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BIDEN’S CLIMATE ‘SWEET SPOT’: Presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden outlined his much-anticipated upgraded clean energy agenda on Tuesday, seeming to reach for a political “sweet spot” by proposing to eliminate carbon emissions from power plants by 2035, without treading into hotspots like carbon pricing and fracking.
By proposing a clean electricity standard, Biden is following the path of more than half of U.S. states, including Republican-led ones, that have implemented mandates requiring utilities to use increasing amounts of power from zero-carbon sources.
“Vice President Biden’s CES is built on a smart approach to advancing clean energy deployment that has already been tested by numerous states, is broad technologically, and recognizes the critical role of the private sector. It also will be less controversial than a national carbon tax or cap and trade system, with real prospects for bipartisan support.” Dan Reicher, an energy policy professor at Stanford University who helps lead the group Clean Energy for Biden, told Josh.
Meeting the demands of activists: Biden announced the plan ahead of a speech Tuesday afternoon in Wilmington, Delaware, framing his call to spend $2 trillion in his first term on clean energy and infrastructure as a way to combat climate change and rebuild sustainably after the coronavirus pandemic.
Biden’s upgraded clean energy agenda delivers on pressure he received from progressives who asked him to strengthen a previous plan he released during the primary to spend $1.7 trillion across 10 years to reach net-zero emissions by 2050 across the entire economy.
Biden also responds to demands for providing “environmental justice,” a movement that has become louder during recent months of police protests, by promising to spend 40% of clean energy investments in disadvantaged communities.
“The jobs crisis gives Biden a strong incentive to increase his climate ambition as a matter of creating millions of new clean energy jobs, not just emissions reductions,” Paul Bledsoe, an energy and climate expert with the Progressive Policy Institute, told Josh. “The sweet spot, especially for younger voters, is economic stimulus that spurs job-intensive sectors like building efficiency, manufacturing electric cars and managing forests for carbon sequestration.”
To be sure, Biden’s new plan is unprecedented (and would require help from Congress): Along with his call for zero-carbon power for 2035, Biden proposes “upgrading” or retrofitting 4 million commercial buildings and “weatherizing” 2 million homes over four years to make them more energy efficient.
He pledges to make “major public investments” in electric vehicle infrastructure — including in 500,000 charging stations, and sets a goal of all buses being zero-emissions by 2030.
And he aims to create a “cash for clunker” program providing consumers rebates to swap their gasoline-powered vehicles for electric ones.
Welcome to Daily on Energy, written by Washington Examiner Energy and Environment Writers Josh Siegel (@SiegelScribe) and Abby Smith (@AbbySmithDC). Email [email protected] or [email protected] for tips, suggestions, calendar items, and anything else. If a friend sent this to you and you’d like to sign up, click here. If signing up doesn’t work, shoot us an email, and we’ll add you to our list.
EPA WON’T TIGHTEN OZONE STANDARDS: The EPA proposed Monday to keep Obama-era limits for ground-level ozone set in 2015, the second time in recent months the agency has spurned tighter air pollution limits.
EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler told reporters the decision was made after a review of current scientific information, which he said continues to support the 2015 standards. He also touted that ozone concentrations have fallen 4% between 2017 and 2019 even as the economy grew.
Don’t trust the process, environmentalists say: “The nation was deprived of the scientific conversation we should have had on ozone,” Gretchen Goldman, research director for the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Center for Science and Democracy, told Abby.
Goldman and other environmentalists say the Trump administration truncated the review and cut out scientific expertise. The EPA declined to create an independent panel of outside scientific experts to assist with the ozone standards review, as has been typical practice.
Wheeler, however, defended the review, and he argued the EPA had to “streamline” the process to make sure it met the statutory deadline to complete the review within five years.
STATES TEAM UP TO PUSH ZERO-EMISSION TRUCKS: Fifteen states and D.C. will develop a plan over the next six months to accelerate adoption of zero-emitting trucks and buses, with a goal to make 100% of new sales zero-emission by 2050, Abby reports this morning.
The states, which include California, New York, Colorado, Maryland, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Oregon, are aiming to have 30% of all new truck and bus sales be zero emissions by 2030, in addition to the mid-century target, according to a memorandum of understanding.
The new partnership follows California’s recent adoption of clean truck standards, which require all new truck sales in the state to be zero-emission by 2045. Under the memorandum, states can choose to adopt California’s standards, but they aren’t required to. The states will also consider options like purchasing incentives or nonfinancial incentives such as preferred access to congested areas for zero-emission trucks.
TAKING STOCK OF RENEWABLES INVESTMENT: The U.S. attracted more private sector investment in renewable energy than ever before in 2019, but annual funding levels must still ramp up at least 28% to reach $1 trillion in investments by 2030, the American Council on Renewable Energy said in a new report Tuesday.
