by Michael Svoboda, Yale Climate Connections
September 2, 2026
Leah C. Stokes spent five intense years in the maelstrom of American climate politics. “The Carbon Wave: A Story of Democracy, Parenthood, and the Race to Protect Our Planet,” released September 1, is her memoir of those years, with nods to what led up to them and what has happened since during Trump 2.0.
When Democrats prevailed in the 2018 midterms, activists, academics, and policymakers began to imagine what a serious climate bill might do. Stokes, who had written “Short-Circuiting Policy,” a scholarly account of how the fossil fuel industry and electric utilities successfully delayed climate action, was pulled into the planning for this legislation.
In her new book, Stokes, a professor of political science at the University of California, Santa Barbara, chronicles the ups and downs of this climate policy quest. She shows how the Green New Deal became, with the election of Joe Biden, the $6 trillion Build Back Better Bill, then, as resistance mounted, the $3 trillion Build Back Better Bill, then the $1 trillion Build Back Better Bill, and then, finally, the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, which invested $369 billion in clean energy and energy security programs. Though a far cry from the original bill, it was still, as the administration described it, “the single largest investment in climate and energy in American history.”
Over their five years together, the team behind the bill had to surmount seemingly endless political and technical obstacles, along with COVID, storms, and wildfires. The team also went through personal milestones together: illnesses and deaths, relationships and births, including the arrival of Stokes’ twins, who spent time in a NICU under COVID protocols.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity. If you purchase a book through one of the links on this page, a percentage of the proceeds funds our journalism.
Michael Svoboda: I think many readers will be surprised to learn that the person providing this detailed account of the effort to pass the biggest climate bill in American history is a Canadian.
Leah Stokes: Yes, especially given what’s going on in this moment. I’m a very proud Canadian! And when I did most of this work, I was a Canadian citizen. I only became an American citizen pretty deep into my climate activism.
I first moved to the United States in 2008, when Barack Obama was running for president alongside Joe Biden. Then I did a master’s of public administration at Columbia University and learned how public policy is made. Then I did a PhD at MIT in public policy, and I really learned the American system – as an outsider.
I am a Canadian culturally; I think that outsider perspective is an important part of the story. But I am also a proud American at this point. The thing about the United States is that it has such an outsized impact on the world. If we can change policy here, it ripples out globally.
Svoboda: What do you mean by “the carbon wave?”
Stokes: For a long time, we have worked within a paradigm of the carbon footprint. This idea came out of academic literature, but it was popularized by fossil fuel companies. BP spent hundreds of millions of dollars advertising this idea. It became so ubiquitous that when Al Gore created his Oscar-winning climate documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth,” it was used as the framework for action for the audience.
I think it’s a deeply flawed paradigm: It pushes responsibility onto everyday individuals when dealing with climate change is really about the infrastructure of our society. I’m trying to create a new paradigm: Rather than acting by yourself, think about joining with others to make the biggest impact possible.
Start with getting a heat pump or an electric vehicle. Then scale it up to electrifying a school in your community or working to get a bike lane. Then you can work to change laws and policies and really the structure of society.
So “The Carbon Wave” is about pointing people towards collective action and structural change as the ways we can really take on the climate crisis because that is how we will decarbonize our society.
When we think about climate change and all the solutions, it can feel really overwhelming. Should I not eat a hamburger? Should I ride a bicycle? And, obviously, there are much bigger things, like coal power plants and factories.
What I started to think about at this time was that, actually, there are just two really big things that we need to do to tackle the climate crisis. The first one is to clean up our electricity system and try to get to 100% clean power as fast as possible. Then we can use that clean power to power our homes, our cars, our public buildings, our factories.
When you do the math, you realize that these two solutions actually get us three-quarters or more of the way to solving the climate crisis: clean electricity plus electrification.
For what a person can do on their own – in their home or backyard – and for what we need to do at the level of society, we just need to remember two things: clean electricity and electrification.
Svoboda: But for a climate bill, you need something that tells you, OK, if we take this action, we can expect to see carbon emissions drop x amount between now and 2050, one of the deadlines for the Paris Climate Agreement. You need a model that combines the net results of the different actions.
Stokes: Yes. That came out of the office of Sen. Schumer [a Democrat from New York]. Adrian Devoney, his chief of staff, had previously worked on environmental legislation for Sen. Merkley [a Democrat from Oregon]. He had seen how powerful a model could be in explaining complicated problems and solutions.
He knew this climate bill wasn’t going to be one big thing, like a cap-and-trade program. It was going to be a symphony of many different things. And so in order to explain the bill to people, he hired Tim Snyder to build this thing called “The Ambition Tracker.” The goal was that if they changed the legislative text, they would be able to put it through this model and understand what the outcome would be [in terms of carbon pollution].
Svoboda: So you now have a global model, but then you need to know the metrics on every possible policy. And the key figure associated with this second key tool is Sonia Aggarwal.
Stokes: That’s right. Sonia Aggarwal had worked outside of government. She had built this thing called the Energy Policy Simulator.
When she then gets a job in the White House, one of her assignments is to figure out what the United States could do. And so she talks to people in different agencies, then plugs a bunch of ideas into her energy policy simulator and comes up with the goal of cutting carbon pollution by about 50% by 2030. Biden makes the big announcement on Earth Day, setting the ambition for the legislative process.
