How Congress Can Get Past Posturing as Energy and Climate Crises Collide
President Biden is caught between fuel-price spikes and wider inflation and his climate pledges and party divisions. With midterms looming, where do Democrats go from here?
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UPDATED - Please watch and share this Columbia Climate School Sustain What brainstorm on issues and options for energy and climate policy with Republicans still in complete resistance mode and Democrats' tenuous hold on Congress imperiled by inflation and internal divisions.
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My guests were U.S. Representative Sean Casten, who represents the Sixth District of Illinois and is a member of the House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis; Amy Myers Jaffe, a research professor and managing director of the Climate Policy Lab at Tufts University's Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy; Nina Ignaczak, who covers climate with a focus on the Upper Midwest as founder, publisher, and executive editor of Planet Detroit and through her Bulletin newsletter Michigan Climate News; and Antonio Mora, an Emmy Award-winning journalist who writes his A View from the Center newsletter at Bulletin and is best known for his work as news anchor on Good Morning America and Chicago's CBS affiliate WBBM-TV.
Needless to say, there was much to discuss given President Joe Biden's bind trying to fight surging fuel prices by boosting supplies even as climate reports and climate campaigners say swift cuts in fossil fuel use are more urgently needed than ever to slow global warming.
Everyone made vital points. Here's a highlight from Casten to watch or read, centered on the reality that President Biden can still make a case for a grand push toward a future in which the United States is longer dependent on climate-heating fossil fuels or beholden to dictators or volatile global markets:
First he described what he will and won't debate with his counterparts across the aisle:
"There are truths in the world"
"When you have a party committed to the idea that climate change is not urgent, that we don't need to deal with this, that we're just going to plant trees, I cannot look my children in the eye if I treat that as a valid point of view. And that's not a partisan issue. That's because there are truths in this world.
"Where I will acknowledge the both-sides-ism is that, by and large, if you come into politics out of concern for the environment, you're probably a Democrat; if you come into politics out of concern for energy access, you're probably a Republican. And there's very little overlap in those worlds [when] trying to understand how we make sure that your home is warm, that you meet your transportation needs, that you have a first-world lifestyle and you have a minimum environmental impact.
"But that and doesn't happen very often. I think part of the proof of that is, we're concerned about energy prices right now. There are two ways to lower prices: You can boost supply or you can lower demand. To have a conversation in Washington about lowering demand, there's an awful lot of folks who say you're asking for hair shirts.
"But there's so little understanding of how wasteful our energy system is, how much opportunity there is to make do with less. The fact that Switzerland generates three times as many dollars of economic activity for every BTU of energy they use. What are they doing right that we're doing wrong? The big thing is we subsidize the fossil fuel sector by $650 billion a year. Turns out that actually really gets in the way of efficient capital allocation.
Supply and demand struggles in the White House
"And you can see that tension playing out in the White House right now, where you have folks who are really strong and understand the demand-side implications - the Jennifer Granholms, the Gina McCarthys, the John Kerrys - and the national-security voices, they are all Democrats, but they're all supply siders. Their voices are really ascendant right now. And I think the most important thing that we should be doing is saying, okay, how do we how do we make sure that in the future we are not exposed to the volatility of some crazy petro-dictator, whether that's Putin or or Maduro or MBS [Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud], we don't want to be exposed to that.
"And there is the narrative that all we need to do is ramp up production in the United States is this fantasy that you can build an LNG terminal in 24 hours. To be fair, the narrative that we can cut our oil demand is a fantasy, that we can build wind turbines and solar farms in 24 hours, and heat pumps and electric vehicle charging stations and all the rest of that stuff.
"I would like to see the Biden administration use this as an opportunity to really be Churchillian and say, you know, 'We've entered the area of consequences. The time for baffling half measures has come to a close, and I have nothing to promise you but fantastic wealth because we're going to have so much money left in our pocket.' But that is only [possible] if we make the investments now to curtail demand and to curtail demand in a way that maintains just as much access to hot water and cold beer. But there's there's just not a lot of people in Washington that I think have the understanding of both."
Reading and resources
Why Biden can't help Europe rid itself of Russian gas - a Politico story centering on Jaffe's analysis of liquefied natural gas markets and geopolitics
As Gas Prices Soar, Biden’s Climate Ambitions Sputter - a recent article by Coral Davenport at The New York Times
House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis hearing on "cost-saving climate solutions" involving boosting household energy efficiency and cutting planet-warming emissions.
Yes, There Can Be a Climate-Safe Energy Bill This Year - my recent brisk conversation with longtime climate-focused Democratic advisor and staffer Paul Bledsoe on a legislative package that West Virginia's Joe Manchin and progressives might actually agree on. Listen to the audio podcast or watch below.
Banner art credits: Capitol photo by Martin Falbisoner CC BY-SA 3.0; "Show your stripes" warming trend graphic for Washington, D.C., from the great Show Your Stripes tool by Ed Hawkins of the University of Reading.
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