to run an economy when an economy runs uncertainty, just doesn’t understand how investment decisions are made,

Bill Loveless: What changes do you see in Trump’s approach to energy and climate change since his first term? Or has there been any significant change?

Heidi Heitkamp: I think he’s going to be a lot more aggressive because of the promises that he made. I don’t think that this was a high economic priority, but I think that what he has promised is drill, baby drill because we’re going to reduce your costs and you see it, see his economic advisors coming out saying, well, how we’re going to meet inflation concerns is we’re going to lower the cost of transportation. And I know oil functionally is traded on an international price and it’s supply demand driven. And I just saw a presentation. We have a law professor actually from North Dakota who’s one of the leading experts in oil and gas law, and he just did a CLE continuing legal education in North Dakota looking at long-term demand curves. Everybody should be looking at the projections for long-term demand. Probably one of the things that he has he would like to reverse the most is the movement towards electric cars, but he is got this guide running Doge and now he’s going to buy a Tesla. And so it’s just like, it is a schizophrenic kind of attitude that I think doesn’t bode well in the marketplace.

Bill Loveless: I want to get back to remark you made before about Congress, your old haunt. You said it’s broken, and I don’t think many people would dispute that, but it’d be interesting to hear what you mean by that.

Heidi Heitkamp: Well, I mean, here’s a great example. Anyone who understands the challenges of energy today knows that it’s an infrastructure. We have plenty of energy sources, whether it’s renewable. What we’re challenged is trying to figure out how to move energy, how to actually get the permitting. And Senator Manchin worked his heart out. I mean, I know, and basically scaled back and did a very modest permitting reform bill that he couldn’t get across the finish line. Now, anyone who understands the American economy knows that we need to move energy to where energy is needed. And that may discourage a lot of people on the green side of this, but there was the development of some interesting partnerships between traditional energy companies and green energy companies because all of a sudden you need that power line, you need that pipeline. You need to be able to produce enough electricity to meet demand.

And we aren’t doing that in this country along with some challenges for the power grid, whether it’s an east west high or whatever you’re looking at in terms of building infrastructure for our energy, building out enough infrastructure for our energy demand of all the things. I mean the IRA, that wouldn’t have happened without Manchin, but yet he is demonized so often and he got that done, played a major role in the overall infrastructure. And so you look at kind of what I like to say is the lookup issues. Everybody’s like, oh, you’re going to drill in Anwar or whatever. And I’m like, no, they’re not. They’re not going to drill there. They’ve got the petroleum reserve. They’ve opened up. I mean, Biden actually opened up permitting in the petroleum reserve, which if you’ve been up there, you understand what the difference is

Bill Loveless: In Alaska.

Heidi Heitkamp: Yeah, in Alaska. And so you’ve got a failure of Congress to look into the future and say, what are the energy needs? What are the demands and how are we going to meet those demands and do it in a way that meets our climate challenge? Now, people don’t like hearing this particularly on the left, but the only reason the United States has been able to pretty drastically reduce our CO2 emissions is because we’ve converted from coal to natural gas. And that has been a huge opportunity to reduce the carbon footprint. But because it is natural gas, oh my goodness, we can’t possibly do that. But we could do backend natural gas with carbon capture and greatly reduce the footprint, get rid of methane emissions, which is why I brought that up. And so I always like to say when I look at the climate problem, I think everybody should be energy source agnostic and look at what the actual numbers would say.

And a lot of the ideas that are promoted, and this will get me in trouble too, like rooftop solar. Yeah, that’s all good, but it’s not going to solve our climate problem. And we’re challenged right now, and depending upon whether you see increased deficiencies in data centers, everybody’s energy bill is going to go up. And I don’t think Trump understands that because he’s out there bally whoing, oh, look, we got this major investment in this data center. I want to say, yeah, good luck with that because eventually you’re going to have a lot of consumers in those states who are going to see their utility bill go up 25, 30%, and it’s going to be because of excess demand. And to me, we need a nonpartisan, not bipartisan, but a nonpartisan energy plan for this country. It’s just as important as being nonpartisan in our national security, and I don’t see it. And if I were in Congress, this would be a major focus for me, and I would just take the barbs and the arrows that come with being source agnostic, as I like to say.

Bill Loveless: Well, like Joe Manchin from West Virginia, you were among the more conservative members of the Senate Democratic Caucus when you were on Capitol Hill. Is there something we learned from that wing of the potty when it comes to finding bipartisan agreement on issues like energy or climate change?

