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It was mostly theater — but that doesn’t make it meaningless.
Republicans in Washington do not have a great track record executing themed policy weeks. Consider the Trump administration’s original 2017 Infrastructure Week, which had the misfortune of coinciding with former FBI Director James Comey’s live testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee. Or take the Infrastructure Week scheduled a few months after that, which Trump famously derailed by blaming “both sides” for the white supremacist-initiated violence in Charlottesville. Or take the Infrastructure Week after that one, when — well, you get it.
Past attempts at holding an Energy Week haven’t fared much better, and unless you’re an incredibly close reader of procedural political news, it’s possible you missed that last week was an Energy Week, too. (What else could you possibly have been thinking about?)
On the surface, Energy Week 2024 didn’t offer much worth paying attention to, which could also explain the absence of headlines. The House used the occasion to vote on four energy-related bills that have no chance of surviving in the Democrat-controlled Senate: H.R. 1023 (passed 209-204), which would repeal the Inflation Reduction Act’s $27 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund; H.R. 1121 (passed 229-188, with 15 Democratic “yeas”), which prevents the president from imposing a moratorium on fracking without the authorization of Congress; H.R. 6009 (passed 216-200), a Lauren Boebert-sponsored bill that would block the Interior’s update of oil and gas leasing regulations; and H.R.7023 (passed 213-205), which chips away at Clean Water Act rules. The House also passed two non-binding resolutions, one that “denounces the harmful, anti-American energy policies of the Biden administration” and another that condemns the carbon tax, which saw 10 vulnerable Democrats join Republicans voting in favor of it.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer called these efforts “bogus and nasty,” so it seems pretty clear these bills are destined to die somewhere between the House and Senate chambers, and the left mostly laughed them off. California Democratic Representative Scott Peters slammed Energy Week as an “unserious messaging exercise.” The Environmental Defense Fund called the week a waste. Longtime Hill commentator Jamie Dupree treated the affair to an eye roll in his Substack, noting that three of the bills voted on last week — H.R. 1121, H.R. 1023, and H.R. 1141 — were already approved by the House as part of the Lower Energy Costs Act (H.R. 1) last spring.
House Republican Leader Steve Scalise seemed to acknowledge this overlap in a recent interview with E&E News, complaining that H.R. 1 has languished in the Senate “for about a year now” — though, as Dupree points out, the bill never actually got sent by the House to the upper chamber, a delay for which “I can’t get any Republicans on Capitol Hill to give me a straight answer,” Dupree wrote.
In other words, Energy Week appears to be a classic case of political theater. But that doesn’t mean it was all meaningless. It’s always worth asking who, exactly, is all the song and dance for?
It may not have been another unfortunate policy-week coincidence that Energy Week lined up perfectly with CERAWeek, the energy summit held in Houston, where the head of Saudi Aramco called the phase-out of oil and gas a “fantasy.” What was not included on the Energy Week slate is also revealing — for instance, Washington Republican Cathy McMorris Rodgers’ hydropower permitting bill. Perhaps it was excluded because it would have represented an actual attempt at policy-making, which is not what Energy Week was all about?
Danielle Butcher Franz, the CEO of the American Conservation Coalition’s Action Fund, told me in an emailed statement that she thinks “Congressional Republicans were right to celebrate American energy and push for domestic energy production” last week. But she also expressed disappointment over the party missing a “critical opportunity to demonstrate that American energy is clean energy,” and called the dismissal of climate change by some of the Republican members “frustrating and unproductive.” Butcher Franz added, for example, that expanding nuclear energy, building more energy projects, and beating China could have been “conservative approaches” to lowering emissions that nevertheless were absent from the slate of energy bills.
Energy Week wasn’t entirely pointless as a policymaking exercise, though. Sure, it was largely a wink to donors, but it also marked a show of alignment on priorities at a time when Republicans’ ability to get things done could reasonably make fossil fuel interests nervous. That Energy Week’s bills also align with the goals of the Heritage Foundation-authored playbook for a Republican presidency is further reassurance that the party is pursuing policies aimed at reducing barriers to new leasing and drilling rather than repeating the chaos of the previous administration. It’s organized. It’s intentional. It’s setting the stage.
