The Carbon Wave

Leah Stokes (0:00)

On July 14th, 2022, the climate bill that I had worked on for years seemingly died. Senator Joe Manchin, the pivotal 50th vote, had walked away from the negotiation table again. In Washington, my friend Adrian Deveny, a Senate staffer, sat in his home office, watching his kids through the glass door and sobbed.

He had given a decade of his life to this bill. He barely slept for three days. And out in California, I held my not quite one-year-old twins and cried too. Late that night, another friend, Sonia Aggarwal, called from the White House. She'd been working on this bill for almost 18 months straight. The two of us had been on the phone many days, and she told me that night, this is just a bump in the road. We are going to win, she said. But you know, it's a really big bump. I could hear her son in the background, mimicking her, yelling, it's a really big bump, over and over again. We laughed between our tears. For nearly two weeks, it seemed like the story was over. Reporters wrote the bill's obituary. Pundits explained where we'd gone wrong, and I felt lost.

At the time, I didn't know it, but there were closed-door meetings happening with Senator Manchin in the Senate basement in total secrecy.

Finally, 33 days after the bill was condemned to death, the Inflation Reduction Act was signed into law. It was and remains the largest climate investment in American history. This is the story of how that happened.

This is A Matter of Degrees. I'm Dr. Leah Stokes.

Katharine Wilkinson (2:02)

I'm Dr. Katharine Wilkinson. In this episode, we are once again flipping the format. But today, Leah is the one in the hot seat because, drum roll, she wrote a new book.

Leah Stokes (2:13)

That's right. I have a new book out September 1st. It's called The Carbon Wave, A Story of Democracy, Parenthood, and the Race to Protect Our Planet. The book tells the unlikely story of how the largest climate law in American history passed, the so-called Inflation Reduction Act.

Katharine Wilkinson (2:32)

The book is detailed and personal. It is suspenseful and deeply inspiring.

It gives us a front row seat to how policy change unfolds. You can pre-order The Carbon Wave right now at bookshop.org. We'll put a link in the show notes.

Leah Stokes (2:52)

And in this episode, we're going to bring on two of the book's main characters. They are people who gave years of their lives to making this law a reality in both Congress and the White House.

Katharine Wilkinson (3:04)

But first, I'm going to take this opportunity to talk to the author. Leah, what exactly is a carbon wave?

Leah Stokes (3:13)

So, as I think pretty much all of our listeners know, the carbon footprint is a really ubiquitous idea. And that's because it was popularized by fossil fuel companies. They spent hundreds of millions of dollars advertising this idea. And the concept is that everybody as an individual is responsible for their carbon pollution. You have to like, you know, bike or recycle or compost or something like that. And it's a very individualistic paradigm. So the carbon wave is a concept that is supposed to replace the carbon footprint. And it's the idea that we can join with others in a collective to change the rules of society, to change the structure, the infrastructure of our society. It's that structural work that is actually going to defeat the climate crisis. And that is where we should be focusing our attention.

So the carbon wave is kind of like how droplets in the ocean join together to become a really big wave. That's the same idea, a bunch of people coming together to change really big things in our society.

And in this book, I use that metaphor of the carbon wave to tell a story of how thousands of people joined together to pass the largest climate law in American history, which then rippled out heat pumps and homes and electric cars that got them on the road and solar panels all across the country and batteries, right? It had such a big effect to change the structure of society. And that's why we have to focus on big structural changes through carbon waves.

Katharine Wilkinson (4:48)

And of course, as a droplet in the carbon wave that saw this bill come into being, you were a pregnant droplet. You were pregnant with twins during this time and then giving birth. Tell us what that chapter was like for you.

Leah Stokes (5:05)

At the time that I was working on the Inflation Reduction Act, well, it wasn't called that back then. It was called Build Back Better or the Green New Deal or whatever you want to say. At the time, I was pregnant with twins. It was super high risk. We didn't know what would happen if the kids would survive or not.