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Fighting that insurgency cost as much as $2 trillion, according to one estimate, and the lives of nearly 5,000 American troops

And it likely would fall to nascent Iraqi fighters, who just two years ago ditched their weapons and uniforms in Mosul, to repel ISIS and launch a counterinsurgency.

Volesky warned that such attacks in liberated areas are one reason the U.S. is advising the Iraqi and Kurdish forces charged with liberating Mosul to move deliberately. Fas

But there are alternatives. Al Qaeda, for example, has embraced local Sunnis, not terrorized them, allowing the group to return to areas and recruit members.

Iraqi and Kurdish forces are now as far as 20 miles outside Mosul’s city center. The U.S. military has said the operation could last anywhere from weeks to months.

After its defeat, ISIS said the promised apocalyptic battle would come at a later, unspecified date.

A series of attacks last week killed at least 55 people in Baghdad. And in July, at least 324 people died when a truck bomb struck a popular shopping area in central Baghdad, the deadliest attack since the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime in 2003.

But after two years of brutal reign, ISIS may not be able to attract Sunnis to its insurgency. Not after the terror group that robbed their cities, beheaded their citizens, and made crimes of smoking, shaving, and playing music.

But that timetable could shift. In the last week, ISIS has lost a number of key cities in a matter of days. And in those battles, the group appears to be on the defensive before abandoning territory altogether. Most notably, ISIS lost the Syrian city of

And it is possible that ISIS, in taking credit for bombings, is exploiting the frustration of other groups seeking to upend the current Iraqi government.

Or just as likely, the U.S. military is wrong. After all, last year, U.S. commanders forecasted an ISIS expansion in Libya, which instead flailed

She also said it had become “impossible” to predict “what will happen to the North and what actions it will take” since the purge and execution last month of Mr. Kim’s uncle, Jang Song-thaek, who was long considered Mr. Kim’s mentor and the second-highest-ranking figure in his secretive government.

South Korea halted the flow of aid and investment to the North in 2008, demanding that Pyongyang give up its nuclear weapons. It also curtailed inter-Korean trade following the sinking of a South Korean naval ship in 2010, which Seoul says was caused by a North Korean torpedo attack.

After months of harsh rhetoric following the North’s nuclear test last February, North and South Korea reached an agreement last August to revive the reunions. But the North later ended the talks, blaming the South for refusing to resume an inter-Korean tourism program at the North’s Diamond Mountain resort, which had been highly lucrative for Pyongyang until it was shut down in 2008.

The Korean War, which began in 1950, was fought to a stalemate and an ultimate cease-fire in 1953. Since then, no exchanges of letters, telephone calls or emails have been allowed between North and South Koreans, and family reunions remain a highly emotional issue and an indicator of the state of relations on the peninsula.

Mr. Kim made similarly conciliatory comments toward the South during his New Year’s Day speech in 2013, but they were followed by a series of provocative acts, including its February nuclear test. Just last month, Pyongyang sent a letter to Ms. Park’s office threatening “strikes without warning.”

38% of people from ethnic minorities said they had been wrongly suspected of shoplifting in the last five years, compared with 14% of white people, with black people and women in particular more likely to be wrongly suspected

Minorities were more than twice as likely to have encountered abuse or rudeness from a stranger in the last week.

As well as demonstrating how much more likely ethnic minorities are to report negative experiences that did not feature an explicitly racist element, the poll found that one in eight had heard racist language directed at them in the month before they were surveyed.

The poll persistently found evidence that the gap in negative experiences was not confined to the past. For example, one in seven people from ethnic minorities said they had been treated as a potential shoplifter in the last month, against one in 25 white people.

Many Chinese tech companies are “at this critical size that the China market alone is not enough to support their business and valuation,

The surge also positions Asia’s investors to win stakes in markets that Western companies covet, or that have national security implications.

. “If you think that being the locus of invention gives you a boost to your GDP and so forth, that’s a deterioration of the U.S. competitive advantage.”

Although one of the biggest Asian investors is Japan’s SoftBank Group Corp. , which has tapped Middle Eastern money to create the world’s largest tech-investment fund, it is Chinese activity that is having the greatest impact.

China is creating unicorns—startups valued at a billion dollars or more—at much the same pace as the U.S., drawing on funding from internet giants like Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and Tencent Holdings Ltd. as well as more than a thousand domestic venture-capital firms that have raised billions of dollars a year for the past few year

Chinese-led venture funding is about 15 times its size in 2013, outpacing growth in U.S.-led financing, which roughly doubled in that time period

Most Chinese-led investment so far has gone to the country’s own firms, the Journal analysis found. Many of them, like the Yelp equivalent Meituan-Dianping, are household names with millions of customers in China, yet virtually unknown elsewhere.

The rise of China’s venture market “signifies a shift from a single-epicenter view of the world to a duopoly,” he says.

Madhur Deora, chief financial officer for Paytm, one of India’s biggest e-payments firms, says the company approached Alibaba affiliate Ant Financial instead of U.S. backers for funding in 2015 because Chinese mobile-internet innovations are “way far ahead of anything that’s happened in the U.S.

One reason China’s push into new technologies worries many in the U.S. is that, unlike the hunt for good returns that underpins most Western venture finance, a lot of Chinese investment is driven by strategic interests, some carrying the specter of state influence.

China is pushing hard into semiconductors, for which the government has provided billions of dollars in public funding, and artificial intelligence, where Beijing in July set a goal of global leadership by 2030

Mr. Lee, the venture investor, predicts that in the next five to 10 years Chinese tech companies will become pacesetters for tech-related development, vying with the likes of Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Facebook for dominance in markets outside the English-speaking world and Western Europe.

“All the rest of the world will basically be a land grab between the U.S. and China,

“The U.S. approach is: We’ll build a better product and just win over all the countries,” says Mr. Lee. The Chinese approach is “we’ll fund the local partner to beat off the American companies.”

Asia’s rise as a startup financier is even starker in the biggest venture investments—those of $100 million or more. These megadeals have become an increasingly important part of venture finance as valuations have ballooned, with their proportion of deal volume growing from around 8% in 2007 to around half of the total last year.

In Southeast Asia, a flood of Chinese money into local startups—such as the $1.1 billion Alibaba-led investment into Indonesian online marketplace PT Tokopedia last year—is drawing the region closer to China

Chinese money is also playing a big role in India, which, with a population of 1.2 billion, has been described as the next big internet market. Chinese and Japanese investors each led nearly $3 billion in venture finance in India last year, ahead of the nearly $2 billion in deals led by U.S. investors

“Think of strategic investments and M&A as playing a game of go,” said Mr. Tsai, the Alibaba executive vice chairman, at the investor conference last year. “In a game of go the strategic objective is to put your pieces on the chessboard and surround your opponent.”

In most countries it is fair to assume that any millionaire exodus is composed mainly of locals, and not foreign investors, because the wealthy classes will be dominated by citizens or longtime residents.

In 2017, the largest exoduses came out of Turkey (where a stunning 12 percent of the millionaire population emigrated) and Venezuela. As if on cue, the Turkish lira is now in a free fall.

matched the flight from the stagnant and sanction-battered economy of Russia, which also lost 2 percent of its millionaire population.

Until 2016, Britain had a sizable influx of millionaires every year, but the flow suddenly reversed last year with a net exodus of 3,000, amid fears that as Britain exits the European Union, London will fade as a financial capital. It did not help that in 2017 the government raised taxes on foreigners who buy property.

On the flip side, slowing outflows can be a welcome sign, and in 2017 the biggest shift for the better came in that caldron of anti-rich hostility, France.

Stunningly, India in 2017 suffered a net loss of 7,000 members, or 2 percent, of its millionaire population. That exodus came despite global optimism about India’s growth prospects

France had long been seen as the anti-Britain, a left-leaning bastion of prying bureaucrats and high taxes that scared off the wealthy, despite the charms of Paris. But the growing exodus of millionaires peaked in 2016 with a net outflow of 12,000, then slowed sharply to just 4,000 last year.

n the worst cases, bouts of capital flight can gain momentum until the value of the currency collapses, plunging the nation into crisis. Balance of payments records show that 10 of the last 12 major currency crises, dating back to the Mexican peso meltdown of 1994, began when residents started sending money abroad, which was typically two years before the currency collapsed

Right now, this forensic accounting offers clear evidence of looming financial difficulty in only one major country: Turkey. Starting early last year, affluent Turks began effectively moving large sums of money out of the country

The losses for India, Russia and Turkey were gains for havens like Canada and Australia

joined lately by the United Arab Emirates. Owing largely to the stability and glitter of the most famous emirate, Dubai, the United Arab Emirates in 2017 had a net inflow of 5,000 millionaires, increasing the size of its affluent population by 6 percent, the largest gain in the world

At some job fairs in early March, major companies simply didn’t show up; now all those career events have been canceled.

