Speaking at a carpenters’ training facility in Pittsburgh on Wednesday, President Joe Biden unveiled an economic recovery proposal called the American Jobs Plan, a plan reminiscent of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal in scope and ambition. It would pump $2 trillion into the economy this decade and heavily invest in fighting climate change and building green infrastructure. “This is no time to build back to the way things were,” the White House said in its preview of the plan. “This is the moment to reimagine and rebuild a new economy.”

That’s exactly what this plan would do over the next eight years. The American Jobs Plan would direct $621 billion toward transportation infrastructure, with $174 billion of that going toward building out the U.S.’s electric vehicle market. It would pour $111 billion into shoring up the nation’s crumbling water infrastructure and eliminate all lead pipes and service lines. It would direct $100 billion toward revamping the country’s electric infrastructure, in no small part to avoid the kind of power crises that have hit different parts of the country, most recently Texas, in the wake of extreme weather. The plan shoots for 100 percent carbon-free electricity by 2035 — a timeline climate activists pushed Biden toward during his presidential campaign. 

More than $200 billion would go to “produce, preserve, and retrofit more than two million affordable and sustainable places to live.” One hundred billion would go toward workforce development, and a portion of that money would be dedicated to job training programs for green industries. Workers who lose their jobs “through no fault of their own” — think out-of-work coal miners — would have access to a Dislocated Workers Program that would train them in new skills for sectors like clean energy, manufacturing, and caregiving. 

Bridges would get fixed, roads would be repaved, tunnels would be bolstered. The plan has money for communities displaced by climate change and funding for “nature-based” solutions such as forests, wetlands, and watersheds. And 40 percent of the benefits of the investments in climate and clean infrastructure would go to disadvantaged communities. 

“The American Jobs Plan will lead to a transformational progress in our effort to tackle climate change with American jobs and American ingenuity,” Biden said on Thursday, and “protect our community from billions of dollars of damage from historical superstorms, floods, wildfires, droughts, year after year.” 

The White House says the plan would be paid for by reversing the Trump administration’s 2017 tax cuts for corporations and levying new taxes on corporations and wealthy Americans. Biden would raise the corporate tax rate from 21 percent to 28 percent and eliminate billions of dollars in subsidies for fossil fuels, something he promised to do on the campaign trail. Biden promised that the plan wouldn’t raise taxes on Americans making less than $400,000. 

The American Jobs Plan is a blueprint for what Biden wants Congress to do. The bill legislators come up with could look different from what the White House announced this week. And in order for whatever plan eventually gets written to actually become law, the Biden administration and both chambers of Congress will have to navigate a series of tricky hurdles. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says she wants the House to pass this infrastructure and jobs bill by July 4, which means she has just six weeks in session to make it happen. The progressive members of her caucus are already getting ready to rumble — they say the plan isn’t ambitious enough. Pelosi will have to do some wheeling and dealing to get her moderates in line, too. The veteran lawmaker is likely up to the challenge, though the timing is tight. 

The bill will run into more serious roadblocks in the Senate, where Democrats’ majority is razor-thin. The White House says it wants to work with Republicans to pass the plan, but, even though infrastructure has historically been one of the rare legislative arenas where both parties have been able to find middle ground, many Republicans are almost certainly going to vote against it. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is already gearing up for a fight over the proposed corporate tax hike. The White House will keep pushing for bipartisanship, but the reality is that this bill will likely get passed via the budget reconciliation process — which allows legislators to pass spending and tax measures while bypassing the filibuster process that allows the minority party to block any Senate bill that doesn’t have 60 votes. But the rules that govern the budget reconciliation process are strict, and squeezing all of Biden’s hopes and dreams into a form that fits the process will be tough.  

Democrats have incentives to push Biden’s agenda through. Polling from the progressive think tank Data for Progress and the climate PR campaign Climate Power shows a majority of voters think the federal government should be doing more to bring America’s infrastructure up to speed. The question is whether voters like infrastructure enough to vote blue in 2022 and 2024. 

“The divisions of the moment shouldn’t stop us from doing the right thing for the future,” Biden said in Pittsburgh. 
Biden has come a long way since the Democratic primary, when the subdued former vice president promised to make America normal again. The next several months will determine whether the Democrat can pull off one of the biggest economic transformations since World War II.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Biden unveils a ‘once-in-a-generation’ infrastructure plan in Pittsburgh on Mar 31, 2021.

This post was originally published on Grist.

Since taking office in January, President Joe Biden has had his hands full managing the COVID-19 pandemic and rolling out the most aggressive vaccination drive in U.S. history. This month, congressional Democrats muscled a $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief plan across the finish line, passing the first major bill of the Biden administration without a single Republican vote. With the first legislative hurdle of 2021 out of the way, the Biden team is reportedly turning to another time-sensitive crisis: climate change. 

On Monday, the New York Times reported that Biden’s economic advisers are preparing to unveil a set of recommendations that will guide Biden’s agenda for the next several months. The advisers, according to documents obtained by the Times, will suggest that the president split his “Build Back Better” plan, the jobs and economic recovery platform he campaigned on, into at least two major pieces of legislation. The first will focus on physical infrastructure — repairing the nation’s roads, bridges, and tunnels, as well as investing heavily in clean energy, jobs training, and energy-efficient housing. The second will fortify the nation’s “human infrastructure,” investing in programs to help workers, parents, students, and children. In total, the two-pronged package could cost more than $3 trillion. 

The first prong, the climate-centered spending program, is what the Biden administration is expected to focus on in the near term. It looks a bit like the Green New Deal that progressives including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who introduced the famous climate resolution in 2019, have been advocating for. About $1 trillion will be funneled toward the obvious parts of America’s infrastructure that need help — bridges, roads, pipes, power grids, railroads, and an expanded network of electric vehicle charging stations. Significant spending would also be directed toward “high-growth industries of the future” like 5G telecommunications and renewable energy innovation and deployment. There would even be funding for a million energy-efficient and affordable housing units. The idea is to shore up the nation’s ailing infrastructure and slash carbon emissions at the same time. 

