Steve McBee’s AMPED Newsletter Covers Thriving Economy Project Launch
Finally: A Plan!
The Thriving Economy Project is out today. It’s the kind of ambition clean energy has been missing.
Steve McBee
09/15/2026
This column has spent a lot of words explaining the need to organize the power of the clean energy industry in support of policies that expand markets and head off the worst scenarios for climate change.
Less discussed are the policies we’re organizing to support. In the aftermath of the IRA wipeout, “what’s next” conversations in Washington are either largely backward looking (bring back the IRA), focused on the pieces (tax incentives or not), or mired in the complicated politics of vote counting in Congress.
What’s missing is a conversation about the goals we’re trying to achieve, and the framework that enables them. The constituent parts can be worked out once those questions are settled.
Ambition is required both on the goals and the enabling framework. The IRA was excellent policy, but was never going to be enough on its own. A new plan must excite the public and earn the support of a solid majority of voters, translating into bipartisan backing in Washington that ensures that, once policies are passed, they stay passed.
The Thriving Economy Project
The Thriving Economy Project, published today by SEEC Institute, meets both the ambition and the imagination threshold. It deserves a hard look, and is exactly the type of innovative and sophisticated approach we need to figure out what’s next. In the interest of transparency, I serve on SEEC Institute’s board, so I am not a neutral observer here.
More than 800 policy recommendations that cut across the economy, built over eighteen months and informed by more than 1,300 ideas submitted by farmers, manufacturers, small business owners, labor leaders, utility districts, CEOs, researchers, universities, municipalities, students, and community advocates. Nearly 150 responses to a formal request for information, from Fortune 100 companies to environmental nonprofits. Hundreds of conversations in a dozen states.
This project did not start with answers, but with questions. Lots of them, from a broad and diverse cross section of stakeholders who collectively determine the cadence and construct of the energy transition.
Economics, Not Emissions
The nine chapter titles show a deliberate attempt to shift the terms on which climate policy is debated. Agricultural opportunity. Rural and Tribal economies. Affordable, resilient communities. Cheap and abundant American energy. Next generation technology built here. A globally competitive energy sector. Accessible finance. A government that delivers.
The organizing question is not how we cut carbon. It’s how Americans build wealth, keep costs down, and remain leaders in a rapidly changing world order.
Achieving that vision requires working with allies and partners to strengthen supply chains, develop common standards, and expand markets for high-quality technologies that will reduce costs, improve resilience, and raise the standard of living for the global community.
Same with the benchmarks the project organizes around.
Chapter five does not open with a target for gigawatts, instead measuring affordability. Chapter one wants farmers to have diversified income and stop relying on single crop revenue and federal bailouts. Chapter three wants housing to stay affordable, as risk climbs and insurance markets buckle. Chapter seven wants a clean energy supply chain that does not run through Beijing.
That is the language of price, reliability, speed to power, and national security. It is the language I argue we need to be fluent in, not because it polls better, though it does, but because it is true and because it is the argument we can win with people who are never going to vote for us on climate alone.
Washington Still Matters (A Lot)
There is a fashionable view that Washington is broken, the action has moved to the states, and serious people should stop wasting their time on federal policy. States matter enormously. They open markets, they incubate ideas, and some of the best work in this sector is happening in statehouses right now.
But as someone who has run companies and organized capital across the clean energy sector, I’ve suffered through the roadblocks embedded in a system built around hundreds of utilities and a patchwork of mandates and incentives, each enforced through different regulatory and political structures.
To move capital at scale, a central demand signal is required. So while change at the state and local level is critical, at some point Washington will need to step in and set the rules.
These recommendations were built to be usable in a divided government, ahead of the next presidential election, by whoever holds the gavel.
Not to sit on a shelf until someone wins a trifecta. Good policy first, politics second. Ambitious ideas that need time to develop consensus, alongside things that could move next year.
Members of Congress Put in the Work
I want to give real credit to the nine members who did not delegate this to a task force, and who put their names on the cover.
Nikki Budzinski on agriculture. Melanie Stansbury on rural and Tribal economies. Kathy Castor on resilient communities. Maxine Dexter on ecosystems. Mike Levin on energy affordability and the grid. Deborah Ross on technology and innovation. George Whitesides on energy security and competitiveness. Sean Casten on finance. Gabe Amo on making government work.
They were paired with ten outside experts who have run these issues from inside agencies, committees, and administrations, and backed by a bipartisan steering committee of twenty people from very different walks of life. Eric Fins led the project and gets serious props for herding more than 1,300 policy ideas into something coherent and accessible.
The SEEC Caucus is one of the largest independent caucuses in the House. That size is usually described as a membership number. It should be described as a capability, and this report is what that capability looks like when it is put to work behind a clearly defined goal.
A Plan Is Not Power
Great policy ideas don’t pass themselves. They need a public that wants them, a workforce of more than three million people who understand they are not an employment statistic but a force, an industry willing to argue for its own products without stuttering or hedging, and enough organized political power to get to sixty votes in the Senate. That is the work I’m committed to and will continue to write about here.
But equally, you cannot organize around nothing. The Thriving Economy Project doesn’t get it all right and doesn’t claim to. But it will seriously elevate and reframe the policy conversation and help get us to a final product that meets the moment.
Read it. Argue with it. Improve it. Then let’s get to it.