Since ACORE launched its $1 trillion campaign in 2018, the U.S. has attracted $125.1 billion in private sector investment in renewables, or one-eight of the goal, the report said. The U.S. would need to attract $87.5 billion per year in private sector investment to reach the 2030 goal.
Pandemic headwinds: The renewable energy sector has lost nearly 100,000 jobs during the coronavirus pandemic, and project delays have reduced expected new capacity in 2020 by 21%, ACORE said. Nonetheless, ACORE found investors are still confident in renewable energy growth, and more than half of investors the group surveyed said they plan to increase renewables investments by at least 10% this year.
NATURAL GAS GROUP TOUTS EFFICIENCY TO CUT EMISSIONS: Natural gas utilities’ investments in energy efficiency programs are critical to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, as well as helping low-income households with energy costs, the American Gas Association said in a new report Tuesday.
Natural gas utilities invested $3.8 million per day in energy efficiency in 2018, avoiding 2.25 million metric tons of carbon emissions, according to the report. Between 2012 and 2018, natural gas utilities’ efficiency investments avoided 13.5 million metric tons of emissions.
“As we look to solutions to address climate change going forward, it’s pretty clear that energy efficiency is going to be a big part of our climate change solution,” Karen Harbert, AGA’s CEO, told reporters Tuesday. She added energy efficiency is part of the trade group’s climate change position statement.
OPEC BULLISH ON OIL DEMAND RECOVERY AS IT PLANS TO EASE CUTS: Saudi Arabia-led OPEC and its allies led by Russia are planning to begin increasing their oil production in August, sticking to a scheduled tapering of production cuts agreed to as part of a historic agreement, even in the face of uncertainty about the coronavirus and what that means for oil demand.
OPEC+, as the collective is known, will ease their production cuts by some 2 million barrels per day in August, the Wall Street Journal and others have reported, as the group of oil-producing nations projects optimism about the world’s economic recovery.
OPEC confirmed its bullish forecast for oil demand recovery in its monthly oil market report released Tuesday, in which the group projected the world to consume 90.72 million barrels per day in 2020, a 130,000 barrel per day increase from its forecast last month.
OPEC expects oil demand to rise to 97.72 million barrels per day in 2021, not far from the 100 million barrels per day the world normally consumed before the pandemic.
The optimistic forecast comes after OPEC+ enacted a record production cut agreement of 9.7 million barrels per day in May, later extending it through July, in order to lift oil prices from a historic crash.
Oil prices have since stabilized at around $40 per barrel, far higher than the worst in April, but not high enough for many producers.
CYNTHIA LUMMIS BETS ON FOSSIL FUELS IN SEEKING RETURN TO CONGRESS: Cynthia Lummis is pursuing a return to Congress as a senator representing Wyoming to secure a future for fossil fuels, Josh reports in a profile for our magazine this week.
“A great deal of my interest in returning to Washington is based on the tough climate that our energy sector faces,” said Lummis, 65, who left Congress in 2017 after eight years as Wyoming’s sole representative in the House, when she was the only female member of the conservative Freedom Caucus.
Lummis is positioned to take advantage of the state’s first election-year Senate vacancy since 1995 in a state that has not sent a Democrat to the Senate since 1970.
Wyoming, the state with the smallest population, is the nation’s largest coal producer thanks to its Powder River Basin and one of the top producers of oil and gas.
Now, that status is under threat due to competition from cleaner alternatives and a political consensus on the need to address climate change.
“The changes in the energy economy have been very substantial very quickly,” Lummis told Josh.
Parsing her climate change views: Lummis, a former cattle rancher and lawyer, said she is “on board” with the shift occurring among many Republicans in Congress on promoting private sector innovation to address climate change.
“Those who say climate change is an existential threat are completely mistaken,” said Lummis, who insisted that fossil fuel use doesn’t need to be reduced to address climate change adequately, a view at odds with climate scientists. “We do have time to address this. We should address it.”
Running close to Trump: Lummis, who faces a Aug. 18 primary, is a heavy favorite. She’s endorsed by incumbent Sen. Mike Enzi, who is retiring, and by John Barrasso, the state’s other sitting senator, who chairs the Environment and Public Works Committee.
She is aligning herself with Trump (who is “very popular in Wyoming”) and his administration, after being a finalist twice to be secretary of the Interior Department (she is not bitter about losing out on the job, and is a cheerleader for the agency’s focus on rolling back regulations).
Read more of the Lummis profile here.
The Rundown
RUNDOWN
New York Times GAO: Trump boosts deregulation by undervaluing cost of climate change
Wall Street Journal Universities cut oil investments as student activism builds
Financial Times Shale boss says US has passed peak oil
Calendar
1 p.m. The House Natural Resource Committee’s Subcommittee on Energy and Mineral Resources holds a remote hearing on the environmental and community impacts of fossil fuel infrastructure.
