The SustainUW Podcast is created and hosted by Office of Sustainability interns, bringing conversations about sustainability at UW–Madison to life.
In this episode, EPA Chief of Staff Dan Utech discusses climate optimism as it relates to the past, present, and future of environmental policy in the United States. Hosted by Brynne Hill, Audrey Davies, and Aiden Culver, this Q&A conversation provides a deeper understanding of the Environmental Protection Agency and recent federal climate action.
Transcript
Brynne: Thank you so much for tuning into the Sustain UW podcast. My name is Brynne.
Audrey: I’m Audrey.
Aiden: And I’m Aiden.
Brynne: And today we are joined by a very special guest, Dan Utech, Chief of Staff for the EPA. Thank you for joining us.
Dan: My pleasure. Thanks for having me.
Brynne: Could you tell us a bit about your role and who you are?
Dan: Be happy to. And thanks for having me on the podcast. Appreciate it. So, my name is Dan Utech. I am the Chief of Staff at EPA, so I’m kind of the top aide to the Administrator of the EPA. His name is Michael Regan, and he was appointed by President Biden and confirmed by the Senate back in 2021.
I started in this current job on Inauguration Day in 2021, and I’ve been there ever since. And I’ve spent the bulk of my career in Washington, D.C., in a variety of capacities. I started at EPA, actually, so it’s kind of a homecoming for me to come back to the agency. But I also worked on Capitol Hill, worked for three different senators. And then had the opportunity to join the Obama Administration, worked there for all eight years, first at the Department of Energy and then at the White House, focused largely on climate change. For President Obama during his second term, I ran the office that coordinated climate policy activities focused on domestic U.S. emissions across the government. So, really happy to have this opportunity to talk to all of you about climate and maybe some other environmental issues along the way.
Brynne: Today we have a Q&A discussion format, and we’ll be focusing on the conversation of climate optimism. To start off, Audrey will ask us a question.
Audrey: So, our first question is: why is climate optimism a priority for you at this moment?
Dan: Yeah, thanks for that. So, as I said, I’ve been at this for a while. I’ve been working on climate policy for a while now, and I’ve really never been more optimistic about our ability to make progress and to address this issue. And I’ll get into some reasons why in a minute, but I want to back up to the part of your question, which is, you know, polling shows that more people are worried about climate change than ever before.
There’s a variety of polls out there, including a group called the Pew Center on Climate that’s been polling on this issue for probably 20 years now. Their 2023 poll found that 54% of Americans are really concerned about the impacts of climate change on their lives and on the future. That’s up ten points from 2009. So, we know that there’s a lot of concern out there. And, you know, there are bad headlines that people see. Before coming out, I reviewed some recent Wisconsin headlines about impacts like hotter summer nights and difficulty sleeping during summer nights. And, you know, before we started, you all told me that you were out here this summer. So you might have experienced that yourself. For folks without AC, there are impacts on walleye populations, a whole bunch of things.
So, I think it’s easy to see that stuff and think we’re not making progress. And maybe we can’t tackle this. But from where I sit, I’ve never been more optimistic. And that’s because we really have made progress over the last ten years, particularly under President Biden. And so I’ll just quickly tick through some reasons why I think we’re really making progress and why I’m recently optimistic.
The first thing is that countries around the world are actually upping their climate ambition. So back in 2015, I worked for President Obama. There was a U.N. process where countries came to talk about climate change and to try to reach an agreement about next steps. At that time, they put a framework in place. The U.S. was a key player in doing that, where essentially countries come forward and say, “Here’s where we’re trying to go in the next 5 or 10 years on climate change, here are the targets we’re trying to hit.” And then they come back, report how they’re doing, and make new pledges. On the basis of that work, we’ve really seen that already we’re on a better trajectory, emissions-wise globally, than we were ten years ago.
Second, emissions are coming down. This is particularly true in developed economies like the U.S., the U.K., and Europe. Our emissions are down about 17% from 2005 levels. The U.K. is down 39%. So, there’s progress that has been made, and there’s reason to think that’s going to continue.
Third, we’ve got tools to attack this problem and continue making progress. Part of that is policy. President Biden proposed a very ambitious climate change bill, and Congress enacted that just over two years ago. He also directed his cabinet to do everything that they can do to get after this problem. And EPA has been at the heart of that work. So, we’ve got tools—between incentives, standards, and a whole bunch of things—that are going to continue to drive down emissions from our power sector, from transportation, from industry, from all the sources of emissions. So, that’s the third reason: we’re making progress across a range of sectors.