The number of new job listings posted between mid-February and mid-March dropped 29 percent compared with the same period last year, according to data from the job marketplace ZipRecruiter. Postings for retail stores fell 14 percent, events jobs went down 20 percent and casino and hotel jobs dropped 23 percent.

The hiring situation will probably get worse over the next few months, as closures and cancellations ripple across the economy. “These are still early effects. The first wave of industries hit will not be the last,” said Julia Pollak, a labor economist at ZipRecruiter. “There will be a large human cost.”

Historically, college students who graduate into a recession have settled for lower-paying jobs at less prestigious companies than people who finished college even a year earlier. Economists have found that the impact of that bad luck can linger for as long as 10 or 15 years, leading to higher unemployment rates and lower salaries — a phenomenon known as “scarring.”

Whether the class of 2020 will face long-term consequences depends on a range of factors, including the length of the pandemic and the severity of the recession that seems certain to follow. But it doesn’t look good.

A severe downturn could also jeopardize the career prospects of students who graduate later this year or in 2021.

Some industries, like nursing, have even seen an increase in job listings, according to ZipRecruiter. The number of e-commerce listings rose 228 percent over the past four weeks compared to last year. Personal consulting jobs went up 26 percent.

Over the last few weeks, many job-hunting seniors have engaged in an awkward dance with recruiters in industries like law, journalism and technology, asking for updates while trying not to seem insensitive or selfish. All the traditional rules of engagement in a job hunt suddenly feel irrelevant. A meet-up for coffee is out of the question. A request for a networking call might seem invasive.

For some seniors, uncertainty about the economy has created outrage. Most of them were in fifth grade in 2008. But they remember the damage wrought by the Great Recession.

“This is the first pandemic that I have lived through, that my parents have lived through, but this isn’t the first time the economy has not been great,” said Amy Germano, a senior at James Madison University. “If we can get through the recession in 2008, I think we can get through this.”

The relatively fast pace endured despite the loss last week of two jurors who were struck from the panel after they said that because of Minneapolis' recent $27 million settlement with Floyd's family, they could no longer promise to be impartial.

The jury reached 14 members days after Cahill denied the defense's motions to move the case to another venue or delay the proceedings – steps that Chauvin's attorney, Eric Nelson, called for because of the potential impact of the settlement news on the jury pool.

The initial jury pool included 326 people; as of late last week, Cahill said that the court had questioned around 60 of them. The selection process continued on Monday, as the judge and the two sides of the case sought to ensure the jury is fair and impartial. As of around midday Monday, the defense had used 14 of its 18 challenges and the prosecutors had used 8 of their 10 challenges, Cahill said.

In another ruling from Friday, Cahill ruled that only a portion of the evidence and details from an earlier police stop of Floyd would be allowed in the trial.Cahill noted similarities between Floyd's interaction with police on May 25, 2020, and the earlier police stop on May 6, 2019. In both instances, the judge said, there were signs that Floyd had ingested drugs after being approached by police officers. In the two cases, Cahill said, Floyd's physical behavior is "remarkably similar."

But the judge also said Floyd's "emotional behavior" from that earlier encounter was not admissible. And he restricted how much of a police video recording from the 2019 arrest could be used in court.The only recordings from the 2019 incident that are relevant to the current case, he added, are segments that could be linked to the cause of Floyd's death and his medical condition.The case is being closely watched, with Floyd's death having inflamed widespread protests against racial inequality and police brutality.

Trump remains broadly popular within the GOP. But the riot has led a small group of House Republicans -- including Rep. Liz Cheney, the No. 3 in GOP leadership in the chamber -- to support his impeachment.

The Florida Republican told CNN that he wished Trump "responded faster" to quell the violence, calling the riot "unacceptable" and "un-American" and for some of the insurrectionists to be prosecuted.

he did not hold Trump accountable for the attack

The US Chamber of Commerce, corporate political action committees and major conservative donors are reevaluating whether they will donate to the 147 Republican members of Congress who objected to certifying the presidential election on the day of the attack in a deluded bid to overturn the results. Those members include Scott and House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy, who cited voter integrity concerns.

Business PACs are significant players in politics, accounting for more than $360 million in federal contributions during the 2020 cycle -- with about 57% of the money flowing to GOP candidates, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics.

"Corporations, individuals, they have a choice," the senator said. "If you believe in a big government, less freedoms, socialism, you ought to actually put all your money into supporting the Democrats. If you want opportunity, and lower taxes and less government, you're going to support Republicans."

Some major American companies, including Amazon and CNN's owner AT&T, have announced they will withhold PAC donations to those who objected to certifying the election results.

The donor revolt is "going to make every Republican's job that much harder," said Ken Spain, a GOP strategist. Spain said the corporate pushback now under way illustrates a fissure between corporate America and rank-and-file Republicans on issues such as free trade that has only grown wider in recent years.

"Lawmakers' actions leading up to and during last week's insurrection will weigh heavy in our evaluation of future support," said AFP CEO Emily Seidel in a statement.

"We will take into account the totality of what candidates and elected officials do, including the actions of last week, and importantly, the actions in the days ahead in determining whether or not we support them," said Neil Bradley, the chamber executive vice president, on Tuesday. "I actually want to be very clear: There are some members, who by their actions, will have forfeited the support of the US Chamber of Commerce."

Some major conservative donors have also focused their ire on the individual Republicans they view as having helped to instigate last week's events, particularly Hawley. Missouri businessman Sam Fox, who donated $300,000 to a super PAC that aided Hawley's election in 2018, said in a statement that the senator "can certainly forget about any support from me again" after last week's events.

The senator wrote an op-ed for the Southeast Missourian newspaper explaining why he continued to object after the violence in the Capitol. "The reason is simple: I will not bow to a lawless mob, or allow criminals to drown out the legitimate concerns of my constituents," Hawley wrote.

Dan Eberhart, an Arizona-based energy executive considering a bid against Democrat Sen. Mark Kelly in 2022, said, "I have been a big donor to Rick Scott in the past and plan to continue to be."

Eberhart said disaffected donors will "make up with Republicans pretty quickly" if the Democrats, who will soon control the White House and both chambers in Congress, "overreach" in their agenda. "Donors will want the counterweight that Republican provide. More money may go to the leadership PACs, but it will still go to Republicans if those are the policies donors support," he added.

After House Republicans picked up seats in 2020 and with the Senate split 50-50 -- and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris set to be the tiebreaker -- eyes will turn to next year's midterms. The party out of power typically does well in midterms, and in 2022, Senate Republicans will have more seats to defend than the Democrats, including in battleground states like Florida, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Wisconsin.

But Trump and his legacy will continue to shape the perceptions of the party in the next election. Already, Ben Wikler, chair of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, announced on Wednesday that the party is going up with a six-figure ad buy that blames Johnson for inciting the riot at the Capitol.

When asked if he blamed Trump for losing the Senate, Scott said, "My focus is on 'how do we go forward?' "

So-called continuing claims rose to nearly 5.3 million for the week ended Jan. 2, from 5.1 million a week earlier, according to the Labor Department. That marked the first weekly increase since November.

Hunter Keegan, 27 years old, of Fairfax County, Va., said he lost his job as a corporate recruiter for a health-care company last April. He said he immediately began applying for work in the greater Washington, D.C., area as well as in other parts of the country where the labor market seems to be faring better.

Seasonal quirks and the passage last month of a $900 billion Covid-19 relief bill could have muddied the claims picture somewhat.

At the same time, the bill added the $300-a-week supplement for those receiving unemployment benefits through March 14 and extended two federal pandemic programs that otherwise would have paid out their final benefits in December. News of the relief package could also have contributed to an uptick in initial claims by encouraging additional workers to apply or previously eligible workers who exhausted their benefits to reapply.

