IGP Roundtable Discusses Global Energy Transition and Geopolitics

On October 21, Jason Bordoff, founding director of SIPA’s Center on Global Energy Policy, sat down with Adam Tooze, IGP Affiliated Faculty member, Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Professor of History at Columbia, and director of the European Institute, to discuss the global energy transition underway and how it will reshape geopolitics. Tooze fielded questions from some 20 SIPA students about changing policy approaches to energy and geopolitics.

Bordoff, who is a member of IGP’s Faculty Advisory Board, is focused on the energy transition’s impact on trade as governments embrace protectionist measures. “How do we carry out the clean energy transition if we’re in trade wars?” he asked. Before joining the Obama administration’s National Security Council and subsequently founding CGEP, Bordoff began his career in the US Treasury under Secretary Larry Summers in the Clinton administration. Back then, climate and energy policy were viewed from the perspective of increasing globalization. “You would have been fired for using the term ‘industrial policy’ in the Clinton administration,” Bordoff explained.

Tooze agreed that protectionism does not make sense for anyone advocating for climate policy. He highlighted how thinking has shifted from Summers’ market failure approach, advocating that public policy should only be used to address market failures that could not be solved by private markets. Laws such as the Inflation Reduction Act go much further in setting labor standards, climate subsidies, and mechanisms to restore America’s manufacturing base. This proactive approach has also resulted in protectionist efforts from both political parties.

“You should care less about where clean energy comes from than how cheap it is,” Bordoff underlined. But with China leading in the global production of electric vehicles, batteries, and solar panels, that raises concerns about America's ability to compete on clean energy technology. In March 2024, President Biden announced tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles, and many politicians seek to expand them. “The rhetoric to compete with China has gotten out of hand,” Bordoff argued. "China is now responsible for the larger share of global emissions, and has become deadly serious about the energy transition," he noted, acknowledging that it does not excuse their efforts to dominate the market, but instead creates room to cooperate.

This shift demonstrates a disconnect between policy and reality, Tooze observed, since “the West is a diminishingly important part of the puzzle. The challenge is how do we move the whole cause worldwide.” Those efforts take time, and the US Government does not have the capital to bring to bear to finance climate adaptation across the world the way the Chinese government can. “We only just made good on our promises in Copenhagen in 2009,” he lamented, referring to the 2009 climate agreement where developed nations committed to enormous financing for developing nations by 2025.