Sign In or Create an Account.

By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy

Politics

The Real Point of Republicans’ Energy Week

It was mostly theater — but that doesn’t make it meaningless.

An elephant on the Capitol.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

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.

Red

You’re out of free articles.

Subscribe today to experience Heatmap’s expert analysis 
of climate change, clean energy, and sustainability.
To continue reading
Create a free account or sign in to unlock more free articles.
or
Please enter an email address
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Economy

California’s Big Electrification Experiment

What if, instead of maintaining old pipelines, gas utilities paid for homes to electrify?

Plugging into the PG&E logo.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

California just hit a critical climate milestone: On September 1, Pacific Gas and Electric, the biggest utility in the state, raised natural gas rates by close to $6 due to shrinking gas demand.

I didn’t say it was a milestone worth celebrating. But experts have long warned that gas rates would go up as customers started to use less of the fossil fuel. PG&E is now forecasting enough of a drop in demand, whether because homeowners are making efficiency improvements or switching to electric appliances, that it needs to charge everyone a bit more to keep up with the cost of maintaining its pipelines.

Keep reading...Show less
Blue
Electric Vehicles

The Dream of Swappable EV Batteries Is Alive in Trucking

Revoy is already hitching its power packs to semis in one of America’s busiest shipping corridors.

Putting a battery into a truck.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Battery swaps used to be the future. To solve the unsolvable problem of long recharging times for electric vehicles, some innovators at the dawn of this EV age imagined roadside stops where drivers would trade their depleted battery for a fully charged one in a matter of minutes, then be on their merry way.

That vision didn’t work out for passenger EVs — the industry chose DC fast charging instead. If the startup Revoy has its way, however, this kind of idea might be exactly the thing that helps the trucking industry surmount its huge hurdles to using electric power.

Keep reading...Show less
Yellow
Climate

AM Briefing: Fixing the Grid

On the DOE’s transmission projects, Cybertruck recalls, and Antarctic greening

A Big Change Is Coming to the Texas Power Grid
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Current conditions: Hurricane Kirk, now a Category 4 storm, could bring life-threatening surf and rip currents to the East Coast this weekend • The New Zealand city of Dunedin is flooded after its rainiest day in more than 100 years • Parts of the U.S. may be able to see the Northern Lights this weekend after the sun released its biggest solar flare since 2017.

THE TOP FIVE

1. DOE announces $1.5 billion investment in transmission projects

The Energy Department yesterday announced $1.5 billion in investments toward four grid transmission projects. The selected projects will “enable nearly 1,000 miles of new transmission development and 7,100 MW of new capacity throughout Louisiana, Maine, Mississippi, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas, while creating nearly 9,000 good-paying jobs,” the DOE said in a statement. One of the projects, called Southern Spirit, will involve installing a 320-mile high-voltage direct current line across Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi that connects Texas’ ERCOT grid to the larger U.S. grid for the first time. This “will enhance reliability and prevent outages during extreme weather events,” the DOE said. “This is a REALLY. BIG. DEAL,” wrote Michelle Lewis at Electrek.

Keep reading...Show less
Yellow