With help from Kelsey Tamborrino, Zack Colman and Jonathan Custodio.
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— Democratic support, including from President Joe Biden, for a slimmed-down, climate-focused BBB doesn’t guarantee success, with several outstanding disagreements within the caucus.
— House Oversight is having another round of oil and gas hearings next month, with board directors from several fossil fuel majors invited to take the hot seat this time.
— Biden’s looming decision on solar tariffs has the Senate split into bipartisan factions.
HAPPY FRIDAY! I’m your host, Matthew Choi. Clean Air Task Force’s Stuart Ross gets the trivia for knowing Suzy met Sam while performing in “Noye’s Fludde” in “Moonrise Kingdom.” For today: How many jurors are traditionally in a Scottish criminal jury? Send your tips and trivia answers to [email protected]. Find me on Twitter @matthewchoi2018.
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: Biden’s new BBB climate path.
HOW TO GET A CLIMATE BBB CUTOUT: Senate Democrats are on board with President Joe Biden’s interest in retooling the Build Back Better Act into a narrower party-line bill that nixes some social policy priorities while retaining the core of their climate change agenda. Democrats have maintained for weeks they can reach a deal with holdout vote Sen. Joe Manchin on the over $500 billion in clean energy portions of the Build Back Better bill — particularly $320 billion worth of green tax credits — citing the West Virginian’s recent statement that tackling climate change is one area Democrats can “probably” find agreement on.
But Biden’s resetting of expectations is just the start of a new negotiating process, Senate Democrats say, as actual talks have been frozen for weeks after Manchin said he could not support the original iteration of the bill. Manchin doesn’t sound ready to move quickly on any narrower bill. He told reporters Thursday he wanted to “start with a clean sheet of paper and start over” with negotiations on the climate and social spending package.
That means Democrats still haven’t clinched specific final details of a climate package and are no closer to resolving lingering hang-ups flagged by Manchin such as a methane fee targeting emissions from the oil and gas sector and extra incentives for electric vehicles made by unionized labor. Though National Climate Advisor Gina McCarthy projected confidence Thursday that the electric vehicle tax credits will remain, saying during the Washington Auto Show that “I’m not seeing any dispute about the need to continue to make sure that these technologies are affordable and accessible to everyone.”
“What needs to happen next is [Democratic] leadership and Sen. Manchin and those of us who have been working on these issues just need to iron out what it is exactly we are talking about — not just high level stuff but the actual functional details,” Sen. Martin Heinrich told Pro’s Josh Siegel.
Heinrich and other Senate Democrats note that Manchin has not publicly opposed the clean energy tax package and some of the subsidies support technologies Manchin has long favored, including nuclear power, hydrogen and carbon capture for use on fossil fuel plants. The Senate Energy Committee has separately released its portion of the climate package that raises royalty rates and fees on oil and gas production on federal lands — signaling the West Virginian chair is on board with other aspects of Democrats’ climate agenda.
Meanwhile, Senate Environment and Public Works Chair Tom Carper told Josh on Thursday that he’d continue pushing for his panel’s methane fee within a smaller climate and social spending legislative package, noting he has already made concessions to Manchin offering significant subsidies to help oil and gas operators comply.
“We have worked very hard with Sen. Manchin and his team and other stakeholders, came up with a good plan, a very good approach, and by golly we are going to get it done sooner rather than later,” Carper said.
But Manchin’s colleagues say they know better than to bank on his support. Sen. Tina Smith (D-Minn.) recalled how Manchin forced Democrats to eliminate the Clean Electricity Performance Program after she had pressed him to support it for months.
“Sen. Manchin is a polite person,” Smith told Josh on Thursday. “But when he says no, he usually means it.”
And not all legislators are on board with divorcing parts of BBB such as the Child Tax Credit to get the climate provisions through. Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.) said Thursday “We are not interested in a slimmed-down, Build Back Better package” as the caucus continues to discuss the climate issue.
OIL HEARING, PART TWO: The House Oversight and Reform Committee invited board directors from Exxon Mobil, Chevron, BP and Shell to testify at a Feb. 8 hearing on their efforts to ensure companies honor commitments to address climate change. Included in the invite: Alex Karsner, the renewable energy advocate whom activist shareholder group Engine No. 1 elevated to the Exxon board last year.
“Boards of directors of fossil fuel companies have a key governance role to play in addressing the climate crisis by overseeing and guiding companies’ climate strategies, promoting transparency, and holding management accountable to meaningful emissions reductions,” Chairwoman Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) and Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), who chairs the environment subcommittee, said in their letter.
The hearing comes in the wake of CEOs for the same four firms testifying before the committee last October. Maloney and Khanna said those companies have since “failed to fully produce certain subpoenaed documents” and set a Feb. 1 deadline to comply. Those documents covered information related to the companies’ climate pledges and board materials.
THE SENATE SOLAR SPLIT: The Biden administration has until Feb. 6 to decide whether to extend Section 201 tariffs on imported solar panels, and the matter is splitting the Senate into bipartisan factions fiercely pushing in both directions. The matter gets at a conflict between two of the administration’s key priorities: The build out of renewable energy and the protection of the U.S. manufacturing sector and its jobs.
Ohio Sens. Sherrod Brown and Rob Portman led a bipartisan group this week urging Biden to extend the tariffs to give U.S. solar manufacturing a chance to grow. Chinese-made solar components are considerably cheaper but are far more carbon intensive than their U.S. counterparts and are riddled with ethical concerns surrounding forced labor reports in Xinjiang. Democrats included tax credits for domestic solar manufacturing in their reconciliation package, hoping to make the sector more independent of foreign supply chains, but U.S. manufacturers still say further protections are needed.
