"GOP Builds Climate Plan" - But No Taxes, No Carbon Pricing, No Mandates, No Regulations Allowed

By the time House Republicans huddled yesterday to discuss climate policy, their talking points were already in motion. Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and GOP leaders of the relevant committees have been hitting the big ideas for months. Energy innovation should be central to climate policy, not regulation or a carbon tax. Emissions must go down in the developing world — but not through the Paris Agreement.

The goal of yesterday's meeting, Republican aides and lawmakers said, was to teach the full House GOP conference how to talk about climate policy and to put together a legislative package of energy-innovation-style bills as an answer to Democratic plans (Greenwire, Jan. 16). "I think it was educational, and it was for people who are uninvolved with it," said Rep. John Shimkus (R-Ill.), ranking member of the Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Environment and Climate Change. "We have nothing to be afraid of in this debate."

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Several of the bills on Walden's "12 in 20" list, for instance, are bipartisan, including measures to spur carbon capture and advanced nuclear. Progressives, however, are not on board with those plans. But most experts say there needs to be a larger market signal of some kind — a direct price on carbon, a regulatory regime, tax incentives or something else — to get clean energy to the domestic market at the scale needed to address the problem. The argument goes that once it's widely deployed in the United States, clean energy technology can be exported cheaply elsewhere. "What we hear over and over again from innovators is that these technologies have to come to market in the United States, and then they will go to the rest of the world," Freed said.

Republicans, as a whole, aren't willing to go there yet. Shimkus yesterday knocked the idea of pricing carbon or any "centralized system" of transitioning the country away from fossil fuels. John Coequyt, Sierra Club global climate policy director, noted that just last month, congressional Republicans and the White House blocked expansions for clean energy and electric vehicle tax credits as part of year-end spending talks (E&E Daily, Dec. 19, 2019). "That was a serious and limited solution they failed to support, but they are suddenly serious a few weeks later after decades of climate denial?" Coequyt said in a statement.

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https://www.eenews.net/stories/1062101001