Miranda Green

I wanted to start by asking you about the title. You know, we’ve all heard the phrase “carbon footprint,” and I think “carbon wave” is supposed to be a play on words. So what does it mean to you?

Leah Stokes

Everybody knows what a carbon footprint is, and that’s actually because the fossil fuel industry spent hundreds of millions of dollars advertising it globally. So the basic idea of a carbon footprint is that an individual is responsible for a certain amount of pollution every year, and they need to do everything that they can by themselves, sort of like sit in the dark with their wool sweater and reduce carbon pollution, and I really reject that framework because I think it takes infrastructure and structural choices and puts them on individuals.

So the carbon wave is the opposite idea. It’s about people joining together. So if each of us is like a droplet, then we can join together to form a wave, and what do we do when we get together? We do collective action and structural change, and so that can look like, you know, installing heat pumps at the school down the block, or even in your own home, or getting your city government to, you know, get a fleet of electric vehicles, or it can look as big as changing state laws or federal laws that can really ripple out across society.

Miranda

Looking at the origin story of the Inflation Reduction Act, when did you realize that you were going to be part of this?

Leah

So I was a professor at UC Santa Barbara at the time, and I wanted to get more involved in climate policy. I had just lived through the Thomas Fire, which was at that time the largest fire in California history. After it happened, there were these mudslides in Montecito that killed more than 20 people in my community, and I just felt like, wow, climate change is happening now, and it’s so dire and urgent. So, we’ve got to do more.

And I wrote this post on Twitter, and then I started to get calls from journalists like you, sort of asking me to explain things, and before long I was working with campaigns, giving them ideas, and with activist groups too. 

And so what happened was Gov. Jay Inslee from Washington State was running for president largely on a climate platform. And when he didn’t become the nominee, the people in that campaign decided to start an organization called Evergreen Action, which was about campaigning not for a person but for a climate law, and I got involved with them, with people like Sam Ricketts, and we started to work together on how we could get specific provisions into a big climate law on clean electricity and also on electrification. And that’s really the story of the book. How we sort of work together to try to coordinate and push for a big climate law from the outside.

Miranda

What was it like for you getting thrown into kind of the politics of all of this? Do you think you were prepared?

Leah

Yeah, I had spent one summer working in D.C. way back in the Obama administration, and that’s actually where I met Adrian Deveny, another one of the main characters in the book. But you know that was it, like four months in D.C. But I was kind of an outsider. Like I wasn’t an American citizen at the time [I was Canadian]. I lived in Santa Barbara, but because it was the pandemic, we were able to start doing so much activism online, and it allowed us to build these networks with hundreds of groups and coordinate in a way that the climate and environmental justice movement had not done before.

So many people had learned lessons from the big failure under the Obama administration with the Waxman-Markey bill, where everybody kind of descended into infighting with organized labor and environmental justice and climate groups, and nobody could kind of agree with what to do on climate, and so there were a lot of efforts to try to bring people together. And that’s not easy, right? When you have these groups who don’t always agree, and you’re trying to build consensus and bring people to the table, there’s a lot of conflict. There’s going to be drama and conflict, and I think it’s important to share that experience so that people, you know, are ready to keep pushing and not sort of like throwing in the towel when the conflict starts. Because that is just the nature of politics.

Miranda

How did you and your team decide what direction to take this bill?

Leah

I tell the story in the book behind the scenes of Sonia Aggarwal, who worked in the White House climate office. So Sonia was an analyst on the outside, and she had spent decades trying to count up carbon pollution. This is her area of expertise, and then she found herself working inside the White House alongside others, working on the national target for the country under the Paris Agreement. And so, working together with others in the White House, she comes up with this idea of cutting carbon pollution in half by 50-52% by 2030, and President Biden makes this big announcement on Earth Day, and that was really exciting for us working on the outside because what it did was set a goal, sort of like a north star for what the bill needed to accomplish. And I think that was a really amazing effort to really try to pass a climate law at the scale of the problem. Not just say, oh, we passed a climate law, pat ourselves on the back, but really say it’s got to meet the scale of the problem.

Miranda

I wanted to ask you more about a concept you bring up a lot in your book, about being a new mom. Parenthood is such a main part of your story. How has being a mother changed your outlook on raising kids in a warming world?

Leah

So the book really takes on this idea that you shouldn’t have a kid because of climate change and tries to debunk it. And I debunk it in two ways. The first thing that I say is that, you know, an individual baby being born is not responsible for the fossil fuel-based energy system. This really is the carbon footprint paradigm, and it’s this idea that the number one thing you can do about climate change is not have a kid. This is BS. The fossil-fuel-based energy system existed the day that we were all born. 

The second thing that people really think about is that we’re all doomed, right? That you shouldn’t have a kid because the world is terrible, and we’re all doomed. It’s understandable that people are freaked out, but we are not doomed, and climate change is not killing us all or wiping out humanity or civilization tomorrow. And what we do today really matters. 

When we have these doom narratives, it can push us toward inaction and fear and paralysis, and that benefits the fossil fuel industry. So I work on hope as an active verb. I do action every day to try to change fossil fuel machines into clean electric machines and make the world better—not for my own kids, but for all living beings.

Miranda

In August of 2022, the IRA gets signed into law, and then two years later, President Trump gets reelected to office and picks apart the bill. You wrote in your book that it felt a bit like we were two steps forward and one step back. But in your Substack, you recently wrote an article that said no, the Democrats’ big climate law is not dead.

Leah

Well it’s just not accurate factually. Like, there are some real heartbreaking losses. These were things like tax credits for everyday people to get a heat pump. They were environmental justice investments that were so hard-fought.

However: Not a single Republican voted for the original climate bill, but fast forward three years, more than two dozen are raising their hand in the House of Representatives saying, “You know, I’m not so sure we should get rid of all those tax credits that are building factories in my district, that are building solar panels and batteries and wind projects.” And so they didn’t get rid of those tax credits; they still exist today, you know. 

I think if you read the news, you’d think that those 500-plus factories slated to be built in more than half of congressional districts across the country, that they’re all gone, right? No, my friend. Nine in 10 of them still exist and are moving forward.

So the dynamics are really shifting, and I would say probably about half of the Inflation Reduction Act is still around, and it’s the largest provisions that are still around. So like these tax credits that build factories and clean energy projects, those were the biggest ones in the package, and they still exist. 

Miranda

What are your expectations for the climate movement in the near future?

Leah

I really hope that we will have activists showing up to ask tough questions, and we will have independent academics and analysts like me willing to speak the truth, and not just be, you know, oh, I want power and access. Because we need leaders who do the right thing and follow through, not just sort of do lip service. Groups like Climate Defiance that are shutting down events and asking tough questions. You know, they can feel uncomfortable sometimes. You’re like, why are these kids so disruptive? But if we don’t have disruptive, confrontational politics, then politicians can just get away with greenwashing and saying things, but not actually following through.

So I’m hopeful that you know we’re actually at the same moment as the Green New Deal. We’re just before the midterms, right? It was right after the midterms [in 2018] that AOC did this sit-in with Sunrise Movement, and they called for a Green New Deal, and then the Democratic presidential primary starts, and then there’s this race to the top about who’s the most climate of them all. 

This is the exact same moment when we rewind back in time, where we set the seeds and we really planted the long-term trajectory for this climate bill. That’s what my book is all about, and so it can feel like a really dark moment right now. But it’s always darkest before the dawn.