Harold Ickes was a one-man mind belief, confidant, and brass-knuckled enforcer for Franklin D. Roosevelt. To his political adversaries, together with the Republican doyenne Clare Boothe Luce, he possessed the “thoughts of a commissar and the soul of a meat axe.” As head of the Public Works Administration through the Nineteen Thirties, Ickes rapidly turned billions of {dollars} in New Deal appropriations into dams, bridges, faculties, and badly wanted buildings. As an ardent conservationist later serving as secretary of the inside, he ran roughshod over the oil trade. However in Could 1941, with warfare looming, Roosevelt appointed the person he known as “Horrible Harry” the nation’s first “oil czar.” The longtime bane of American petroleum oil executives would oversee the opening of 13,400 new wells in his first 12 months—a manufacturing enhance to 40 million gallons every day, and a 30 p.c enlargement of refinery output. It was later written that the Western allies “floated to victory on a sea of oil.”
This exceptional flip of affairs has resonance as America takes on one other world-historical problem—this time towards authoritarianism and navy adventurism in Europe and probably Asia as effectively. Relating to competitors with Russia and China, it’s power and different crucial provide chains that characterize the essential battle house. The collective skill of the technologically superior democracies to withstand coercion—whether or not emanating from Moscow, Riyadh, Tehran, Caracas, or Beijing—depends upon entry to crucial minerals and different industrial supplies. Landmark items of laws—specifically, the Inflation Discount Act plus the Infrastructure Funding and Jobs Act—have offered large new funding and incentives (almost $400 billion value) to develop the market, construct the infrastructure, and develop dependable suppliers for electrical automobiles (EVs) and different clear power and transportation applied sciences. To verify all of it occurs, successfully and expeditiously, President Joe Biden has turned to his personal brainy and pugnacious D.C. insider (and oil trade antagonist)—John Podesta.
Like Ickes, Podesta must bulldoze by the paperwork and attain out past conventional political allies and ideological consolation zones. As importantly, and just like the curmudgeonly New Vendor, Podesta might want to work constructively with trade—together with mining companies, heavy manufacturing, and power corporations related to fossil fuels—which are conventional political adversaries. In the end, an efficient power transition would require constructing a safe and dependable provide chain among the many U.S. and its shut allies and buying and selling companions that isn’t depending on China or Russia. As an illustration, the typical EV requires 5 instances the amount of crucial minerals (by weight) as a traditional automobile. The U.S. at the moment extracts negligible quantities of lithium, cobalt, nickel, and different minerals important to EV batteries, although some allies and companions can and do produce extra. The image for processing essentially the most crucial minerals—wherever from 50 to 90 p.c of that are managed by Chinese language corporations—is even bleaker.
As Ickes steamrolled the Public Works Administration through the Nineteen Thirties—after which corralled oil corporations through the Nineteen Forties—Podesta must lean exhausting on each trade and authorities to attain vital (however accountable) enlargement of home mining and processing of crucial minerals and supplies. He should overcome obstacles to producing extra dependable, cleaner, and cheaper electrical energy, together with an enlargement of transmission infrastructure throughout the nation—a precedence that has foundered within the face of native NIMBY opposition up to now. Moreover, the IRS might want to present readability and a level of flexibility to make sure most eligibility for buying tax credit whereas nonetheless incentivizing the transition away from problematic overseas sourcing.
In any other case, the long-overdue power transition won’t ever acquire enough traction and take root past the present administration. Such a failure will depart the U.S. depending on essentially the most pollutive fuels and on the mercy of the international locations that produce them.
In the end, the power transition will succeed or fail primarily based on its capability to energy future financial development and enhance the residing requirements of all Individuals. Doing so requires an “power czar” keen to work each side of the congressional aisle, acquire the belief of accountable members of the enterprise neighborhood, and maintain assist amongst fair-minded environmentalist leaders.
To satisfy this historic second, Joe Biden needn’t change into one other FDR. However John Podesta might want to channel his interior Harold Ickes. And shortly.