None of this is set in stone. First, Biden has to sign off on the plan his advisers drew up. He’s on the record endorsing all of the ideas under the $3 trillion umbrella, but it’s unclear whether he’ll be enthused about breaking his Build Back Better plan into pieces. After the soft launch in the New York Times, Biden’s advisers will introduce the plan to the president and legislative leaders this week. 

If Democrats embrace the piecemeal approach, the next step is to figure out how to get the proposal through the 50-50 Senate. Democrats were able to pass the $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief bill via an obscure process called budget reconciliation, which allows legislators to incorporate spending and tax measures into the federal budget — and to bypass the filibuster process that allows the minority party to block any Senate bill that doesn’t have 60 votes. But the rules that govern the budget reconciliation process are strict. Democrats who were hoping that the COVID-19 relief bill would include a $15 federal minimum wage were disappointed when the parliamentarian, the person in charge of deciding what is “budget germane” or not, ruled that the minimum wage requirement did not meet the budget reconciliation guidelines. Portions of Biden’s infrastructure plan could meet a similar fate in the offices of the House and Senate parliamentarians.  

Budget reconciliation is supposed to be a backdoor solution to getting bills passed anyway. And with politicians on both sides of the aisle claiming to care about infrastructure, it shouldn’t be a problem for Congress to pass a bipartisan infrastructure bill. But in today’s polarized political environment, it’s a tall order. Former presidents Donald Trump and Barack Obama both promised to fix the nation’s infrastructure and couldn’t make it happen. 

Then again, Republican and Democratic leadership are facing new pressure from their respective caucasus to come up with bipartisan solutions to congressional gridlock. Moderate Senate Republicans Lisa Murkowski, Susan Collins, Mitt Romney, and others have signaled that they have an appetite for climate action. Moderate Democrats in the Senate, namely Joe Manchin of West Virginia, want Biden to foster the kind of bipartisan collaboration he promised on the campaign trail and has been advocating for since. 

A major roadblock stands in the way of bipartisanship: Biden’s team is proposing that some or all of the $3 trillion infrastructure proposal be paid for by raising taxes on corporations and possibly individuals who make more than $400,000 per year. If there’s one thing Republicans hate, it’s tax hikes. “I don’t think there’s going to be any enthusiasm on our side for a tax increase,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said last week. 

Over the next few weeks, Biden will have to make a fraught political calculation: water down his climate infrastructure package so that it appeals to Republicans or try to get the whole enchilada passed without Republican support. The former is a gamble — there’s no guaranteeing McConnell will rally his troops around a Democratic bill no matter how weak it is. The latter is also tricky — Biden risks alienating voters and some key members of his own party by going it alone. White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki says it’s too early to say how the White House aims to drum up support for this bill. “Any speculation about future economic proposals is premature and not a reflection of the White House’s thinking,” she said. Whatever ends up happening, one thing is almost certain: Climate change is back on the menu in Congress.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Biden’s team is teeing up a massive climate and infrastructure bill on Mar 23, 2021.

This post was originally published on Grist.

Before it was pumped, leveed, and paved, south Florida looked like a network of spongy wetlands. Over the course of about a century, those damp lowlands were transformed into a paradise for more than 9 million people, complete with a bustling tourism industry and trillions of dollars worth of infrastructure. Now, the flattest state in the union is uniquely threatened by sea-level rise: the lower third of the state could be submerged in just a few generations. The ocean is threatening to turn paved paradise back into a sponge.

After years of dragging their feet, Republican lawmakers in the state are trying to prevent that from happening — but they still aren’t talking about the most necessary solutions to the problem.

Last week, Republican state legislators in Florida announced a suite of measures intended to save the Sunshine State from rising seas. The central plank of the plan, which is widely expected to become law, will direct $100 million per year over the next two years toward protections against sea-level rise and flooding. As a result, homeowners who pay to raise their houses higher off the ground will get a tax break. Local governments will get funding to come up with targeted strategies to deal with impending rise. The Florida government, in partnership with the University of South Florida, will establish a Flood Hub for Applied Research, which will exclusively focus on the state’s exposure to flooding and how to reduce those risks.

Carlos Curbelo, a Republican and former U.S. representative for south Florida, told Grist that the $100 million per year figure might seem small from a federal perspective, where funding for climate adaptation usually comes in billion dollar increments, but it’s a significant investment at the state level. “The fact that it’s being championed by Republicans makes it even more noteworthy,” he said. “I’ve always believed that the bipartisan solution to climate change will be born in Florida.”

It’s not often that Republican state senators and representatives introduce legislation that addresses the effects of climate change. While blue states rushed to fill the climate action void left by the Trump administration over the past four years, red states pulled in the opposite direction: passing laws to undermine climate science, shore up coal and other polluting sources of energy, and withdraw from regional cap-and-trade agreements. Republicans in Oregon literally fled the state to avoid voting on a carbon pricing bill.

The same story has largely played out in Florida, where former Governor Rick Scott, who served between 2011 and 2019, stifled climate science and even banned environmental regulators from using the term “climate change.” But that’s starting to change, in no small part because Florida doesn’t have the luxury of ignoring climate change anymore.

Last summer, the state’s current Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, signed Florida’s first climate-related law ever, SB 178, into law. It prohibits the spending of tax dollars on projects in coastal zones that have not taken rising sea levels into account. The new suite of measures builds on that first foray into climate change mitigation.