Last Wednesday, Mr. Trump encouraged his supporters to march to the Capitol to pressure lawmakers to overturn his election loss, leading to a rampage that left five people dead. The rally was planned on Facebook, Twitter and elsewhere. On Parler, people posted advice on which streets to take to avoid the police; some posted about carrying guns inside the Capitol.

Parler grew slowly until early 2020, when Twitter began labeling Mr. Trump’s tweets as inaccurate and some of his supporters joined Parler in protest. After November’s election, Parler grew even more quickly as Facebook and Twitter clamped down on false claims that the vote had been rigged. So many users signed up that, at times, they overloaded the company’s systems and forced it to pause new registrations.

The tech companies’ actions last week to limit such toxic content with Mr. Trump and Parler have been applauded by liberals and others.

“I think we should recognize the importance of neutrality when we’re talking about the infrastructure of the internet,” he said.

But Parler had a significant advantage: money.

In total, people downloaded Parler’s app more than 10 million times last year, with 80 percent in the United States, according to Sensor Tower, the app data firm.

“I don’t feel responsible for any of this and neither should the platform, considering we’re a neutral town square that just adheres to the law.”

There is no place on our platform for threats of violence and illegal activity,” Apple said in a statement. Google said, “We do require that apps implement robust moderation for egregious content.”

“It’s devastating,” Mr. Matze told Fox News on Sunday. “And it’s not just these three companies. Every vendor, from text message services to email providers to our lawyers, all ditched us, too, on the same day.” He said he was struggling to find another company to host Parler’s website.

As the pandemic roars on, voters across America remain deeply angry and worried about the future. But the vocal outrage from women, in particular, is clear on protest lines and in polling data. Women were more likely than men to report having participated in protests over the past two years, and mothers with children in the home were twice as likely as fathers to report participating in a protest, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation poll from June.

Now, the rage moms are railing in Facebook groups about school shutdowns and in teacher union meetings about reopening without proper protection from the virus. They’re also packing virtual town halls with frustrations about schools, child care and the lack of leadership.

“There’s nobody giving us solutions,

Ms. Lopez is exactly the kind of voter Democrats hope will push them to victory in November, and they are aiming to turn that frustration with government inaction into a vote against Mr. Trump.

While the anger is loudest on the left, Democrats hope to capitalize on indications that the rage reaches across party lines

The broader focus on caregiving issues marks a significant shift in the political climate of even a few months ago, when Senator Elizabeth Warren made child care a centerpiece of her campaign in the Democratic presidential primary

At campaign events six months ago, Ms. Warren’s proposals for universal, government-funded child care would elicit nods primarily from mothers in the crowd, she said, followed by quiet conversations in the selfie line with women about their personal struggle balancing work and child care.During a virtual town hall meeting she held last month, however, more than half of the questions from the audience of 70,000 people were about schools, child care and working parents.

The pandemic is the spark but the backlash against Mr. Trump has been burning since the day after his inauguration, when millions of women joined protests across the country. Their fire has endured through #MeToo, waves of teachers’ strikes led by predominantly female unions, the outcry against school shootings, and Black Lives Matter demonstrations, a movement started largely by female racial justice activists. For the second election cycle in a row, a record-breaking number of female candidates are running for federal office. Mr. Biden’s selection of Ms. Harris was widely seen as a nod to the energy women have given the Democratic Party during the Trump era.

“Women are mobilized on a bigger scale than we’ve seen in a generation at least,” said Annelise Orleck, a historian at Dartmouth College who studies women’s political activism. “Women are organizing all across the spectrum.”

The activism is diffuse and multiracial, reflecting political battles that working class women have long waged for better health care, schools and child care. In some ways, more affluent suburban women are simply waking up to the untenable choices poorer women and women of color have faced for generations.

Last month, the Biden campaign kicked off a “Moms for Biden” group

The rebellion by white college-educated women against Mr. Trump helped Democrats win key swing districts in 2018, giving the party control of the House.

In recent weeks, support for Mr. Trump has begun to drop among white non-college educated women and older women — two more ideologically moderate groups that bolstered his winning coalition four years ago

In a recent Washington Post/ABC News poll, Mr. Biden leads by 24 points among suburban women and just four points among suburban men, a statistical dead heat.

Last month, Mr. Biden announced a sweeping $775 billion caregiving proposal that would cover care for young children, older adults and family members with disabilities.

Mr. Biden has repeatedly described caregiving as an economic necessity that deserves sustained support, a marked shift in political rhetoric on a topic that was often seen by politicians as a special interest, not an issue to put at the center of a campaign

Parents with minor children make up about one-third of the country’s work force, according to the Brookings Institutions. In 2018, 23.5 million working parents relied upon school and child care programs while they went to work.

“For the last 10, 20 years, this has been sidelined and siloed as just a women’s issue,” said Brigid Schulte, who runs the Better Life Lab at New America, a research group. “It’s not and it never has been.”

Ms. Richards says Supermajority planned for 800 women to sign up for a recent organizing training it offered. It got 1,800 responses in the first week.

“The fact that we do not value child care, that we don’t value early education, this is not something that Covid created — it’s something that Covid exposed,” she said

While Democrats have proposed the most ambitious plans to tackle child care, there are some signs that Republicans, too, are facing pressure to address the issue. Last month, the House passed two bills that would provide more than $220 billion in funding for child care centers and tax credits. Each bill had support from more than a dozen Republicans, a notable number in a deeply polarized Congress.

“It wasn’t easy for most parents that I’ve talked to. To have no access to child care is crippling,” she said. She hopes the crisis point reached by many families during the pandemic will create political momentum for policies like paid leave, universal early childhood education and universal sick days.

“This pandemic has ripped wide an open wound that families have struggled with for a long time.”

it would probably be many years until it was safe enough to “return to approximately the lifestyle we had.” She said, “We have to settle to live with the virus.”

Epidemiologists are worried about many unknowns, including how long immunity lasts; how the virus may mutate; the challenges of vaccine distribution; and the possible reluctance to accept the vaccine among some groups.

the epidemiologists are living with stringent precautions and new workarounds in place, far stricter than those of many ordinary Americans

Most scientists say around 70 percent of the population will need to be immune for the United States to reach herd immunity, when the virus slows down significantly or stops

Three-quarters of respondents said they planned to spend Christmas, Hanukkah or other winter holidays only with members of their household, or not celebrate at all, similar to how they spent Thanksgiving.

most epidemiologists agreed on these general principles: They are less worried about outdoor activities and about touching surfaces, and more worried about indoor activities and those with large groups.

“Indoor venues with lots of people is the riskiest situation,” said Leland Ackerson of the University of Massachusetts. “Outdoors with few people, social distancing and precautions is the least risky.” He said that during the last month, he had hiked with friends, opened mail without precautions and run errands.

“It’s funny: When you asked this before, I was so optimistic about the U.S. being able to lead and address this in a timely fashion,” said Rachel Widome, associate professor at the University of Minnesota. “I told you I thought things would be better by now. I was very wrong. They are dramatically worse.”

Of 23 activities of daily life that the survey asked about, there were only three that the majority of respondents had done in the last month: gathering outdoors with friends; bringing in mail without precautions; and running errands, like going to the grocery store or pharmacy.

Nearly a third of respondents said they would be comfortable returning to more activities of daily life once they were vaccinated. Some said they would feel comfortable doing only certain things, like socializing with people who had also been vaccinated

A few said they would wait until the country had reached the herd immunity threshold and they had received a vaccine themselves.

“I would do some minimal travel, small indoor gatherings with other close relatives when I am vaccinated, but maintain safety precautions such as wearing a mask and social distance.”

Some said they were less worried than last spring about socializing outdoors, touching surfaces or sending young children to school. They were more worried about indoor air transmission and the dangers of not wearing masks.

“It entirely depends upon what we do as a nation to address the pandemic,” said Emeli Anderson, a doctoral student of epidemiology at Emory. “Right now, we are not nearly doing enough.”

Many epidemiologists expressed disappointment and frustration that public health messaging had not been more effective, and that a growing share of Americans seemed to distrust science. They feared that the politicization of measures like wearing masks and staying home would have long-term consequences.

