Subscribe today to the Washington Examiner magazine and get Washington Briefing: politics and policy stories that will keep you up to date with what’s going on in Washington. SUBSCRIBE NOW: Just $1.00 an issue!
SOME CLARITY ON THE CLIMATE CONTROVERSIES IN THE DEMOCRATIC PRIMARY: MSNBC’s two-day climate change forum hosted by Georgetown University lacks the buzz of CNN’s seven-hour town hall earlier this month. Maybe it was the empty seats, and occasional audience member who fell asleep (one snoring man was asked to leave) that made it feel this way.
But the forum provided more clarity about where Democratic presidential candidates stand on the divisive elements of their ambitious plans, elicited by sharp questioning from MSNBC hosts and college students.
Top candidates Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, and Kamala Harris skipped the event, but that didn’t stop Josh and Abby from sitting through two-days of one-hour interviews with 11 other Democratic candidates spanning Thursday into Friday.
A few takeaways from what we saw below…
Welcome to Daily on Energy, written by Washington Examiner Energy and Environment Writer Josh Siegel (@SiegelScribe) and Abby Smith (@AbbySmithDC). Email [email protected] for tips, suggestions, calendar items, and anything else. If a friend sent this to you and you’d like to sign up, click here. If signing up doesn’t work, shoot us an email, and we’ll add you to our list.
*Fracking fight: Low-polling candidates warned about the political and practical risks of banning fracking immediately across public and private land, as Warren and Bernie Sanders have proposed.
“Natural gas has got to be the bridge,” said Representative Tim Ryan of Ohio on Thursday. “Saying we are going to immediately ban fracking, they will hear you want to take our jobs,” he added of fossil fuel workers in purple states like his. “These people need to vote for us.”
Julian Castro sought to distinguish his plan for fracking, making clear his priority would be stopping it first on federal lands, where only 21% of oil was produced in 2018, and 13% of gas.
“We need to ban fracking beginning with fracking on public lands and then phase out fracking for everyone else,” Castro said Thursday.
*Nuclear ‘conundrum’: How to treat nuclear power, which provides more than half of America’s carbon-free electricity, continues to perplex Democrats.
“I do not know why other candidates are shying away from nuclear,” said Andrew Yang on Thursday.
“Maybe they’re just not as forward-thinking,” he said of anti-nuclear candidates.
John Delaney, the moderate former Maryland congressman, said he supports keeping existing nuclear plants online, while also investing in smaller advanced reactors that are being developed.
“I don’t think you can be serious about climate and against existing nuclear,” Delaney said Thursday. “It’s fantastic baseload energy that you need,” to support variable renewables.
Marianne Williamson, however, aligns with the anti-nuclear group that includes Sanders, and to a lesser extent, Warren, saying she worries about safety.
“If something goes wrong with nuclear energy, I don’t think people have really stopped to take in the harm,” Williamson said Thursday.
She urged going beyond “just thinking about the facts. I want you to think about this with your heart.”
Castro summarized the fight over nuclear as a “conundrum” with no easy answer.
“From a cost and reliability of getting projects done perspective, it doesn’t have a good track record,” Castro said. “Existing nuclear has a role to play, but I am not necessarily eager to use new nuclear energy. We should focus on renewable energy.”
*Carbon pricing: Supporters of carbon pricing positioned it has a realistic policy that can pass Congress on a bipartisan basis — despite its historical political failures.
“I’m for a carbon fee and dividend,” Yang said. “That’s something even industry leaders have been calling for at this point.”
Delaney sponsored a bipartisan carbon fee and dividend bill in Congress last year.
He floated new language to sell Republicans on the policy, saying the revenue would be put in a “lockbox” that the government can’t touch and returned to Americans in equal amounts. He claims he’d target GOP senators representing Southeast states vulnerable to sea level rise for votes.
“I don’t take money and spend it on a bunch of government projects,” Delaney said. “You can’t do that politically.”
*The role of the federal government: Sanders clarified his plan to nationalize production of renewables.
“What we are proposing in fact is for the federal government to be a major, major, major producer of wind, solar, and other sustainable energy,” Sanders said Thursday.
Sanders said he isn’t proposing a government takeover of utilities, but the federal government would take a “much more active role” in production of zero-carbon power, to then sell to public and private utilities.
“What our proposal does do is greatly expand the role the federal government is playing in the production of energy big time, but the plan does not include the nationalization of the private utilities,” he said.
Ryan described a smaller role for government in which it would inspire innovation for the private sector to develop renewable energy, electric vehicles, and battery storage with the help of tax incentives and R&D funding.
“It’s not this bullshit ‘government is going to control everything,’” Ryan said. “You need the free market. We’ve got to move forward with things that can pass that Democrats and Republicans can support.”
*Carbon capture: Georgetown students, and others who Skyped in from out of state universities, asked pointed questions about the necessity of carbon capture, and whether reaching carbon-reduction goals would require offsetting emissions — an inherent necessity of any goal to reach net-zero emissions by midcentury.
Students asked if Delaney was prolonging the life of fossil fuels by proposing a “C02 expressway” of pipelines he wants to build across the Midwest to transport captured carbon to store or use for commercial applications. Delaney has also proposed “moonshot” spending on nascent direct air capture technology, which he said could remove 20% of C02 that exists in the atmosphere.