“Coming out of Governor Scott’s legacy, this is better than nothing,” Yoca Arditi-Rocha, executive director of the nonprofit, Florida-based CLEO Institute, told Grist. “It’s a good first step.” But Arditi-Rocha pointed out that a bill to counteract sea-level rise is not the same as a bill that addresses the root causes of climate change. “We’re at the frontlines of the climate crisis, and flooding is not the only issue we’re experiencing,” Arditi-Rocha said, citing extreme weather, algal blooms, and rising temperatures as other consequences of planetary warming in Florida.

Preston Robertson, president and CEO of the Florida Wildlife Federation, told Grist that the bills are a Band-Aid solution to the state’s problems. “We need to try to stem rising seas at the source, which is to decrease these power sources that create greenhouse gases,” he said, “and that’s not in any of these bills.”

The fact that the bills don’t direct any funding or attention to managed retreat — the methodical and coordinated movement of people away from risks (in this case, flooding) — is even more concerning. Even if Florida’s state legislators were able to pass a comprehensive plan to address emissions, some sea-level rise is already baked in. At some point not that far in the future, south Florida will be covered in water. People will have to move elsewhere before that happens. But neither political party in Florida — or at the federal level, for that matter — has made any real effort to confront that reality, perhaps because the thought of retreating from sea-level rise has implications that are too grim to bear.

“How in the world do you do that when there are trillions of dollars in property just in Miami-Dade alone?” Robertson asked. “It’s almost impossible to get your mind around the fact that if the seas keep rising, those residences and commercial structures are going to become uninhabitable.”

Curbelo said that managed retreat is still a taboo topic in his state. “I think both parties want to avoid that issue for as long as possible,” he said. “It is a bipartisan issue in the sense that no party really wants to talk about it.”

Communities on the front lines of sea-level rise don’t have the luxury of avoiding the issue. In 2019, local officials in the Florida Keys informed residents that they will not be able to raise every street above flood lines. It “sent shock waves” through communities in the Keys, Curbelo said. Soon, those residents will have to move elsewhere. But there are still a thousand open-ended questions about how that will work. “Where do they go, into the Everglades?” Robertson said. “I have no answer for that.” The sooner leaders help them figure it out, the less painful retreat will be.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Florida Republicans are ready to stop rising seas — just not climate change on Mar 9, 2021.

This post was originally published on Grist.

The Delaware River Basin, a 13,539-square-mile area bisected by a sparkling river that stretches from New York’s Catskill Mountains to the Delaware Bay, is officially closed to fracking. Last week, a little-known but powerful interstate commission called the Delaware River Basin Commission, or DRBC, voted 4-0 to make a 2010 de facto ban on fracking in the basin permanent.

The ban, which outlaws fracking in Marcellus Shale gas deposits in the parts of the four states that fall within the basin’s boundaries, is the result of more than a decade of work by regional environmental groups and growing public opposition to fracking. It may be the biggest anti-fracking milestone in the Northeast to date.

Vermont, Maryland, and New York state permanently banned fracking in 2012, 2017, and 2020, respectively, but Vermont doesn’t have any natural gas to speak of, while Maryland and New York have small reserves.

Seven Pennsylvania counties within the Delaware River Basin sit over the northeast’s Marcellus Shale rock formation, which holds trillions of cubic feet of natural gas. Natural gas is extracted from the shale via a process called hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, which typically involves shooting pressurized water mixed with sand and chemicals — some of which, like methanol, are hazardous to human health — into the shale to crack it open. Those chemicals can seep into the surrounding environment and have been found in drinking water supplies.

“This is a really important win both for the environment, for the Delaware River Basin and for all the groups who have been fighting this for so long,” Wes Gillingham, associate director of Catskill Mountainkeeper, one of the environmental groups that has been pushing the DRBC to adopt a permanent fracking ban, told Grist. “To see the whole basin protected, the whole watershed, this whole ecosystem which is one of the most pristine ecosystems on the East Coast, it’s a wonderful thing to be part of.”

The official ban on fracking in the basin has been a long time coming. The DRBC, made up of the governors of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware along with the northeastern division head of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, started kicking around the idea of regulating hydraulic fracturing in 2008 in response to Pennsylvania’s shale boom and stopped approving new drilling in the basin in 2010 while it figured out what kind of permanent regulations to adopt. The commission faced pushback from a group of landowners in gas-rich Wayne County, Pennsylvania, in 2016, who sued the DRBC in federal court, arguing that the commission didn’t have jurisdiction over their land. That lawsuit was thrown out, and in 2017, the commission proposed a permanent ban on fracking that was finally officially adopted last Thursday.

The Wayne County lawsuit, however, was brought back from the dead on appeal in 2018 and is still ongoing today. That lawsuit will play out in Pennsylvania over the coming months or maybe even years, but it’s clear that the landowners don’t have the support of their Democratic governor. In a statement read aloud at the DRBC hearing approving the fracking ban last week, Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf said he was “proud to join with other DRBC commissioners in preserving the water resources of this unique region for generations to come.”

Natural gas groups are livid about the DRBC’s decision and the federal government’s role, or lack thereof, in the vote. The Army Corps of Engineers representative abstained from voting for or against the fracking ban last week, saying that the Biden administration was still undergoing a period of transition and didn’t give the corps a direct command on how to vote. “This vote defies common sense, sound science, and is a grave blow to constitutionally protected private property rights,” David Callahan, the president of an industry group called the Marcellus Shale Coalition, said in a statement. “We were hopeful that President Biden would keep his vague commitment to not ban fracking, as he told Pennsylvania voters over and over.” Biden has not banned fracking — he can’t do that without congressional approval — but he has imposed a moratorium on new oil and gas leases on public lands.