“This virus has humbled me as a professional and a person,” said Michelle Odden, associate professor of epidemiology at Stanford. “I did not think this level of failure in a federal response was possible in the United States. We have a lot of work to do.”

assuming a highly effective therapeutic drug isn’t developed, a significant number said it would be at least a year before they felt it would be safe to do many of the things they used to.

“I expect that wearing a mask will become part of my daily life, moving forward, even after a vaccine is deployed,”

Many said they planned to keep working from home at least part of the time. Some said they would always be more hesitant about greeting people with a handshake or a hug, being in crowded places or traveling internationally.

“I think it will be a few years before gathering with large groups of people in crowded public places and being on airplanes and other public transportation will feel safe to me,”

Others cautioned that even when the physical dangers of the pandemic recede, other consequences are likely to be long-lasting. They mentioned the effects of isolation on children’s developing brains; the exposure of deep inequities in health care and in safety nets; and the fear and sadness of so much illness and death.

To avoid detection, Lewis’ captors snuck him and the other survivors into Alabama at night and made them hide in a swamp for several days. To hide the evidence of their crime, the 86-foot sailboat was then set ablaze on the banks of the Mobile-Tensaw Delta (its remains may have been uncovered in January 2018).

Most poignantly, Lewis’ narrative provides a first-hand account of the disorienting trauma of slavery. After being abducted from his home, Lewis was forced onto a ship with strangers. The abductees spent several months together during the treacherous passage to the United States, but were then separated in Alabama to go to different owners.

“We very sorry to be parted from one ’nother,” Lewis told Hurston. “We seventy days cross de water from de Affica soil, and now dey part us from one ’nother. Derefore we cry. Our grief so heavy look lak we cain stand it. I think maybe I die in my sleep when I dream about my mama.”

Lewis also describes what it was like to arrive on a plantation where no one spoke his language, and could explain to him where he was or what was going on. “We doan know why we be bring ’way from our country to work lak dis,” he told Hurston. “Everybody lookee at us strange. We want to talk wid de udder colored folkses but dey doan know whut we say.”

As for the Civil War, Lewis said he wasn’t aware of it when it first started. But part-way through, he began to hear that the North had started a war to free enslaved people like him. A few days after Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered in April 1865, Lewis says that a group of Union soldiers stopped by a boat on which he and other enslaved people were working and told them they were free.

Lewis expected to receive compensation for being kidnapped and forced into slavery, and was angry to discover that emancipation didn’t come with the promise of “forty acres and a mule,” or any other kind of reparations. Frustrated by the refusal of the government to provide him with land to live on after stealing him away from his homeland, he and a group of 31 other freepeople saved up money to buy land near Mobile, which they called Africatown.

Many decades later, her principled stance means that modern readers get to hear Lewis’ story the way that he told it.

that’s particularly true on the I.R.A., which has to build all these things in the real world.

we’re trying to do industrial physical transformation at a speed and scale unheralded in American history. This is bigger than anything we have done at this speed ever.

The money is beginning to move out the door now, but we’re on a clock. Climate change is not like some other issues where if you don’t solve it this year, it is exactly the same to solve it next year. This is an issue where every year you don’t solve it, the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere builds, warming builds, the effects compound

Solve, frankly, isn’t the right word there because all we can do is abate, a lot of the problems now baked in. So how is it going, and who can actually walk us through that?

Robinson Meyer is the founding executive editor of heatmap.news

why do all these numbers differ so much? How big is this thing?

in electric vehicles and in the effort, kind of this dual effort in the law, to both encourage Americans to buy and use electric vehicles and then also to build a domestic manufacturing base for electric vehicles.

on both counts, the data’s really good on electric vehicles. And that’s where we’re getting the fastest response from industry and the clearest response from industry to the law.

ROBINSON MEYER: Factories are getting planned. Steel’s going in the ground. The financing for those factories is locked down. It seems like they’re definitely going to happen. They’re permitted. Companies are excited about them. Large Fortune 500 automakers are confidently and with certainty planning for an electric vehicle future, and they’re building the factories to do that in the United States. They’re also building the factories to do that not just in blue states. And so to some degree, we can see the political certainty for electric vehicles going forward.

in other parts of the law, partially due to just vagaries of how the law is being implemented, tax credits where the fine print hasn’t worked out yet, it’s too early to say whether the law is working and how it’s going and whether it’s going to accomplish its goal

EZRA KLEIN: I always find this very funny in a way. The Congressional Budget Office scored it. They thought it would make about $380 billion in climate investments over a decade. So then you have all these other analyses coming out.

But there’s actually this huge range of outcomes in between where the thing passes, and maybe what you wanted to have happen happens. Maybe it doesn’t. Implementation is where all this rubber meets the road

the Rhodium Group, which is a consulting firm, they think it could be as high as $522 billion, which is a big difference. Then there’s this Goldman Sachs estimate, which the administration loves, where they say they’re projecting $1.2 trillion in incentives —

ROBINSON MEYER: All the numbers differ because most of the important incentives, most of the important tax credits and subsidies in the I.R.A., are uncapped. There’s no limit to how much the government might spend on them. All that matters is that some private citizen or firm or organization come to the government and is like, hey, we did this. You said you’d give us money for it. Give us the money.

because of that, different banks have their own energy system models, their own models of the economy. Different research groups have their own models.

we know it’s going to be wrong because the Congressional Budget Office is actually quite constrained in how it can predict how these tax credits are taken up. And it’s constrained by the technology that’s out there in the country right now.

The C.B.O. can only look at the number of electrolyzers, kind of the existing hydrogen infrastructure in the country, and be like, well, they’re probably all going to use these tax credits. And so I think they said that there would be about $5 billion of take up for the hydrogen tax credits.

But sometimes money gets allocated, and then costs overrun, and there delays, and you can’t get the permits, and so on, and the thing never gets built

the fact that the estimates are going up is to them early evidence that this is going well. There is a lot of applications. People want the tax credits. They want to build these new factories, et cetera.

a huge fallacy that we make in policy all the time is assuming that once money is allocated for something, you get the thing you’re allocating the money for. Noah Smith, the economics writer, likes to call this checkism, that money equals stuff.

EZRA KLEIN: They do not want that, and not wanting that and putting every application through a level of scrutiny high enough to try and make sure you don’t have another one

I don’t think people think a lot about who is cutting these checks, but a lot of it is happening in this very obscure office of the Department of Energy, the Loan Program Office, which has gone from having $40 billion in lending authority, which is already a big boost over it not existing a couple decades ago, to $400 billion in loan authority,

the Loan Program Office as one of the best places we have data on how this is going right now and one of the offices that’s responded fastest to the I.R.A.

the Loan Program Office is basically the Department of Energy’s in-house bank, and it’s kind of the closest thing we have in the US to what exists in other countries, like Germany, which is a State development bank that funds projects that are eventually going to be profitable.

It has existed for some time. I mean, at first, it kind of was first to play after the Recovery Act of 2009. And in fact, early in its life, it gave a very important loan to Tesla. It gave this almost bridge loan to Tesla that helped Tesla build up manufacturing capacity, and it got Tesla to where it is today.

EZRA KLEIN: It’s because one of the questions I have about that office and that you see in some of the coverage of them is they’re very afraid of having another Solyndra.

Now, depending on other numbers, including the D.O.E., it’s potentially as high as $100 billion, but that’s because the whole thing about the I.R.A. is it’s meant to encourage the build-out of this hydrogen infrastructure.

EZRA KLEIN: I’m never that excited when I see a government loans program turning a profit because I think that tends to mean they’re not making risky enough loans. The point of the government should be to bear quite a bit of risk —

And to some degree, Ford now has to compete, and US automakers are trying to catch up with Chinese EV automakers. And its firms have EV battery technology especially, but just have kind of comprehensive understanding of the EV supply chain that no other countries’ companies have

ROBINSON MEYER: You’re absolutely right that this is the key question. They gave this $9.2 billion loan to Ford to build these EV battery plants in Kentucky and Tennessee. It’s the largest loan in the office’s history. It actually means that the investment in these factories is going to be entirely covered by the government, which is great for Ford and great for our build-out of EVs

And to some degree, I should say, one of the roles of L.P.O. and one of the roles of any kind of State development bank, right, is to loan to these big factory projects that, yes, may eventually be profitable, may, in fact, assuredly be profitable, but just aren’t there yet or need financing that the private market can’t provide. That being said, they have moved very slowly, I think.

