Subscribe today to the Washington Examiner magazine and get Washington Briefing: politics and policy stories that will keep you up to date with what’s going on in Washington. SUBSCRIBE NOW: Just $1.00 an issue!
DEMOCRATIC RECRIMINATION: Ben Marter, a centrist Democrat who is director of communications for the American Petroleum Institute, has a memo to his party — it risks losing control of the House in 2022 if it continues to be associated with the Green New Deal.
It’s a convenient position for Marter, of course, given he is employed by the nation’s largest oil and gas lobby.
But his concerns are shared by other centrists who powered Democrats to the House majority in 2018, such as Rep. Conor Lamb of Pennsylvania, who blamed liberals for the party’s failure to pick up seats this year and suggested their hostile rhetoric on fossil fuels is damaging.
“Leading Democratic officials are sounding the alarm that an urgent course correction is needed if Democrats hope to hold the House majority in 2022,” Marter wrote in a memo he shared exclusively with Josh, which he intends to share with stakeholders on Capitol Hill. “It is these voices that will hold the keys to preserving that majority.”
Marter, a former staffer for Sen. Dick Durbin, the second-ranked Democrat, argued that Republicans were able to shrink the size of his party’s majority by winning in races in which energy issues were prominent.
“It’s no coincidence that in each of the states where Democrats fell short, energy is a critical economic pillar for local communities and a job creator for thousands of families,” Marter wrote. “It’s clear that a failure to push back forcefully against extreme policies like the Green New Deal and to articulate a strong economic message focused on jobs and low energy costs were deciding factors in many of these races.”
For example, GOP state senator Stephanie Bice unseated freshman Democrat Rep. Kendra Horn in a heavy oil-producing district.
Horn had tried to separate herself from President-elect Joe Biden’s debate comment that he’d like to transition away from oil. But Bice still portrayed Horn as a tool of Democrats who voted in Congress to restrict oil and gas drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and supported Obama-era environmental regulations.
Republican Yvette Herrell defeated incumbent Democratic Rep. Xochitl Torres Small in a rematch election after losing her New Mexico House district when the two faced off in 2018.
The district’s economic connection to the fossil fuel industry prompted Torres Small to distance herself from Biden’s clean energy plans, which includes banning new drilling on federal lands — prominent in New Mexico — a policy that API strongly opposed and ran ads against.
Marter also cites comments from long-time centrist Democratic Rep. Henry Cuellar of Texas, who held onto his seat but blamed the rhetoric of liberals on energy issues for boosting President Trump’s performance in blue Texas counties bordering Mexico. “You can’t go in and get rid of jobs,” Cuellar told Axios.
Counterpoint: More liberal Democrats argue that Biden’s win was keyed by strong turnout from young people who were inspired by his aggressive climate agenda. It’s also worth noting that Trump distorted Democrats’ positions, inaccurately claiming Biden would ban all fracking and that he favored the Green New Deal.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said recently that House Democrats path to keeping and expanding their majority runs through more strongly defending liberal positions she argues are broadly popular.
“Co-sponsoring the Green New Deal was not a sinker,” she told the New York Times, noting Rep. Mike Levin of California, original co-sponsor, kept his seat.
Welcome to Daily on Energy, written by Washington Examiner Energy and Environment Writers Josh Siegel (@SiegelScribe) and Abby Smith (@AbbySmithDC). Email [email protected] or [email protected] for tips, suggestions, calendar items, and anything else. If a friend sent this to you and you’d like to sign up, click here. If signing up doesn’t work, shoot us an email, and we’ll add you to our list.
NUCLEAR IS ALL THE RAGE, EVEN FOR BIDEN: Biden is poised to embrace nuclear power and will look to build upon the Trump administration’s support for new smaller forms of the technology, Josh reports in a story this morning.
Biden’s support for nuclear power, as articulated in his climate plan and affirmed in the Democratic Party platform, promises to be one of the rare instances of energy policy continuity between the incoming and outgoing administrations.
“He has an opportunity to build on the bipartisan support in Congress for advanced nuclear and help bring these decarbonization tools to market,” said Jeff Navin, a former acting chief of staff at the Energy Department during the Obama administration.
Republicans have long favored nuclear power, but it is increasingly being supported by Democrats, who realize wind and solar are insufficient to decarbonize the power grid, since renewables cannot deliver 24-hour electricity.
What Biden would do: Biden’s climate plan calls for creating a clean energy innovation office within the Department of Energy, dubbed ARPA-C (the “C” stands for climate) that would seek to enable small nuclear reactors to reach half the construction cost of today’s reactors. A joint task force Biden set up with Sen. Bernie Sanders, a liberal nuclear skeptic, even endorsed investing in advanced nuclear.
“Given the rapidly increasing severity of the climate crisis, you have seen a broadening of support for the technologies it will take to bring the crisis under control,” said Dan Reicher, a candidate to be Biden’s secretary of the Energy Department.
Watch for Congress: Nuclear is one of the few areas where you can get bipartisan bills through the Senate, given GOP support.
Sen. John Barrasso, likely set to chair the Energy Committee next year (see more on that below), just introduced a bill to keep alive old reactors while also further cutting regulatory barriers to approving new technologies.
“Nuclear must be a central part” of climate policy next Congress, he told Josh.
ENERGY COMMITTEE SHAKEUP: Barrasso announced his intent yesterday to lead Republicans on the Senate Energy Committee next year, seeking to take over the top slot from term-limited Sen. Lisa Murkowski.