Environmental groups aren’t totally happy with the ban, either. It doesn’t prohibit the export of water from the Delaware River to areas outside of the watershed for fracking projects, nor does it ban the import of fracking wastewater from outside projects. However, the DRBC voted 5-0 to approve a resolution to start the rulemaking process for imports and exports of water for and from fracking. “Hopefully we can extend the fracking ban farther and farther,” Gillingham said. “Every day, there’s more science that comes out that shows this is really not safe, and that’s not even mentioning what it’s doing to our climate.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Here’s why this new fracking ban in the Northeast is a big deal on Mar 3, 2021.

This post was originally published on Grist.

Since taking office, President Joe Biden has re-entered the United States into the Paris Agreement, revoked a key permit for the Keystone XL pipeline, and placed a moratorium on new oil and gas leases on public lands. Republicans in Congress aren’t happy. This week, Republicans signaled how they aim to block Biden’s agenda — and what the right’s vision for federal climate action might look like.

On Monday, two Republican senators, Steve Daines of Montana and Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, unveiled two measures aimed at undercutting the Paris Agreement. The first, a resolution officially introduced by Daines, says the president should “submit the Paris Agreement to the Senate for review and consideration.” The text of the resolution says that the president can only enter into a treaty if two-thirds of the Senate supports it. The second, a bill introduced by Blackburn, would prevent tax money from being used to rejoin the Paris Agreement. “This bill and resolution will ensure not a single dime of American’s hard-earned money goes toward the Paris Climate Agreement,” Senator Roger Marshall from Kansas, a cosponsor of the bill, said in a statement.

It is highly unlikely that either measure will get much airtime in the Senate, chiefly because Democrats control the upper chamber and get to decide which bills do and don’t get taken up. But, Democratic majority aside, the senators’ measures don’t have a future in the Senate because they don’t make any sense. “The basis for each of these actions is just wrong from a policy standpoint,” Roger Pielke Jr., professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, told Grist.

The resolution is predicated on a constitutional requirement that says presidents can’t enter into treaties without the Senate’s support, but the U.S. has never engaged with the Paris Agreement as a treaty. President Obama joined the accord via executive order, President Trump withdrew using the same method, and President Biden re-joined the agreement last month via, you guessed it, executive order. “In the imaginary world where this would be adjudicated, say in the courts, there’s no way it would be understood as a treaty,” Pielke said.

The bill preventing taxpayer dollars from being used to rejoin the agreement is also offbase. The Paris Agreement is an “agreement to agree,” Pielke said, which means no American dollars are actually funding the thing itself. Money will come into play domestically in the U.S. if legislators pass bills aimed at helping the nation meet its emissions-reduction targets under the Paris Agreement. And the U.S. has already paid approximately $1 billion into the United Nations Green Climate Fund to help poor nations deal with the consequences of climate change, but there is no financial requirement of joining the Paris Agreement in general. “Somebody says we’re going to cut funding for Paris, it doesn’t even mean anything because there is no such thing,” Pielke said.

For Quillan Robinson, vice president of government affairs at the conservative environmental group the American Conservation Coalition, the Daines and Blackburn legislation is a missed opportunity. “What I would like to see is for Republicans to criticize the Paris accord and say, ‘This is not actually an effective measure,’ and then propose what we are going to do,” he said. “Because, as we know, a vast majority of Americans want to see climate action.”

Some Republicans are coming up with a climate strategy beyond obstructing Biden’s agenda. Last weekend, two dozen House Republicans attended a secret climate summit in Salt Lake City, Utah. The point of the summit was to begin formulating a Republican response to rising temperatures. Outside groups including the Heritage Foundation, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Audubon Society, and the American Conservation Coalition, the group Robinson works for, held events to educate members of Congress on climate and environment issues.

The summit was attended by Republicans who have been involved in climate policy at the federal level before as well as representatives new to climate change. Garret Graves of Louisiana, the top Republican on the House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis; David McKinley of West Virginia, who introduced carbon sequestration legislation last Congress; and Blake Moore of Utah, a political newcomer, were among the 25 representatives in attendance. The Washington Examiner, which first reported the secret summit, said that representatives did not come away with a detailed policy plan, but Bruce Westerman of Arkansas, one of the organizers of the event, “promised future legislative action.”

On the Senate side, Mitt Romney from Utah, who has signaled he’s open to a carbon tax in the past, gave his strongest endorsement of such a pricing mechanism to date in a virtual event with the New York Times on Tuesday. “I’m very open to a carbon tax, carbon dividend, where there’s a tax on oil companies and coal companies and so forth,” Romney said. Lisa Murkowski, another moderate senator, has said she’d be open to a carbon tax too. It’s “worth putting on the table,” she said last October. Meanwhile, the incoming chair of the Senate Agriculture Committee said the committee will take up the Growing Climate Solutions Act, a bipartisan bill introduced by Senator Mike Braun of Indiana last Congress that would help farmers sell carbon credits into carbon trading markets, and move it to the Senate floor for consideration.

Pielke reads these developments as hopeful signs that Blackburn and Daines aren’t representative of the entire GOP. “If the Marsha Blackburns of the world are distracted by the shiny object of Paris and meanwhile more serious efforts are done trying to build support for policy that’s fine, let them have their dead horse to beat,” Pielke said. He’s more focused on moderates in Congress who may soon be ready to reach across the aisle on this issue. “The reality is, if we’re to succeed, we’re going to have to put forward policies that can get substantial bipartisan support,” he said.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How Republicans are responding to Biden’s climate agenda — in public and in private on Feb 26, 2021.

This post was originally published on Grist.

Representative Debra Haaland, a Democrat from New Mexico and a member of the Laguna Pueblo tribe, introduced 13 bills with bipartisan cosponsors in 2019. Dozens of lawmakers, some of them Republicans, say she is a good collaborator and an excellent champion of public lands. She has a 98 percent lifetime score from the League of Conservation Voters, a mainstream environmental advocacy group. When President Joe Biden tapped her to lead the Department of the Interior, environmental groups, environmental justice advocates, and tribes rejoiced. Haaland will become the first Native American Cabinet secretary in U.S. history if the Senate confirms her.

