With help from Anthony Adragna, Annie Snider, Alex Guillén and Ben Lefebvre
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— President Joe Biden promised to tackle the country’s greatest water pollution problems, but the costs of doing so could make it harder to fulfill another top White House priority: Equity for low-income Americans.
— Jennifer Granholm was officially sworn in as the new Energy secretary on Thursday, the first of Biden’s confirmed Cabinet members who will lead the administration’s effort to expand clean energy and combat climate change.
— Biden’s new social cost of carbon will be a key figure for the administration to justify its sweeping climate change policies. So, where is it?
GOOD FRIDAY MORNING! I’m your host, Kelsey Tamborrino. Renee Eastman of the Salt River Project is the trivia winner. When the federal minimum wage went into effect in 1938, the wage was initially set at 25 cents an hour. For today: Granholm isn’t the only former governor to serve as Energy secretary. Name the others. Send your tips and trivia answers 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.
BIDEN’S WATER CHALLENGE: The Biden administration will ask Congress to spend trillions to renovate the country’s infrastructure. But even the most optimistic lobbyists don’t expect the water sector to win a big enough share of that money to cover the cost of upgrading the country’s aging and failing water infrastructure — let alone building expensive treatment systems, removing lead service lines and hardening low-lying water utilities to withstand the growing threats from climate change.
As Pro’s Annie Snider reports this morning, without addressing the affordability crisis head on, the administration risks cutting off the poorest Americans from access to drinking water and wastewater services if it implements new regulations that could add hundreds of millions of dollars of costs for water utilities.
“A new regulation to make sure that your drinking water is safe or your wastewater is treated for a chemical that would make everybody safer will come at a cost,” said Adam Krantz, president of the National Association of Clean Water Agencies. “To comply with that cost will demand a rate increase, and that rate increase will arguably hit those who are poorer in a greater way, in terms of their relative-to-income ability to pay.”
The Biden administration has indicated it plans to use the tools at its disposal to address the issue. In a statement, Radhika Fox — the acting head of EPA’s water office who worked on equity issues in her prior job leading the nonprofit U.S. Water Alliance — said the agency will “incorporate affordability and equity considerations as it advances the Biden-Harris administration’s water priorities.
Water advocates say they are working with the administration on ways to tweak the federal government’s primary tool for investing in water infrastructure — the State Revolving Funds that offer low-interest loans for water and sewer upgrades — and Fox said EPA supports targeting those loans to underserved communities.
MEET YOUR NEW ENERGY SECRETARY: Granholm was swiftly sworn in Thursday as the 16th Energy secretary, following her Senate confirmation. She now helms a department that will be critical for rolling out new innovations to meet Biden’s vision of pushing the country toward net-zero greenhouse emissions by 2050 and 100 percent clean power by 2035.
At her swearing-in, Granholm was joined by her husband, daughter and son-in-law, according to a pool report, and was sworn in on a Bible from her father, who passed away last year.
Granholm also appeared last night on MSNBC for her first official interview as secretary, where she called her new role “the job of a lifetime.” The new secretary touted Biden’s recent supply chain order as a potential job-creator: “If we can bring the supply chains for all of these clean energy products to the United States instead of letting our economic competitors eat us for lunch, the jobs that could be created for us in the U.S., good paying jobs, are boundless.”
And, she said the Energy Department is going to focus on both discovery and deployment of new technology going forward. “We’ve got to upgrade the grid. We’ve got to add new energy, new clean energy. We’ve got to add gigawatts to the grid,” she said. “So, the Department of Energy is also going to be in the business of deployment.” The Energy Department also unveiled a video message and blog post from Granholm on clean energy.
HE’S BACK, BABY: Former EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler will make his first big public appearance since the end of the Trump administration at this weekend’s CPAC gathering in Orlando, where he is slated to appear on some spicily named panel discussions. On Saturday, Wheeler will participate in “The Only Thing We Have to Fear is… Neera, Herself: How to Block a Tyrannical Administrative State,” along with Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.). He follows that up on Sunday afternoon with another panel on elections called “Pandora’s Ballot Box.”
EPA IG FOLLOWS UP ON FLINT: Five years after the lead contamination crisis in Flint, Mich., captured the country’s attention, EPA’s Inspector General is opening a follow-up probe to assess whether the agency followed through on its recommendations for avoiding such scenarios in the future. The July 2018 IG report laid the lion’s share of blame for the crisis with the state of Michigan, but said that EPA should step up its oversight of the state’s implementation of the Safe Drinking Water Act and improve the integration of environmental justice considerations. In a memo to the heads of EPA’s enforcement, water and Region 5 offices sent Thursday, the IG’s office said it is preparing to begin field work on the follow-up audit.
CONTINENTAL WANTS APDS PDQ: Continental Resources, the independent oil company founded by Trump ally Harold Hamm, sued Interior over the fate of 50 applications for drilling permits last year. The suit, filed in the U.S. District Court of North Dakota Western Division, says the permits were originally delayed more than two months because of software problems at the Bureau of Land Management, but by law should have been approved before the Biden administration took office. The company is now asking that about two dozen of the permit applications be approved by March 8 and the others within 11 days of a court order. An Interior spokesperson declined to comment.
Worth noting: BLM lost hundreds of staffers because the Trump administration relocated its headquarters to Colorado.