Heidi Heitkamp: This is going to sound like sour grapes, so get ready. The single most important piece of legislation for the oil industry was lifting the ban on oil exports, which was done and signed into law by Barack Obama, led by Harry Reed, and really my bill. Okay. And how we did that is we stabilized the production tax credits and the investment tax credits for renewables, and you saw a dramatic increase. By that, I mean stabilizing, what we were doing with the renewable tax credits is every year we would extend them, we’d extend them in December for the next year. That’s not how investment and energy works. That’s another sign that this whole thing is broken. So I used up a lot of political capital with my colleagues and was able to get that done. And across the finish line, the first thing that somebody who had been one of the chief lobbyists, Harold Ham from Continental Petroleum when it came, and my colleagues thought, well, Heidi really needs this.

It’s important to her state. This is a huge delivery point. He signed on with my opponent as his campaign treasurer. And so the lesson of this is if you want non-partisan energy policy, then start being non-partisan. And that’s the danger right now of all these people flocking to Donald Trump that they aren’t going to have a seat at the table when the worm turns and you don’t. I mean, there’s a lot of industries that have figured out how to, I wouldn’t say lobby, but how to inform Congress on what their needs are without just playing one side. I think the oil and gas industry has been terrible, and they’d say, well, they won’t even talk to me. Well, I wonder why when somebody did give you the opportunity to talk to them and then that happened, that the thing is no, they just are Republicans. They’re not going to ever support a Democrat.

Bill Loveless: Well, I mean the whole political landscape has changed so much across the country. I mean, I covered Congress for many years when I saw the bipartisan work of say, the Senate Energy Committee, Republicans, Democrats, it almost didn’t matter who was chairing the committee, they reported bills to the flawed and bills were passed. I recall the 2005, 2007 Energy Policy Acts, for example, signed by George Bush. The country itself has just changed since then. And of course, therefore you have the repercussions on the hill, which probably makes it difficult Congress to function at all. I don’t know, how does the worm turn or when does the worm turn?

Heidi Heitkamp: I think it’s even more complicated than that because you look at, I mean, everybody’s like, oh, Keystone XL Pipeline. And that is the biggest red herring of all, because what I always tell people is, look, the first thing Donald Trump did when he took over in 17 was he granted that permit. And in four years they never built the pipeline and nothing stopped him except a bunch of conservative Republican ranchers in Nebraska. And so this infrastructure problem is not, it’s not a partisan problem, it’s a NIMBY problem, and it also is a problem where the people who are building these projects would rather use eminent domain than sit down at a kitchen table and talk neighbor. And so they’re not very smart about how they go about trying to seek and pay for easements. They aren’t very smart about how they hire to have people talk to the local folks. And I’m not saying you’re going to get everybody, I mean, I am not that naive, but I can show you examples of really stupid things that were done by folks who wanted to cite a CO2 pipeline in North Dakota, and they angered people before they even had a conversation by sending ’em letters saying, yeah, we’ll be on your property here to really, and these are people who would jealously guard politically private property rights, but willing to walk all over ’em when those private property rights get in their way.

Bill Loveless: I’d like to talk a little bit more about North Dakota, and I know you’re always happy to talk about North Dakota. Your former governor Doug Bergham is the, not only the interior secretary now in the Trump administration, but also heads Trump’s National Energy Dominance Council. Tell us about him and what his appointment to this job means for federal energy policy.

Heidi Heitkamp: Well, he didn’t come out of energy. He came out of the tech world, started a very successful and eventually company that was great plain software that was purchased by Microsoft, and he is not someone I thought would ever be in the MAGA world, let’s put it that way, but he is, and so we’ll see how he balances his love for the beauty that is the beauty of the West with his stated purpose of advancing energy dominance, which by the way, we are energy dominant, so mission accomplished. I just think if you benchmark everything and say, okay, what does it look like in a year from now? Are you going to double those numbers? Guess what, bill? They’re not going to double those numbers. And so I think there is a need to speak truth to power about what’s likely, and one of the reasons why the voters of this country are so discouraged is things get overpromised.

