With help from Kelsey Tamborrino, Ben Lefebvre, Annie Snider and Daniel Lippman
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— Tax credits and carbon pricing: Democrats are looking to other ways to reduce carbon emissions as the proposed program to pay utilities to add green generation hits a roadblock.
— Willie Phillips, Biden’s pick to fill the vacant FERC seat faces the Senate Energy Committee today, and members of both parties are anxious to know if he backs a strategy to fight climate change.
— EPA unveiled a long-awaited roadmap to deal with PFAS, including categorizing the toxicants to speed up testing. But some environmentalists fret it doesn’t go far enough.
HAPPY TUESDAY! I’m your host, Matthew Choi. Congrats to NRDC’s Ed Chen for knowing José Feliciano sang his controversial rendition of the national anthem before Game 5 of the 1968 World Series. For today: Adele was born in what part of London? Send your tips and trivia answers to [email protected]. Find me on Twitter @matthewchoi2018.
WHAT ELSE IS ON THE PLATE: Climate activists and Democratic lawmakers aren’t giving up on fulfilling President Joe Biden’s emissions goals through their reconciliation bill, even if that gets harder without the Clean Electricity Performance Plan. From expanding tax credits to carbon pricing, additional pathways toward net-zero emissions are getting a another look.
“There are a range of good ideas and proposals out there from members of Congress about how this legislation can help meet that goal,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters on Monday. “And there’s no question in our minds there’s important debating right now happening about what the components of the climate proposals will be in these packages … these packages will have a historic impact in addressing our climate crisis.”
What’s not clear is whether any of those measures will draw the support from all 50 Democratic senators, or hold together the moderates and progressives in the House. Still, climate advocates are going to their toolkits to come up with proposals to replace the CEPP. “In an ideal world, lawmakers would be willing to use every available tool to address the climate crisis, including a CEPP. But if not, these remaining policies are very powerful,” Flannery Winchester, communications director at Citizens’ Climate Lobby, which has been pushing for a carbon pricing measure for months, told ME.
Senate Finance Chair Ron Wyden thinks now is the moment for a carbon price mechanism that he’s long sought, as well as the clean energy tax credits he’ll have to craft with the House Ways and Means committee. On Monday he touted to reporters his committee’s tax plan for scaling tax savings based on emissions reductions as the “lynchpin of this agenda.”
Wyden says he’s working on a carbon pricing mechanism that is popular among his Democratic peers, and Bloomberg reported Monday that expanded loan guarantees for clean energy technology and compensations for emissions reductions were also on the table.
PAGING VACLAV SMIL: Senate Energy Chair Joe Manchin isn’t backing down from his opposition to CEPP, telling Channel 4 News’ Siobhan Kennedy on Monday: “The clean utility plan is $150 billion for what’s already transitioning. We’ve transitioned.”
It’s a stance environmentalists fiercely criticize, since the market forces that are changing the U.S. energy mix aren’t driving it fast enough to meet Biden’s 2035 net-zero power grid goal or prevent catastrophic climate change. Leah Stokes, an associate professor of political science at U.C. Santa Barbara who’s worked on CEPP, told ME that tax cuts as they stand alone aren’t enough to reach Biden’s climate goals and stressed that there needs to be major investments to push the energy sector away from carbon emissions.
“It doesn’t have to be that program,” Stokes said of the CEPP. “What it has to be is meaningful investment in the power sector at the pace and scale that’s necessary.”
Related: “The Manchin and Bernie show consumes Democrats,” from POLITICO’s Burgess Everett and Marianne LeVine.
SENATE ENERGY COMMITTEE’S BIG DAY: The Senate Energy Committee holds a hearing to vet a number of key nominees today, including FERC nominee Willie Phillips, whom Biden has tapped to replace Neil Chatterjee.
Phillips, the chairman of the DC Public Utilities Commission, will face questions from Republicans on the panel about whether he’s on board with Democrats’ efforts to move away from fossil fuels, and what role the energy regulator should play in that. Ranking Member John Barrasso, for one, intends to press him on “how he thinks these policies will impact the affordability and reliability of electric and natural gas services.”
Also stepping into the committee’s spotlight is former Carbon Capture Coalition director Brad Crabtree, who is nominated to become assistant secretary of Energy for fossil energy and carbon management, and Charles Sams for director of the National Park Service.
The committee’s public lands subpanel will also markup a spate of legislation today focusing on fossil fuel extraction, conservation and recreation. Among the bills is Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto’s End Speculative Oil and Gas Leasing Act (S. 607 (117)) that would only allow auctioning federal lands that the Bureau of Land Management determines has reasonable potential for energy development.
THE PURSE STRINGS: Senate Democrats released their nine remaining spending plans for Fiscal Year 2022 on Monday, including measures for Interior, Environment and other related agencies (appropriators unveiled their energy and water provisions back in August). The Interior and Environment spending measure, which would hike EPA’s budget to $10.54 billion, up $1.3 billion from FY 2021, also includes an increase of $12.6 million for renewable energy development in solar, wind, and geothermal projects. Pro’s Jennifer Scholtes and Caitlin Emma set it up here.
WHAT’S THE HOLD UP? Eight Midwestern Republican senators pressed Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack on Monday on the delayed rollout of financial assistance for members of the biofuels industry still reeling from the coronavirus pandemic. The senators called it past time that “hardworking biofuel producers receive the critical aid that you promised.”