“I would suggest respectfully you’ll find out that she will listen to you,” Republican Don Young, a representative from Alaska, told senators at Haaland’s confirmation hearing on Tuesday, urging them to support her nomination. If nothing else, he said, a president has the right to pick his “crew.”

But not everyone is on board with her confirmation. Haaland faced intense scrutiny from both Republicans and Democrats over her record this week. Senate hearings for Biden’s other nominees so far, including Pete Buttigieg and Janet Yellen, have largely sounded like what they are: job interviews. Haaland’s hearing resembled a cross-examination at times. Republicans kept circling back to one central argument: Haaland was too “radical” to lead the Department of the Interior. Senators also said she was “extreme,” noted that they were “troubled” and “concerned” about her nomination, and said her views will hurt an American “way of life.”

“I’m not convinced the Congresswoman can divorce her radical views and represent what’s best for Montana and all stakeholders in the West,” Republican Senator Steve Daines of Montana wrote in a statement ahead of the hearing. On Tuesday, Senator John Barrasso from Wyoming said Haaland’s views on oil and gas leasing were “squarely at odds with the responsible management” of public lands. Some House Republicans are aligned with these senators in their opposition to Haaland. In January, 15 House Republicans sent Biden a letter asking him to withdraw her nomination, which they called “a direct threat to working men and women and a rejection of responsible development of America’s natural resources.”

The main issue for some Republicans and even one centrist Democrat — Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee chair Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who didn’t indicate that he would support Haaland’s nomination until Wednesday — is that Haaland has condemned fracking on public lands and has supported sweeping climate measures such as the Green New Deal resolution introduced by Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez of New York and Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts. At Interior, Haaland will be in charge of administering Biden’s moratorium on new oil and gas leases on public lands. Haaland spent much of her speaking time at her hearings this week assuring senators that she wouldn’t let her personal views govern her decisions as the head of Interior. Her role, she said, is to “serve all Americans, not just my one district in New Mexico.”

Still, Republicans aren’t convinced. Before her hearing even began, Daines promised to block Haaland’s confirmation by placing something a hold on her nomination, which would force extra voting and generally slow down the confirmation process, and he has not signaled that he intends to drop the issue. Barrasso hasn’t said he’ll put a hold on Haaland’s nomination, but he’s signaled he’ll vote against her. “If Representative Haaland intends to use the Department of the Interior to crush the economy of Wyoming and other western states, then I’m going to oppose the nomination,” the Senator from Wyoming said during his opening remarks.

For some Indigenous environmental advocates and Democrats, the opposition to Haaland’s nomination smacks of racism and a resistance to progress.

“She is a Brown, traditional Indigenous woman who cares about the land and future generations,” Ashley McCray, a member of the Absentee Shawnee and Oglala Lakota nations and an organizer for the Indigenous Environmental Network, told Grist. “At the foundation of that, she is unsettling settler colonialism which is really what the United States government is.”

Julia Bernal, an enrolled member of the Sandia Pueblo tribe and environmental justice director at the Pueblo Action Alliance, a Pueblo community organization in New Mexico, told Grist that Haaland’s nomination and her identity as a Native American woman threatens the status quo in Washington D.C. “People in general are afraid of change,” she said.

In a USA Today opinion piece published on Tuesday, Mark Udall and Tom Udall, former U.S. senators from Colorado and New Mexico, respectively, wrote that the criticism of Haaland has been spurred by “something other than her record.”

“Were either of us the nominee to lead the Interior Department, we doubt that anyone would be threatening to hold up the nomination or wage a scorched earth campaign warning about ‘radical’ ideas,” the Udalls, who are first cousins, wrote. “Her record is in line with mainstream conservation priorities.”

Instead of badgering Haaland with questions about her “radical” views, Bernal wishes senators had spent more time asking her about how she would direct the Department of Interior, which oversees the Bureau of Indian Affairs, to consult with tribes. “There are a lot of issues that remain with how land has been managed” in the U.S., Bernal said, citing broken treaties and erasure of Indigenous perspectives throughout U.S. history.

Daines, the most outspoken critic of Haaland’s record, asked Haaland a total of 18 questions during his allotted speaking time on Tuesday. He only asked Trump’s Interior Department appointees, Ryan Zinke and David Bernhardt, a couple of questions apiece, according to HuffPost environmental reporter Chris D’Angelo, who compiled a list of the senators’ questions. Not one of Daines’ 18 questions for Haaland was about how she would support tribes as secretary of the Interior. Bernie Sanders, a Democrat from Vermont, did ask Haaland how the government could “help make Indian lives better.” “It’s the job of the federal government to live up to its tribal trust promises,” Haaland said.

Despite Republican opposition, Democrats likely have the votes they need to approve Haaland’s nomination. But Daines’s block will compound Haaland’s already delayed confirmation process. Biden’s nominee is on track to begin her tenure as head of the Interior later than any other president’s first Interior secretary in modern history.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Deb Haaland isn’t as ‘radical’ as some Republican senators think on Feb 25, 2021.

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There’s a saying among energy wonks about the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission: It’s never seen a pipeline it didn’t like. But the commission’s new chair could make that adage a thing of the past.

The independent commission known as FERC, pronounced like a kid-friendly version of the popular expletive, was established by Congress in 1977 to regulate the United States’ energy landscape. FERC wields an enormous amount of power, overseeing the nation’s pipelines, natural gas infrastructure, transmission lines, hydroelectric dams, electricity markets, and, by association, the price of renewables and fossil fuels. It’s made up of up to five commissioners — no more than three members of the same party can serve at a time — including one chair, who sets the commission’s agenda.

