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CLIMATE DIPLOMATS: President-elect Joe Biden‘s plans for climate diplomacy are coming into view with the naming of top personnel.
Former Secretary of State John Kerry will be the Biden administration’s “climate envoy,” the transition team announced today.
And Biden’s nominee for secretary of state, Anthony Blinken, is someone who will look to coalesce international partners to tackle climate change, in a sharp break from the Trump administration.
“Simply put, the big problems that we face as a country and as a planet, whether it’s climate change, whether it’s a pandemic, whether it’s the spread of bad weapons — to state the obvious, none of these have unilateral solutions,” Blinken said at a Hudson Institute forum in July. “Even a country as powerful as the United States can’t handle them alone.”
Blinken, a former deputy secretary of state under President Barack Obama, is a centrist institutionalist who would return to pursuing the multilateral climate cooperation that helped produce the Paris agreement.
At the Hudson Institute forum, he endorsed Biden’s plan for the U.S. to reach net-zero emissions by 2050, calling it a “number one priority.” But he said taking care of pollution at home “doesn’t solve the problem if the rest of the world is 85% of global emissions.”
Having a strong domestic climate regime would enable the U.S. to “leverage our economic and moral authority to push the world to take more determined action.”
He’d start by rallying countries to make stronger updated commitments to the Paris deal, while also pressuring China — which beat the U.S. with a carbon neutrality target — to stop financing coal exports through the Belt and Road initiative.
Blinken also cited a commitment to “locking in” enforceable targets to reduce emissions in global shipping and aviation while “pursuing stronger measures to make sure that other nations can’t undercut the United States economically as we meet our own commitments.” That, presumably, is a shout-out to imposing a border carbon adjustment on products from overseas.
The world seems ready to embrace Biden’s approach: A closing statement issued after the G-20 Summit this weekend, a meeting of the 20 most industrialized nations, called climate change one of “the most pressing challenges of our time” and included new language on the role of financial regulators in addressing climate risk.
It said the Financial Stability Board, a group of international regulators, was “continuing to examine the financial stability implications” of the issue. The Trump administration had protested such language in the past linking the economy to climate change.
President Trump, meanwhile, railed against the Paris agreement from the sidelines, delivering a video address touting his withdrawal “from the unfair and one-sided” accord, which Biden is poised to quickly rejoin.
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.
TRUMP’S EFFORT TO KEEP MONEY FLOWING TO FOSSIL FUELS: A new proposal floated by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency on Friday would prohibit large U.S. banks from restricting specific industries from access to lending and other financial services.
While the proposal isn’t specific to energy companies, it follows outcry from Republican lawmakers that banks were declining to support fossil fuel companies. In fact, the proposal itself cites a letter from Alaska GOP lawmakers over the summer slamming banks for “unfairly” targeting the oil and gas industry by refusing to invest in new drilling in the Arctic.
In its proposal, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency said banks are “unequipped” to balance risks such as climate change that are “unrelated” to financial exposure.
The clock is ticking for the Trump administration, however. If the rule isn’t finalized by Jan. 20, Biden could, and likely would, easily drop it. The agency is taking comment on the proposal through Jan. 4, giving the Trump administration just 16 days to turn around a final version (a near impossible feat in the regulatory world).
More on the proposal in Abby’s story from Friday.
FOLLOW THE $$ TRAIL: The fossil fuel industry received between $10.4 billion and $15.2 billion in loans, tax breaks, and waived fees through pandemic-related economic aid programs, according to an analysis this morning by Bailout Watch, Public Citizen, and Friends of the Earth. The industry also got indirect help through $432 million of Federal Reserve corporate debt purchases. More than 26,000 coal, oil, and gas companies benefited from some type of stimulus aid, with the majority of those getting support from the Paycheck Protection Program.
“By directing aid to companies whose problems long predated the pandemic, the government has artificially prolonged the industry’s decline and postponed the coming transition to clean energy sources,” the activist groups said.
EFFICIENCY GROUPS’ WISH LIST FOR BIDEN: The incoming Biden administration can take major action to improve energy efficiency and save billions of tons of carbon emissions even without Congress, by strengthening appliance efficiency standards and setting new efficiency requirements for homes, 20 clean energy groups wrote in a letter to Biden today.
The next round of appliance efficiency standards alone could avoid as much as 3 billion tons of carbon emissions by 2050, wrote the groups, which include Advanced Energy Economy, the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, Natural Resources Defense Council, and Sierra Club.
The groups are also calling on Biden to update energy efficiency criteria for new federally assisted housing and home loans made by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, as well as set new efficiency standards for manufactured homes. They are also encouraging Biden to issue an executive order setting new goals for federal agencies to improve the efficiency of their buildings and strive for zero-carbon new buildings.
EFFECTS OF LIFTING THE CRUDE OIL EXPORT BAN: After Congress lifted the crude oil export ban in a budget deal in 2015, the U.S. oil export market, unsurprisingly, expanded dramatically — from 465,000 barrels per day to 10 countries in 2015 to nearly 3 million barrels per day to 43 countries as of last year.
That’s according to a Government Accountability Office report released Friday. The expanded export market in turn further incentivized domestic oil production, which increased by roughly one-third over the last four years, and allowed the U.S. industry to charge higher prices, according to the report, which was requested by Democratic Sens. Tom Carper and Ed Markey.
Lifting the export ban had little effect on U.S. refined products, however, the GAO found. In fact, the GAO said lifting the export ban likely reduced U.S. refiners’ profit margins, in part because they had to pay higher prices for domestically produced crude.
In addition, the GAO found that lifting the export ban decreased demand for so-called Jones Act tankers, or ships that move cargo between U.S. ports. As exports rose, U.S. producers largely used foreign vessels to ship their product because their operating costs are typically cheaper, the report noted.
HOUSE DEMOCRATS PROBE PEBBLE MINE’S HONESTY: Top Democrats on the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee are questioning whether executives for the Pebble Mine project in Alaska were telling lawmakers one thing publicly and investors something else entirely in private.
“Pebble appears to have shuffled its deck of facts depending on the players at the table,” wrote House Transportation Committee Chair Peter DeFazio and water and environment subcommittee Chair Grace Napolitano in separate letters Friday to Pebble’s interim CEO and a top official at the Army Corps of Engineers overseeing permitting of the project. They later called Pebble executives’ public statements “disingenuous, misleading and potentially illegal.”
Trip down memory lane: The Pebble project, which would be the largest gold and copper mine in North America, has run into several hurdles on its way to a final permit, including opposition from prominent conservatives such as Donald Trump Jr. The Army Corps in August said the project developers must take additional measures to mitigate harms to wetlands and streams before receiving approval.
The lawmakers’ letter comes after an environmental group released secretly recorded tapes of conversations with executives for the Pebble project attempting to woo investors. In those tapes, the executives made comments contrary to their public statements, including that they’d seek to expand the project. Following the tapes’ release, Pebble chief executive Tom Collier stepped down, and Alaska Republican Sens. Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan came out strongly against the project.
Democrats’ probe, however, could quickly become moot. Biden has said he would reject the Pebble project.
The Rundown
Bloomberg The secret origins of China’s 40-year plan to end carbon emissions
Axios Environmental group pushes new clean-energy tax credit
Associated Press Charleston weighs wall as seas rise and storms strengthen
Reuters Pipe dreams leave US energy firms caught in climate trap
Roll Call Wasserman Schultz makes climate pitch in Appropriations gavel bid
Reuters Plotting future, U.S. biofuel industry seeks federal clean fuel program from Biden
Calendar
MONDAY | NOV. 23
The House and Senate are out.