Fourth is that there’s a lot of private investment. Government has a role in research, standard setting, and incentives. But really, most of the action is going to be in the private sector. And we’ve seen on the order of $415 billion of private investment into clean energy technologies.
Finally, technology continues to outperform expectations. For example, back between 2000 and 2020, there were numerous projections about what the decline in solar energy costs might be. The average across the U.S. was about 3% per year. But if you look at the 20-year period from 2000 to 2020, solar costs actually came down 15% per year. I think we tend to be conservative and underestimate the progress we can make in some of these areas.
And lastly, young people are certainly, in this country and around the world, the most concerned and most interested in getting after this problem. That’s the final reason for optimism.
Aiden: Well, I have a brief follow-up. So, you spoke about how there are countries that kind of enter into international agreements to make more ambitious commitments to climate change. How do those types of agreements differ from what private companies might make in terms of commitments?
Dan: That’s a great question. Let me just talk about the framework. The framework that was put in place in 2015 was basically a pledge-and-review framework. Countries put forward targets and then put forward not just the targets but also how they intend to meet the targets. They then report on progress or, in some cases, on where they didn’t get to where they said they might want to go. I don’t know enough about the corporate reporting side to say how that compares, but I think it’s a pretty transparent process. It’s a way that countries hold each other accountable, and that’s really the key mechanism in that agreement. That’s the basic framework. I don’t think every country is hitting every metric they put forward.
But emissions are coming down in a lot of countries, as I said. One consequence of that is that back in 2015, if you looked at where we thought global warming was headed over the century—like, where we’d get to in 2100—there was a range, but we were headed for about a 3.5-degree Celsius increase, with some projections going up to five or even more than five degrees.
We’re now on a trajectory that’s more like a ceiling of 3.5 or four degrees. So just by virtue of the path that we’ve put ourselves on in the last ten years, we’ve taken some of the really worst potential impacts off the table. If we continue on the path we’re on, and if we continue to aim for an even lower trajectory, then we can take even more of those worst impacts off the table. That’s how it’s working so far.
Aiden: It’s good to hear.
Brynne: So, you just went through a great list of sources of optimism and some of the successes going on. That leads into our next question: how do you and the EPA, more broadly, put forward a hopeful message to the public while also conveying the seriousness of the problems we still need to solve regarding climate change?
Dan: It’s a great question. I think for us, our objective, role, and responsibility really is to put forward the best information we have. I have an optimistic take on where we are, but we’re not really in the optimism business per se. We’re a federal government agency, and we try to be straight shooters.
Science is the foundation for a lot of what we do. We have a lot of researchers at the agency, and science underpins all the decision-making that we do. When we set standards for power plants, cars, or whatever it might be—emission standards—it’s all founded on our deep scientific and technical record.
We do our best to communicate what we know about the environment, to communicate clearly about what we’re doing about it, and to explain how we think those actions will help. That’s really the core of it. But, you know, we’re always looking for new ways to communicate with people and reach new audiences. For my boss, the current EPA Administrator Michael Regan, youth outreach has been a priority. He travels a lot and is always trying to learn from people where they are and communicate what we’re doing. He’s our top communicator for sure.
One of the things he did last fall was set up the first-ever National Environmental Youth Advisory Council at the EPA. I think we’ve got 16 members. It launched last fall. Unfortunately, we don’t have a member from Wisconsin, so the next time it opens for applications, people should look out for that. We’ll make sure you all are aware of it when it happens.
We’ve got 16 young people, ranging from high school seniors all the way up to 29 years old, from all different places across the country. They’re learning about what we’re doing, taking that back to their communities, and also bringing in their experiences. That’s one specific way under our current Administrator that we’ve tried to get the word out about what we’re doing and get new input into the agency.
Audrey: Our next question ties into a global outlook toward climate change and the role we as individuals have within that outlook. Maintaining a sense of urgency about climate change can be difficult in the United States, given the geographic and emotional disconnect between daily life and global climate impacts. How can we help narrow that disconnect?