BEHIND SCHEDULE: The White House last week missed a self-imposed deadline for unveiling an interim social cost of carbon, a monetary assessment of benefits from curbing greenhouse gas emissions that is used in justifying climate rules. But as the Biden team works on that interim estimate, it does so without key political appointees who would normally be involved in the process, Pro’s Zack Colman reports. Nevertheless, a substantially higher value than the $52 per ton in today’s dollars imposed by the Obama administration is certain. That’s because there is a better understanding about how emissions translate to damages and how to refine climate effects for specific communities.
Biden will also likely use a lower discount rate than the 3 percent former President Barack Obama employed, a person who has spoken directly with Biden administration officials told Zack. Even a slightly lower discount rate would spike the calculation; when the Obama team modeled its estimates in 2016, a 3 percent discount rate carried a $42 per ton price while a 2.5 percent rate hit $62 per ton.
The person said the Biden administration seems aware a 3 percent discount rate is inconsistent with new data, and is instead exploring a 2 percent rate. But it’s not clear if Biden will suggest that figure when releasing the new social cost of carbon figure.
BIDENS TRAVEL TO TEXAS: The president and first lady are traveling to Houston today to meet with local leaders on recovery and relief efforts following the deep freeze last week that left millions in the state without power or clean water. Biden will travel with Republican Gov. Greg Abbott “most of the day” to survey the damage on the ground, press secretary Jen Psaki said Thursday.
“The president doesn’t view the crisis and the millions of people who have been impacted by it as a Democratic or Republican issue,” Psaki said. “He views it as an issue where he’s eager to get relief to tap into all the resources in the federal government, to make sure the people of Texas know we’re thinking about them, we’re fighting for them.” However, Psaki said there won’t be much in the way of policy discussions today, noting that “right now we’re focused on getting relief to the people in the state, getting updated briefings, tapping into all of the levers of the federal government.”
ME FIRST — SENATORS URGE CENSUS TO INCLUDE UTILITY BILL DATA: Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey is leading a letter today to the U.S. Census Bureau that calls for including questions regarding U.S. households’ experiences with paying utility and delivered fuels bills during the pandemic. The letter, also signed by Sens. Patty Murray, Jeff Merkley, Jack Reed and Bernie Sanders, highlights how Americans are struggling to pay for electricity, water and heat during the pandemic, which is being compounded by severe weather events, like last week’s in Texas, that affect the grid and can cause spikes in utility bills.
“[W]e do not have nationwide, comprehensive data on the extent of these problems, which makes it more difficult to formulate a response at the appropriate scale,” the letter states. The U.S. Census Bureau already has a Household Pulse Survey that measures experiences during the pandemic, but the senators want that expanded to specific survey questions about utility and delivered fuels bills.
Suggested questions include whether a household can “comfortably afford” electric, gas, water or delivered fuels bills, or whether a household has had to take any steps to or stop household energy or water use because it could not pay.
LANDS BILL UP: House lawmakers today consider a sprawling public lands conservation package, H.R. 803 (117), backed by the Biden White House, after they work their way through several dozen amendments. Democrats and Republicans brawled over the package during the initial debate Thursday night. “I urge my colleagues to consider the decades of work that has gone into the bill that’s before us and to recognize the chance that we all have to vote to protect these places,” Rep. Joe Neguse said. But Republicans, led by Rep. Bruce Westerman, said lawmakers affected by the designations oppose the package, which he called a “terrible, horrible, no good, very bad bill.”
Putting people on the record: House Republicans are aiming this morning to jam moderate Democrats by forcing them to go on the record about Biden’s early moves on climate change. GOP lawmakers will invoke a procedural tool, known as a motion to recommit, attempting to rescind Biden’s executive order that contained a pause on new oil and gas leasing on public lands and a secretarial order limiting decision-making on drilling to senior political appointees. It’s the first such attempt by Republicans to invoke the tool this Congress since Democrats substantially weakened it. The impact of those changes, adopted by the House in January, means bills cannot actually be amended on the floor but instead only sent back to committee.
“What we would like is to go back to committee and at least talk about some of this stuff — and talk about the damage that the Biden ban is doing to our economy and to rural communities — because apparently the Democrats don’t want to talk about it,” Westerman told ME on Thursday. “So if they don’t want to talk about it, we’ll use what limited strategies that we have to bring the topic up.”
Reminder: The bill notably would permanently bar new mining claims near the Grand Canyon and withdraw 200,000 acres from future oil and gas development in Colorado’s Thompson Divide.
FRACK NO: The Delaware River Basin Commission — a federal interstate agency that oversees four Northeastern states and represents more than 13 million people — voted on Thursday to ban fracking in the basin after a multiyear push from environmental advocates. The commission approved the regulations first authorized on a preliminary basis in 2017 to prohibit fracking in the basin, Pro’s Samantha Maldonado reports. That was after, in 2010, it imposed what was essentially a drilling moratorium in the basin, which is being challenged in federal court. The four state representatives voted in favor of the ban Thursday, while the federal government’s representative abstained. The basin overlaps two counties in Northeastern Pennsylvania that are part of the Marcellus Shale.
— “Kennedy: I’m sorry for calling Haaland a ‘whack job,’” via POLITICO.
— “Power outages main cause of oil, gas shut-ins: Texas update,” via Bloomberg.
— “New Mexico goes to court over slow cleanup at U.S. nuclear lab,” via Associated Press.
— “Petrobras CEO says will step down as Brazil’s president moves in on oil giant,” via The Wall Street Journal.
— “Why pro-drilling Don Young came to back Haaland for Interior,” via Roll Call.
— “Scientists see stronger evidence of slowing Atlantic Ocean circulation, an ‘Achilles’ heel’ of the climate,” via The Washington Post.
THAT’S ALL FOR ME!