Historically, the commission has not done a good job of taking climate change and environmental justice into account as it has approved and regulated energy projects across the U.S. “I would put FERC in the basket of agencies that have huge climate relevance, but where climate has generally not been front and center,” Barry Rabe, a professor of public and environmental policy at the University of Michigan, told Grist. A system for accounting for climate impacts isn’t baked into FERC’s structure, he explained. That could change as President Joe Biden executes a “whole of government” approach to tackling climate change.

“One of the most interesting places to do climate policy is at FERC,” Representative Sean Casten, Democrat from Illinois, told Grist in January. “What would it mean to actually change markets to accelerate the deployment of clean energy? Frankly, you can be much more policy smart and much more environmentally ambitious doing that in the context of a FERC hearing than you can doing it through Congress.”

In January, President Joe Biden appointed Richard Glick, formerly the sole Democratic vote on the commission, to chair FERC. Glick’s priorities? Environmental justice and climate change mitigation and adaptation. Last week, at his first press conference since being appointed to lead the commission last week, Glick announced that FERC will create a senior-level position dedicated to assessing the environmental justice impacts of proposed projects. For the first time, the commission will take a look at how developments like natural gas pipelines affect surrounding communities to make sure they don’t “unfairly impact historically marginalized communities,” Glick said.

But experts say Glick’s influence on the commission will extend far beyond the new environmental justice position. “In the day-to-day operation, the chair has enormous unilateral influence over the direction of the agency, the agency’s priorities, and when it brings certain matters to the full commission for a vote,” Tyson Slocum, director of the nonprofit consumer rights advocacy group Public Citizen’s energy program and a FERC watchdog, told Grist. “Glick understands that FERC has a terrible track record on environmental justice issues, particularly on pipeline cases, and he understands that environmental justice is a major initiative of this administration,” he said. Under Glick, FERC could liberate renewables from what Slocum calls “artificial impediments” and allow renewable energy to hit the grid at the lowest possible cost.

One of those artificial impediments that FERC could consider in the coming months is something called the minimum offer price rule, or MOPR. During Trump’s term, gas generators complained that states responding to the climate crisis were implementing policies to encourage large-scale renewables, which was causing so much renewable energy capacity to come online that energy prices were dropping below what the gas generators needed in order to operate in a profitable manner.

“The gas generators, as monopolists are prone to do, ran to regulators and cried, ‘Gosh, this is unfair,’” Slocum said. In 2019, FERC ordered PJM, the nation’s largest regional transmission organization, to expand its minimum offer price rule to nearly all of PJM’s state-subsidized energy resources. The move effectively required renewable energy generators to bid into auctions at higher prices than they would otherwise charge — and boosted the competitiveness of gas generators tired of being outbid. FERC approved a similar rule for ISO New England, a regional transmission organization serving Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont. “It’s awful, it’s unsupported, it’s added billions of dollars in artificial charges to people’s monthly utility bills all to benefit and prolong the life of natural gas generators,” Slocum said.

Glick, who voted against both of those measures as a member of the commission because he felt states should be allowed to make their own decisions about their energy resources, could reassess those rules in the coming months. “The commission is going to be looking to squarely address MOPR,” Jeff Dennis, managing director and general counsel of a clean energy trade group called Advanced Energy Economy, told Grist. “It was the best example of the last administration getting in the way of clean energy.” Dennis worked at FERC for more than a decade holding senior positions including director of policy development.

In addition to taking a hard look at MOPR, Dennis said he expects Glick to develop a more cooperative attitude toward states and their green energy objectives. Glick could also update electricity transmission policy to encourage more transmission infrastructure — the backbone of America’s power system, without which power from power plants wouldn’t be able to flow to customers. System reliability is going to be a priority, too, especially considering the power issues Texas and other states are experiencing right now. The commission has already launched an investigation into why a winter storm and cold snap earlier this week left more than 4 million Texans in the dark.

Glick is in a powerful position as head of FERC, but he still has to work with the Republicans on the commission, at least until June, when Trump-appointed commissioner Bernard McNamee retires and Biden appoints his replacement. Incorporating climate change into an agency like FERC is a bit like “turning a battleship,” Rabe said. “You can name a new chair, but you’ve got this other set of commissioners, it’s a majority vote, and the commission is designed to limit the ability of a president to rapidly turn that battleship.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How a pipeline-loving agency could be key to realizing Biden’s climate plan on Feb 18, 2021.

This post was originally published on Grist.

Former President Donald Trump will forever leave his mark on the federal government, but some of his administration’s rules aren’t standing the test of time. President Biden wants to reconsider and possibly scrap more than 100 anti-environmental actions his predecessor took during his term, including Trump’s efforts to weaken protections for migratory birds and gray wolves and loosen regulations on pesticides, oil and gas drilling, and appliances. That could take years, but the process has already begun. And Biden is getting an assist from courts.

On January 19, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit rejected Trump’s rollback of emissions regulations for coal-fired power plants, ruling that Trump’s rule replacing the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan “hinged on a fundamental misconstruction” of the Clean Air Act. Last Friday, a three-judge panel on the D.C. Circuit Court found that parts of Trump’s rollback of ozone pollution laws were illegal. The judges found that elements of Trump’s policy “contravene the statute’s unambiguous language,” and “rests on an unreasonable interpretation of the statute.”

On Monday, a federal court in Montana dealt another blow to Trump’s industry-friendly environmental legacy. U.S. District Judge Brian Morris, an Obama appointee who was a thorn in Trump’s side for much of his presidency, vacated the Trump administration’s so-called “secret science” rule that limited the kinds of studies the Environmental Protection Agency could use to craft its policy.