Dan: That’s a great question. I think there’s a lot of things we can all do. Maybe I’ll just go back to where I started at the top. It can feel overwhelming, but there are things everybody can do. I think the way we try to engage with folks at the agency is to give people tools in a variety of ways—ways to take action, to be more informed.
Audrey: Would you say there’s variation regionally in the United States regarding how to approach issues related to climate change?
Dan: Yeah, for sure. Part of that has to do with the fact that in our great and very large country, there’s a lot of regional variation. For example, the availability of renewable energy resources varies—sunnier places, windier places. It’s interesting to see where some of the clean energy investment is happening and where renewable energy production is happening.
Texas, for example, is a massive renewable energy producer. It’s very windy there and sunny as well. Our country definitely varies by region. Climate impacts hit differently regionally, and people’s attitudes about climate change vary too. People in different areas also face slightly different problems and therefore need different solutions depending on where they live.
Brynne: It sounds like geography definitely influences where climate solutions can be implemented. There’s a lot of regional variation, so solutions can’t be uniform. Likewise, as you said, the risks we face as a result of climate change also vary greatly by region. For instance, the Southeast struggles with too much precipitation, like with Hurricane Milton. Meanwhile, the American West faces recurring drought conditions and wildfire risks. That shows how climate change impacts the U.S. very differently, which influences the kind of policies we need to address these issues.
Audrey: I have another follow-up question. How does environmental justice and that entire movement play into this disconnect and narrowing it?
Dan: Yeah, that’s something we think about a lot at the EPA and work hard on. Administrator Michael Regan, who leads the EPA, is the first Black man to run the agency. Before coming to the EPA, he ran the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality and came in really committed to working on environmental justice. President Biden and Vice President Harris ran on a platform that included environmental justice as a key component.
At the EPA, we’ve worked hard to center everything we do around that priority. That’s come through in a few ways. First, the climate legislation that the President proposed, which Congress enacted, for the first time allocated significant resources directly for environmental justice purposes. The EPA got $3 billion largely to award to communities around the country to tackle environmental justice problems.
Another significant initiative is the Justice40 framework. This means that 40% of the benefits from many of these programs under the Inflation Reduction Act must accrue to disadvantaged communities. We’ve worked really hard to ensure those benefits reach the communities that need them the most.
Lastly, we elevated the Office of Environmental Justice within the EPA. It’s now on equal footing with other offices, like our Office of Air and Office of Water. This elevation might sound bureaucratic, but it’s actually really important for how things function within the agency. It ensures that environmental justice gets the attention and resources it deserves.
Aiden: So, you’ve spoken about the Inflation Reduction Act a little already, but I was wondering specifically if you could talk a bit more about the developments and initiatives it has led to within the EPA? And maybe walk us through what changed right after the act was passed.
Dan: That’s a great question. Let me start broadly and then get into specifics about the EPA. The Inflation Reduction Act is the biggest climate bill in history. Full stop. There’s just a lot in it. Much of it focuses on incentives of various kinds for clean energy—both to develop better technologies and, more importantly, to deploy those technologies. These incentives are available to families, businesses, and communities, with programs designed for each of these groups.
One of the things we saw almost immediately after it passed in August 2022 was a significant uptick in clean energy investment. By 2023, we were already seeing a substantial increase in investment, and that trajectory has continued into 2024. Even though the detailed implementation process for the programs is ongoing—it takes a year or two to fully roll out all the provisions—we’re already seeing the impacts.
At the EPA, we received over $40 billion under the Inflation Reduction Act. Let me highlight a few key programs. One is the Climate Pollution Reduction Grants Program. This program enables states, tribes, and local governments to receive funding to develop climate plans. While developing plans might sound a bit mundane, it’s crucial. Not every state has the resources to engage in this kind of work, so this funding fills that gap.
In Wisconsin, for example, two tribal communities were awarded funding. The Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa received $8 million to fund residential building electrification for 200 homes and install solar at 85 residences. The St. Croix Chippewa Indians were awarded $5 million for similar projects.
Another major program is the $5 billion for replacing diesel school buses with clean school buses. This is funding school districts nationwide to transition to electric buses, which is a huge deal.
Finally, there’s the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. This includes $7 billion for solar deployment targeted at low-income communities and $20 billion for nonprofit financial institutions to fund projects around the country. We expect this will draw in private funding—maybe six or seven times the federal investment.
There are a lot of other programs, but those are some of the highlights.