Day one, I’m going to reduce your egg prices. No, you’re not. We’re in middle of a bird flu epidemic and it’s just going to be really, really hard to do that, and we still haven’t cleared up supply chain challenges, and you certainly aren’t going to do that with 25% tariff on steel and aluminum. And so it’s like a lot of this is atory, which I learned that word, that a hundred dollars word in law school, which is aspirational, but that’s not how voters see it. Voters see it as promises, and so we’ll see what happens. I wish Doug well. I think he is a well-intended and well-meaning person, and like I said, I never thought he would be in the mago world.

Bill Loveless: Yeah, oil of course is big in North Dakota, but so isn’t wind power. There’s plenty of wind

Heidi Heitkamp: And coal

Bill Loveless: And coal of course,

Heidi Heitkamp: With carbon capture, which was another bill that I led when I was there, which was expanding the 45 Q tax credits, which really got amped up and put on steroids in the IRA. It’s so good on them. I think right now, if you’re looking at clean energy and you’re looking at investments, the sweet spot for non-partisan development is really in the nuclear space. Now. You’re going to have NIMBY problems, you’re going to have citing problems, but I think everybody appreciates that this is a reliable baseload source of power. We’ve learned a lot over the years on spent fuel. There’s new technologies, and so I think a lot of, on both sides of the aisle, I think people are very interested in what can happen. Texas ironically, one of the biggest renewable sources of energy, right? Mean Texas has a lot of wind, a lot of solar, and they’re really working hard on a state level to expand their nuclear development. And so there’s a space, but all you hear about is drill, baby drill. The smart thing would be how are we going to find where people can agree and develop that resource?

Bill Loveless: Climate change is a term barely heard on the hill these days, at least among the Republican majorities. You said in 2021 that Republicans believed climate change was an issue that had to be addressed. You even recalled at that time that then house Republican leader, Kevin McCarthy had a climate plan. That’s not the case right now. I mean, how do you find middle ground on issues like climate change?

Heidi Heitkamp: I think it’s short-termism, right? Kick the can down the road. You can’t convince people that, I mean, and you have to have leaders who are willing to basically say there is a necessity to doing this. It’s interesting. I saw a comedian recently say that Miami wants to be the cryptocurrency capital of the world. He said, okay, because in 40 years, there won’t be a Miami and there won’t be cryptocurrency. So we’re seeing huge mitigation costs for what’s happening with climate. And people don’t want to believe that. They want to say, oh, it’s just weather patterns. That’s not what the science would tell you. But we’re one of the few countries in the world that actually is still having this debate, but we’re also having a debate about vaccinations. We’re also having a debate about fluoride. The one thing that I would tell you, bill, that I find fascinating is kind of the war on science, that scientific consensus that has been around a long time is now being questioned.

I don’t know that that’s a bad thing, but when it’s being questioned by people who have no expertise, that’s dangerous. And so you see it in climate, you see it in healthcare, you see it across the board. And so climate isn’t alone in meeting these challenges on what I would call, not a war on science, but certainly some very, very difficult period of time for scientists who are notoriously nonpartisan, notoriously nonpolitical, and now all of a sudden they’re waking up and they’re realizing, oh, that grant that I had to study this now is partisan because it does something with wind. And wind, according to the current president causes cancer. And so we have to back off that, or we have to write it in language that sneaks it through. That doesn’t address the challenge head on.

Bill Loveless: You were once a lawyer at the Environmental Protection Agency. I

Heidi Heitkamp: Still am a lawyer.

Bill Loveless: Well, yes, but at EPA, right? A few years ago,

Heidi Heitkamp: I actually have a specialty degree in environmental law. I went to Lewis and Clark Law School to get that concentration in environmental law.

Bill Loveless: What did you do at EPA?

Heidi Heitkamp: I worked in water enforcement, but it’s a little more complicated than that because at the time when I worked at EPA, I started out as a student. I was a student intern, and I was assigned to a task force within water enforcement of their top lawyers who were looking at what was happening with the Love canal cases. What was happening with all this was before Superfund was passed, this is before you had really strong enforcement of hazardous waste disposal. And one of the cases I worked on was a criminal case involving a company that had knowingly dumped a lot of toxins into the Ohio River and contaminated the river. And what I remind students that I speak with is I said, when I started out in the environmental movement, you couldn’t eat the fish out of the Great Lakes and the environmental movement you couldn’t see across the street in la.