Of course, none of this will matter if Democrats and climate-moderate Republicans win elections this year. But if that doesn’t happen, well — we might end up looking back at Energy Week and wondering how we ever missed it.
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They might not be worried now, but Democrats made the same mistake earlier this year.
Permitting reform is dead in the 118th Congress.
It died earlier this week, although you could be forgiven for missing it. On Tuesday, bipartisan talks among lawmakers fell apart over a bid to rewrite parts of the National Environmental Policy Act. The changes — pushed for by Representative Bruce Westerman, chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee — would have made it harder for outside groups to sue to block energy projects under NEPA, a 1970 law that governs the country’s process for environmental decisionmaking.
When those talks died, they also killed a separate deal over permitting struck earlier this year between Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming. That deal, as I detailed last week, would have loosened some federal rules around oil and gas drilling in exchange for a new, quasi-mandatory scheme to build huge amounts of long-distance transmission.
Rest in peace, I suppose. Even if lawmakers could not agree on NEPA changes, I think Republicans made a mistake by not moving forward with the Manchin-Barrasso deal. (I still believe that the standalone deal could have passed the Senate and the House if put to a vote.) At this point, I do not think we will see another shot at bipartisan permitting reform until at least late 2026, when the federal highway law will need fresh funding.
But it is difficult to get too upset about this failure because larger mistakes have since compounded the initial one. On Wednesday, Republican Speaker Mike Johnson’s bipartisan deal to fund the government — which is, after all, a much more fundamental task of governance than rewriting some federal permitting laws — fell apart, seemingly because Donald Trump and Elon Musk decided they didn’t like it. If I can indulge in the subjunctive for a moment: That breakdown might have likely killed any potential permitting deal, too. So even in a world where lawmakers somehow did strike a deal earlier this week, it might already be dead. (As I write this, the House GOP has reportedly reached a new deal to fund the government through March, which has weakened or removed provisions governing pharmacy benefit managers and limiting American investments in China.)
The facile reading of this situation is that Republicans now hold the advantage. The Trump administration will soon be able to implement some of the fossil fuel provisions in the Manchin-Barrasso deal through the administrative state. Trump will likely expand onshore and offshore drilling, will lease the government’s best acreage to oil and gas companies, and will approve as many liquified natural gas export terminals as possible. His administration will do so, however, without the enhanced legal protection that the deal would have provided — and while those protections are not a must-have, especially with a friendly Supreme Court, their absence will still allow environmental groups to try to run down the clock on some of Trump’s more ambitious initiatives.
Republicans believe that they will be able to get parts of permitting reform done in a partisan reconciliation bill next year. These efforts seem quite likely to run aground, at least as long as something like the current rules governing reconciliation bills hold. I have heard some crazy proposals on this topic — what if skipping a permitting fight somehow became a revenue-raiser for the federal government? — but even they do not touch the deep structure of NEPA in the way a bipartisan compromise could. As Westerman toldPolitico’s Josh Siegel: “We need 60 votes in the Senate to get real permitting reform … People are just going to have to come to an agreement on what permitting reform is.” In any case, Manchin and the Democrats already tried to reform the permitting system via a partisan reconciliation bill and found it essentially impossible.
Even if reconciliation fails, Republicans say, they will still be in a better negotiating position next year than this year because the party will control a few more Senate votes. But will they? The GOP will just have come off a difficult fight over tax reform. Twelve or 24 months from now, demands on the country’s electricity grid are likely to be higher than they are today, and the risk of blackouts will be higher than before. The lack of a robust transmission network will hinder the ability to build a massive new AI infrastructure, as some of Trump’s tech industry backers hope. But 12 or 24 months from now, too, Democrats — furious at Trump — are not going to be in a dealmaking mood, and Republicans have relatively few ways to bring them to the table.
In any case, savvy Republicans should have realized that it is important to get supply-side economic reforms done as early in a president’s four-year term as possible. Such changes take time to filter through the system and turn into real projects and real economic activity; passing the law as early as possible means that the president’s party can enjoy them and campaign on them.
