The second question is whether we continue to involve more and more people in the transformation. We have more than 100,000 farmers and ranchers adopting climate-smart agricultural practices. Will this climate action, distributed climate action, continue to expand?

The last thing is how good we are at building what we need to build. Steel underground. One of the things we've been trying to evolve as a discipline is actually developing social license specialization around these new technologies so that they can scale. Can we build at the pace we need to ensure that when a tower goes up, the community feels like they built the barn together, rather than being ripped off?

We have discussed economic and industrial leadership, but political leadership is really important as well. Trump said he would withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement for the second time in five years. Wouldn't that make it harder to achieve the trajectory you just described?

Will this action spell the end of U.S. climate leadership, or prevent us from making the progress we need? No. But it carries symbolism and probably a lot of second-order meaning.

Since this administration took office, we have established a climate headquarters in the West Wing. A new team. Gina McCarthy led it and now I lead it. We have senior executives on our team who focus on various areas of the economy and have backgrounds in science, business, engineering and policy.

What happens if you don’t have the attention from the top and the heavy input from very talented people? What would happen if the United States attended multilateral forums or bilateral dialogues and did not prioritize developing rules for a clean energy economy?

I think what's happened is that the United States has excluded American workers from the competition for clean energy jobs and diminished our influence around the world. Not only will there be no climate pause over the next four years, neither will our competitors—in their bid to seize the advantages of clean energy technologies and compete for global influence.

Four years is not a long time. You must have started thinking about a second term. Are you thinking about things you want to do but can’t?

First and most important is the area where we have not yet reached escape velocity. For the sake of our economy, we must continue to work hard. This is unfinished business and will need to be driven by state and local governments, the private sector, and the federal government.

The second thing is making sure we invest enough in talent and workforce. We have a bad habit as a country of removing talent from the top instead of investing in institutions that attract more people into the workforce. Unions are leading the way on this; Biden has spent a lot of time on apprenticeship growth.