And they feel like they’re moving quickly. They just got out new guidelines that are supposed to streamline a lot of this. Their core programs, they just redefined and streamlined in the name of speeding them up

However, so far, L.P.O. has been quite slow in getting out new loans

I want to say that the pressure they’re under is very real. Solyndra was a disaster for the Department of Energy. Whether that was fair or not fair, there’s a real fear that if you make a couple bad loans that go bad in a big way, you will destroy the political support for this program, and the money will be clawed back, a future Republican administration will wreck the office, whatever it might be. So this is not an easy call.

when you tell me they just made the biggest loan in their history to Ford, I’m not saying you shouldn’t lend any money to Ford, but when I think of what is the kind of company that cannot raise money on the capital markets, the one that comes to mind is not Ford

They have made loans to a number of more risky companies than Ford, but in addition to speed, do you think they are taking bets on the kinds of companies that need bets? It’s a little bit hard for me to believe that it would have been impossible for Ford to figure out how to finance factorie

ROBINSON MEYER: Now, I guess what I would say about that is that Ford is — let’s go back to why Solyndra failed, right? Solyndra failed because Chinese solar deluged the market. Now, why did Chinese solar deluge the market? Because there’s such support of Chinese financing from the state for massive solar factories and massive scale.

EZRA KLEIN: — the private market can’t. So that’s the meta question I’m asking here. In your view, because you’re tracking this much closer than I am, are they too much under the shadow of Solyndra? Are they being too cautious? Are they getting money out fast enough?

ROBINSON MEYER: I think that’s right; that basically, if we think the US should stay competitive and stay as close as it can and not even stay competitive, but catch up with Chinese companies, it is going to require large-scale state support of manufacturing.

EZRA KLEIN: OK, that’s fair. I will say, in general, there’s a constant thing you find reporting on government that people in government feel like they are moving very quickly

EZRA KLEIN: — given the procedural work they have to go through. And they often are moving very quickly compared to what has been done in that respect before, compared to what they have to get over. They are working weekends, they are working nights, and they are still not actually moving that quickly compared to what a VC firm can do or an investment bank or someone else who doesn’t have the weight of congressional oversight committees potentially calling you in and government procurement rules and all the rest of it.

ROBINSON MEYER: I think that’s a theme across the government’s implementation of the I.R.A. right now, is that generally the government feels like it’s moving as fast as it can. And if you look at the Department of Treasury, they feel like we are publishing — basically, the way that most of the I.R.A. subsidies work is that they will eventually be administered by the I.R.S., but first the Department of the Treasury has to write the guidebook for all these subsidies, right?

the law says there’s a very general kind of “here’s thousands of dollars for EVs under this circumstance.” Someone still has to go in and write all the fine print. The Department of Treasury is doing that right now for each tax credit, and they have to do that before anyone can claim that tax credit to the I.R.S. Treasury feels like it’s moving extremely quickly. It basically feels like it’s completely at capacity with these, and it’s sequenced these so it feels like it’s getting out the most important tax credits first.

Private industry feels like we need certainty. It’s almost a year since the law passed, and you haven’t gotten us the domestic content bonus. You haven’t gotten us the community solar bonus. You haven’t gotten us all these things yet.

a theme across the government right now is that the I.R.A. passed. Agencies have to write the regulations for all these tax credits. They feel like they’re moving very quickly, and yet companies feel like they’re not moving fast enough.

that’s how we get to this point where we’re 311 days out from the I.R.A. passing, and you’re like, well, has it made a big difference? And I’m like, well, frankly, wind and solar developers broadly don’t feel like they have the full understanding of all the subsidies they need yet to begin making the massive investments

I think it’s fair to say maybe the biggest bet on that is green hydrogen, if you’re looking in the bill.

We think it’s going to be an important tool in industry. It may be an important tool for storing energy in the power grid. It may be an important tool for anything that needs combustion.

ROBINSON MEYER: Yeah, absolutely. So green hydrogen — and let’s just actually talk about hydrogen broadly as this potential tool in the decarbonization tool kit.

It’s a molecule. It is a very light element, and you can burn it, but it’s not a fossil fuel. And a lot of the importance of hydrogen kind of comes back to that attribute of it.

So when we look at sectors of the economy that are going to be quite hard to decarbonize — and that’s because there is something about fossil fuels chemically that is essential to how that sector works either because they provide combustion heat and steelmaking or because fossil fuels are actually a chemical feedstock where the molecules in the fossil fuel are going into the product or because fossil fuels are so energy dense that you can carry a lot of energy while actually not carrying that much mass — any of those places, that’s where we look at hydrogen as going.

green hydrogen is something new, and the size of the bet is huge. So can you talk about first just what is green hydrogen? Because my understanding of it is spotty.

The I.R.A. is extremely generous — like extremely, extremely generous — in its hydrogen subsidies

The first is for what’s called blue hydrogen, which is hydrogen made from natural gas, where we then capture the carbon dioxide that was released from that process and pump it back into the ground. That’s one thing that’s subsidized. It’s basically subsidized as part of this broader set of packages targeted at carbon capture

green hydrogen, which is where we take water, use electrolyzers on it, basically zap it apart, take the hydrogen from the water, and then use that as a fue

The I.R.A. subsidies for green hydrogen specifically, which is the one with water and electricity, are so generous that relatively immediately, it’s going to have a negative cost to make green hydrogen. It will cost less than $0 to make green hydrogen. The government’s going to fully cover the cost of producing it.

That is intentional because what needs to happen now is that green hydrogen moves into places where we’re using natural gas, other places in the industrial economy, and it needs to be price competitive with those things, with natural gas, for instance. And so as it kind of is transported, it’s going to cost money

As you make the investment to replace the technology, it’s going to cost money. And so as the hydrogen moves through the system, it’s going to wind up being price competitive with natural gas, but the subsidies in the bill are so generous that hydrogen will cost less than $0 to make a kilogram of it

There seems to be a sense that hydrogen, green hydrogen, is something we sort of know how to make, but we don’t know how to make it cost competitive yet. We don’t know how to infuse it into all the processes that we need to be infused into. And so a place where the I.R.A. is trying to create a reality that does not yet exist is a reality where green hydrogen is widely used, we have to know how to use it, et cetera.

And they just seem to think we don’t. And so you need all these factories. You need all this innovation. Like, they have to create a whole innovation and supply chain almost from scratch. Is that right?

ROBINSON MEYER: That’s exactly right. There’s a great Department of Energy report that I would actually recommend anyone interested in this read called “The Liftoff Report for Clean Hydrogen.” They made it for a few other technologies. It’s a hundred-page book that’s basically how the D.O.E. believes we’re going to build out a clean hydrogen economy.

And, of course, that is policy in its own right because the D.O.E. is saying, here is the years we’re going to invest to have certain infrastructure come online. Here’s what we think we need. That’s kind of a signal to industry that everyone should plan around those years as well.

It’s a great book. It’s like the best piece of industrial policy I’ve actually seen from the government at all. But one of the points it makes is that you’re going to make green hydrogen. You’re then going to need to move it. You’re going to need to move it in a pipeline or maybe a truck or maybe in storage tanks that you then cart around.

Once it gets to a facility that uses green hydrogen, you’re going to need to store some green hydrogen there in storage tanks on site because you basically need kind of a backup supply in case your main supply fails. All of those things are going to add cost to hydrogen. And not only are they going to add cost, we don’t really know how to do them. We have very few pipelines that are hydrogen ready.

All of that investment needs to happen as a result to make the green hydrogen economy come alive. And why it’s so lavishly subsidized is to kind of fund all that downstream investment that’s eventually going to make the economy come true.

But a lot of what has to happen here, including once the money is given out, is that things we do know how to build get built, and they get built really fast, and they get built at this crazy scale.

So I’ve been reading this paper on what they call “The Greens’ Dilemma” by J.B. Ruhl and James Salzman, who also wrote this paper called “Old Green Laws, New Green Deal,” or something like that. And I think they get at the scale problem here really well.

“The largest solar facility currently online in the US is capable of generating 585 megawatts. To meet even a middle-road renewable energy scenario would require bringing online two new 400-megawatt solar power facilities, each taking up at least 2,000 acres of land every week for the next 30 years.”