The rule, which was finalized just two weeks before Biden took office, would have required researchers to disclose the underlying data from their health studies, like medical records, before the government could use the studies’ conclusions as evidence in its rulemaking. Researchers typically do not disclose this data in order to protect the privacy of their human subjects. Many health studies rely on anonymized health data, and federal agencies have been using their findings to inform policy for decades.

“By shining light on the science we use in decisions, we are helping to restore trust in government,” former EPA administrator Andrew Wheeler wrote in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal in January.

Environment groups didn’t agree. Last month, the Environmental Defense Fund, the Montana Environmental Information Center, and Citizens for Clean Energy challenged the rule in court, arguing that the Trump administration misclassified the rule in its rush to finalize it before Trump left office. Morris sided with the environmental groups and said that Trump’s EPA had acted out of order by issuing the rule as though it were procedural rather than substantive. It’s now up to Biden’s EPA to reconsider the rule.

“The ‘censored science’ rule was one of the Trump administration’s most brazen efforts to undermine the scientific foundations of regulatory policy,” Richard Revesz, director of the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University, said in a statement on Monday. “Today, the Trump anti-science effort, which had been opposed by the leadership of major scientific organizations, was quickly dispatched.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The latest Trump EPA rule to get tossed? The ‘secret science’ ban. on Feb 2, 2021.

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The team of people President Joe Biden tapped to head up his agencies have significant roles to play in delivering on his climate agenda. Biden’s Cabinet — the folks who will lead the departments that make up the executive branch — will execute the president’s executive orders halting drilling on public lands, implementing new emissions control measures, conserving land, and launching a Civilian Climate Corps, among other things. But before they do that, Biden’s nominees need to be confirmed by the Senate, which has been busy squabbling over the filibuster and the forthcoming impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump.

Even so, the upper chamber’s committees have found the time to hold hearings over the past two weeks to examine Biden’s candidates for a slate of departments. More hearings will take place in the coming weeks.

On the climate front, the Senate held hearings for treasury secretary nominee Janet Yellen (former chair of the Federal Reserve), transportation secretary nominee Pete Buttigieg (the South Bend, Indiana mayor who ran for president in 2020), and energy secretary nominee Jennifer Granholm (former governor of Michigan). Some of these positions don’t seem like they’re directly related to executing Biden’s climate agenda. But the president has promised a “whole of government” approach to dealing with the crisis, and these three players will be key to making that happen. Yellen has already been confirmed by the Senate. Buttigieg has advanced past the Commerce Committee to a full Senate vote, which means he will be confirmed imminently, and Granholm is likely to be confirmed soon as well.

Here’s what the three nominees said about rising temperatures at their confirmation hearings and what that signals about how they’ll approach climate policy in the future.

Yellen served under former President Barack Obama as the first female chair of the Federal Reserve and has long warned of the risks of climate change to the economy. As secretary of the treasury, she will shape the federal budget and Biden’s tax and spending policies. She’s a big proponent of the carbon tax.

“Climate change is an existential threat to not only our environment, but also our economy,” Yellen wrote in response to questions posed by Senator Chuck Grassley, a Republican from Iowa and the chair of the Senate Committee on Finance, on January 21. “I believe we must seriously look at assessing the risks to the financial system from climate change.” At her Senate cross-examination a couple of days earlier, Yellen promised to set up a new Treasury “hub” that would assess those risks. “We should take these risks very, very seriously,” she said. Climate change is risky business, and Yellen is on a mission to make it less financially fraught.

Buttigieg, former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, will lead Biden’s Department of Transportation. Buttigieg will oversee a sector that’s responsible for 28 percent of the U.S.’s greenhouse gas emissions. During the presidential primary, Buttigieg released a $1 trillion proposal for sustainable infrastructure with the aim to boost public transit, passenger rail, and electric vehicles.

At his hearing before the Senate Commerce Committee last week, Buttigieg promised to make climate change a top priority for the department. “When the books are written about our careers, one of the main things we’ll be judged on is whether we did enough to stop the destruction of life and property due to climate change,” he said to Senator Ted Cruz, Republican from Texas, during a heated moment sparked when Cruz challenged Buttigieg on Biden’s decision to cancel a key permit for the Keystone XL pipeline. Buttigieg also said that the U.S. has a “unique window of opportunity” for investing in infrastructure and addressing climate change at the same time. Bullet trains and electric vehicle charging stations, here we come?

Granholm is a former energy advisor to Hillary Clinton and worked with the Obama administration to push automakers to invest in green technologies after the Great Recession. As head of the Department of Energy, the former Michigan governor would help lead the transition from gas-powered to electric vehicles and start work on Biden’s stated goal of a 100 percent clean electrical grid by 2035.

She emphasized climate change and job creation at her hearing before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee on Wednesday. “I am obsessed with creating good-paying jobs in America,” she said. Fossil fuels aren’t off the table for the former governor. “I think it is important that as we develop fossil fuels that we also develop the technology to reduce greenhouse gas emissions,” she said in response to a question from Republican Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming. “If we’re going to get to net carbon zero emissions by 2050, we cannot do it without coal, oil, and gas being part of the mix.” The Michigander mentioned that she drives a Chevy Bolt, an electric vehicle that Granholm told senators has great acceleration.

Senators also heard from Gina Raimondo, the governor of Rhode Island and Biden’s pick to head up the Department of Commerce, which houses the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “Tackling climate change,” she said at her hearing before the Senate Commerce Committee on Wednesday, “goes hand in hand with creating good, paying jobs.”

Biden’s so-called Climate Cabinet still has a long way to go before getting down to business. Next week, Senate committees will hear from Environmental Protection Agency administrator nominee Michael Regan and agriculture secretary nominee Tom Vilsack. Stay tuned.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Biden’s cabinet picks are not afraid to talk about climate — so far on Jan 29, 2021.

