Dan Brouillette, the Energy secretary in the Trump administration, says President Biden’s climate envoy John Kerry is “misguided” to think he can set aside the biggest confrontations with China to cooperate on combating climate change.
“China is going to play them,” Brouillette told the Washington Examiner in a wide-ranging interview.
Brouillette, in office from 2019 until January, has spent the weeks since he left vacationing with his family in Tennessee as he decides his next plans.
But that hasn’t stopped him from watching Biden’s first weeks in office.
The Biden administration has signaled it wants to continue former President Donald Trump’s tough line on China over issues such as trade, intellectual property theft, and market access. But Kerry, who celebrated the U.S. return to the Paris Agreement on Friday, is banking on treating climate as a “standalone issue,” given China’s importance in enabling the world to meet emissions reduction goals.
AMID TEXAS BLACKOUTS, DEMOCRATIC ENERGY REGULATORS DISMISS GOP EFFORT TO ENSURE GRID ‘RESILIENCE’
Kerry has compared the scenario to President Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev negotiating over nuclear arms in 1986. China and the United States, the world’s top emitters and largest economies, represent as much as 45% of global emissions.
However, Brouillette doesn’t trust China’s pledge to reach carbon neutrality by 2060. To get on that path, critics say, China should be aiming to reduce emissions this decade, not just stop growing them, by reducing its consumption of coal.
“They will agree to some 2060 target and have no intention of meeting any of it,” Brouillette said. “If they can get relief on the trade side and make some cockamamie commitment for 2060, they will do it. The Chinese are pretty sophisticated players and see through these comments [from Kerry].”
Brouillette also criticized Biden’s executive action to pause oil and gas leasing on public lands and waters. Lost production, he said, would be replaced elsewhere, meaning emissions won’t fall much globally.
“If we end production in the U.S., you will slow the transition of places like China and India [from coal] to natural gas,” Brouillette said. “As a result, we won’t have anywhere near the carbon reductions we think we’ll have.”
Brouillette, a Texas native, was closely following the power shortage crisis happening in his home state this week. He did not follow other Republicans in blaming renewables for failing to keep the lights on (coal and natural gas represented more than half of the power that dropped offline during Texas’s energy crisis).
But he advised Biden to emphasize grid resilience as part of his infrastructure investment agenda, which is expected to include efforts to modernize the grid against worsening extreme weather events from climate change.
“If President Biden is going to do big public funding of infrastructure, resiliency needs to be part of the conversation,” Brouillette said.
Brouillette was the deputy under Trump’s first energy secretary, Rick Perry, when the agency proposed a controversial measure encouraging federal energy regulators to subsidize financially struggling coal and nuclear plants in the name of resilience, claiming these plants deserve higher payments for their ability to store fuel on-site as backup in the event of a disaster.
But that did not stop coal plants and nuclear units in Texas from succumbing to frozen equipment after not being weatherized for the cold.
“We never pretended to have the absolute right idea,” Brouillette said of his and Perry’s resilience proposal. “We just wanted to have the discussion.”
Brouillette was also less willing than Perry, a former governor of Texas, to defend the state’s go-at-it-alone approach to managing its grid, which some link to this week’s failures. Texas operates its own grid, mostly free from oversight by federal regulators, a point of pride that Perry said this week means citizens of the state would accept being without electricity to “keep the federal government out of their business.”
But whereas power plants in the Northeast and the Midwest weatherize for the cold out of necessity, there’s no commercial incentive for Texas facilities to do so.
“There are always going to be events that drive load levels like we are seeing now,” said Brouillette, alluding to high demand for electricity. “If you are willing to accept that, and your consumers are, perhaps a free market model works like in Texas. The question becomes, are you comfortable with that price volatility? If you’re not, buy a bit of insurance to take the edges off the highs and the lows.”
Turning back to the Biden administration, Brouillette said he’s encouraged by the rhetoric of his presumed successor, Jennifer Granholm, who is awaiting her confirmation vote to lead the Energy Department.
Brouillette says he has no problem with Granholm’s plans to focus the Energy Department on promoting the development of electric vehicles as a way to revive the U.S. manufacturing base and create new jobs in clean energy.
“I wish her the best of luck,” Brouillette said. “She is going to have her prerogatives. Elections have consequences, and she is entitled to move the department how she wants to.”
READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER HERE
Like other Republicans, Brouillette endorsed a recent Biden climate announcement to provide $100 million in funding through the Energy Department’s innovation hub, known as ARPA-E, for early-stage research in “cutting-edge, disruptive” clean energy technologies. He credited the Biden team for broadening the focus of its $100 million solicitation to include technologies beyond wind and solar, including advanced nuclear power and machines to help capture emissions from fossil fuels.
“Absolutely, it’s the right approach,” Brouillette said.
