Former White House National Climate Advisor Ali Zaidi (right) talks with Professor Dan Esty at the "Rethinking Climate Change Progress" event at Kroon Hall on February 14, 2025.
A Conversation With White House National Climate Advisor Ali Zaidi
The head of the White House Climate Policy Office under President Joe Biden from 2022 to 2025 recently visited the Yale School of Environment for a candid discussion about his former boss’ relentless focus on climate action as jobs creator as well as the need to develop a “more flexible, less pure” narrative around climate and energy.
Speaking to a full house in Kroon Hall’s Burke Auditorium, Ali Zaidi recounted a conversation he had with his former boss President Joe Biden about a week or so after the president took office. Zaidi, who led the White House Climate Policy Office and served as National Climate Advisor from 2022 to 2025, remembered a freewheeling conversation on a range of issues, including a discussion about Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), which are climate action plans embodying national efforts to reduce emissions under the terms of the Paris Agreement.
“Look, I’m as data centric as the next guy, but if you guys think your job is to be GHG accounting, you won’t be coming in here a lot,” Zaidi recalled the president commenting, as a “slightly euphemistic way of saying that the bottom line was not just going to be greenhouse gas reduction.”
Whether it’s the loss and damage fund, or it’s the conversation about how we accelerate decarbonization, we have got to be relentless starting all the way from the bottom, which is the intellectual foundation of building and sticking to a paradigm that prioritizes partnership, trust, transparency, flexibility, and a relentless drive to get the job done.”
Ali Zaidi White House National Climate Advisor, 2022 - 2025
That discussion illustrated Biden’s “uniquely vigorous focus” on climate action as jobs creator, Zaidi said, noting that while the idea was not original to Joe Biden, it was one of two major paradigm shifts that defined the Biden Administration’s approach to climate policy.
“… we talked about how we would put prevailing wage and apprenticeship requirements into the entire tax code. And, so, suddenly, the tax code was not just scaling up solar, it was lifting solar workers into a wage that was better,” Zaidi said. “And that is not just saying climate creates jobs, it’s augmenting the benefits that flow from it …. I sort of think about it as the blue collar backstop to climate backsliding.”
Zaidi joined host Dan Esty, the Hillhouse Professor of Environmental Law and Policy, at the Yale School of the Environment on February 14, for “Rethinking Climate Change Progress,” a discussion that included a look back at Biden Administration policy initiatives to address climate change and drive decarbonization as well as a conversation about potential paths forward under the second Trump Administration.
Along with a focus on augmenting or enhancing the delivery of the economic and other co-benefits of climate action, including in the arena of environmental justice, the Biden Administration also emphasized a shift from a macro- to a micro-approach to climate policy, Zaidi noted. “Climate has been a magnet for brilliant macro-thinkers, and the policy solutions, as a result, are these very elegant macro-policy solutions,” he said. “We decided for both political economy reasons, but also because I think the president sought to accomplish multiple bottom lines, including an economic revitalization, to go from this macro-approach to sort of a climate micro-moment. And the design of the policy was really aimed at that ambition, lifting people up into the middle class, focusing on the literal places they had been laid off as the places we would create the jobs, and doing it relentlessly in every single solitary sector of the accounting.”
Looking ahead, Esty noted the Inflation Reduction Act, the Biden Administration’s flagship climate legislation, was crafted to ensure that its benefits would be spread widely across the country, perhaps even more heavily loaded into red states or red congressional districts, and he asked Zaidi if he thought that offered some protection against dismantling, and, if so, what pieces of the legislation stood the best chance of survival.
When thinking of a “heat risk map” of the IRA, Zaidi said the items that are the brightest in his mind are retail items, such as EV tax credits. “Retail is high risk because it’s hard to get 300 million Americans to show up in Washington, D.C., and say, ‘I would really want that.’”
Also, at high risk are initiatives designed to benefit low-income and underserved individuals and communities, such as apprenticeships, permanent wage, direct pay that goes to rural co-ops, the greenhouse reduction fund, and the zero-emission home rebate program, he noted, adding that a technology-neutral credit that goes to large utilities could be an example of an item that could be relatively safe.
Esty also questioned Zaidi about regulation, more specifically if he felt that there was a continued backlash to what many Americans in the post-pandemic era perceive as overregulation — one that may have played a role in the 2024 election and could continue to affect progress on decarbonization moving forward.
In his reply, Zaidi pointed to the relatively unknown history of the Green New Deal, recalling that it was in actuality an abundance agenda that developed out of frustration with scarcity.
“I think there’s this big problem with the regulatory project in America, and around the world, that requires a lot of interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary work to build back up. It’s not just a problem for progressive objectives; it’s a problem for capital deployment. How are you going to make a bet on a jurisdiction that doesn’t know where it wants to go and may in an arbitrary and capricious way just stop you because there are no rules,” he asked. “We've got to figure out — and this is a core part of progress and rethinking the way forward — what is the minimum necessary regulatory apparatus to meet capital formation in these critical areas, and then, at least, hold onto that and strengthen that.”
A place such as Yale, Esty noted, is very well positioned to think about what those critical regulatory pieces are and what areas, in contrast, might be considered overhanging or excess.
Along those lines, during the Q&A portion of the discussion Andie Creel, YSE PhD student, asked Zaidi what he thought the role of institutions, particularly academic institutions like the Yale School of the Environment, should be in carrying forward work on climate solutions and decarbonization.
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That question, which is one we should all be asking ourselves, is going to have very different answers for everyone, he said, adding that in some cases we need to come up with the new legal architecture and completely reformulate the trade system, while in others we had to try to ensure we don’t lose the progress we've made, noting the work done by Eli Fenichel, the Knobloch Family Professor of Natural Resource Economics, under the Biden Administration to expand the national economic accounting system to better capture the links between nature and the economy.
“So going back to my climate micro-moment. It takes a really long time to get heat pumps into a house. That’s a permitting friction. That’s an engineering friction; that’s a behavioral psychology friction.... That’s all work that someone’s got to do to make it easier for the person in the federal government who now has had five people to the right of them and left of them fired. So, they don't really don’t have time to think blue sky about this stuff….” Zaidi said. “So, whether it’s the early innings of things like heavy industry and nature, or as the late innings of things like transportation and power, there’s so much work to do.”
When asked if he’s still optimistic about climate progress and decarbonization overall, Zaidi said he is but also thinks we have got to “get a new narrative around climate and energy that’s more flexible, less pure.”
“Whether it’s the loss and damage fund, or it’s the conversation about how we accelerate decarbonization, we have got to be relentless starting all the way from the bottom, which is the intellectual foundation of building and sticking to a paradigm that prioritizes partnership, trust, transparency, flexibility, and a relentless drive to get the job done,” he said.
“Rethinking Climate Change Progress” with Ali Zaidi, former White House National Climate Advisor, was co-hosted by the Yale Center for Environmental Law & Policy, the Yale School of the Environment Policy Analysis Learning Community, Business and the Environment Learning Community, Energy Learning Community, and Climate Learning Community.
