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CLIMATE MEASURES IN THE INFRASTRUCTURE BILL: Some liberals have dismissed the $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill — containing $550 billion in new spending — as not being a “climate bill” and continued that charge over the weekend after the House finally passed the bill with the support of 13 Republicans, pushing it to President Joe Biden for his signature.
New modeling by the REPEAT Project, an initiative of Princeton University, found that the bipartisan Infrastructure bill on its own would barely affect U.S. emissions this decade.
But that’s not the point, proponents say, and such claims discount what the legislation means in the larger picture when passed as a precursor to Democrats’ larger spending bill. That second measure includes a record $555 billion of green tax subsidies and other “carrots” for clean energy.
Sasha Mackler, executive director of the energy project at the Bipartisan Policy Center, said the value in the bipartisan bill is that it enables the buildout of infrastructure like transmission lines to deliver wind and solar power and pipelines to transport captured carbon dioxide that can help facilitate the deployment of more clean energy.
“This is really an investment in the long-term and creating the enabling infrastructure to make those other pieces happen more quickly and affordably,” Mackler told Josh.
Reminder of what’s in the bill. The bipartisan legislation would fully fund more than a dozen clean energy demonstration projects originally authorized under the Energy Act of 2020 approved at the end of last year, including for long-duration energy storage, advanced nuclear reactors, carbon capture, and direct air capture. These technologies are farther out from being widely commercialized, so it’s difficult to model the emissions cuts they’d produce if all came to fruition.
But coupling that funding with clean energy tax credits will likely help get the new technologies to wide adoption and scale, Mackler said.
The bill also creates a nearly $5 billion program to combat methane emissions by employing oil workers to plug leaking “orphan” oil and gas wells, and establishes the first-ever credit program providing subsidies to keep alive struggling nuclear plants, preserving the nation’s largest source of zero-carbon power.
The bipartisan bill contains $7.5 billion for the first federal effort to help build a network of EV chargers across the country, and supports the creation of hydrogen and direct air capture infrastructure hubs.
And it creates a new “Grid Authority” within the Energy Department to speed the approval process for transmission lines, which can take up to a decade, and also gives leeway for DOE to designate corridors of national interest, permitting quicker construction.
This is all just on the mitigation side of the ledger: The infrastructure bill, in an initiative championed by Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, provides $47 billion supporting measures for cities and states to protect against the effects of climate change, the most in U.S. history earmarked towards so-called “resilience” or “adaptation.”
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WHITE HOUSE TEASES IMMINENT ACTION ON GASOLINE PRICES: The Biden administration is talking more urgently about taking action to address high gasoline prices, with Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm teasing this morning an “announcement” this week.
“He’s certainly looking at what options he has in the limited range of tools a president might have to address the cost of gasoline at the pump, because it is a global market,” Granholm told MSNBC of Biden.
Biden as recently as last month acknowledged there is little he can do, at least in the short-term, and warned that gas prices won’t come down this year.
That’s because OPEC+ has rejected his calls to increase oil production in order to ease a tight global market that has caused pump prices to rise in the U.S.
Whatever Biden does will likely only matter on the margins: Any administration action would be intended to display to the public it is doing something to combat high prices at a time when consumers are preoccupied with inflation and Republicans are warning Biden’s agenda to limit the use of fossil fuels will make things worse.
“Part of what they are doing is trying to show they care,” Kevin Book, managing director of ClearView Energy Partners, a research group, told Josh. “They are working hard to be sympathetic to the marginal drivers and voters that will be part of close elections in 2022.”
Few good options: ClearView Energy noted in a report this morning its “growing expectation” for the Biden Administration to sell crude oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.
Releasing oil from the nation’s emergency SPR, a move usually reserved for supply disruptions like a national disaster, likely won’t make much of a difference either.
ClearView also floated Democrats pursuing passage of the long-touted “NOPEC” bill that would open up the cartel to antitrust lawsuits, potentially leaving it vulnerable to paying billions of dollars in repatriations.
The No Oil Producing and Exporting Cartels or NOPEC Act, that has been introduced in every Congress over the past 20 years, but never signed into law. Threatening to pass NOPEC may prove more viable than actually passing it, ClearView notes, since cratering oil prices too much would be bad for the U.S. economic recovery, and it would risk alienating Saudi Arabia, the leader of OPEC and nominal ally.