His move would open up the top GOP spot on the Senate Environment Committee, expected to be filled by West Virginia Republican Sen. Shelley Moore Capito. She would be the first woman to hold the Republican leadership position on that panel and the second-ever woman to chair the committee, behind Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer, if Republicans keep the Senate.
Barrasso, who already sits on the Energy Committee, is likely to maintain a focus on low-carbon technologies such as carbon capture and advanced nuclear that Murkowski has also strongly backed. However, he might not lean as far into broader policy discussions as Murkowski, who has recently expressed an openness to consider policies like carbon pricing and talks frequently of how warming oceans, melting ice, and other climate change effects are harming her state.
CHATTERJEE’S MIC DROP: The recently demoted FERC commissioner Neil Chatterjee took advantage of a late starting commission meeting this morning by delivering a lengthy speech on his greatest hits as chairman and indirectly criticizing his replacement, James Danly.
“Some might prefer to ignore the pressing questions of the day. I prefer to address them head-on,” Chatterjee said, arguing that FERC has an obligation to address climate change, the “preeminent issue of our time” and reiterating his view that his carbon pricing action “cost me the gavel.”
Danly dissented from the carbon pricing statement and also opposed a Chatterjee-led rule opening FERC’s power markets to distributed energy sources.
Chatterjee, who previously worked on energy policy for Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell, also congratulated Biden for his election win, something his former boss won’t do. Chatteree said Biden as vice president “always made a point to step in and check in on me although I was an insignificant staffer.”
In business news: FERC voted today to reject a rehearing request on its revisions to the rules that govern the 1978 Public Utilities Regulatory Policies Act, or PURPA.
Chatterjee and Danly carried the vote, with FERC’s lone Democrat, Richard Glick, dissenting. Glick said FERC’s changes would gut the statute and harm developers of small renewable energy projects.
GOVERNMENT EFFORTS ARE RUNNING WELL BEHIND PARIS AGREEMENT TARGETS: Governments will have to put in place policies to dramatically accelerate emissions reductions across all sectors of the economy, even the power sector, where decarbonization has occurred more quickly in recent years, to keep warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, the World Resources Institute and ClimateWorks Foundation said in a new report today.
The report, which judges sectors’ progress based on the Climate Action Tracker, says many sectors of the economy are headed in a direction to lower emissions, but much too slowly. For example, to meet the 1.5-degree target, the report finds the world would have to ramp up renewable energy’s share of electricity and phase out coal power five times faster than it is already. The world would also have to speed up adoption of electric cars 22 times faster than current rates, the report says.
In two areas, too, the world would need to make a full U-turn: stopping deforestation and addressing agricultural emissions, which the report notes are still increasing.
“To be able to avoid the worst climate change impacts and limit warming to 1.5 [degrees], you have such a small carbon budget left by midcentury that it means that no matter where your starting point is, you’re falling down to negligible emissions by midcentury,” said Kelly Levin, a senior associate at WRI and a lead author of the report. That would be a “significant departure from our current way of living.”
Levin told Abby she is encouraged by recent trends of governments ramping up their climate targets, including Asian countries like China and Japan. But she said next year, when countries are set to detail stronger targets under the Paris Agreement and will be spending big on pandemic recovery, will be critical.
“We are running out of time,” Levin added. “There is a challenge that if we don’t increase action in the short term, that we can lock in carbon intensive infrastructure that will last for decades.”
RELATED…PANDEMIC GIVES UNITED STATES ANOTHER SHOT AT PARIS TARGETS: U.S. emissions are set to drop 9% this year due to the coronavirus pandemic, “inadvertently” giving the U.S. a second chance at meeting the emissions target set out by the Obama administration under the Paris climate agreement, BloombergNEF says in a new report today.
Prior to this year, the U.S. was “well off track” with the goal to cut emissions 26% to 28% by 2025, BNEF says. The 9% dip in emissions this year, nearly all of it due to the pandemic alone, brings the U.S. in line with the Paris Agreement pathway. Without the pandemic, U.S. emissions would have fallen just 1%, largely due to changes in the power sector, BNEF estimates.
If disruptions due to the pandemic continue into next year, BNEF expects U.S. emissions to be 5% lower than in 2019. Nonetheless, the Biden administration would need to make much more aggressive policy commitments to reduce emissions outside the power sector in order to achieve the 2025 target, BNEF adds.
INDUSTRY PUSHES COOLANT BILL DURING LAME DUCK: The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, and appliance industry groups are calling on Congress to pass bipartisan legislation limiting potent greenhouse gas refrigerants known as hydrofluorocarbons, or HFCs, before the end of the year.
Disagreement over the HFC bill had initially hung up broader energy legislation from advancing in March, but Barrasso, the main critic of the measure, and his Democratic counterpart Sen. Tom Carper have since struck a deal that would allow the bill to move forward. However, neither the HFC measure nor the broader energy package have been taken up since then.
“Securing a federal HFC phase down now would settle an uncertain regulatory landscape,” the industry groups and the Natural Resources Defense Council wrote in a letter to congressional leaders yesterday.
It’s likely Biden would work on policies to restrict HFCs. He could make quick progress by sending a global agreement limiting HFCs to the Senate for ratification. The Trump White House has refused to advance that deal, negotiated by the Obama administration, despite bipartisan and industry support.
The Rundown
Bloomberg Biden urged to make Haaland first Native American in cabinet
Washington Post New Trump administration rules could allow more logging and roadbuilding in the nation’s forests
Wall Street Journal PG&E taps Michigan utility leader to become next CEO
Reuters Desperate for fuel, Venezuelans steal PDVSA crude and make their own gasoline
Calendar
THURSDAY | NOV. 19
The House and Senate are out.
