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The GOP's failed Obamacare repeal effort holds lessons for the climate law [1]

['Maxine Joselow']

Date: 2023-02-09

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Republicans want to repeal climate programs. It might backfire.

House Republicans are seeking to claw back funding for climate change programs established by the Inflation Reduction Act, the Democrats’ landmark climate and health-care law.

There’s just one problem: The programs are bringing an influx of cash and jobs to their states, making it harder to justify repeal to their constituents.

A similar problem bedeviled Republicans during their failed effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act, whose provisions disproportionately benefited people in red states with some of the highest uninsured rates.

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“Republicans are walking into the same trap again,” Lori Lodes, executive director of the environmental group Climate Power, told The Climate 202.

“They’re trying to score political points, but they’re not thinking about what this will really mean for their communities,” said Lodes, who was involved in the fight to pass the Affordable Care Act at the Service Employees International Union.

Of course, GOP party-line bills are unlikely to pass the Democratic-controlled Senate or be signed into law by President Biden, who wields veto authority. But even as a messaging exercise, Republicans’ efforts to ax popular climate programs could backfire politically, critics say.

Still, Republicans have defended their approach, saying they are trying to protect their constituents from higher energy costs and prevent fraudulent use of the climate law’s $369 billion in green spending.

Gunning for the green bank

The House Energy and Commerce Committee on Tuesday considered a discussion draft of a bill to repeal the $27 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund created by the climate law.

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The fund, commonly known as a green bank, will provide low-cost financing for projects that cut greenhouse gas emissions.

Of the $27 billion, states and tribes can apply for $7 billion worth of grants and loans earmarked for disadvantaged communities.

Rep. Gary Palmer (R-Ala.), who is expected to sponsor the bill, slammed the green bank as a “slush fund” during the Energy and Commerce Committee hearing.

The program will help “Wall Street firms to basically set up a climate bank, but it doesn’t help the American people with their utility bills,” Palmer said. “Will this $27 billion slush fund lower the cost of heating for these American families?”

However, the program is set to “primarily benefit red states” that happen to have the highest emissions nationally, said Reed Hundt, chief executive of the Coalition for Green Capital, a nonprofit group that advocates for green banks.

Deep-red Texas had the highest carbon emissions of any state in 2019, the latest year for which data is available, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration .

Liberal California had the second-highest emissions, followed by conservative strongholds such as Florida and Ohio.

“The Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, as the name implies, means you spend money where you can reduce greenhouse gas emissions,” Hundt told The Climate 202. “The majority of those emissions come from red states. That’s not because they vote Republican; it's just the facts.”

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Sean Kelly, a spokesman for Energy and Commerce Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.), said the bill is meant to protect against abuse of the $27 billion at the Environmental Protection Agency, which is tasked with doling out the funds.

“The Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund allocates an incredible amount of authority and resources to the Environmental Protection Agency, yet lacks measures to ensure accountability or transparency in how those resources are used," Kelly said in a statement. "In other words, this provision creates a taxpayer-funded slush fund for Wall Street and heightens the risk for overspending, fraud and abuse. That is not a responsible way to allocate these resources.”

Targeting the methane fee

Meanwhile, Rep. August Pfluger (R-Tex.) has introduced a bill to repeal the Methane Emissions Reduction Program, which establishes the first-ever federal fee on methane emissions from oil and gas operations.

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The charge starts at $900 per metric ton of methane in 2024, increasing to $1,500 in 2026.

To help with compliance, the program provides $1.5 billion upfront to oil and gas companies to cut their methane pollution.

Methane traps far more heat than carbon dioxide, the most abundant greenhouse gas, during its first decade in the atmosphere.

Pfluger, who represents the oil- and gas-producing Permian Basin, said in a statement that his bill would “strike the Natural Gas Tax imposed by President Biden in the Inflation ‘Expansion’ Act,” adding that the methane fee would “drive up the cost of household energy bills.”

According to an analysis by the think tank Resources for the Future, the methane fee would have only a negligible impact on household energy bills.

