With help from Alex Guillén, Annie Snider and Eric Wolff
Editor’s Note: Morning Energy is a free version of POLITICO Pro Energy’s morning newsletter, which is delivered to our subscribers each morning at 6 a.m. The POLITICO Pro platform combines the news you need with tools you can use to take action on the day’s biggest stories. Act on the news with POLITICO Pro.
— President Donald Trump alleges Joe Biden would kill the oil industry, but the industry’s fortunes have withered on his watch.
— Amy Coney Barrett is officially the newest justice on the Supreme Court, significantly shifting its ideological makeup.
— EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler asked the Justice Department to investigate several environmental groups over concerns they were receiving secret funding from foreign governments, such as China and Russia.
GOOD MORNING! IT’S TUESDAY. I’m your host, Kelsey Tamborrino. Neste’s Alex Menotti gets the trivia win for knowing that Arlington, Va., is the smallest self-governing county in the United States. For today: How many U.S. state names end with the letter “O”? Send your tips, energy gossip and comments to [email protected].
Check out the POLITICO Energy podcast — all the energy and environmental politics and policy news you need to start your day, in just five minutes. Listen and subscribe for free at politico.com/energy-podcast. On today’s episode: Trump’s scorecard on the oil industry
TRUMP’S CRUDE AWAKENING: President Donald Trump spent the past several days drawing attention to Joe Biden’s comment that he would transition away from oil. But several industry players told POLITICO that the Trump administration overall hasn’t delivered the concrete benefits they had hoped for, Pro’s Ben Lefebvre reports.
So far, at least 40 U.S. oil companies have sought bankruptcy protection in 2020, while dozens of others have slashed spending and cut tens of thousands of jobs as the pandemic worsened the downturn that was taking hold of the industry last year. Trump disappointed executives last month by reversing early term pledges and making vast swaths of shoreline off Florida and other states off-limits to drilling, and the administration’s aggressive regulatory rollbacks have been so rushed and beset by legal challenges that Democrats may have little trouble reinstating the rules if they reclaim power.
“Three and a half years of rollbacks facing serious litigation ensures a lot of things are ‘to-be-decided,'” said Wayne D’Angelo, an energy lawyer and partner at legal firm Kelley Drye, who has represented oil and gas companies and trade associations on federal environmental issues.
More fundamentally, oil and executives told POLITICO, the president doesn’t really understand their business — and his famously chaotic White House has set up a system where only a relative handful of favorite energy executives have access to people who can shape policy.
“I don’t think it’s one of these things where we as an industry get in a room and say, ‘Man that was a good four years,'” said one industry executive who requested anonymity. “It was more like ‘meh.'”
BARRETT ON THE BENCH: The Senate on Monday night confirmed Barrett to the Supreme Court by a 52-48 vote, elevating the 48-year-old judge and daughter of a retired Shell executive and significantly shifting the highest court in the land to the right. Barrett raised eyebrows during her confirmation hearings this month when she dodged Democrats’ questions on climate change science, saying at first she had not studied the science but that it was irrelevant to her judgeship, then later describing the issue as “a very contentious matter on public debate” that she would not address further. None of that impeded her from being confirmed and quickly sworn in on Monday.
The judiciary has consistently recognized the science behind climate change and the threat it poses. True, there does appear to be at least some behind-closed-doors disagreement, such as when an announcement over a climate science seminar last year triggered a scathing email battle between judges in D.C. But the vast majority of climate change-related rulings over the past decade-plus have recognized the phenomenon’s danger to public health and welfare — even when the judges may be ruling against agency action. For example, then-Judge Brett Kavanaugh in 2016 said addressing climate change was a “laudable” policy even as he appeared skeptical of the Obama administration’s legal authority to do so.
On her docket: Barrett will participate in several upcoming Supreme Court actions in the environmental sphere. This coming Monday, the court is slated to hear arguments in a wonky case over whether certain Fish and Wildlife Service documents from an endangered species review of a draft Obama-era EPA rule must be released under the Freedom of Information Act. Later in the term, the court will take up a question about whether state-law climate lawsuits can be removed to federal courts, where they’re likely to be blocked. And the high court is waiting to hear the Justice Department’s thoughts on two additional cases before deciding whether to hear them; one is a fight between Wyoming, Montana and Washington state over coal exports, and the other will decide the future of the PennEast gas pipeline in New Jersey.
PLEASE SHOW YOUR WORK: The top House Democrats who oversee EPA’s water pollution work are demanding that the Trump administration provide specifics about the real world impact of last month’s rollback of an Obama-era regulation limiting toxic water discharges from coal plants. In a letter to EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler Monday, Transportation Chair Peter DeFazio (Ore.) and water subpanel Chair Grace Napolitano (Calif.) asked that EPA identify the individual power plants that benefited from the rollback and those that it expects to participate in a voluntary program that the administration used to argue its rollback would result in greater pollution reductions than the original Obama-era rule.
A daily look at what POLITICO Energy reporters are watching this cycle. Today, Pro’s Anthony Adragna and Annie Snider look at a wave of doctors and scientists running competitive races this year.
CALLING ALL DOCS AND SCIENTISTS: Trump’s criticism of his own medical experts during a worldwide pandemic and his unwillingness to full-throatedly accept the dire threat posed by climate change are giving ammunition to a host of scientists seeking to flip seats for Democrats this cycle.
The wave of activism within professions that typically avoid politics began after Trump’s election with the March for Science in 2017 and led to groups like 314 Action that had some success boosting scientists to office in 2018.
