With help from Anthony Adragna, Alex Guillén and Zack Colman.
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— Senate negotiators hope to work out their bipartisan infrastructure agreement this week, with legislative text possibly coming out this afternoon.
— Progressive activists are unsatisfied with Democrats’ climate provisions and are pushing to spend more and cut things like carbon capture out of the reconciliation package.
— Energy and environment appropriations, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, FERC and energy cybersecurity will get the spotlight in hearings this week.
HAPPY MONDAY! I’m your host, Matthew Choi. Dow’s Ryan Weiss gets the trivia for knowing Lithuania gained independence in the aftermath of World War I. For today’s trivia: Who was the last signer of the Declaration of Independence to die? 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: The wildfire firefighter shortage.
THE BIG WEEK: Senate negotiators are hoping to get their bipartisan infrastructure framework squared away today (or at least this week), with Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) saying Sunday that legislative text could be unveiled this afternoon and the group was “down to the last couple of items”. Among the major sticking points going into the weekend were how proposed funding streams from Covid relief would cover the nearly $600 billion in new spending and the levels of financing for public transportation.
The public transit question was one lingering dispute, with Democrats fretting that Republicans were trying to shortchange transit for highway spending. “Robust funding for transit must be included in the legislation. We will not support any package that neglects this fundamental part of our nation’s infrastructure,” EPW Chair Tom Carper (D-Del.) and Banking Chair Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) said in a statement last week.
Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) took to ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos” to contest that his party was to blame, saying “we have one issue outstanding and we’re not getting much response from the Democrats on it. It’s about mass transit. Our transit number is very generous.”
Portman also pushed back against House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who reiterated Sunday that she wouldn’t bring the bipartisan infrastructure bill to the floor until the Senate also passes a $3.5 trillion spending package with many of the Democrats’ social and climate priorities. Portman said holding the bipartisan infrastructure package up was “entirely counter to what President Biden has committed to” and “inconsistent with the agreement we have on a bipartisan basis.”
Portman warned that if Pelosi engages in legislative brinkmanship and “has her way, we could” end up with nothing. Marianne LeVine has more for Pros.
FROM THE LEFT, FROM THE LEFT: Democrats in Congress are also facing pushback from environmentalists itching to max out on climate provisions in the current infrastructure push.
“The Sunrise Movement, the youth-oriented group that championed the Green New Deal, says Democrats’ $3.5 trillion reconciliation plan should be $10 trillion instead. Friends of the Earth blasted an energy infrastructure measure from Senate Energy Chair Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) as ‘the Exxon infrastructure bill.’ And activists have accused Democrats of ‘betraying our generation’ and waved signs calling President Joe Biden a ‘coward’,” Anthony Adragna reports for Pros.
It isn’t just the scope of Democrats’ climate priorities. Climate activists are also unhappy with the inclusion of carbon removal provisions that they say will simply prolong the use of fossil fuels.
But lawmakers have to stretch thin legislative saran wrap over wide ideological tupperware. Democrats fret that going too far to the left could break down the current climate push like the failed cap-and-trade attempt during the Obama administration that accompanied the midterm “shellacking” that handed Republicans the House in 2010.
“I think people who want to make their voices heard and opinions known should have at it,” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) told Anthony. “But those of us who have decision-making responsibilities need to be working on stuff that will pass and stuff that will get us to 1.5 degrees [Celsius].”
Still, progressives retort that Democrats risk losing support if they fail to secure heavy investments in climate. And they reject that pushing lawmakers further on climate would cost them support from moderate Democrats. “What’s important is making sure that folks like Joe Manchin recognize this legislation isn’t going to harm communities in West Virginia; it’s going to invest in communities in West Virginia,” Mitch Jones, policy director for Food and Water Watch, told Anthony.
Read more about the left-flank push for more ambitious climate action from Anthony.
HEAR WE GO: Here’s a rundown of some of this week’s hearings in the energy and environment space.
The seven-bill minibus package, H.R. 4502 (117), which includes appropriations for Energy-Water and Interior-Environment, will be the topic of a House Rules Committee meeting today as it sets the legislation up for floor consideration later this week. Ursula Perano and Julia Arciga have a Pro Bill Analysis for the package.
Interior Secretary Deb Haaland will appear before the Senate Energy Committee on Tuesday to go over the department’s budget request for FY 2022. It comes on the heels of the committee’s heated deadlock on the nomination of Tracy Stone-Manning to lead the Bureau of Land Management. Haaland stood by Stone-Manning’s nomination during a visit to Colorado last week, where she also popped by the BLM headquarters, which was moved to Grand Junction from D.C. under the Trump administration. The department is still deliberating on whether to move HQ back to D.C.
Also Tuesday, a House Energy and Commerce Committee subcommittee will hear from the five FERC commissioners, including outgoing commissioner Neil Chatterjee. The panel will go over some of FERC’s latest initiatives, including potential reforms to transmission planning and financing.
Legislators will also examine the cybersecurity of the nation’s energy infrastructure on Tuesday. A House Oversight subcommittee will have a hearing on cybersecurity threats to the grid, and the Senate Commerce Committee will conduct a hearing on protecting pipelines from cyber attacks.
A House Small Business subcommittee will also meet Tuesday to discuss economic opportunities from the transition to clean energy.