But repealing the program would likely undercut new business expected by oil-field services giants that make the equipment needed for compliance, including Houston-based Baker Hughes and Schlumberger.

Last spring, Schlumberger created a business unit dedicated to helping the oil industry cut methane emissions.

Both companies are already preparing for a windfall from Environmental Protection Agency rules that require oil companies to curb methane seeping from pipes and other equipment.

“Baker Hughes believes in the importance of reducing methane emissions, and we continue investing in the improvement of our own technologies that quantify and abate emissions,” Alessandro Bresciani, Baker Hughes’ senior vice president for climate technology solutions, said in an email.

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Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Chair Thomas R. Carper (D-Del.), who crafted the methane fee, said in a statement that “anyone trying to repeal the Methane Emissions Reduction Program should know that dog won’t hunt.”

Spokespeople for Pfluger and Palmer did not respond to requests for comment.

On the Hill

Lawmakers relaunch talks on permitting overhaul

Lawmakers in both parties are relaunching talks on overhauling the nation’s permitting process for energy projects, after a controversial permitting bill from Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) was dropped from must-pass legislation last year.

Manchin, who chairs the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, met with House Natural Resources Committee Chair Bruce Westerman (R-Ark.) last week to discuss the issue. The men were also seen talking on the House floor before President Biden’s State of the Union speech on Tuesday.

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Meanwhile, during a Natural Resources Committee hearing on Wednesday, members on both sides of the aisle voiced support for the effort. Rep. Cliff Bentz (R-Ore.) said it’s hard to dispute that the nation has “permitting difficulties,” pointing to the significant delays in securing final approval for energy projects.

Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.) said speeding up the permitting process is the “key to everything,” including deploying more clean energy. Dingell told The Climate 202 after the hearing that she was “optimistic” about a bipartisan deal on permitting in this Congress, adding that she has been meeting with environmentalists and labor groups to discuss the issue.

However, Raúl M. Grijalva (Ariz.), the top Democrat on the Natural Resources panel, raised concerns about undermining the National Environmental Policy Act, a bedrock environmental law that gives affected communities a say on proposed projects. Environmental justice advocates have echoed these concerns, saying the law has been an important tool for disadvantaged communities to fight polluting projects in their backyards.

Pressure points

Can individuals solve climate change? Federal cash is changing the calculus.

For more than a decade, people have been told that their individual actions to combat climate change would have little impact on actually solving the ongoing crisis — with just 90 large companies instead bearing most of the responsibility for global warming, The Washington Post’s Shannon Osaka reports.

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But now, as the Inflation Reduction Act begins to pour huge amounts of money into emissions reduction programs, ordinary people are suddenly in the driver’s seat of America’s energy transition, despite contributing little to the climate crisis.

Nearly one-third of the benefits from the climate law in the coming decade depend on citizen action, with about $7.5 billion in tax incentives to purchase electric cars and $24 billion in credits for shifting home appliances away from fossil fuels.

Still, experts say systemic changes — including action from governments and major corporations — will also play a crucial role in staving off the most catastrophic effects of global warming.

Here’s why someday we may be storing carbon in sidewalks

For the first time, two tech companies demonstrated last week that it is possible to suck carbon dioxide from the air and store it in concrete — the production of which is responsible for about 8 percent of global carbon emissions by some estimates, The Post’s Dino Grandoni reports.

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The companies, Heirloom Carbon Technologies and CarbonCure, injected canisters of captured carbon dioxide into a freshly poured patch of concrete. If this process is scaled up, they said, it could help safely store carbon dioxide and reduce the cement industry’s environmental footprint.

Rob Niven, chief executive of CarbonCure, called the amount of CO2 locked away “a drop in the bucket” compared to the amount the world needs to pull from the atmosphere to avert a climate catastrophe. But he added that the experiment showed “the technical viability” of sequestering carbon from the air in concrete, paving the way for future progress.

In the atmosphere

Viral

Asking the important questions:

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[1] Url: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/02/09/gop-failed-obamacare-repeal-effort-holds-lessons-climate-law/

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