And so this is the problem with short-term thinking, because if you don’t tell that history, if you don’t talk about what was the conditions prior to the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act Superfund, what were those conditions that led to a real, I mean, and actually ironically led by Republicans. There’s a guy named Dick Ottinger who was one of the heroes of the environmental movement from New York, huge Republican. And so this was not a partisan issue. It was like, we have huge problems when you can’t see across the street in LA and that’s causing damage to our infrastructure. We’ve got to clean this up. And so I worked on the Love Canal cases one of the early, and then the backlash came with Ronald Reagan, who he put Ann Gorsuch, who is the mother of the current Supreme Court justice in charge of the, and it was clear that they were going to roll back enforcement actions in particular.

And so it wasn’t what I signed up for when I said I wanted to do this work. But I do think, and I do want to say this, that it is really important that people appreciate with regulation about 20% of the cost of regulation will solve typically about 80% of the problem that you’re trying to solve. The other 80% deals with the 20%. And so at what point do you reach a point at which there’s an assumption of risk or at least some better economic analysis of increased regulation. And so I got a black eye from a lot of people in that community because I wanted to talk about regulatory reform and actually doing that kind of cost benefit analysis on regulation that would allow us to deploy resources more efficiently.

Bill Loveless: Yeah. What do you make of the proposed cuts at the EPA, both in terms of personnel and regulation?

Heidi Heitkamp: Well, proli Politica just did a story that they are no longer going to publish the list of toxins. And I want to say, okay, you’ve got this whole, and again, schizophrenia in the administration. For anyone who suffers from that disease, please don’t think that I’m not sensitive to it, but there is just this lack of consistency because you’ve got Kennedy out there saying, make America healthy again, talking about, I’m going to eliminate additives in food and I’m going to do this and I’m going to do that. And in the meantime, you’re basically eliminating all the science, or at least disclosure of the science that would tell us what in fact is happening in terms of increased toxins. There’s a lot of really interesting research on plastics right now and probably don’t want to be outed, but Bloomberg is doing some really interesting advocacy on reducing the amount of utilization of plastics in our environment that people would argue is having a direct health effect. And so the lesson I think of the early environmental movement is you could see it, right? You could see the smog, you could see the fish being contaminated. You could see the river on fire, you could see the landfills exploding. And all of that was happening in the late seventies when I started in this business. And now a lot of the threats are invisible, and it’s harder to convince people that we should be deploying resources to tackle those threats.

Bill Loveless: You’ve spent, you’ve been at the University of Chicago now for what about two or three years, even longer. I think you were an advisor there

Heidi Heitkamp: And my daughter went to school here. So we like to fly the University of Chicago flag. You guys have a great institution at Columbia, a little more challenged than we are these days,

Bill Loveless: But

Heidi Heitkamp: Love it here and love, love the access to amazing scientists who are doing really fun and interesting things. And I think this whole NIH cutback is really dangerous for this country. I want to say this Bill, and I’ve kind taken over here, but the director of National Intelligence, which is the job that Tul Gabbard has writes an assessment of what the threats are every year. And one of the threats that they have identified is the reduction of commitment to applied research. We’re falling behind other countries that has a huge national security implication, but it has a huge implication for American economic dominance going forward. And so this whole war on science, I’ll put it this way, I’m a 25 year cancer survivor, and so I had stage three breast cancer. I didn’t sit around and tell my doctors what to do. They’re the experts. And I think this attitude, I always say, you know how they say there’s no atheist in a foxhole? There’s no anti medical person with stage four cancer. They want to know what the science is telling them and what the treatment is. And very few people would back away from an opportunity for life-saving treatment, but yet we don’t respect it if it doesn’t affect you personally.

Bill Loveless: Talk a little bit more in terms of the feedback, your experience with students in your case at the University of Chicago. You’ve said in the past that climate change has been a big issue for young voters. Again, you’ve just completed a job at this college campus. Do you still think that’s the case? If so, it didn’t seem to come through in the last election.

