Harris Adviser’s ‘Marshall Plan’ Offers Glimpse Into How She Might Govern

A top economic adviser to Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign for the White House has called for the United States to establish a new federal program to loan foreign countries billions of dollars so they can buy American-made green energy technologies.

In an of Congolese cobalt-mining ventures, as Beijing looks to increase its already dominant share of the market for most metals needed for making batteries and other green technologies.

The U.S. Export-Import Bank went unmentioned in Deese’s roughly 5,100-word essay. While the other leading federal financing authority for overseas deals has funded major clean energy projects such as Poland’s first nuclear power plant, the Ex-Im Bank’s charter is set to expire at the end of 2026, and its reauthorization could prove an uphill battle in Congress.

The Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office could offer a model for the Clean Energy Finance Authority, Deese suggested. Under current director Jigar Shah, the domestically focused Energy Department lender approved 11 investments totaling $18 billion in the past two fiscal years, rapidly expanding its operations to dole out money from Biden’s landmark climate laws.

Geothermal energy, an emerging power source that uses heat from the Earth’s molten core to make steam to produce 24/7 zero-carbon electricity, offers a notable through line from the original Marshall Plan. After World War II, Italy used U.S. funding “to buy American drilling technology, pipes, and other industrial equipment to rebuild its energy sector ― including the equipment needed to restart Europe’s first commercial geothermal plant, powered by steam from lava beds in Tuscany.”

“By 1950, that region had more than doubled its geothermal capacity and remained a major contributor to Italy’s total power demand,” Deese wrote.

Now that U.S. companies are harnessing the same technology that spurred the American oil and gas boom to expand the potential for geothermal energy, Deese wrote, the country should export equipment to Southeast Asia and Africa. With the Biden administration leading more than a dozen countries in a pledge to triple global nuclear energy output by 2050, Deese suggested that a Clean Energy Finance Authority could also fund new nuclear plants.

Deese, who headed sustainable investing at BlackRock before Biden tapped him as the top White House economic adviser in December 2020, envisioned the Clean Energy Finance Authority taking a more “nimble, market-oriented” approach to draw in more private investment.

Ninety percent of the original Marshall Plan was funded through government grants, which don’t need to be paid back. But the climate-oriented 2.0 version “could easily be the inverse, with less than ten percent of its expenditures in the form of grants and the rest of the capital being deployed as equity, debt, export credit, and other forms of financing,” Deese wrote.

The program would also require Washington to “level the global playing field through the active yet measured use of trade tools such as tariffs.”

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has promised to put such high tariffs in place on Chinese goods that it would effectively end imports within four years ― a proposal that Deese called “a cynical fantasy playing on populist fears.” Instead of “using blunt tools to effectuate what amounts to a unilateral retreat,” Deese said the U.S. should work with allies to challenge China’s unfair trade practices.

Another tool, he said, could be a carbon-based tariff like the one the European Union is adopting, charging higher import fees for goods that come from countries with heavily polluting energy systems. Such a policy could be relaxed to complement specific deals the Clean Energy Finance Authority brokers.

“In this moment of domestic economic strength ― stark against the backdrop of heightened competition, a fracturing world, and a raging climate crisis ― the United States can do something generous for people across the globe in a way that benefits Americans,” Deese concluded. “It should take that leap, not just because it is the morally right thing to do but also because it is the strategically necessary thing to do.”