Jennifer A Dlouhy and Ari Natter
Mon 28 October 2024
(Bloomberg) -- Kamala Harris hasn’t laid out a detailed vision for addressing climate change and energy if she’s elected president — but she’s already getting plenty of advice.
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Environmentalists and former advisers have outlined their prescriptions for ways a victorious Harris could build on Biden-era climate initiatives — including the sweeping Inflation Reduction Act — to drive more US clean energy deployment and winnow planet-warming pollution worldwide.
“The Inflation Reduction Act was just a down payment on the climate crisis,” said Leah Stokes, an environmental politics professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara. “There is lots more to be done.”
And some climate activists are pushing a harder line, quietly developing blueprints for Harris to stifle flows of US oil and gas if the Democrat prevails over Republican Donald Trump.
The lobbying portends an agenda that could be a tailwind for clean energy technology companies and renewable project developers — as well as a hindrance to fossil fuel interests.
Harris, who battled oil companies and championed environmental justice long before she became vice president, has made clear that, like President Joe Biden, she’ll promote emission-free energy as a way to trim utility bills and drive economic growth. A campaign policy outline stresses that she and her running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, will “work to lower household energy costs” and create “the well-paid union jobs of the future” while responding to the climate crisis.
Paul Bledsoe, a former White House official under President Bill Clinton who lectures on environmental policy at American University, said he expects Harris to stick with this economic messaging. “If there is one theme she keeps coming back to,” he said, “it is climate policy should help keep costs down.”
Here’s a closer look at three areas where climate advocates see room for major action from a Harris White House.
1. Getting to IRA 2.0
Unlocking the full potential of the IRA is a multi-year task, bedeviled by permitting delays, domestic supply chain constraints and long waits to connect power projects to the grid. Fixing some of these bottlenecks would require action by Congress.
“Permitting reform” has become a catch phrase in Washington — a kind of shorthand for the broader set of obstacles the US must address in order to realize the full benefits of low- and zero-emission technology. And while there’s bipartisan consensus that current rules hold back all sorts of energy development, there’s little agreement on an approach for revamping them. Many environmentalists slammed a permitting bill advanced in July by Senators John Barrasso, a Republican, and Joe Manchin, an independent, saying it made too many concessions to the oil and gas industries.
Biden has put in place fundamental policies needed to decarbonize the US economy, said Bob Keefe, executive director of the E2 advocacy group. But “we need to focus on implementation and speeding up even more.” That’s something Harris could prioritize.
If Harris is elected but Republicans have control of any part of Congress, she’ll have far less room to maneuver. But if Democrats win a trifecta, that could present an opportunity to expand the IRA’s domestic energy manufacturing incentives, potentially reaching further up the supply chains for solar panels and other technology. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has already committed to taking another bite at the climate apple and has said he’s eyeing the same procedural gambit that helped produce the IRA in 2022.
Lawmakers could work with Harris to deliver on her promise of lower energy costs for homeowners by expanding tax rebates tied to the installation of heat pumps and other equipment. The rebate money provided by the IRA is “a small fragment of what we need,” Stokes said.
Environmentalists are encouraging Congress to revive some proposals that didn’t make it into the IRA the first time around. One contender: a so-called Clean Electricity Performance Program that would have used grant money to entice electric utilities to hit annual targets for emission-free power generation while hitting the laggards with fees.
An IRA 2.0 also could open a window for factoring carbon intensity into trade policy — an approach that offers a competitive advantage to US exports made with a smaller environmental footprint than their foreign rivals. Biden’s senior adviser for international climate policy, John Podesta, already proposed a new trading system that prices in the greenhouse gas emissions embodied in various goods, and announced a task force focused on the idea. As president, Harris could take some steps to advance the approach administratively, but far more could be done in collaboration with Congress, where the idea has drawn some Republican support.
Brian Deese, a former White House official now advising the Harris campaign, has pitched an even bolder strategy. A clean energy Marshall Plan would use US financing to encourage other countries to deploy clean energy using made-in-America technology, presenting an alternative to China’s manufacturing might. The approach, which Deese outlined independent of the campaign, would allow the US “to help others while helping itself,” effectively putting its own industries front and center in the energy transition while aiding developing countries that “need access to cheap capital and technology” to quickly shift away from fossil fuels.
“One of the biggest opportunities — but also urgent priorities — that we have is putting in place a more credible regime to accelerate the energy transition globally,” Deese told Bloomberg. “That can be done in a way that becomes high opportunity.”
2. Tackling industrial and gas power plant emissions
If elected, Harris would inherit a suite of unfinished environmental policy tasks from Biden. Among them is reducing pollution from the industrial sector, which is responsible for about a quarter of US greenhouse gas emissions today. Further investments in decarbonizing heavy industry could be paired with new regulatory limits on emissions from steel mills, concrete plants and other facilities.
“We would love to see cutting-edge policy attention” on industrial emissions, said Lena Moffitt, executive director of the advocacy group Evergreen Action. That could take the form of “a Day One executive order saying we are going to lead the world in creating the clean tech” necessary to clean up the sector, she said.
The Biden administration already imposed limits on greenhouse gas emissions from the nation’s coal power plants. But under Biden, the Environmental Protection Agency is still working to develop a rule targeting the nation’s existing fleet of gas-fired power plants, which may be summoned into more service to meet a surge in electricity demand tied to manufacturing and artificial intelligence. That regulation won’t even be proposed before Inauguration Day, adding to the to-do list that could await Harris.
3. Curbing oil and gas
Some environmental activists are drafting blueprints for Harris to take a more aggressive stance clamping down on fossil fuels. But in a shift from their approach to Biden four years ago, they’ve largely held their fire in public and haven’t pushed Harris to commit to policy positions that could alienate undecided voters in key battleground states.
Still, they’re developing ideas that Harris could advance through executive power, setting them in motion as early as Day One. Top targets include limiting liquefied natural gas exports and shutting down Energy Transfer LP’s Dakota Access Pipeline, which carries oil from North Dakota to Illinois, taking advantage of a federal court ruling that required more environmental analysis of the project.
Earlier this month, environmentalists pushing for a swift end to oil and gas production laid out other demands, including using special emergency authority to bar crude exports and to curb US public investment in foreign fossil fuel projects. And they encouraged Harris to draw on her experience tangling with oil companies as California’s attorney general by prodding a federal investigation of the industry’s approach to the climate crisis. “An investigation into the oil and gas majors by the Department of Justice is long overdue,” the groups, including Zero Hour, told Harris.
If elected, Harris would face the same political sensitivities around the cost of gasoline that have stymied similar efforts to restrict supply. And on the campaign trail, she’s taken pains to highlight surging US oil and gas production that’s hit record levels under her and Biden’s watch.
Still, if she wins, activists have made their expectations clear.
“We need more than platitudes,” said Collin Rees, with Oil Change International. “We’re looking for specific pledges: a permanent halt to new LNG exports, a rejection of the disastrous Dakota Access Pipeline and a clear plan to phase out fossil fuel production and end environmental injustice.”
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