Meanwhile, Sens. Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.) and Jerry Moran (R-Kan.) led their own competing group urging Biden to nix the tariffs to encourage solar deployment, arguing overseas supply chains are a market reality for the rapid build out of solar needed to reach the administration’s emissions goals. The Solar Energy Industries Association also backs letting the tariffs expire, saying they make solar components far more expensive. Pro’s Gavin Bade and Kelsey Tamborrino have more on the dispute.
NO MORE CR-AZY APPROPS: A cohort of some of the biggest environmental groups is urging Congress’ top appropriators to get a deal done to fund the government without having to pass another continuing resolution. Failing to do so would continue funding at levels set under the Trump administration, which the groups and Democrats say is far too low to meet the federal governments’ current climate and environmental agenda.
“A yearlong stopgap bill would perpetuate these shortfalls and extend damaging policy provisions at a moment when we cannot afford to wait,” the groups write in a letter to the House and Senate’s top appropriators.
The groups — including the Environmental Defense Fund, League of Conservation Voters, Natural Resources Defense Council and Sierra Club — praised the FY 2022 appropriations bills approved by the House last year for including bolstered funding for several environmental priorities and programs, including nearly $1.5 billion increase in funding for clean energy and water, and over $7.3 billion increase in funding for Interior and related agencies.
House and Senate appropriators met last week in what they described as a productive huddle to find a funding solution, and Democratic leaders kept faith alive this week for an omnibus agreement before the Feb. 18 funding deadline. But Republicans voiced stern opposition to some of Democrats’ key climate and environmental priorities reflected in last year’s appropriations proposals, including for the Civilian Climate Corps and other climate programs.
GULF OF MEXI-NO: House Democrats criticized the Biden administration for moving forward with oil and gas lease sales in the Gulf of Mexico on Thursday, saying it was counter to its emissions reductions and clean energy goals. Rep. Alan Lowenthal, who was chairing a hearing of the House Natural Resources Energy and Mineral Resources oversight subcommittee, said the “Gulf coast has been treated as a sacrifice zone,” citing both pollution on the coast and the region’s vulnerability to climate change-related disasters.
Republicans on the committee retorted that shutting down domestic oil and gas production would simply redirect demand to overseas suppliers with far less stringent environmental protections. The administration itself has defended its lease sale as reluctant compliance with a federal court order prohibiting its previous pause on new lease sales, though progressives dispute the idea the administration was cornered on the matter.
CRYPTO CLIMATE CRACKDOWN: House Democrats made it clear Thursday that cryptocurrencies will be front and center when discussing clean energy, with lawmakers on the House Energy and Commerce Oversight subcommittee spitballing ways to make sure energy consumers don’t get stuck with the bill for the crypto-mining industry’s substantial energy consumption. Representatives of crypto-mining firms refuted that their high energy use would destabilize power grids, saying there could be an opportunity for investment in renewable upgrades.
“While the industry has matured since and there are now responsible actors in this space, we should be ready to collaborate and encourage innovation and investment in cleaner renewable energy,” Chair Frank Pallone said. Pro’s Sam Sutton has the key takeaways from the hearing.
WHAT’S UP AT FERC: FERC voted to uphold the certificate for a compressor station at Weymouth, Mass.’s Atlantic Bridge project at its open meeting Thursday, though the Democratic majority agreed the commission should have taken greater consideration of the facility’s environmental justice impacts in determining if it should have been approved in the first place. It was the first time in years a majority of commissioners agreed that environmental justice impacts warranted reassessment of a project whose very reconsideration was a subject of dispute last year. Pro’s Catherine Morehouse has more from Thursday’s meeting.
OILING UP: Global oil supplies could see a major upshoot this year as OPEC+ increases its output and renewables trail in meeting global energy demand, Toril Bosoni, the International Energy Agency’s head of oil market analysis, said Thursday. IEA is projecting possible increases of 6 million barrels a day of oil production, potentially cooling prices that have become a political cudgel against the Biden administration, Pro’s Ben Lefebvre reports.
NUCLEAR REACTIONS: The total cost of the two new nuclear reactors at Georgia Power’s Plant Vogtle site has risen from an estimated $14.1 billion in 2009 to about $32 billion in the fall of 2021, an approximate 127 percent increase, according to a new report Thursday from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. The report — which concluded Georgia Power “repeatedly misled” the Georgia Public Service Commission and its staff about the project’s likely cost and schedule — also found that the power from the Vogtle 3 and 4 units will be about five times as expensive as acquiring the same amounts of energy and capacity from renewable solar plus storage purchase power agreements.
In response to IEEFA’s report, Georgia Power told ME the Vogtle units 3 and 4 remain “a critical investment” for the state, and “are the most reliable energy source and able to generate electricity at full power 24/7, more than twice as much as solar and wind.” The company added it has provided up-to-date information on the project throughout the construction monitoring public process with the Georgia PSC. “Any suggestion or claim to the contrary is not true,” the company said.
— “Peru says oil spill caused by Tonga waves is an ‘ecological disaster‘,” via Reuters.
— “EPA Union Urges Virginia Lawmakers To Reject Trump’s Former EPA Chief,” via The Huffington Post.
— “Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm violated a federal conflict-of-interest law by improperly disclosing stock sales,” via The Huffington Post.
— “Biden: Putin ‘has no misunderstanding’ about consequences of Ukraine invasion,” via POLITICO.
— “Why Coal Miners Are Pushing Manchin to Pass a Climate Bill,” via Bloomberg.
THAT’S ALL FOR ME!
