More Goodies For The Fossil Fuel Sector From GOP's New Climate "Plan"
EDIT
Starting in the 1990s, European fossil fuel producers like Shell and BP looked to shape the face of climate and energy policy rather than go to war with it, working with big greens like the Environmental Defense Fund to push their preferred solutions—like carbon markets, rather than more stringent emissions regulations—at the national and international level. The social media of virtually every major oil company talks up their commitments to electric vehicles, wind and solar power and carbon pricing. Several fossil fuel companies are now signed onto efforts like the Oil and Gas Climate Initiative, which tout companies’ ability to self-regulate. The American Petroleum Institute (API)—a trade association for the oil and gas industry—has launched a climate-conscious ad buy dubbed We’re On It, and has attempted to rebrand the sector as “natural gas and oil.” Earlier this month, API hinted that it could even start supporting climate bills that incentivize carbon capture and investments in low-carbon technologies. In contrast to “legislation that’s supported by far-right Republicans and far-left Democrats,” API CEO Mike Sommers told a press call earlier announcing the ad campaign that “it’s some place in the middle where we think we can meet and we can work together on this key priority.”
Ask and ye shall receive. In an exclusive published Monday by Axios’s Amy Harder, Republican Representatives Kevin McCarthy, Garret Graves and Bruce Westerman—two of whom have taken donations from API this cycle—previewed a suite of new measures aimed at countering the Green New Deal, focused on incentivizing carbon capture and investment in low-carbon technologies, as well as conservation. The policies would reduce taxes on companies that export clean energy, expand an existing tax credit for carbon capture and storage, double R&D funding for energy and plant a lot of trees to capture carbon dioxide. Their plan, as reviewed by Axios, is scant on details. It also steers clear of any binding emissions targets and reportedly includes support for natural gas. “It’s a mistake to set arbitrary targets like some folks are doing,” Graves told Harder.
EDIT
What these conservative climate proposals mainly show is that at least some segment of the American right feels the need to have a good line on climate. That’s probably thanks to recent climate-fueled disasters, as well as increasing pressure from the left: calls for a Green New Deal, for example, and an upswing in activism by groups like the Sunrise Movement and youth climate strikers. Although support for climate action in the GOP remains weak, 52 percent of young Republicans think the government is doing too little on climate, along with 46 percent of women in the GOP, according to a Pew Research Center poll released in November. But if enterprising Republicans want to be loyal to their donors in the fossil fuel industry, the plan laid out in Axios this week may be the way of the future—conservative politicians embracing some suite of policies with a green veneer, but which demand little of the industries that have brought the world to this moment.
Whether such proposals have any political future is a different question. There still isn’t much appetite for a moderate climate plan, whose backers over the years—including Jeff Flake and Carlos Curbelo—have either left Congress or been booted out of office. The chances of such a plan passing is slim to none. Any policy in line with the science on climate change and emissions reduction, moreover, will constitute a direct challenge to the fossil fuel industry’s business model, premised as it is on exploring for and extracting as much dirty fuel as possible. The IPCC’s Special Report on capping warming at 1.5 degrees celsius finds that—barring colossal advancements in our ability to suck carbon out of the atmosphere—global coal, oil and gas use will need to decline by 97, 87 and 74 percent by 2050, respectively. Its authors recommend a “rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society” to reach that goal. Thanks to industry pressure and tens of billions of dollars worth of subsidies, we’re headed in the opposite direction: despite remarkable growth in the amount of renewables on the grid, fossil fuels still supply some 80 percent of America’s power.
EDIT
https://newrepublic.com/article/156269/republicans-climate-change-plan-big-oils-climate-change-plan