With help from Ben Lefebvre
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— President-elect Joe Biden is expected to officially tap Janet Yellen for Treasury secretary, a job with significant climate implications.
— And former Secretary of State John Kerry will serve as Biden’s special presidential envoy for climate.
— General Motors announced it is withdrawing from a lawsuit challenging California’s right to enforce greenhouse gas rules for automobiles.
GOOD MORNING! IT’S TUESDAY. I’m your host, Kelsey Tamborrino. Christi Tezak of ClearView Energy Partners gets the trivia win for correctly naming the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration as the other government agency established in conjunction with EPA under the Reorganization Plan No. 3 of 1970. For today: What was the name of the first turkey pardoned under the Trump administration? 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. On today’s episode: Kerry’s back, and he’s got some company
STOCKING UP THE CABINET: President-elect Joe Biden is expected to name Janet Yellen to be his Treasury secretary. The formal announcement — a historic move intended to satisfy competing factions within the Democratic Party — could come as soon as today, as Biden pledged to name his Treasury pick around Thanksgiving. If named and confirmed, Yellen would be the first woman to hold the position.
Biden’s pick for Treasury secretary is one of several key positions closely watched by green activists, who see it as crucial to tackling climate change amid concerns about the risks it poses to the financial system. Yellen, who is not the first choice of many environmentalists to head Treasury, has been more outspoken in recent weeks on the role that central banks and other financial regulators must play, Pro’s Zack Colman reports.
“She was clearly trying to burnish her climate credentials, which is a good sign that they see this as a top priority,” said Jamie Henn, founder and director of Fossil Free Media. “She’s someone we can work with, but someone we will have to push farther than her previous comments.”
Yellen has called a carbon tax a “textbook solution” to addressing greenhouse gas emissions. She’s a member of the Climate Leadership Council, a group that advocates putting a price on carbon emissions and returning the revenues to households as a dividend, and last month Yellen and Mark Carney, a former Bank of England governor, published a report detailing how financial regulators can limit climate risk, while noting that “the scale of the challenge means that carbon prices alone are not enough.”
As Zack notes, Treasury can set a climate agenda through the Financial Stability Oversight Council, which is made up of Treasury and the chiefs of other financial regulators, by asking other agencies what steps they’re taking to address climate risk. Environmentalists also argue that the Dodd-Frank Act gives Treasury the authority to clamp down on the risks that banks, insurers and taxpayers face from the burning of fossil fuels. But a Treasury chief would have to be willing to use the full scale of those powers.
“[T]he struggle to provide a Biden administration with the political space to wield this kind of power has only just begun,” wrote Justin Guay, director of global strategy with the Sunrise Project, an advocacy group working to get insurers to drop fossil fuel companies, in Greentech Media. “Industry is lining up on one side, with the climate community on the other.”
KERRY PICKED: Already, Biden on Monday announced a slate of nominations and appointments to his foreign policy and national security team, including John Kerry as the first special presidential envoy for climate to sit on the National Security Council. The position puts Kerry, a familiar name in international climate efforts, in charge of Biden’s push to put the U.S. back at the forefront of international climate diplomacy, as Zack also reports.
As secretary of State under the Obama administration, Kerry helped deliver a victory in 2015 for the Paris climate accord, and has since launched World War Zero, an effort to start a wartime-like mobilization to fight climate change. “The work we began with the Paris Agreement is far from done. I’m returning to government to get America back on track to address the biggest challenge of this generation and those that will follow. The climate crisis demands nothing less than all hands on deck,” he tweeted Monday.
In the role, Kerry will also be a key player promoting Biden’s vision that national economic recoveries in the wake of the coronavirus should prioritize sustainability, much as the European Union and United Nations have championed. The New York Times reported that Biden intends to name a White House climate policy coordinator in December who will help streamline domestic climate policies throughout federal agencies.
GM WITHDRAWS FROM CAR STANDARDS SUIT: General Motors will withdraw from a lawsuit challenging California’s right to enforce greenhouse gas rules for automobiles, CEO Mary Barra wrote in a letter to environmental groups, Pro’s Debra Kahn reports.
Barra pledged that GM would work with the incoming administration and California on national emissions rules. “Given this shared enthusiasm and the President-elect’s call to bring the country back together, we believe there is now a path to achieve agreement on a national standard and complementary policies to accelerate the electrification of the light-duty transportation sector,” Barra wrote.
Biden called GM’s announcement “encouraging” in a statement, adding it demonstrated “a promising path forward for how industry, labor, government, and environmental organizations can come together to tackle big problems and make vital progress on behalf of the American people.”
What’s next? Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.) quickly called for other automakers to stop backing the Trump administration and use California’s agreement with the five automakers as a template for a national standard. Toyota, for one, said Monday it was “assessing the situation.”
BOSTON MAYOR TALKS CLIMATE MAYORS, BIDEN: Boston Mayor Marty Walsh, the newly named chair of Climate Mayors, spoke to ME on Friday about his priorities for the role and how cities can work with the Biden administration to tackle climate change. “I think the fact the Climate Mayors — we have 450-plus mayors around the country — that infrastructure is there now for the White House that might not have been there under the Obama administration.