And that’s just solar. We’re not talking wind there. We’re not talking any of the other stuff we’ve discussed here, transmission lines. Can we do that? Do we have that capacity?

ROBINSON MEYER: No, we do not. We absolutely do not. I think we’re going to build a ton of wind and solar. We do not right now have the system set up to use that much land to build that much new solar and wind by the time that we need to build it. I think it is partially because of permitting laws, and I think it’s also partially because right now there is no master plan

There’s no overarching strategic entity in the government that’s saying, how do we get from all these subsidies in the I.R.A. to net zero? What is our actual plan to get from where we are right now to where we’re emitting zero carbon as an economy? And without that function, no project is essential. No activity that we do absolutely needs to happen, and so therefore everything just kind of proceeds along at a convenient pace.

given the scale of what’s being attempted here, you might think that something the I.R.A. does is to have some entity in the government, as you’re saying, say, OK, we need this many solar farms. This is where we think we should put them. Let’s find some people to build them, or let’s build them ourselves.

what it actually does is there’s an office somewhere waiting for private companies to send in an application for a tax credit for solar that they say they’re going to build, and then we hope they build it

it’s an almost entirely passive process on the part of the government. Entirely would be going too far because I do think they talk to people, and they’re having conversations

the builder applies, not the government plans. Is that accurate?

ROBINSON MEYER: That’s correct. Yes.

ROBINSON MEYER: I think here’s what I would say, and this gets back to what do we want the I.R.A. to do and what are our expectations for the I.R.A

If the I.R.A. exists to build out a ton of green capacity and shift the political economy of the country toward being less dominated by fossil fuels and more dominated by the clean energy industry, frankly, then it is working

If the I.R.A. is meant to get us all the way to net zero, then it is not capable of that.

in 2022, right, we had no way to see how we were going to reduce emissions. We did not know if we were going to get a climate bill at all. Now, we have this really aggressive climate bill, and we’re like, oh, is this going to get us to net zero?

But getting to net zero was not even a possibility in 2022.

The issue is that the I.R.A. requires, ultimately, private actors to come forward and do these things. And as more and more renewables get onto the grid, almost mechanically, there’s going to be less interest in bringing the final pieces of decarbonized electricity infrastructure onto the grid as well.

EZRA KLEIN: Because the first things that get applied for are the ones that are more obviously profitable

The issue is when you talk to solar developers, they don’t see it like, “Am I going to make a ton of money, yes or no?” They see it like they have a capital stack, and they have certain incentives and certain ways to make money based off certain things they can do. And as more and more solar gets on the grid, building solar at all becomes less profitable

also, just generally, there’s less people willing to buy the solar.

as we get closer to a zero-carbon grid, there is this risk that basically less and less gets built because it will become less and less profitable

EZRA KLEIN: Let’s call that the last 20 percent risk

EZRA KLEIN: — or the last 40 percent. I mean, you can probably attach different numbers to that

ROBINSON MEYER: Permitting is the primary thing that is going to hold back any construction basically, especially out West,

right now permitting fights, the process under the National Environmental Policy Act just at the federal level, can take 4.5 years

let’s say every single project we need to do was applied for today, which is not true — those projects have not yet been applied for — they would be approved under the current permitting schedule in 2027.

ROBINSON MEYER: That’s before they get built.

Basically nobody on the left talked about permitting five years ago. I don’t want to say literally nobody, but you weren’t hearing it, including in the climate discussion.

people have moved to saying we do not have the laws, right, the permitting laws, the procurement laws to do this at the speed we’re promising, and we need to fix that. And then what you’re seeing them propose is kind of tweak oriented,

Permitting reform could mean a lot of different things, and Democrats and Republicans have different ideas about what it could mean. Environmental groups, within themselves, have different ideas about what it could mean.

for many environmental groups, the permitting process is their main tool. It is how they do the good that they see themselves doing in the world. They use the permitting process to slow down fossil fuel projects, to slow down projects that they see as harming local communities or the local environment.

ROBINSON MEYER: So we talk about the National Environmental Policy Act or NEPA. Let’s just start calling it NEPA. We talk about the NEPA process

NEPA requires the government basically study any environmental impact from a project or from a decision or from a big rule that could occur.

Any giant project in the United States goes through this NEPA process. The federal government studies what the environmental impact of the project will be. Then it makes a decision about whether to approve the project. That decision has nothing to do with the study. Now, notionally, the study is supposed to inform the project.

the decision the federal government makes, the actual “can you build this, yes or no,” legally has no connection to the study. But it must conduct the study in order to make that decision.

that permitting reform is so tough for the Democratic coalition specifically is that this process of forcing the government to amend its studies of the environmental impact of various decisions is the main tool that environmental litigation groups like Earthjustice use to slow down fossil fuel projects and use to slow down large-scale chemical or industrial projects that they don’t think should happen.

when we talk about making this program faster, and when we talk about making it more immune to litigation, they see it as we’re going to take away their main tools to fight fossil fuel infrastructure

why there’s this gap between rhetoric and what’s actually being proposed is that the same tool that is slowing down the green build-out is also what’s slowing down the fossil fuel build-out

ROBINSON MEYER: They’re the classic conflict here between the environmental movement classic, let’s call it, which was “think globally, act locally,” which said “we’re going to do everything we can to preserve the local environment,” and what the environmental movement and the climate movement, let’s say, needs to do today, which is think globally, act with an eye to what we need globally as well, which is, in some cases, maybe welcome projects that may slightly reduce local environmental quality or may seem to reduce local environmental quality in the name of a decarbonized world.

Because if we fill the atmosphere with carbon, nobody’s going to get a good environment.

Michael Gerrard, who is professor at Columbia Law School. He’s a founder of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law there. It’s called “A Time for Triage,” and he has this sort of interesting argument that the environmental movement in general, in his view, is engaged in something he calls trade-off denial.

his view and the view of some people is that, look, the climate crisis is so bad that we just have to make those choices. We have to do things we would not have wanted to do to preserve something like the climate in which not just human civilization, but this sort of animal ecosystem, has emerged. But that’s hard, and who gets to decide which trade-offs to make?

what you’re not really seeing — not really, I would say, from the administration, even though they have some principles now; not really from California, though Gavin Newsom has a set of early things — is “this is what we think we need to make the I.R.A. happen on time, and this is how we’re going to decide what is a kind of project that gets this speedway through,” w

there’s a failure on the part of, let’s say, the environmental coalition writ large to have the courage to have this conversation and to sit down at a table and be like, “OK, we know that certain projects aren’t happening fast enough. We know that we need to build out faster. What could we actually do to the laws to be able to construct things faster and to meet our net-zero targets and to let the I.R.A. kind achieve what it could achieve?”

part of the issue is that we’re in this environment where Democrats control the Senate, Republicans control the House, and it feels very unlikely that you could just get “we are going to accelerate projects, but only those that are good for climate change,” into the law given that Republicans control the House.

part of the progressive fear here is that the right solutions must recognize climate change. Progressives are very skeptical that there are reforms that are neutral on the existence of climate change and whether we need to build faster to meet those demands that can pass through a Republican-controlled House.

one of the implications of that piece was it was maybe a huge mistake for progressives not to have figured out what they wanted here and could accept here, back when the negotiating partner was Joe Manchin.

Manchin’s bill is basically a set of moderate NEPA reforms and transmission reforms. Democrats, progressives refuse to move on it. Now, I do want to be fair here because I think Democrats absolutely should have seized on that opportunity, because it was the only moment when — we could tell already that Democrats — I mean, Democrats actually, by that moment, had lost the House.

I do want to be fair here that Manchin’s own account of what happened with this bill is that Senate Republicans killed it and that once McConnell failed to negotiate on the bill in December, Manchin’s bill was dead.

EZRA KLEIN: It died in both places.ROBINSON MEYER: It died in both places. I think that’s right.

Republicans already knew they were going to get the House, too, so they had less incentive to play along. Probably the time for this was October.

EZRA KLEIN: But it wasn’t like Democrats were trying to get this one done.

EZRA KLEIN: To your point about this was all coming down to the wire, Manchin could have let the I.R.A. pass many months before this, and they would have had more time to negotiate together, right? The fact that it was associated with Manchin in the way it was was also what made it toxic to progressives, who didn’t want to be held up by him anymore.