This post was originally published on Grist.

It’s hard to quantify political power, but it’s safe to say that big tech companies wield a lot of it. A decade ago, companies like Amazon and Google employed just a smattering of lobbyists who worked to influence D.C. policymakers on their behalf. Now, the Big Five tech companies — Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Google, and Amazon — spend tens of millions of dollars each year lobbying Congress. In 2020, they collectively spent $61 million domestically lobbying on issues that included international tax policies, copyright reform, and content policy.

Only a tiny fraction of Big Tech’s legislative lobbying might is going toward advocating for climate policy, according to a new report from the think tank InfluenceMap. Between 2019 and 2020, just 4 percent of Apple, Alphabet (Google’s parent company), Amazon, Facebook, and Microsoft’s self-reported lobbying activities targeted climate-related policy at the federal level. In Europe, these companies do even less lobbying on climate — InfluenceMap says they have been “largely silent on the EU’s ambitious climate policy agenda.”

This halfhearted effort to promote climate-friendly policies stands in sharp contrast to Big Tech’s much-publicized promises to lead the rest of the business sector, and indeed the entire world, toward a greener future.

Apple, for instance, revealed a plan last summer to make its supply chain and products carbon neutral by 2030, something CEO Tim Cook said will be good for the planet and its products. “With our commitment to carbon neutrality, we hope to be a ripple in the pond that creates a much larger change,” Cook said. In 2019, Amazon unveiled a climate plan that aims to get the company to meet the decarbonization requirements of the Paris Agreement 10 years early. “If we can do this, anyone can do this,” Amazon founder Jeff Bezos said at the time.

“Climate change is a crisis we will only be able to address if we all work together on a global scale,” Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said. Facebook aims to make its global operations net-zero, starting with making its value chain net-zero by 2030. “We will support new public policy initiatives to accelerate carbon reduction and removal opportunities,” Microsoft president Brad Smith wrote in January last year, outlining seven principles the company will adhere to in its quest to remove more emissions than it produces by 2030 and eliminate all of its emissions since 1975 by mid-century. “We know that no company, no matter how ambitious, can solve a challenge like climate change alone,” Google said in its sustainability report last September.

It’s clear that these companies like to talk about climate action being a collective effort. But despite the many detailed climate plans and pledges, Big Tech has done strikingly little government-level work to bring about the global-scale climate action it says it wants to see. The little lobbying the Big Five do has been largely focused on technical rules that are directly tied to these companies’ abilities to stick to their climate commitments, like procuring enough renewable energy. Meanwhile, the world is nowhere near where it needs to be to meet the climate targets outlined in the Paris Agreement.

“Relative to their scale, they invest very little in saving the planet,” Nic Bryant, a spokesperson for the climate activist group Extinction Rebellion, told Grist, referring to tech companies. “These companies could and should be leading the way.”

What’s more, tech companies are being vastly out-lobbied by Big Oil, the InfluenceMap report found. Chevron, Shell, ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips, and BP directed, on average, 38 percent of their legislative lobbying to climate-related policies between 2019 and 2020. Much of that lobbying activity was, unsurprisingly, against climate policy.

And during Donald Trump’s presidency, when the federal government did virtually nothing to address the climate crisis and some states tried to pick up the slack, the five major tech companies engaged on climate policy at the state level in less than half of the 22 states where they are headquartered, own data centers, or have regional offices.

“We worked from a list of almost 50 major climate bills that have been proposed in states over the last few years, and we found that Big Tech engaged on only a couple of them,” Kendra Haven, U.S. engagement manager for InfluenceMap, told Grist. Apple, Google, and Facebook, all headquartered in California, did almost no lobbying in the state, which has an aggressive climate agenda. Chevron, by comparison, also based in California, dedicated 51 percent of its disclosed lobbying activities to climate policy there.

“These companies have statements that indicate climate is a shared problem that needs to be addressed by society as a whole,” Dylan Tanner, executive director of InfluenceMap, told Grist. “The question to investors and stakeholders in the tech companies is, given this huge power and then your statements on climate, do you want to leave it up to a few oil and gas companies to decide the broad agenda on climate?”

Further complicating Big Tech’s stance on climate are its membership in industry associations. InfluenceMap scored each of the Big Five tech companies on the climate-friendliness of the industry groups they belong to. These are organizations like the Chamber of Commerce, the most powerful trade organization in the world, which has lobbied extensively against climate policy, as well as groups with progressive agendas like the Renewable Energy Buyers Alliance. By looking at Big Tech’s membership in industry associations across the board, InfluenceMap found “misalignment between the companies’ own climate lobbying positions and those of their industry associations.”

“Big Tech has no problem shelling out tens of millions of dollars jockeying for their own interests in Washington, so we know their failure to lobby for climate solutions is not due to a lack of means, but a lack of will,” David Arkush, director of the climate program at the nonprofit consumer advocacy organization Public Citizen, told Grist. “If they’re serious about climate, they need to push for government climate action at the scale and speed we need.”

Representatives for two of the tech companies named in the report asserted that they take climate change seriously. “Amazon believes that both private and public sector leadership is required to address the scale of the challenge, and we actively advocate for policies that promote clean energy and address climate change,” a spokesperson for Amazon told Grist. “We believe government action is a critical tool to advance climate solutions, and we will continue advocating for policies that address the urgency of the climate crisis.”

“We’re committed to fighting climate change and are taking substantive steps without waiting for any legislative action,” a spokesperson for Facebook told Grist.

Spokespeople for Alphabet, Apple, and Microsoft did not respond to Grist’s request for comment prior to this article’s publication.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Big Tech says it wants to solve climate change. Its lobbying dollars say otherwise. on Jan 28, 2021.

This post was originally published on Grist.