The top Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee say they have successfully “reset” the conversation about climate change on Capitol Hill, promoting private sector innovation as an alternative to Democratic ideas favoring regulation, taxes, or mandates.
But Greg Walden of Oregon, the panel’s ranking Republican, and John Shimkus of Illinois, the No. 2 GOP member, won’t be around in Congress to realize whether voters perceive their party as finally taking the issue seriously after neglecting it for years.
“We have made real progress,” said Walden, 63, who is retiring along with Shimkus, 62, in January. “We have made clear that Republicans have innovation at the head of our agenda. We frankly have shook up the Democrats and gotten the debate where it needs to be: in a better place.”
Walden, the former chairman of the GOP campaign arm, and Shimkus, the top Republican on the Environment and Climate Change Subcommittee, reflected on the climate change agenda they helped spearhead in a rare joint interview with the Washington Examiner.
“We have been able to put out and help educate people on the success of private sector investments without heavy-handed government, without government taxing fossil fuels or setting up cap-and-trade or mandates,” Shimkus said.
Since the rollout of the Left’s Green New Deal, the GOP leaders of the committee have shifted their tone in order to respond to polling showing the vulnerability of Republicans among young and suburban voters concerned about the environment and climate change.
Walden and Shimkus, with the backing of House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy and Garret Graves, top Republican of a special select climate committee, have introduced an agenda to counter global warming focused on four “buckets”: innovation, conservation, adaptation, and preparation.
In February, House Republicans unveiled a legislative package intended to represent the first plank of their climate agenda, focused on using trees and technology to capture carbon emissions.
But the pandemic disrupted the rollout of the rest of the GOP agenda.
Instead, party leaders have mostly focused in recent months ahead of the election criticizing the plans of Democrats and their presidential nominee Joe Biden, which Republicans view as expensive and potentially disruptive to the reliability of the electricity system, pointing to the recent blackouts in California.
Walden and Shimkus, along with most Republicans, opposed a Democratic clean energy innovation bill that passed the House this week, ridiculing it as comparable to the Green New Deal even though it contains several bipartisan bills passed by their committee.
“You cannot dismiss that if you go too aggressively, the impact that has on grid reliability,” Walden said. “If you shut down nuclear, coal, and hate gas, there are consequences.”
But that defensive approach risks ceding the issue to Democrats, the fate Walden and Shimkus had hoped to avoid. Biden and Democratic leaders Chuck Schumer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi have promised to make climate change a top legislative priority if they win full power in 2021. Democrats have united around an agenda that would phase out fossil fuels from the electricity sector through mandates, seeking to reach net-zero emissions across the economy by midcentury while increasing federal spending on renewable technologies and electric vehicles.
President Trump has made the task harder for Republicans to carve their own path on the issue by refusing to acknowledge the role of climate change in recent extreme weather events and recently suggested without evidence that the Earth will “start getting cooler.”
Shimkus, who represents a rural district along the Indiana border that’s long depended on coal and nuclear power, acknowledged that Trump’s rhetoric is challenging to overcome. He has fought with Trump before over other issues, criticizing the president’s withdrawal of U.S. troops from the Syria-Turkey border last year as “despicable.”
“For us, it’s, ‘See what we do, not what we say,’” Shimkus said. “I have always had challenges with this president. He’s the head of our party by definition. I can see why there are some conflicting thoughts on what we as a party are doing. But most members will run on their record.”
Walden and Shimkus are eager to tout a dozen emissions-cutting bipartisan bills they’ve proposed as short-term options for Congress to address in an election year, including measures boosting small nuclear reactors, long-duration energy storage projects, natural gas exports, and carbon capture.
But Walden and Shimkus suggested that even in retirement, they won’t endorse more comprehensive policies such as carbon pricing or a clean electricity standard that Democrats and scientists say are needed to avert the worst consequences of climate change.
“I would try to do the right things for the right reasons, so it doesn’t matter if I am coming or going,” Walden said. “I prefer an incentive approach to a hit-them-upside-the-head approach. In my core, I am more a free market person who thinks these companies will respond to market forces and get there.”
The Republican duo said they foresee no need for the United States to set a target for zeroing out its emissions, saying that companies and states have established their own goals. China, the only country that emits more than the U.S., surprised the world this week by committing to carbon neutrality by 2060.
“You can’t turn on NFL games anymore without having companies talk about how they can get to net-zero,” Shimkus said. “You cannot compare a republic to a dictatorship,” he added, dismissing the sincerity of China.
