2026.6 - Priyanka Mohanty and Leslie Chang
"Why 'High-Road' principles are critical to guide the energy transition"
While the Trump Administration has attempted to reverse progress on climate change, the market continues to trend toward the electrification of our economy. As policymakers look to the future, industrial policy will be a critical next step in manufacturing technology locally, growing jobs in the energy transition, and building political consensus around climate action—while learning from the lessons of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).
What the IRA attempted to do—and what was the norm during our 20th-century industrial transformation—was to leverage the partnership and expertise of unions to drive the buildout of a new industrial future. However, decades of neoliberalism and a singular focus on profit maximization created a divided climate community. Businesses, scientific institutions, and policymakers focused on the energy transition did not necessarily see or understand the value of bringing labor into the buildout of a new climate economy, and this played out across the country during the Biden Administration.
As we look toward building a politically durable vision for the energy transition, we return to the basics: defining what “labor” really means; examining its history, including its growth and decline over the 20th century; explaining why worker participation and empowerment are important to building and enabling the clean energy economy; exploring how labor can help repair and advance broader societal change; and identifying where some of the negative perceptions of labor originate, both inside and outside the climate community.
We argue in this session that a successful strategy must incorporate 'high-road' principles to address both the climate and affordability crises while creating the economic opportunities needed to bring communities into the massive, whole-of-economy transition. The United States can win the politics of the energy transition by using growing investment in, and the increasing sophistication of, climate technologies such as batteries and renewable energy as an opportunity to regrow our productive capacity and industrial base, build community buy-in through good jobs and public benefits, and create consensus around the massive whole-of-economy investment needed for the transition to scale. Achieving this vision will require a positive, high-road partnership between clean technology manufacturers and workers.
Speaker Bios:
Priyanka Mohanty is the Executive Director of the United Auto Worker's climate arm, the Center for Manufacturing a Green Economy (UAW-CMGE). Priyanka has spent over a decade in the climate movement, starting her career at the New Climate Economy (NCE), an initiative housed within the World Resources Institute, where she worked with stakeholders across emerging economies to accelerate climate policy delivering economic growth and good jobs. From there, she worked on transportation policy with The California Governor’s Office of Land Use and Climate Innovation and then became an Affiliate Scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab doing techno-economic work on electrification in the US and India before joining UAW-CMGE.
Leslie Chang is the Industrial Development Director at UAW-CMGE. She brings over ten years of experience working with governments on issues related to climate change, global health, and digital financial services. She was previously the Director of Strategy and Policy at Caelux, a domestic solar manufacturing startup that spun out of Caltech. In this role, she helped scale the company from lab to fab and advocated for stronger tax and trade provisions for onshoring advanced manufacturing companies. Notably, Leslie supported the drafting and inclusion of Section 45X Advanced Manufacturing Production Tax Credit in the Inflation Reduction Act.
Lost The Plot:
Lost The Plot is a monthly seminar series - virtual and free - that talks about the systemic issues of climate change. Open to all but targeted at professionals working in climate and sustainability who want to more deeply connect with climate - which often is quite absent from our careers - and examine what it is We are all doing (and NOT doing) to address this generation-defining challenge. We seek to dispel the technooptimist standpoint inherent to the broader effort today, and instead look critically at the sociopolitical systems that have prohibited stronger and more meaningful action to date. Each month a different speaker will lead a unique discussion, come for one or all, and view whichever you miss on YouTube after. Learn more at www.lost-the-plot.com .