What becomes clear by the winter of this year, February, March of this year, is that as Democrats and Republicans begin to talk through this debt-ceiling process where, again, permitting was not the main focus. It was the federal budget. It was an entirely separate political process, basically.

EZRA KLEIN: I would say the core weirdness of the debt-ceiling fight was there was no main focus to it.

EZRA KLEIN: It wasn’t like past ones where it was about the debt. Republicans did some stuff to cut spending. They also wanted to cut spending on the I.R.S., which would increase the debt, right? It was a total mishmash of stuff happening in there.

That alchemy goes into the final debt-ceiling negotiations, which are between principals in Congress and the White House, and what we get is a set of basically the NEPA reforms in Joe Manchin’s bill from last year and the Mountain Valley pipeline, the thing that environmentalists were focused on blocking, and effectively no transmission reforms.

the set of NEPA reforms that were just enacted, that are now in the law, include — basically, the word reasonable has been inserted many times into NEPA. [LAUGHS] So the law, instead of saying the government has to study all environmental impacts, now it has to study reasonable environmental impacts.

this is a kind of climate win — has to study the environmental impacts that could result from not doing a project. The kind of average NEPA environmental impact study today is 500 pages and takes 4.5 years to produce. Under the law now, the government is supposed to hit a page limit of 150 to 300 pages.

there’s a study that’s very well cited by progressives from three professors in Utah who basically say, well, when you look at the National Forest Service, and you look at this 40,000 NEPA decisions, what mostly holds up these NEPA decisions is not like, oh, there’s too many requirements or they had to study too many things that don’t matter. It’s just there wasn’t enough staff and that staffing is primarily the big impediment. And so on the one hand, I think that’s probably accurate in that these are, in some cases — the beast has been starved, and these are very poorly staffed departments

The main progressive demand was just “we must staff it better.”

But if it’s taking you this much staffing and that much time to say something doesn’t apply to you, maybe you have a process problem —ROBINSON MEYER: Yes.EZRA KLEIN: — and you shouldn’t just throw endless resources at a broken process, which brings me — because, again, you can fall into this and never get out — I think, to the bigger critique her

these bills are almost symbolic because there’s so much else happening, and it’s really the way all this interlocks and the number of possible choke points, that if you touch one of them or even you streamline one of them, it doesn’t necessarily get you that f

“All told, over 60 federal permitting programs operate in the infrastructure approval regime, and that is just the federal system. State and local approvals and impact assessments could also apply to any project.”

their view is that under this system, it’s simply not possible to build the amount of decarbonization infrastructure we need at the pace we need it; that no amount of streamlining NEPA or streamlining, in California, CEQA will get you there; that we basically have been operating under what they call an environmental grand bargain dating back to the ’70s, where we built all of these processes to slow things down and to clean up the air and clean up the water.

we accepted this trade-off of slower building, quite a bit slower building, for a cleaner environment. And that was a good trade. It was addressing the problems of that era

now we have the problems of this era, which is we need to unbelievably, rapidly build out decarbonization infrastructure to keep the climate from warming more than we can handle and that we just don’t have a legal regime or anything.

You would need to do a whole new grand bargain for this era. And I’ve not seen that many people say that, but it seems true to me

the role that America had played in the global economy in the ’50s and ’60s where we had a ton of manufacturing, where we were kind of the factory to a world rebuilding from World War II, was no longer tenable and that, also, we wanted to focus on more of these kind of high-wage, what we would now call knowledge economy jobs.That was a large economic transition happening in the ’70s and ’80s, and it dovetailed really nicely with the environmental grand bargain.

At some point, the I.R.A. recognizes that that environmental grand bargain is no longer operative, right, because it says, we’re going to build all this big fiscal fixed infrastructure in the United States, we’re going to become a manufacturing giant again, but there has not been a recognition among either party of what exactly that will mean and what will be required to have it take hold.

It must require a form of on-the-ground, inside-the-fenceline, “at the site of the power plant” pollution control technology. The only way to do that, really, is by requiring carbon capture and requiring the large construction of major industrial infrastructure at many, many coal plants and natural gas plants around the country in order to capture carbon so it doesn’t enter the atmosphere, and so we don’t contribute to climate change. That is what the Supreme Court has ruled. Until that body changes, that is going to be the law.

So the E.P.A. has now, last month, proposed a new rule under the Clean Air Act that is going to require coal plants and some natural gas plants to install carbon capture technology to do basically what the Supreme Court has all but kind of required the E.P.A. to do

the E.P.A. has to demonstrate, in order to kind of make this rule the law and in order to make this rule pass muster with the Supreme Court, that this is tenable, that this is the best available and technologically feasible option

that means you actually have to allow carbon capture facilities to get built and you have to create a legal process that will allow carbon capture facilities to get built. And that means you need to be able to tell a power plant operator that if they capture carbon, there’s a way they can inject it back into the ground, the thing that they’re supposed to do with it.

Well, E.P.A. simultaneously has only approved the kind of well that you need to inject carbon that you’ve captured from a coal factory or a natural gas line back into the ground. It’s called a Class 6 well. The E.P.A. has only ever approved two Class 6 wells. It takes years for the E.P.A. to approve a Class 6 well.

And environmental justice groups really, really oppose these Class 6 wells because they see any carbon capture as an effort to extend the life of the fossil fuel infrastructure

The issue here is that it seems like C.C.S., carbon capture, is going to be essential to how the U.S. decarbonizes. Legally, we have no other choice because of the constraints the Supreme Court has placed on the E.P.A.. At the same time, environmental justice groups, and big green groups to some extent, oppose building out any C.C.S.

to be fair to them, right, they would say there are other ways to decarbonize. That may not be the way we’ve chosen because the politics weren’t there for it, but there are a lot of these groups that believe you could have 100 percent renewables, do not use all that much carbon capture, right? They would have liked to see a different decarbonization path taken too. I’m not sure that path is realistic.

what you do see are environmental groups opposing making it possible to build C.C.S. anywhere in the country at all.

EZRA KLEIN: The only point I’m making here is I think this is where you see a compromise a lot of them didn’t want to make —ROBINSON MEYER: Exactly, yeah.EZRA KLEIN: — which is a decarbonization strategy that actually does extend the life cycle of a lot of fossil fuel infrastructure using carbon capture. And because they never bought onto it, they’re still using the pathway they have to try to block it. The problem is that’s part of the path that’s now been chosen. So if you block it, you just don’t decarbonize. It’s not like you get the 100 percent renewable strategy.

ROBINSON MEYER: Exactly. The bargain that will emerge from that set of actions and that set of coalitional trade-offs is we will simply keep running this, and we will not cap it.

What could be possible is that progressives and Democrats and the E.P.A. turns around and says, “Oh, that’s fine. You can do C.C.S. You just have to cap every single stationary source in the country.” Like, “You want to do C.C.S.? We totally agree. Essential. You must put CSS infrastructure on every power plant, on every factory that burns fossil fuels, on everything.”

If progressives were to do that and were to get it into the law — and there’s nothing the Supreme Court has said, by the way, that would limit progressives from doing that — the upshot would be we shut down a ton more stationary sources and a ton more petrochemical refineries and these bad facilities that groups don’t want than we would under the current plan.

what is effectively going to happen is that way more factories and power plants stay open and uncapped than would be otherwise.

EZRA KLEIN: So Republican-controlled states are just on track to get a lot more of it. So the Rocky Mountain Institute estimates that red states will get $623 billion in investments by 2030 compared to $354 billion for blue states.

why are red states getting so much more of this money?

ROBINSON MEYER: I think there’s two reasons. I think, first of all, red states have been more enthusiastic about getting the money. They’re the ones giving away the tax credits. They have a business-friendly environment. And ultimately, the way many, many of these red-state governors see it is that these are just businesses.

I think the other thing is that these states, many of them, are right-to-work states. And so they might pay their workers less. They certainly face much less risk financially from a unionization campaign in their state.

regardless of the I.R.A., that’s where manufacturing and industrial investment goes in the first place. And that’s where it’s been going for 20 years because of the set of business-friendly and local subsidies and right-to-work policies.