“Because cities were individualized working on climate, but they weren’t collectively, and really the pulling out of Paris and the Trump administration’s failure to recognize science and climate as a real threat to society, really forced us to do a lot more work collectively together,” he added. Under Walsh, Boston has set a target to be carbon neutral by 2050 and recently unveiled a plan for zero-emission vehicles.
Walsh also played down the speculation about being under consideration to lead the Labor Department. “I’m looking forward to working with a Biden-Harris administration over the next four years as mayor of the city of Boston,” he said, though he added “it’s an honor to be mentioned” for the Labor role. Walsh also pointed to a need for climate conversation to be had across the administration, as well as with labor organizations, contractors and developers and transportation experts. “We shouldn’t be afraid of having the conversation around climate,” he said. “These threats are real. It’s important to have this cross-departmental work, not just collaboration.”
CAPITO TO CONFRONT CLIMATE IN EPW ROLE: Wyoming Sen. John Barrasso‘s decision to relinquish the Environment and Public Works Committee gavel in favor of the Energy and Natural Resources chair has shifted new attention to Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.). She is widely assumed to be his successor at EPW, although committee staff won’t confirm whether Capito has formally filed paperwork to seek the seat.
Hill staffers and lobbyists who have worked with Capito describe her as pragmatic and well-respected, with an ability to build consensus across the aisle, Pro’s Tanya Snyder reports. The reauthorization of a five-year surface transportation bill is one of her top priorities on the committee, according to an aide, as are water resources and broadband. Her aide also listed “continuing to address climate change” as a priority.
Expect to see friction on the issue between Capito and her would-be counterpart in the House, Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.), whose surface transportation proposal is wrapped in a massive multi-sector infrastructure bill, H.R. 2 (116), centered on combating climate change. The current Senate reauthorization proposal, S. 2302 (116), would be the first-ever surface transportation bill with a climate section. But, by focusing on resiliency rather than mitigation, it does not go nearly as far as DeFazio would like to reduce emissions from mobile sources, Tanya writes.
SCIENCE CHAIR REQUESTS MORE INFO ON LEGATES: The chair of the House Science Committee questioned Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and Neil Jacobs, an assistant secretary at NOAA, on the creation of a new senior-level position within NOAA given to David Legates. In a letter Monday, Texas Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson writes that congressional committees were not given advance notice of the new position or Legates’ appointment. “I am concerned that the position was created, and Dr. Legates appointed to it, for the specific purpose of detailing him to USGCRP in order to influence the development of the 5th National Climate Assessment,” she said, referring to the U.S. Global Change Research Program that produces the report. Legates, a meteorologist who claims that global warming is harmless, was tapped to lead the agency earlier this month.
WHERE IS THIS GAO-ING? Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) is brandishing the results of a recent GAO report, which found lifting the ban against oil exports in 2015 had increased U.S. crude prices, to call for reinstating said ban. The report stated that lifting the ban increased oil exports out of the U.S. and corresponded with higher oil prices as U.S. oil sellers were able to sell their wares closer to the global market price. “Armed with this information, it’s time we reinstate the crude oil export ban and transition toward a clean energy economy that will free us from our fossil fuel addiction,” Markey, who opposed lifting the ban in the first place, said in a press release.
ME would be surprised if an oil export ban was reinstated. Biden was one of the architects of the deal the Obama administration made with Congress that lifted the ban in exchange for renewable energy tax credits, and sources have said Biden likes using U.S. oil to offset Russia and Sauid Arabia’s influence on the world stage. But as ClearView Energy’s Kevin Book pointed out in an analyst note, Markey and other like-minded politicians could cite the GAO report to pressure the administration to limit exports as part of an official climate emergency declaration. Still, even then companies could point to all the crude other countries export or to the road fuel U.S. refiners currently ship abroad to argue that banning U.S. oil exports wouldn’t accomplish much. “If Biden did attempt to reinstate an export ban, we would expect a spate of legal challenges,” ClearView said.
GREEN STIMULUS LAGS COMPARED WITH FINANCIAL CRISIS RESPONSE: Across 10 major global economies, green spending has so far made up a smaller percentage of coronavirus stimulus than it did for the stimulus following the global financial crisis that began in 2007, according to a new report this morning from the World Resources Institute. China, the U.S. and South Korea led on green stimulus after the financial crisis, but today during the Covid-19 pandemic, the EU, France and Germany have announced the most green spending.
After the financial crisis, governments put about $520 billion into green measures like railways, energy efficiency, grid modernization, renewable energy and water and waste management, according to WRI’s analysis, representing 16 percent of the total global fiscal stimulus. The U.S., specifically, spent 12 percent of its total economic stimulus on green measures following the financial crisis, but as of November 2020, less than 1 percent of its $3 trillion coronavirus economic stimulus spending has gone to green measures, Joel Jaeger, a WRI research associate, writes in an accompanying blog post today.
— “Why is Joe Biden considering this man to help fight the climate crisis?” via The Guardian.
— “EU, U.N.-led pact commits oil and gas firms to tackle methane emissions,” via Reuters.
— “Building a new coal-fired power plant? Consol proposes ambitious test to counter coal’s dim outlook,” via Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
— “Where the Great American Outdoors Act stands now,” via High Country News.
— “DOE advances Trump order to dismantle ‘deep state,’” via E&E News.
THAT’S ALL FOR ME!
