Some GOP Lawmakers Claim to be Fighting to Sustain Clean-Energy Progress, But When it Comes to Voting, Not so Much...
It’s an awful time for efforts to sustain a transition to non-polluting energy in America as Biden’s “sand castle” policies (my term from a few years back) are knocked down by President Trump’s teams at Environmental Protection Agency and elsewhere.
Yesterday, EPA administrator Lee Zeldin made his latest move: “EPA is proposing to repeal all “greenhouse gas” emissions standards for the power sector under Section 111 of the Clean Air Act (CAA) and to repeal amendments to the 2024 Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS) that directly result in coal-fired power plants having to shut down.” But that’s just the latest of many efforts to turn an agency established under a Republican president to protect the environment into one seemingly determined to trash it. The push keeps reminding me of Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451” - in which the “fire department” burns books and houses.
In his latest post on clean energy under Trump,
points to a handful of Republican lawmakers who’ve continued to make noises seeking to sustain some of the Biden-era Inflation Reduction Act provisions driving clean-energy adoption. As they wrote last month, “[W]e must ensure certainty for current and future energy investments to meet the nation’s growing power demand and protect our constituents from higher energy costs.”But he notes there’s a difference between issuing letters (an almost identical batch of Republican House lawmakers did so again a few days ago in a letter to Senate leadership) and voting to eliminate some of the destructive provisions in this massive, deficit-ballooning, health-care-weakening, energy-progress-reversing megabill.
An Yglesias excerpt:
[T]he repeal wouldn’t just put us back where we were pre-IRA. It would leave us with no policy support whatsoever for wind, solar, or emerging technologies, including advanced nuclear and geothermal and carbon capture. It doesn’t even leave us with policy support to keep existing conventional nuclear plants open.
The upshot is going to be a loss of innovation and momentum for the long term. And in the short term, it’s going to mean higher electricity prices, as Trump’s multi-pronged effort to kneecap renewables runs up against the supply chain constraints limiting the pace at which new natural gas facilities can be brought online.
This is all genuinely really bad, and I think in a deep and profound way, this is truly not what voters angry about inflation wanted when they cast ballots for Trump.
And yet, it’s what we’re getting.
Insert, June 12, 11:30 am ET -
, who writes the essential newsletter , has posted a relevant piece examining which states stand to lose the most generation capacity and federal money if the Republicans do fully repeal the IRA:
Here’s his list:
Bright spots galore elsewhere
I have to offer something of a counterweight to all of this. At this year’s National Geographic Society Explorers Festival, dozens of veteran and emerging innovators in conservation science, education and technology have been presenting extraordinary work to save endangered species, habitats and cultural traditions around the world.
I’m honored to have served since 2018 as a member of Geographic’s advisory Committee for Research and Exploration. Here are some scenes from presentations at the festival:
Explore to learn more:
Honored last night were Rolex National Geographic Explorers of the Year - the penguin scientist and conservation campaigner Pablo “Popi” García Borboroglu and filmmaker Bertie Gregory. Here’s a snippet from the resulting series Secrets of the Penguins