Svoboda: And soon you’re going back and forth between Tim Snyder and Sonia Aggarwal, brainstorming ideas and providing research on the many different problems they’re trying to solve.
Stokes: Yes, exactly. One goal of the book is to show people how policy change works. That’s why “democracy” is in the subtitle. It actually takes a lot of people from different positions in society to create change. My role as somebody who did not go into government was to work on the outside, with advocates, to coordinate groups to work together, to do things like modeling, to place op-eds or to get quotes in the media, to visit offices and make them aware of what’s happening, to gather information and share it through our networks.
Svoboda: You don’t say this explicitly in your book, but I presume that much of the enormous amount of work you’re doing is pro bono. Are you being at least reimbursed for your expenses?
Stokes: I do different kinds of work. A lot of it is with my professor hat on. I’m very lucky to have a dean at my university who really believes in public scholarship. Sometimes I get $150 for writing an op-ed. And for certain periods, when I was working very deeply within an organization like Evergreen Action or Rewiring, a contractor who would help because we weren’t just working on policy; we were also building these organizations. They were startups in many ways.
Initially, I did a lot of that work just pro bono and volunteer, but eventually the work became so time-intensive, and I started to have such significant expenses with the twins, that I became a contractor myself. I tried to be as transparent as possible. I don’t have contracts with any of those organizations now.
Svoboda: I ask this because you were accused on right-wing social media of profiting, of getting rich, off “the climate hoax.” Your book offers yet more evidence of the way public service, and public servants, are maligned.
Stokes: Yes, there’s a lot of drama and noise. Some of it is literally fossil fuel industry propaganda, and then some of it is our own movements getting duped by fossil fuel industry propaganda. I have friends who believe that there are plants from the fossil fuel industry within the movement.
So yeah, a lot of noise and drama. I capture that in the book, too, because I’m trying to give a real sense of what it was like. It was especially hard when you got attacked by your own side. Sometimes, there can be a perfectionism. You decide that someone in 99% alignment with you, but with a different strategy or tactic, is your enemy. This happens so much in progressive spaces that I felt it was important to capture that dynamic, which really just serves the fossil fuel industry.
Svoboda: Astonishingly, while you’re doing all of this stressful work, you have a very difficult pregnancy. Why was it important for you to include that very personal story in this account of the Inflation Reduction Act?
Stokes: I really love memoir and narrative nonfiction. Those are the books that I read. Rebecca Solnit is a friend and mentor, and I’m a huge fan of her work; she braids the personal and the political together so beautifully. I love books like that because they really give you a sense of what it’s like to be a human on the Earth.
“Short-Circuiting Policy,” my first book, did wildly well for an academic book, but it really only connects with wonky professionals who spend their days working on clean energy. If we want the climate movement to be bigger, and if we want more people to feel like they’re part of it, we have to make it more relatable. There was a wildfire burning when I brought my first daughter home from the hospital. All of us are living through climate impacts all the time.
I also wanted to debunk the carbon footprint idea in an even deeper way. They say the No. 1 thing you can do to take on climate change is to not have a kid. I completely reject that conclusion. I show how people like Sonia and Adrian, who are so deeply dedicated to this issue and understand how bad things could get, are still having kids.
Should I have a kid? I want to help people answer that question because it’s such a common question in our space. And I want to illustrate what it means to show up for your kids during the climate crisis. It’s more than just making sure you have a child-safe car seat and plastic guards in your electrical sockets. There’s a much bigger way we can work to keep our children safe: climate activism.
Svoboda: Wrangling the votes with a detailed whip list takes center stage in the final chapters of your book. You show Sen. Schumer and his office trying to keep all the other senators on board. You recount the roller coaster ride that Sen. Manchin took everyone on.
You have to work and rework the different provisions, and you have to keep rerunning the Ambition Tracker, because the total dollar value of the bill keeps shrinking. Nevertheless, you are still trying to hit some pretty bold climate targets. And all of this work has to be done very quickly.
Then in August of 2022, the bill passes.
Only to be picked apart when Trump is elected in 2024.
What’s this Canadian’s take on American democracy now?
Stokes: I understand the critiques that people have of American democracy, especially the Senate. This body has so much power over, really, billions of people, and even more lives, if you count the nonhuman lives on this Earth.
I think Sen. Manchin specifically is a much more complicated character than I understood at the time. At the end of the day, he did the right thing and sold the bill. I think it’s important to recognize that within the Democratic caucus, there can be disagreement; there can be people you don’t like.
But the fact that not a single Senate Republican was willing to vote for the bill – that is so egregious.
American democracy is really complicated. I hope this book provides some behind-the-scenes understanding of how policy change happens. People can have an outsized impact if they work with others to change the system.
Read: No, the Democrats’ big climate law is not dead
Svoboda: A final question: We’re at the start of a new academic year. What advice do you have for young climate activists just starting their undergraduate educations?
Stokes: The Sunrise Movement is a story about how young people can make a huge difference. I tell a part of that story in this book. The Sunrise Movement was founded by a bunch of undergraduates. They very consciously read civil rights history and studied how change happens. Then they used those lessons to create big actions, like the sit-in at Pelosi’s office that takes place at the very beginning of my book.
I hope people feel inspired. It doesn’t have to start as a huge thing. You just begin where you are and believe that you can make an impact. You can work with the people literally in your class. I hope that this book gives people, students, a sense of agency that they can make a difference if they join with others.
Svoboda: That was a nice way to end, thank you.
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