Heidi Heitkamp: I think I might’ve overstated it, but I think that when everything else, when you aren’t challenged economically and when you don’t have this overall fear of what’s going to happen with the democracy, then you have the luxury for the tier two issues and the ones that you know need to address but don’t have any problems. Another existential threat to this country is our debt and deficit, and it doesn’t rise to a voting issue. And so this is what I’m saying when I say politicians need to look up, they need to be smart enough to know what’s on the horizon coming at ’em. And I think that young people still are concerned, but I think that a lot of what happened in Israel, the Gaza, so there were other things that eclipsed their concern for climate. But when you look at insurance companies pulling out of California because of wildfires or out of Florida because of hurricanes, I mean, there’s going to be direct effects when you look at building coals that are being totally rewritten and adding additional costs for mitigation. So we don’t do a very good job in the climate area identifying what the externality costs are of not dealing with this problem. And then it just seems like I have friends who deeply concerned about climate who think we’ve already tipped over that there’s no going back, and so just build the sea wall in Manhattan and let Miami go underwater. I mean, they honestly will say that.

Bill Loveless: Before we go, I had like to ask you, what is Heidi Heke going to be doing now? And we’d be particularly interested in hearing if she’s going to be keeping an eye on energy issues.

Heidi Heitkamp: Well, this is a passion for me, and it was interesting. I think I told you this story before, Bill, when I got to the Senate, I mean obviously no energy company wanted to talk to me when I was running. I wasn’t going to win. And then when I won, it was like, oh, well, I better get in there and visit with her. And so I remember sitting down with a chief executive officer of a very large energy company, and I was talking about tertiary recovery and what does that look like, and just really spending a lot of time talking about the power grid and the baseload power. I mean, just the kind of language that, I’m not saying I’m an energy expert, but I know a lot about energy. And he said, man, a lot about energy. And I said, yeah, you would’ve known that had you wanted to talk to me before the election.

So I mean, I think I am deeply concerned about the challenges of working people. I think energy cost is going to continue to, we have to figure out a way to keep energy costs low, but also address climate concerns. This is a passion for me, but probably a lot of what I’m going to be doing is taking a look at rural America economics and how we can improve opportunities because one of the reasons why we’re not addressing climate is because the workforces feels very insecure about what does this transition mean for me? What does that mean for my family? I’m working on a rig. I make $140,000 a year. You say, I can go manufacture solar panels. That’s a $60,000 a year job. I don’t want it. That’s not what I do. A boiler maker who’s working in a coal-fired power plant is like he is got a really good job. So I think that we have to have a whole of economic to solve a lot of these problems. We really have to build out an economy in this country that works for everybody. And so my particular interest and expertise, if we could call it that as in rural issues, and I’ll continue to work on those.

Bill Loveless: Well, we continue to stay in touch with you on those issues. It’s always a lot of fun to talk to you, Senator, and I appreciate your taking the time to do it again here on Columbia Energy Exchange.

Heidi Heitkamp: You bet. Take care, Billl.

Bill Loveless: That’s it for this week’s episode of Columbia Energy Exchange. Thank you again, Heidi Heitkamp, and thank you for listening. This show is brought to you by the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs. The show is hosted by Jason Bordoff and me, Bill Loveless. The show is produced by Erin Hardick and Mary Catherine O’Connor from Latitude Studios. Additional support from Caroline Pittman and Kyu Lee. Sean Marquand is the Sound engineer. For more information about the show or the Center on Global Energy policy, visit us online at energypolicy.columbia.edu or follow us on social media @ColumbiaUEnergy. If you like this episode, leave us a rating on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. You can also share it with a friend or colleague to help us reach more listeners. Either way, we appreciate your support. Thanks again for listening. See you next week.

Across America, energy policy is often driven by short-term politics over long-term planning. Despite record-breaking U.S. oil production in recent years, partisan battles continue over fossil fuels and climate action.

States like North Dakota illustrate this tension perfectly. Rich in both oil and wind resources, they navigate between traditional energy production and renewable development. But nationwide, critical energy infrastructure faces roadblocks—from pipelines stalled by local opposition to transmission lines needed for clean energy expansion.

So what will it take to develop a nonpartisan national energy strategy? How do we balance immediate economic needs with climate goals? And as electricity demands grow while the power grid faces new challenges, what will it take to develop an energy strategy beyond the politics of four-year election cycles?

This week host Bill Loveless talks with Heidi Heitkamp about crafting enduring energy policies that serve both economic and environmental goals.

Heidi served as a U.S. senator from North Dakota from 2013 to 2019, becoming the first woman elected to represent the state in that chamber. Before her time in the Senate, Heitkamp served as North Dakota’s attorney general and state tax commissioner. Today, she is director of the University of Chicago Institute of Politics and works with the university’s Institute for Climate and Sustainable Growth.

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Breaking America’s Energy Policy Gridlock

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