The Senate Environmental and Public Works Committee is meeting Wednesday on U.S. Army Corps of Engineers water infrastructure projects, and its Chemical Safety, Waste Management, Environmental Justice, and Regulatory Oversight subcommittee will meet on Thursday to consider nominees for the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigations Board.
And on Thursday, the House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis has a hearing titled “Financing Climate Solutions and Job Creation,” and a House Foreign Affairs subcommittee will have a hearing on international collaboration on renewables.
PROBING WHAT EXXON KNEW: Two senior Democrats on the House Oversight Committee — Carolyn Maloney and Ro Khanna — are inviting senior Exxon lobbyist Keith McCoy to voluntarily participate in a transcribed interview on Aug. 9 on the company’s activities on climate change and forever chemicals. The move comes weeks after McCoy appeared on a surreptitiously-filmed video declaring Exxon funded “shadow groups” to undermine climate policy initiatives, even while publicly backing policies like carbon pricing. The company distanced itself from McCoy’s comments.
“Your statements raise serious concerns about your role in ongoing efforts by ExxonMobil and the fossil fuel industry to spread climate disinformation, including through the use of ‘shadow groups,’ in order to block action to address climate change,” Maloney and Khanna wrote in a letter obtained by ME.
Reality check: ME doubts very seriously McCoy will come in voluntarily to answer questions, but a rejection from him could set the stage for more aggressive steps. Khanna, who chairs the Environment Subcommittee, has previously indicated he’s prepared to issue subpoenas to compel testimony from oil companies.
EFFICIENCY GROUP CALLS FOR AGGRESSIVE TAILPIPE STANDARD: The Biden EPA’s impending new federal tailpipe standards must go significantly further than the original Obama-era targets to counter the efficiency losses under the Trump administration, the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy argues in a blog post this morning. The group’s modeling found that the fleetwide average must hit 55 miles per gallon-equivalent or 161 grams per mile of carbon dioxide by model year 2026 to bridge the emissions gap. “Anything less ambitious would bring several more years of needlessly inefficient vehicles, locking in 15 years or more of extra greenhouse gas” pollution, ACEEE wrote.
Other options only go so far: Sticking to the original Obama standards — which were expected to achieve 47 mpg, lower than the famous 54.5 mpg target because of higher-than-expected truck and SUV sales — would recover only two-thirds of the emissions reductions, ACEEE said. California’s voluntary standard would recover just 31 percent of the Obama gains. And ACEEE called on EPA to eschew compliance flexibilities that soften the program’s reductions.
TESTING PATIENCE: California state officials have long sent calls for consumers to cut back and stave off a major crisis when strong heat strains the grid. But the calls are going out more and more frequently, and Californians are getting sick of it.
“I think we’ve reached the end of people’s casual ability or willingness to just help,” OhmConnect CEO Cisco DeVries told Pro’s Colby Bermel. The state used its “Flex Alert” tool to ask residents to cut back their energy consumption only 21 times from 2009 to 2019. But they used it 10 times last year and five times so far this summer, and demand didn’t drop on July 9 or 10 this year when two Flex Alerts went out. Read more from Colby in Sacramento, who goes into what California’s energy woes could portend for a national shift to renewable energy.
AND IN OREGON: Gov. Kate Brown warned that the state will only experience more frequent and worse wildfires, which she pinned on climate change. “They’re hotter, they’re more fierce, and obviously much more challenging to tackle. And they are a sign of the changing climate impacts,” she said on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday.
DAPL OPERATOR NOT SWEATING PHMSA ORDER: Energy Transfer is downplaying the effect of last week’s enforcement action against the Dakota Access pipeline by the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration. The pipeline’s opponents are hoping the action will prompt the Army Corps of Engineers to order the line drained until a new environmental review is finished next year. But in a statement on Friday, company spokeswoman Vicki Granado painted PHMSA’s notice as “the results of a standard audit” from 2019. “All but one of the items identified have already been addressed (or are in process of being addressed),” she said. “DAPL will address shortly the one remaining issue that PHSMA responded to for the first time this week.”
GIVE CREDIT WHERE CREDIT’S DUE: Agricultural carbon credit programs are gaining steam, but a new report by the Environmental Defense Fund and Woodell Climate Research Center found the standards the programs use can vary dramatically, leading to concerns not all are equally effective. Questions over the consistency and efficacy of the programs could undermine their potential as the Biden administration and the corporate world increasingly view agriculture as a major player in cutting greenhouse gases.
“It’s a very contentious space right now,” Emily Oldfield, lead author of the report and an agricultural soil carbon scientist at EDF, told POLITICO’s Helena Bottemiller Evich. It’s a conflict that’s leading green groups to call on USDA to set uniform standards for the program. Read more from Helena.
— Ross Pilotte is joining The Permitting Institute as senior vice president. Pilotte was previously with the Federal Permitting Improvement Steering Council, where he was senior environmental policy adviser.
— “Inside Trump’s intense search for a Cheney challenger,” via POLITICO.
— “How an Environmental Watchdog of the Hudson River Spends Sundays,” via The New York Times.
— “U.S. and Germany have Nord Stream 2 deal, but lack authority to implement it,” via POLITICO.
— “Iraq in fuel deal with Lebanon to boost its faltering power supply,” via Reuters.
— “‘Climate Chancellor’ Merkel Leaves Germans Flooded and Frustrated,” via Bloomberg.
THAT’S ALL FOR ME!
