Remarks as Prepared for Delivery by National Climate Advisor Ali Zaidi at the Yale Club of New York City on the Biden-Harris Administration’s Progress in Accelerating Clean Manufacturing
Today, we stand together to lift up and reflect on the progress we are making as a nation – progress propelled by the hard work of the American people, endowed with the inventiveness to imagine a better future and inspired with the willingness to roll up our sleeves and build it.
Over the last few years, we have come together around this hopeful calling – united in this important task at this important time. We are building back not only from an awful economic crisis, but also from decades of underinvestment in our infrastructure, our communities, and our industrial strength – truly, an underinvestment in America.
So many times, each of us has driven by that idled factory or blighted plot, some place where the loss of opportunity is fenced in and the chance for a comeback seemingly fenced out. These are monuments to underinvestment and a failed economic policy that promised prosperity will just trickle down – but never delivered.
Fortunately, if we invest in America, there is a better way forward.
Under President Biden and Vice President Harris’s leadership, that is exactly where we are headed – bringing down the barriers to economic opportunity, lowering costs for American families, and, in just three and a half years, creating 16 million jobs with rising wages and with unemployment at its lowest level in 50 years.
We see the bet on America’s promise, our potential and possibilities, paying off as we reclaim the lead in the global race on clean energy and in the interconnected fight against the pollution that fuels the climate crisis.
And we see that bet paying off as we find solutions to what felt like unsolvable problems.
Today, finally, America is leading in the race to innovate the technologies needed to tackle climate pollution in the industrial sector.
The largest source of global climate pollution and the source of about 30 percent of U.S. climate pollution, the industrial sector has long been considered “hard to decarbonize.”
But we’re changing the game. To meet our climate goals, we are innovating and modernizing the way we make steel, aluminum, cement, and other bedrock materials of our economy.
The transformation is underway, and not by accident. The Biden-Harris Administration has deployed all tools in its policy toolbox to expand clean manufacturing. Buoyed by this support, American manufacturers and workers are stepping up.
Yet, as they reach for scale, their efforts have found some critical scaffolding missing – an inability to measure progress.
The U.S. government lacks a comprehensive emissions intensity measurement system. That has been an inhibitor.
Today, we are making progress to help fill that gap – to build the data infrastructure we need to drive forward our clean manufacturing strategy.
We are launching a new and critical effort at the Department of Energy – a pilot program that will offer data tools to track and accelerate reductions in industrial emissions, and to ensure that clean manufacturing remains competitive.
It is a meaningful move to build not just a foundation, but a launch pad for our ambition in this space.
Before offering more details on this data effort, let me describe how this data puzzle piece fits into our broader clean manufacturing strategy.
To fuel today’s industrial transformation, the Biden-Harris Administration is currently deploying the largest investment in clean manufacturing in U.S. history.
These investments are supporting game-changing projects that transform how we manufacture materials that form the backbone of our economy.
A couple of projects will make the U.S. one of the first nations in the world to convert clean hydrogen into clean steel.
One project will build a new clean aluminum smelter – the first primary aluminum smelter to be built in the U.S. in 45 years – which will avoid about 75 percent of the emissions of a conventional facility.
Other projects will virtually eliminate the emissions associated with making cement – a millennia-old process that is responsible for about 8 percent of global, human-caused carbon emissions.
Meanwhile, we’re pairing this supply push with a demand pull. We’re working to ensure that there’s a market on the other end of these investments for the clean steel and cement that’s produced.
Buy Clean, a flagship initiative of the Biden-Harris Administration, leverages the U.S. government’s sway as the largest purchaser on Earth to spur demand for low-emissions construction materials. When the government buys steel for federal buildings or concrete for highways, Buy Clean ensures that we support businesses that are investing in clean production.
Right now, agencies are deploying more than $4 billion under Buy Clean to support government purchases of low-emissions materials. And we’ve recruited a dozen states to do the same, harnessing the power of their procurement as a spur for innovation and scale.
As we invest in clean manufacturing, we are reminded of the importance to not let unfair trade undercut this industrial transformation.
For too long, trade policies that ignore climate change have incentivized a shift in energy-intensive manufacturing to countries with lower standards and higher climate pollution.
We need to level the playing field, and we need to level it up.
Take a look at aluminum. The U.S. used to be the world’s biggest producer of aluminum. Many of our aluminum smelters were powered by clean hydropower. But starting in the 1990s, smelter after smelter closed down under divestment and unfair trade. Each closure spelled lost jobs for workers and lost tax revenue for industrial communities. Today, we have only four primary aluminum smelters left in the country – four.
