With the midterm election outcome — and control of Congress — at the time still uncertain, House Democrats and Republicans held press conferences Friday at the UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP27) in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, each laying down their plans for reducing U.S. emissions while ensuring energy affordability and security.
Rep. Garret Graves (R-La.), current ranking member of the House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis, characterized Democratic efforts to advance clean energy as overly aggressive and too costly.
“We’ve got to stay clearly focused on energy affordability and not forcing our citizens into energy poverty by forcing technologies that are not exportable,” Graves said.
Projected growth in energy demand around the world will provide opportunities for all technologies — solar, wind, hydrogen, nuclear, geothermal and oil and gas, he said.
“If we’re going to increase global demand of oil and gas, we must ensure that the extraction, exploration and production activities are occurring in places where we have the lowest emissions per unit of energy, which largely is in the United States and the Gulf of Mexico,” Graves said. “We’re following science, and we’re following facts.”
Republican interest in climate solutions is strong, said Rep. John Curtis (R-Utah), who founded the Conservative Climate Caucus in 2021. It is now the second largest Republican caucus in Congress, he said.
Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Tex.) slammed Democrats’ “deification of solar and wind,” raising standard Republican arguments about U.S. dependence on China for solar panels and other critical minerals needed for clean energy technologies. Democrats’ efforts to advance renewables are “misguided” and “obsessive in nature,” he said.
Republican control of the House looked increasingly likely on Monday, as votes were counted in pivotal races in Arizona, California, Colorado, Maine and Oregon. Republicans have won 212 seats thus far and appeared to be leading in enough races to hit the 218 seats needed for a majority, versus the Democrats’ current count of 204, according to The New York Times.
But Democrats have retained control of the Senate, with incumbent Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.) edging out Republican challenger Adam Laxalt on Saturday to win another term. A 51st Democratic seat is now possible, pending the outcome of the December runoff election in Georgia between the incumbent Sen. Ralph Warnock (D-Ga.) and Republican challenger Herschel Walker.
Warnock held a small but steady lead on Walker in the election, but neither candidate got 50% of the vote, as required by Georgia law, setting up the runoff election.
Taking press questions in Cambodia on Sunday, where he was attending meetings with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, President Biden said a 51-seat Democratic majority in the Senate would be better as it would mean Republicans would not have to have equal representation on committees.
On the still unsettled control of the House, Biden predicted it would be “perilously close. We can win it. Whether we’re going to win it remains to be seen,” he said.
‘Prepared to Fight’
A divided Congress would mean that any Republican energy proposals passed in the House would likely die in the Senate. With hopes of taking control in both houses of Congress, prior to the election, some Republicans had talked about possibly attempting to pick off certain provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act, such as its funding for additional staff for the Internal Revenue Service.
But, speaking in Sharm el-Sheikh, Rep. Frank Pallone (D-N.J.), chair of House Energy and Commerce Committee, drew the proverbial line in the sand with a strong message to Republicans and to countries watching the outcome of the midterms: “Democrats are prepared to fight,” he said.
“Republicans have made it clear that they’re going to push an extreme agenda that favors fossil fuels and corporate special interests over the interests of the American people and our allies,” Pallone said. “Democrats are here to make it clear that we’re going to aggressively oppose any proposal that would gut or weaken our hard-won climate achievements.”
For the most part, however, House Democrats at COP27, led by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), were taking a victory lap for the IRA, which passed both houses on straight party-line votes.
Pelosi called the law and its $369 billion in clean energy funding “historic in terms of its vision and in terms of the amount of money committed and in terms of the hope that has given people.”
While climate discussions often center on survival of the planet and its vulnerable countries and people, Pelosi said, “We want more than survival; we want more than success. With our IRA legislation, we have crossed the threshold of transformation.”
The technology advances the law will fund will be shared with the rest of the world, she said.
Rep. Richard Neal (D-Mass.), chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, hailed the IRA specifically as smart tax policy. The law’s range of clean energy and manufacturing tax credits use “incentives constructed in the policy to seek certain outcomes. … What’s striking about these $370 billion [sic] worth of tax incentives is it addresses the issue that is fundamental to our system, and it’s called ‘risk-taking.’
“We reward the risk takers through sensible tax policy,” Neal said. “You want to reward long-term investment, and the best way to do that, making sure that those stakeholders keep some skin in the game, is with tax policy.”
Common Goals, Polarized Rhetoric
Beyond election results, the positioning of the two parties on the international stage at Sharm el-Sheikh carried different, but in some ways complementary messages.
Republican arguments about responsible fossil fuel production will likely resonate with other oil- and gas-producing countries, in particular the United Arab Emirates (UAE), which will be hosting COP28 in Dubai next year.
Speaking at the opening plenary at COP27 on Nov. 7, UAE President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan spoke of his country’s efforts to balance being “a responsible supplier” of oil and gas with “lowering carbon emissions emanating from this sector.”
While the UAE is diversifying its energy mix with renewables, Sheikh Mohamed said, his country has “among the least carbon-intensive oil and gas around the world” and would continue to produce fossil fuels for as long as the world needs them.
The Democrats, by comparison, are building a narrative for the IRA as a force multiplier of innovation — and supply chain buildout — that will provide the exportable, affordable clean technologies needed to reduce emissions in developing countries and allow the U.S. to compete with China, economically and politically.
If one peels away the rhetoric, the parties do share some key common objectives and strategies. Both want to ensure U.S. and global consumers have access to clean, secure, reliable and affordable energy. Both advocate for innovation, and in addition to wind and solar, they are also both in favor of developing a range of low- and no-carbon technologies, including advanced nuclear, green hydrogen and carbon capture and sequestration.
But whether bipartisan action will be possible in a deeply polarized Congress remains an open question. Without mentioning the IRA, which provides generous tax credits for all three of those emerging technologies, all the Republicans called for more research and development to advance them.
“We’ve got to get to the point where we pull carbon out of the air if we’re going to meet our goals, so I’d like to see us go big [on] direct air capture, carbon sequestration, nuclear fusion, hydrogen,” Curtis said. “When we sit on this stage in the year 2050, we’re going to look back, [and] there’s going to be an innovation that has come along that we’re not even thinking of today that’s going to play an important role.”