Audrey: That’s a lot of good stuff going on. It sounds like these efforts are unprecedented, not just in the U.S. but globally, in terms of outreach and impacts on different communities. Do you think this type of legislation could serve as a model for how other countries address climate change at the local level?
Dan: I think it really could. Every country has to work within its own system and figure out what solutions work best for them, but this is definitely a strong model. It took us a while in the U.S. to get to this approach. Congress tried other things in the 2000s and 2010s, but there was a shift in public support, driven in part by people advocating for bold climate action. That momentum helped make this approach possible.
Aiden: It’s definitely a good reason to be optimistic about the future.
Brynne: Could you talk a bit more about the role young people have played in influencing national policymaking in recent years?
Dan: Absolutely. When President Obama was in office, he ran on a very ambitious climate platform. It’s interesting to note that in 2008, his opponent, Senator John McCain, had a pretty similar climate platform. The major Republican candidate in that election was calling for something like a 60–65% reduction in emissions by 2050, while President Obama was calling for 85–90%. They were in the same ballpark.
President Obama managed to pass climate legislation in the House but couldn’t get it through the Senate. Fast forward to President Biden’s administration, and we finally had a breakthrough. One big difference between the two periods was the growth of the youth-driven climate movement. Young people really rallied around environmental justice and climate solutions, putting together detailed plans.
To a large degree, President Biden adopted chunks of those plans as a candidate. I remember thinking at the time, “Wow, he’s promising a lot. It’s going to be hard to deliver all of this.” But he really came through, especially with the climate provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act. The youth climate movement played a big role in shaping those policies.
Audrey: Relating to the policy discussion and the administration, how has your ability to help with climate change evolved within different administrations? And what are some personal challenges you’ve experienced in your current position and previous ones due to these changing administrations?
Dan: I think, fortunately, I’ve been lucky to work for two presidents who were both very committed to tackling this issue. I’ve already talked about how both President Obama and President Biden approached climate change. Both of them directed their cabinets to use the tools available to them to address the problem and pushed for legislation.
The biggest difference now is that President Biden was able to get this historic bill across the finish line, and that gives us so much more to work with. The Inflation Reduction Act enables us to do far more than we could have done otherwise. I think that’s a testament not only to the administration’s commitment but also to the shift in public and congressional support that made passing this legislation possible.
Brynne: Absolutely. It’s been very exciting to see this historic momentum build up into successful policies like the Inflation Reduction Act. But as you said, who’s in office most definitely dictates whether we see progress in environmental policy. I’m curious to see what acts Congress might pass in the next term. I see you have all these notes in front of you, and I want to ask if there’s anything you were really excited to talk about that we didn’t get to touch on.
Dan: Well, thanks for asking. First, I just want to say thank you again for having me. This has been a lot of fun.
I think the main thing I want to leave you with is this: as someone who has the privilege of working on these issues every day and seeing what’s happening beneath the headlines, I really am optimistic about our ability to tackle this challenge. That’s due in large part to the leadership of people like President Biden, Vice President Harris, and Administrator Regan, but it’s also because of the efforts of people across this country.
Compared to when I started in this field, there are now so many different ways for people to engage in climate and sustainability work. On one hand, it’s a daunting challenge. On the other hand, it’s an opportunity for almost everyone to get involved in some way—whether in their personal lives, through their studies, or in their future careers.
There will be so many opportunities in the coming years in clean energy manufacturing, engineering, finance, and government at all levels. All of these projects need to be financed, built, and maintained, and there’s a real chance for people to make a difference in a variety of roles. If you’re interested in this work, now is a great time to get involved.
Brynne: We’re grateful to Dan Utech and the EPA for paying a visit to UW–Madison and connecting with students. Apart from sitting down with us for the Sustain UW Podcast, Dan spoke to a wide range of staff, faculty, undergraduates, and graduate students.
Brynne: Today, we heard that climate progress can be made at many levels: local, state, federal, and international. Dan Utech and the EPA at the federal level are a key component of that progress. But Dan reminded us that we don’t need to be federal employees or delegates to the United Nations to make a difference. Maintaining an ambitious, positive attitude while not losing sight of the urgency of climate change can be a promising path forward for all people, students, and community members alike. This outlook is a powerful way to fight apathy and empower climate optimism.
This transcript was generated with the assistance of AI technology and may contain minor errors or inaccuracies.