As U.S. production declined, production in China rose to take its place, driven in part by China’s non-market policies. Today, more than half of the world’s aluminum is made in China. That’s an industrial competitiveness problem. It’s also a climate problem. Because the average ton of aluminum made in China is 65 percent more emissions-intensive than in the U.S.
This race to the bottom has undercut our climate goals, the competitiveness of clean manufacturers, and the good jobs they offer to industrial workers and communities.
Our workers and communities deserve a race to the top – one that supports climate action across borders while buttressing our investments to expand clean manufacturing at home.
That is why earlier this year we created the new White House Task Force on Climate, Trade, and Industrial Competitiveness. To develop tools and approaches that will help close the climate loophole in our trade policies. To ensure a level playing field for our clean manufacturers and workers. To accelerate industrial decarbonization globally.
We want to work with trade partners, Congress, and industry, labor, and environmental stakeholders to help build a new trade framework that actually rewards clean manufacturing.
The Task Force is taking a strategic, cross-governmental approach, building on decades of research and policy expertise. The work of the Task Force includes: identifying and developing data and methodologies for measuring the emissions intensity of traded goods; identifying opportunities to accelerate industrial decarbonization in emissions-intensive, trade exposed sectors; exploring a broad set of potential climate and trade policy options that help us achieve both our domestic and international climate goals; and coordinating engagement with key stakeholders, Congress, and trading partners.
The Task Force is working with like-minded trade partners and allies at all levels of development to develop compatible approaches that foster a level playing field, incentivize industrial decarbonization, reduce the emissions embodied in traded goods, and ensure developing countries have the opportunity and capacity to participate in this low-carbon trade system.
We are engaging with them as they pursue similar efforts, including on questions of data and methodologies, administrability, and policy design. We seek to build a fair and compatible framework for supporting and rewarding clean manufacturing, not a patchwork of divergent approaches.
Data is one area that has been a priority for us – an area we see as primed for progress. Reliable, transparent emissions intensity data is the foundation of effective climate-aligned trade policies. As you know, part of the work of our Task Force is to help ensure that we have credible, robust, and granular data for climate and trade policies.
In addition, as we invest billions in new, emissions-cutting technologies for manufacturing, policymakers and manufacturers need reliable estimates of how quickly we’re reducing the emissions intensity of essential materials.
So do the buyers of these materials. Global demand is rising for steel, aluminum, cement, and other materials that are made with a low level of emissions. New climate-focused trade policies around the world, national green procurement efforts such as Buy Clean, industry commitments, and consumer preferences are all driving this rising demand for clean manufacturing.
As the market for clean manufacturing grows, the United States, our trading partners, and consumers need an accurate and transparent system for measuring the emissions intensity of energy-intensive industrial products.
So far, the United States has not had a comprehensive emissions intensity measurement system.
But today we can report progress to help fill in this missing puzzle piece. The pilot program that the Department of Energy is announcing today will help coordinate data sources across the federal government to assemble rigorous, timely, and accurate emissions intensity statistics.
These metrics will support our climate and clean manufacturing goals alike. An accurate, whole-of-government emissions intensity framework will help to incentivize further reductions in industrial emissions and support the competitiveness of clean manufacturing as the emissions intensity of traded goods becomes increasingly important.
The White House Task Force on Climate, Trade, and Industrial Competitiveness looks forward to continued work with Congress and industry, labor unions, environmental advocates, and academic stakeholders to develop the data infrastructure we need. In fact, we will be following up today’s announcement with a webinar laying out more details and drawing our stakeholders in to be even closer thought partners.
Critically, we also look forward to continued work with trade partners to explore compatible, coordinated approaches to emissions intensity data so we can avoid a patchwork of divergent approaches.
With solid data, we can accelerate the Biden-Harris Administration’s comprehensive clean manufacturing strategy – an interlocking mix of investment, procurement, and trade policies to tackle a major source of climate pollution while boosting a major source of good jobs.
Working together, we can win the industrial transformation we need for a livable climate and a more equitable economy. We can launch the race to the top that our workers and communities deserve.
The promise is what I saw last year in Toledo, Ohio. What was once a brownfield is now the site of a new manufacturing plant, where union steel workers are forging a cleaner product than what we used to import from overseas. The Hot Briquetted Iron from that Cleveland Cliffs factory is the start of a supply chain critical to U.S. automotive manufacturing – for UAW workers an hour away in Michigan making next generation vehicles and helping America lead that global industry. This is the real promise: not just steel in the ground, but steel in the spine of the American middle class. A real chance to win the future.
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