All of it starts to seem more and more familiar. When Manchin and Barrasso unveiled their compromise earlier this year, Democrats didn’t act quickly on it. They felt confident that the window for a deal wouldn’t close — and they looked forward to a potential trifecta, when they would be able to get even more done (and reject some of Manchin’s fossil fuel-friendly compromises).
Democrats, I think, wound up regretting the cavalier attitude that they brought to permitting reform before Trump’s win. But now the GOP is acting the same way: It is rejecting compromises, believing that it will be able to strike a better deal on permitting issues during its forthcoming trifecta. That was a mistake when Democrats did it. I think it will be a mistake for Republicans, too.
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On Biden’s big announcement, Montana’s climate case, and the murder hornet
Current conditions: Temperatures across western states are between 10 and 20 degrees Fahrenheit above seasonal averages • A temple in Thailand collapsed after unrelenting heavy rain • It’s hot and humid on the remote Caribbean island of Sombrero, where a lizard that was facing extinction six years ago has made a remarkable comeback thanks to conservation efforts.
In one of his last major environmental moves before leaving office, President Biden today announced a new climate plan for the United States that includes tougher emissions targets.
All countries under the Paris Agreement are required to submit updated climate plans – or nationally determined contributions (NDC) – by February of next year. While the new goal is an improvement, it is “at the lower bound of what the science demands and yet it is close to the upper bound of what is realistic if nearly every available policy lever were pulled,” said Debbie Weyle, U.S. acting director of the World Resources Institute. “Assertive action by states and cities will be essential to achieving this goal.” The Climate Action Tracker project calculates that the U.S. must cut total emissions by at least 62% below 2005 levels by 2030 to be compatible with a goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. President-elect Trump is expected to take the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement once again.
The Montana Supreme Court yesterday handed a win to a group of 16 youth climate activists, upholding a lower court’s ruling in the landmark Held V. Montana case that the state was violating residents’ constitutional right to a clean environment by permitting fossil fuel projects without considering the climate consequences. The state had argued that its greenhouse gases were a drop in the bucket compared to global emissions, with negligible effects on the climate, but in a 6-1 ruling, the justices disagreed and affirmed the lower court’s decision. “Montana’s right to a clean and healthful environment and environmental life support system includes a stable climate system,” chief justice Mike McGrath wrote.
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The Environmental Protection Agency this week gave the green light for California to enforce its ban on sales of new gas-powered cars by 2035. About a dozen other states, plus some major automakers, adhere to California’s strict vehicle emission standards, so the decision could have broad implications. But it also is likely to be revoked by the incoming Trump administration, and a long court battle could ensue.
A new report from a group of leading climate tech and microgrid development firms examined the feasibility of using off-grid solar and storage to provide clean power for AI data centers. It found solar microgrids would cost nearly the same as using off-grid natural gas turbines, could be built on a shorter timeline as opposed to rolling out new grid connections, and are “enormously scalable.” “We found that there is enough available land in the southwest U.S. alone that is close to roads and gas pipelines to build 1,200 gigawatts of offgrid solar microgrid data center capacity, far more than will be needed for the foreseeable future,” said Zeke Hausfather, lead climate researcher at Stripe. Here’s a look at the varying “time to operation” estimates from the report:
And speaking of data centers, Oklo, a nuclear startup chaired by Open AI’s Sam Altman, has secured a 20-year agreement to supply power to data center operator Switch Inc. Under the deal, Oklo will build small modular reactors that can supply up to 12 gigawatts of electricity and come online by 2030. Caveat: The Financial Timesnoted that the deal “is non-binding and the company’s technology is years from production.”
President-elect Trump’s advisers are telling him to let federally funded critical minerals projects go ahead without environmental reviews, Reutersreported. Nixing the review process currently required under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) could speed up mining projects and help cut U.S. dependence on China for critical minerals used in clean tech like electric vehicles, but it could also allow developers to ignore climate change and environmental justice considerations.
The invasive “murder hornet” has been eradicated from the U.S.
Karen Ducey/Getty Images