USDA announced $700 million in aid as part of the Pandemic Assistance for Producers back in June, and the agency said it would be implemented within 60 days, a deadline the senators said was long passed. “It is simply unacceptable that it has been over 120 days since your announcement and biofuel producers are still waiting,” they wrote. “The pandemic continues to negatively affect biofuel producers. As feedstocks have experienced historic highs, margins to produce biofuel have risen, and many plants remain offline or are operating at reduced rates.”
A USDA spokesperson told ME in a statement that upon taking office, the agency “took the initiative to review who had not received assistance from the previous administration and we made providing support to the biofuels industry a priority when they had received nothing in 2020. We will be accepting applications for this assistance soon.”
The letter was led by Iowa Sens. Joni Ernst and Chuck Grassley, and also signed by Sens. Jerry Moran (Kan.), Deb Fischer (Neb.), Mike Rounds (S.D.), Roger Marshall (Kan.), Ben Sasse (Neb.) and John Thune (S.D.).
PIPELINE POLITICS: House Democrats on the Natural Resource Committee used a Monday hearing on the recent California pipeline oil spill to make the case for climate provisions in the reconciliation bill still languishing in Congress.
Rep. Alan Lowenthal, chair of the subcommittee on energy and mineral resources, linked the latest accident to previous ones and pressed for measures in the reconciliation bill that would ban offshore drilling in U.S. coastal waters in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. The spills occurred “because we have not broken our dependence on fossil fuels and we can continue drilling off our shores,” Lowenthal said at the hearing. “Preventing new offshore drilling is a crucial first step and one that we’re actively working to ensure remains in the Build Back Better Act working its way through Congress.”
Rep. Katie Porter also estimated that the oil producer and pipeline owner Beta Offshore had received $31 million in federal subsidies over the past five years. “With that money, Beta tried to extract more oil,” Porter said. “Then it leaked, devastating Southern California businesses. The Build Back Better budget will end the royalty cuts program, which is the subsidy that Beta got, and that’s just one more reason that we should all support it.”
House Natural Resources Ranking Member Bruce Westerman decried the hearing as a partisan show, saying in a statement that current supply chain woes were responsible for overcrowding the waters near the pipeline. “Instead of calling on the Biden administration to get Americans back to work and keep the supply chain functional, Democrats are blaming their favorite scapegoat: the domestic oil and gas industry,” Westerman said.
PFAS AND FURIOUS: EPA is going after PFAS “forever chemicals” linked to a host of medical issues with a new playbook released Monday, hoping to target the toxicants from the source. It’s a priority EPA Administrator Michael Regan has stressed during his confirmation and goes back to his days leading North Carolina’s Department of Environmental Quality.
The plan includes requiring chemical manufacturers to aggressively test chemicals for health and environmental impacts, and it would group more than 2,000 individual PFAS into about 20 different categories. The move is intended to speed up testing for the chemicals by making safety assessments by category rather than individually testing each PFAS. EPA will also hustle to issue a first-ever mandatory drinking water limit for PFOA and PFOS, hoping to finalize the regulation by the fall of 2023.
House Natural Resources Chair Raúl Grijalva praised the new action plan as a “step in the right direction, but the target timeline of 2023 is too late for many communities whose drinking water has been impacted by these dangerous chemicals.”
Environmental groups also largely praised Monday’s announcement, but argued that it fell short in key respects, particularly in not regulating all PFAS as a class. “While we welcome several proposals in the Roadmap, the agency needs to act with great urgency to address this five-alarm fire and take action on the full class of these toxic forever chemicals,” Erik Olsen, who heads NRDC’s health program, said in a statement.
The Senate Environment and Public Works committee will hear from EPA’s water chief, Radhika Fox, about the agency’s PFAS plans on Wednesday. Annie Snider has more for Pros.
METHANE IN THE FAST LANE: EPA is only “days away” from issuing its updated methane emissions standards, acting head of the agency’s air office, Joe Goffman, said Monday. The Biden administration has been working on updating the standards for months after Biden signed a Senate resolution back in June reinstating Obama-era methane limits.
How the methane standards are implemented remains a point of contention in the industry, with independent oil companies pushing for low-producing “marginal” wells to be regulated differently than those producing at higher volumes. But the Environmental Defense Fund counters that marginal wells collectively contribute a considerable share of emissions, with many of the wells owned by larger companies that can afford to comply with strengthened standards. Pro’s Kelsey Tamborrino and Ben Lefebvre have more.
— Clare Sierawski is now special assistant to the president for climate change finance. She most recently was West Africa manager and climate change co-lead for the U.S. Trade and Development Agency.
— Kristine Svinicki was elected as independent director of the Southern Company board of directors, serving on the Business Security and Resiliency and the Operations, Environmental and Safety committees. Svinicki had previously served on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
— “Nuclear Fusion Edges Toward the Mainstream,” via The New York Times.
— “OPEC+ misses target again, as some members struggle to raise oil output,” via Reuters.
— “Algeria and Morocco fall out over gas, separatists and Western Sahara,” via The Financial Times.
— “To Strike a Climate Deal, Poor Nations Say They Need Trillions From Rich Ones,” via The Wall Street Journal.
— “D.C. Circuit rejects request for rehearing on social cost of carbon ruling,” via POLITICO.
— “Nord Stream 2 fills first line with gas ready for export,” via Reuters.
THAT’S ALL FOR ME!