I think the administration would say, we want this to be a big union-led effort. We want it to go to the Great Lakes states that are our political firewall.

and it would go to red states, because that’s where private industry has been locating since the ’70s and ’80s, and it would go to the Southeast, right, and the Sunbelt, and that that wouldn’t be so bad because then you would get a dynamic where red-state senators, red-state representatives, red-state governors would want to support the transition further and would certainly not support the repeal of the I.R.A. provisions and the repeal of climate provisions, and that you’d get this kind of nice vortex of the investment goes to red states, red states feel less antagonistic toward climate policies, more investment goes to red states. Red-state governors might even begin to support environmental regulation because that basically locks in benefits and advantages to the companies located in their states already.

I think what you see is that Republicans are increasingly warming to EV investment, and it’s actually building out renewables and actually building out clean electricity generation, where you see them fighting harder.

The other way that permitting matters — and this gets into the broader reason why private investment was generally going to red states and generally going to the Sunbelt — is that the Sunbelt states — Georgia, Texas — it’s easier to be there as a company because housing costs are lower and because the cost of living is lower in those states.

it’s also partially because the Sunbelt and the Southeast, it was like the last part of the country to develop, frankly, and there’s just a ton more land around all the cities, and so you can get away with the sprawling suburban growth model in those citie

It’s just cheaper to keep building suburbs there.

EZRA KLEIN: So how are you seeing the fights over these rare-earth metals and the effort to build a safe and, if not domestic, kind of friend-shored supply chain there?

Are we going to be able to source some of these minerals from the U.S.? That process seems to be proceeding but going slowly. There are some minerals we’re not going to be able to get from the United States at all and are going to have to get from our allies and partners across the world.

The kind of open question there is what exactly is the bargain we’re going to strike with countries that have these critical minerals, and will it be fair to those countries?

it isn’t to say that I think the I.R.A. on net is going to be bad for other countries. I just think we haven’t really figured out what deal and even what mechanisms we can use across the government to strike deals with other countries to mine the minerals in those countries while being fair and just and creating the kind of economic arrangement that those countries want.

, let’s say we get the minerals. Let’s say we learn how to refine them. There is many parts of the battery and many parts of EVs and many, many subcomponents in these green systems that there’s not as strong incentive to produce in the U.S.

at the same time, there’s a ton of technology. One answer to that might be to say, OK, well, what the federal government should do is just make it illegal for any of these battery makers or any of these EV companies to work with Chinese companies, so then we’ll definitely establish this parallel supply chain. We’ll learn how to make cathodes and anodes. We’ll figure it out

The issue is that there’s technology on the frontier that only Chinese companies have, and U.S. automakers need to work with those companies in order to be able to compete with them eventually.

EZRA KLEIN: How much easier would it be to achieve the I.R.A.’s goals if America’s relationship with China was more like its relationship with Germany?

ROBINSON MEYER: It would be significantly easier, and I think we’d view this entire challenge very differently, because China, as you said, not only is a leader in renewable energy. It actually made a lot of the important technological gains over the past 15 years to reducing the cost of solar and wind. It really did play a huge role on the supply side of reducing the cost of these technologies.

If we could approach that, if China were like Germany, if China were like Japan, and we could say, “Oh, this is great. China’s just going to make all these things. Our friend, China, is just going to make all these technologies, and we’re going to import them.

So it refines 75 percent of the polysilicon that you need for solar, but the machines that do the refining, 99 percent of them are made in China. I think it would be reckless for the U.S. to kind of rely on a single country and for the world to rely on a single country to produce the technologies that we need for decarbonization and unwise, regardless of our relationship with that country.

We want to geographically diversify the supply chain more, but it would be significantly easier if we did not have to also factor into this the possibility that the US is going to need to have an entirely separate supply chain to make use of for EVs, solar panels, wind turbines, batteries potentially in the near-term future.

, what are three other books they should read?

The first book is called “The End of the World” by Peter Brannen. It’s a book that’s a history of mass extinctions, the Earth’s five mass extinctions, and, actually, why he doesn’t think we’re currently in a mass extinction or why, at least, things would need to go just as bad as they are right now for thousands and thousands of years for us to be in basically the sixth extinction.

The book’s amazing for two reasons. The first is that it is the first that really got me to understand deep time.

he explains how one kind of triggered the next one. It is also an amazing book for understanding the centrality of carbon to Earth’s geological history going as far back as, basically, we can track.

“Climate Shock” by Gernot Wagner and Marty Weitzman. It’s about the economics of climate change

Marty Weitzman, who I think, until recently, was kind of the also-ran important economist of climate change. Nordhaus was the famous economist. He was the one who got all attention. He’s the one who won the Nobel.

He focuses on risk and that climate change is specifically bad because it will damage the environment, because it will make our lives worse, but it’s really specifically bad because we don’t know how bad it will be

it imposes all these huge, high end-tail risks and that blocking those tail risks is actually the main thing we want to do with climate policy.

That is I think, in some ways, what has become the U.S. approach to climate change and, to some degree, to the underlying economic thinking that drives even the I.R.A., where we want to just cut off these high-end mega warming scenarios. And this is a fantastic explanation of that particular way of thinking and of how to apply that way of thinking to climate change and also to geoengineerin

The third book, a little controversial, is called “Shorting the Grid” by Meredith Angwin

her argument is basically that electricity markets are not the right structure to organize our electricity system, and because we have chosen markets as a structured, organized electricity system in many states, we’re giving preferential treatment to natural gas and renewables, two fuels that I think climate activists may feel very different ways about, instead of coal, which she does think we should phase out, and, really, nuclear

By making it easier for renewables and natural gas to kind of accept these side payments, we made them much more profitable and therefore encouraged people to build more of them and therefore underinvested in the forms of generation, such as nuclear, that actually make most of their money by selling electrons to the grid, where they go to people’s homes.

two economists asked whether the ongoing slowdown in British productivity was unprecedented. Their answer: not quite, but that it was certainly the worst in the last 250 years, since the very beginning of the Industrial Revolution.

To find a fitting analogue to the British economic experience of the last decade, you have to reach back to a time before the arrival of any significant growth at all, to a period governed much more by Malthusianism, subsistence-level poverty and a nearly flat economic future. By all accounts, things have gotten worse since their paper was published.

there are eight million young Brits in the work force today who have not experienced sustained wage growth at all.

The experience of Britain over the same period suggests another fly in the End of History ointment, undermining a separate supposition of that era, which lives on in zombie form in ours: that convergence meant that rich and well-​governed countries would stay that way.

focusing on a single “Leave” vote risks confusing that one abrupt outburst of xenophobic populism with what in fact is a long-term story of manufactured decline. As Burn-Murdoch demonstrates in another in his series of data-rich analyses of the British plight, the country’s obvious struggles have a very obvious central cause: austerity

in the name of rebalancing budgets, the Tory-led government set about cutting annual public spending, as a proportion of G.D.P., to 39 percent from 46 percent. The cuts were far larger and more consistent than nearly all of Britain’s peer countries managed to enact

The consequences have been remarkable: a very different Britain from the one that reached the turn of the millennium as Tony Blair’s “Cool Britannia.” Real wages have actually declined, on average, over the last 15 years, making America’s wage stagnation over the same period seem appealing by comparison.

the private sector is also behaving shortsightedly, skimping on long-term investments and extracting profits from financial speculation instead: “To put it bluntly, Britain’s capitalist class has effectively given up on the future.”

there has been a slow, sighing decay — one that makes contemporary Britain a revealing case study in the way we talk and think about the fates of nations and the shape of contemporary history.

if the political experience of the last decade has taught us anything, it is that whether the world as a whole is richer than it was 50 years ago matters much less to the people on it today than who got those gains, and how they compare with expectations

it’s cold comfort to point out to an American despairing over Covid-era life expectancy declines that, in fact, a child born today can still expect to live longer than one born in 1995, for instance, or to tell a Brit worrying over his or her economic prospects that added prosperity is likely to come eventually — at the same level enjoyed by economies in the former Eastern Bloc.

Can Britain even stomach such a comparison? The wealthy West has long regarded development as a race that has already and definitively been won, with suspense remaining primarily about how quickly and how fully the rest of the world might catch up

Britain has long since formally relinquished its dreams of world domination, but the implied bargain of imperial retreat was something like a tenured chair at the table of global elders. As it turns out, things can fall apart in the metropole too

Over two centuries, a tiny island nation made itself an empire and a capitalist fable, essentially inventing economic growth and then, powered by it, swallowing half the world. Over just two decades now, it has remade itself as a cautionary tale.