This go-around, Democrats in three competitive House contests are touting their medical and scientific credentials. In an open contest in sprawling Central Virginia, Dr. Cameron Webb is locked in a competitive race against local political official Bob Good. In an Arizona district northeast of Phoenix, physician Hiral Tipirneni is battling Rep. David Schweikert, who’s struggling amid a slew of ethics violations. And on Long Island, Ph.D. chemist and Union of Concerned Scientists’ National Advisory Board member Nancy Goroff is seeking to knock off Rep. Lee Zeldin, saying that climate change “is a major motivation for me and getting into this race.” The Arizona and Virginia contests are considered tossups, while the one in New York “Leans Republican,” according to the Cook Political Report.
In Senate races, Democrats are hoping two doctors can lead them to upsets in Kansas and Alaska. Dr. Barbara Bollier, who left the Republican Party in 2018, is in a surprisingly competitive contest for an open seat against Rep. Roger Marshall in Kansas; In Alaska, Dr. Al Gross battles incumbent Sen. Dan Sullivan. Both races are dubbed “Leans Republican.” And former NASA astronaut Mark Kelly has stressed the importance of listening to science in his battle against Sen. Martha McSally in Arizona.
Earlier this week, ME highlighted an Alaska ballot measure that would hike the oil production tax in the state. The measure is drawing millions from Big Oil, but it’s certainly not the only provision related to energy and the environment awaiting voters at the ballot box next month. Pro DataPoint’s Patterson Clark has the run-down of state ballot measures for energy, environment, transportation and water.
Do you want more policy-driven graphics and explainers, and in-depth analyses available in multiple formats? Pro Premium has you covered. Learn more about our newly improved experience.
FRACK TALK: As he crisscrossed Pennsylvania on Monday, Trump had one thing on his mind: Fracking. He portrayed it as an issue of “existential importance” for the state home to the Marcellus Shale, POLITICO’s Meridith McGraw reports. “Biden confirmed his plan to abolish the entire U.S. oil industry,” Trump said Monday, speaking to supporters in Allentown, Pa., incorrectly describing Biden’s stance, which is actually focused on ending federal subsidies for fossil fuel companies, barring new fossil fuel permits on public lands and transitioning to renewable energy sources.
Trump also tweeted Monday afternoon that Biden’s comment at last week’s debate that he would transition away from oil was “perhaps the most shocking admission ever uttered in the history of presidential debates.” In doing so, Trump said Biden “confirmed his plan to ABOLISH the entire U.S. Oil Industry — that means NO fracking, NO jobs, and NO energy for Pennsylvania Families!”
But Trump’s full-throated fracking evangelism is not necessarily a message that appeals to the state at large, Meredith reports. A slim majority of Pennsylvania’s registered voters opposed fracking in an August CBS poll, and some of the energy firms that rushed to the state in recent years have seen their stocks plummet as the industry struggles.
DEPARTMENT OF INTERESTING TIMING: Fresh off Trump’s visit to the Keystone State, Energy Secretary Dan Brouillette will travel today to Washington County, near Pittsburgh, to tour an active Range Resources natural gas well site, the Energy Department announced. The secretary will then hold a roundtable on Wednesday at DOE’s National Energy Technology Laboratory in the Pittsburgh area and make a “substantial energy funding announcement.” Brouillette tweeted a reminder Monday that NETL research includes how to make fracking more efficient.
Fracking has “produced energy security and national security for the nation,” Brouillette said on Fox News Radio on Monday. “It’s given us foreign policy options that we didn’t have just a decade ago. So it’s a very, very important technology, and I would dare say that it is the technology that has produced the economic boom over the last three years.” Brouillette also pointed to the coal industry, which he said was “nearly” killed by the previous administration. “When they say that they want to kill oil and gas, a word to the wise: Believe them,” he said.
WHEELER CALLS ON DOJ TO INVESTIGATE GREENS: Wheeler on Monday asked the Justice Department to investigate several environmental groups, including the Sierra Club and the Sunrise Movement, over concerns they were receiving secret funding from foreign governments, Pro’s Alex Guillén reports. In a letter, Wheeler said he referred the matter to DOJ because of “heightened concern that foreign countries, primarily China and Russia, are potentially funding U.S.-based ‘green’ groups to undermine American energy independence and to help maintain the integrity of EPA’s decision-making.”
The administrator was responding to a letter sent earlier this month by Rep. Lance Gooden (R-Texas) that alleged foreign influence at the Sierra Club, Sunrise Movement and the Sea Change Foundation. Gooden’s letter cited “information recently brought to my attention” that the groups are “clearly engaging in politics at best, and operating at the behest of foreign actors at worst.” Republicans have long alleged that foreign interests fund environmental groups’ regulatory agendas in a covert effort to weaken the U.S. energy sector. Green groups have defended their work as proper and called the allegations an effort to distract attention from the market forces hurting the fossil fuel industry.
WIND IN THE OFFING: FERC is holding an all-day technical conference on off-shore wind today. The panels include civil servants and executives from the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and executives from PJM Interconnection, ISO-New England and Avangrid.
— “Trump federal salary adviser quits post over executive order reclassifying workers,” via POLITICO.
— “U.S. sanctions Iran oil minister as Trump ramps up pressure,” via Bloomberg.
— “Revealed: the full extent of Trump’s ‘meat cleaver’ assault on U.S. wilderness,” via The Guardian.
— “Exclusive: GM, Ford knew about climate change 50 years ago,” via E&E News.
— “Biden pledges ambitious climate action. Here’s what he could actually do,” via The New York Times.
— “Tax hikes may help Russian oil majors stomach OPEC output curbs,” via Reuters.
THAT’S ALL FOR ME!
