President Joe Biden won’t accede to left-wing environmentalist requests to exclude carbon capture and nuclear power from his green infrastructure plans, the top White House climate official said Tuesday.
National climate adviser Gina McCarthy said that Biden will instead find other ways to address the worries raised by activists that those technologies wouldn’t address the pollution harming poorer and minority regions. For instance, the administration will pursue stricter mandates on air pollution coming from power plant smokestacks.
Biden “is interested in an all-of-the-above strategy. He really wants to make sure that we have options and opportunities,” McCarthy said during remarks Tuesday at a virtual summit hosted by Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy.
LEFT-WING ACTIVISTS DEMAND DEMOCRATS EXCLUDE NUCLEAR AND CARBON CAPTURE FROM CLIMATE BILL
However, McCarthy said that doesn’t mean Biden will “be blind” to the harms that conventional air pollutants, abundant in power plant smokestacks, cause especially poorer and minority regions. She added the Biden administration intends to regulate those pollutants more strictly.
McCarthy’s comments come in response to concerns raised recently by left-wing climate groups and the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council that certain low-carbon technologies, including carbon capture, direct air capture, and nuclear power, would not alleviate the pollution burden borne by poorer and minority people. Those groups and the council are calling on the Biden administration to avoid investing in those technologies.
Their push is at odds with the view of many centrist environmental groups and top Biden officials, who say the United States won’t meet its aggressive climate goals, including carbon-free power by 2035, without zero-carbon technologies that can run 24/7 and tackle emissions from hard-to-abate sectors such as heavy industry.
The rift could pose challenges for the Biden administration as it attempts to advance its infrastructure package, which includes massive investments for clean energy innovation and is likely the best chance to pass major policy to curb emissions in the near term.
McCarthy, in her remarks, acknowledged the concerns raised by the White House environmental justice advisers, pointing to a draft report they released last week in which they were “very clear on what they liked and didn’t like.”
In that report, the advisers categorized investments in carbon capture and storage, direct air capture, the procurement of nuclear power, “research and development,” “the establishment or advancement of carbon markets, including cap and trade,” industrial-scale bioenergy, and other technologies as ones that “will not benefit a community.”
McCarthy said carbon capture technologies are “add-ons to fossil fuel use that can tend to reduce and manage greenhouse gases but do very little to reduce the other pollutants that are disproportionately hurting environmental justice communities.”
But she stressed that carbon capture, as well as technologies such as nuclear energy and hydrogen, are within the scope of the Biden administration’s climate plans.
“We’re not taking anything off the table,” McCarthy said. The Biden administration will instead seek to “combine” clean energy investments with stronger pollution protections to address the concerns raised by activists, she added.
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In addition, McCarthy said maintaining existing nuclear plants, so long as they are “environmentally sound,” is critical to ensuring a “stable baseload system” as intermittent wind and solar begin powering more of the electricity grid. The Biden administration is weighing subsidies to keep the existing nuclear fleet, which is struggling to compete economically with cheap natural gas, online.
“We’re not going to look at this naively and start saying, ‘Let’s shut stuff down and shift over,’” McCarthy said. “We’re going to do it in a deliberate but expedited way.”