SHELDON WHITEHOUSE CLAIMS ALL BUT MANCHIN BACK CARBON TAX: Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse is keeping the dream alive of a carbon tax emerging as part of the Build Back Better Act.
At least 49 senators support a proposal to add a $20 per-ton fee on carbon to Democrats’ climate and social spending legislation, Whitehouse told Bloomberg on the sidelines of COP26 over the weekend.
“We have 49 out of 50 votes,” the Democrat from Rhode Island said. If the Senate passes it, “the House has assured us they will also pass it, and the White House has assured us the president will sign it into law.”
Whitehouse has previously told Josh as part of the Plugged in Podcast with co-host Neil Chatterjee that a carbon price is “highly likely” to be included in Democrats’ spending package.
To ensure a carbon price doesn’t violate Biden’s pledge to not raise taxes on people making less than $400,000 a year, Democrats and the White House are working to exempt gasoline from the tax, Whitehouse told us.
Elephant in the room: The problem remains that the one senator in question, Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, is the only who matters in a divided Senate where Democrats can’t lose any of their own. We’ve heard nothing to suggest Manchin would come around to support a carbon tax after killing Democrats’ previous attempt at restraining fossil fuels through the clean electricity performance program.
And Republicans oppose the broader reconciliation package.
“If there is going to be a fee on carbon as a transformational policy, it will only come about if it is bipartisan,” GOP Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska said during an Atlantic Council event in Glasgow on Saturday, warning a carbon tax would not be “enduring” if passed on a partisan basis. “No one is going to make the investment. They are going to wait to the next administration to see who is in charge.”
OBAMA DROPS IN AT COP26: Former President Barack Obama took the stage in Glasgow today where he urged nations — and Republicans — to do more to mitigate climate change.
Obama said the globe has seen good progress in the years since the Paris Agreement was signed but that the “ratcheting up of ambition that we anticipated in Paris six years ago has not been uniformly realized,” adding that Russia’s and China’s decarbonization goals demonstrate a “willingness to maintain the status quo.”
He went on to draw comparisons between his own tenure and the difficulty Biden has had in fully enacting his energy and climate change agenda, posed by a lack of “robust majority” in Congress.
“Both of us have been constrained in large part by the fact that one of our two major parties has decided not only to sit on the sidelines but express active hostility toward climate science and make climate change a partisan issue,” he said.
COP WEEK ONE ENDS WITH NEW PLEDGES ON AGRICULTURE: Week One of COP 26 ended with an announcement that twenty-six nations made new commitments to find ways to cut pollution from agriculture and land use.
Governments ranging from Germany to India and Brazil agreed to make changes to farming practices in support of the conference’s “Declaration on Forests and Land Use,” which was agreed to last week by more than 130 nations and seeks to stop and reverse global deforestation by 2030.
ELECTRIC VEHICLE SALES HEADED FOR RECORD: Global electric vehicle sales are projected to exceed 7 million this year, more than twice the 3.2 million sold in 2020.
New EV purchases in China are driving global sales, according to research firm Rystad Energy. Of the 700,000 EVs sold around the world in September, more than 340,000 were in China.
FUSION STARTUP ENJOYS BIG FUNDING BOOST: Washington-based nuclear fusion startup Helion has raised $500 million in new capital as it pursues an aggressive target of 2024 for demonstrating net electricity generation with its Polaris fusion generator.
ITHACA, NEW YORK, AIMS TO DECARBONIZE ALL OF ITS BUILDINGS: The home of Cornell University and some 30,000 residents is moving forward with a first-of-its-kind program aimed at cutting the carbon emissions of its 6,000 residential and commercial buildings.
The voluntary program involves the retrofitting of homes and businesses with better insulation and electric appliances and supports the city’s goal to fully decarbonize its economy by 2030.
The Rundown
Washington Post Countries climate pledges built on flawed data
Washington Post COP26 climate summit shifts from pomp and promises to difficult negotiations
New York Times In fate of oil field, climate activists and energy executives see future
Wall Street Journal Natural-gas exports lift prices for U.S. utilities ahead of winter
Politico EU’s looming carbon tax nudged Turkey toward Paris climate accord, envoy says
Calendar
MONDAY | NOV. 8
The House and Senate are out.