“We are going to have to offset,” Delaney said. “I don’t want to offset forever. But we need these solutions. I want to be ready for it.”
Yang offered other alternatives to capture carbon.
“The simplest way to increase the amount of carbon we capture is to plant more trees,” Yang said. Planting more trees is also more “plausible” than creating “a new carbon capture facility every hour.”
DEMOCRATS ACCUSE FERC REPUBLICANS OF ABUSING AUTHORITY WITH PURPA CHANGES: Democrats accused Republicans on the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission of overstepping their authority by proposing major changes Thursday to how the agency implements a law that requires utilities to buy power from small-scale renewable energy producers.
“Today’s action by FERC is a senseless, partisan move to gut an absolutely crucial tool for promoting competitiveness and sustainable energy,” said House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Frank Pallone of New Jersey. “With this party-line vote, FERC has proposed making qualifying facilities nonfinanceable, throwing up an insurmountable barrier of entry for clean energy generation across the country. Serious questions remain as to whether FERC even has the authority to take this action — questions for which I intend to get answers.”
Pallone said FERC’s proposed changes to the Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act of 1978, or PURPA, represents a step toward “wholesale elimination” of the law.
FERC’s two Republicans, chairman Neil Chatterjee and Bernard McNamee, pushed through the reforms to PURPA with the agency being short two commissioners. Democrat Richard Glick issued a partial dissent.
Utilities applaud PURPA changes: Utilities have complained about the law for years, saying it imposes high costs for them and their customers by requiring them to purchase energy from qualifying facilities at prices that exceed the market rate. Renewables today can better compete with natural gas and other energy sources in the open markets, utilities say, making PURPA’s original intent of promoting energy efficiency and conservation less relevant.
FERC’s revisions to PURPA — which still have to be finalized after public comment — are meant to limit the renewable projects that can benefit from mandatory purchase contracts, by reducing the threshold of sites that can qualify.
“By initiating this important NOPR, Chairman Chatterjee has reaffirmed that there are concrete steps FERC can take to better protect electricity customers from unnecessary energy costs and drive additional investments in renewable energy, all while meeting the commission’s responsibilities under the Act,” said Tom Kuhn, president of the Edison Electric Institute, the main trade group for electric utilities.
DOMINION PROPOSES LARGEST US OFFSHORE WIND FARM NEAR VIRGINIA BEACH:
Virginia’s largest utility Dominion Energy proposed Thursday what would be the largest offshore wind project in the U.S.
Dominion filed an application with grid operator PJM for a 2,600 megawatt facility with 220 wind turbines to be built 27 miles off the coast of Virginia Beach.
If approved by regulators, the $7.8 billion Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project would be completed by 2026, providing enough energy to power 650,000 homes.
The project would help towards meeting the goals of an executive order issued by Virginia Governor Ralph Northam this week requiring his government to develop a plan to produce 30% of the state’s electricity from renewable sources by 2030 and 100% from carbon-free sources by 2050.
Dominion has an internal goal of reducing carbon emissions from its electricity 60% by 2030 and 80% by 2050.
PENTAGON SAYS US WILL DEFER TO SAUDIS ON WHETHER TO BLAME IRAN FOR OIL ATTACK: The U.S. will allow Saudi Arabia to decide if there is enough evidence to accuse Iran of conducting last week’s drone and missile strike that crippled two Saudi oil production facilities, the Washington Examiner’s Jamie McIntyre reports.
“We’ll wait until the final assessment’s completed with the Saudis and that they’ve made the declaration,” Pentagon spokesman Jonathan Hoffman told reporters Thursday.
“This was an attack on Saudi Arabia. We’re supporting their investigation. We have teams on the ground working with them, but we’re not going to get ahead of their conclusions.”
The Pentagon’s caution was in stark contrast to statements Thursday from Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who upon leaving Saudi Arabia continued to unambiguously accuse Iran of launching the attack.
“I think it’s abundantly clear and there is an enormous consensus in the region that we know precisely who conducted these attacks. It was Iran,” Pompeo told reporters traveling with him. “I didn’t hear anybody in the region who doubted that for a single moment.”
AMAZON’S BIG BET ON ELECTRIC VANS: If Jeff Bezos has his way, Amazon will have 100,000 fully electric delivery vans deployed by 2024. The Amazon CEO announced Thursday the company would purchase the vehicles from start-up carmaker Rivian, with vehicles beginning deliveries by 2021.
Dave Clark, Amazon’s senior vice president of operations, said in a tweet the move is the “largest order of electric delivery vehicles ever.”
Some are cautioning, though, that Amazon’s schedule to bring the vehicles into its fleet is quick.
Mark Fields, former CEO of Ford Motor Company, told CNBC in an interview Thursday the delivery schedule is “pretty aggressive.”
“It’s a bit of a risk, because they say they’re going to have this vehicle out, literally, in the next 12 months, and that’s aggressive timing to bring a new vehicle out on an all-new platform,” Fields added.
The big electric buy also comes at a pivotal climate moment for Amazon. Bezos also unveiled a broader climate plan for the company Thursday — under which the company will aim for net-zero emissions by 2040.
Bezos’ announcement comes just one day before more than 1,500 Amazon employees staged a walkout for climate action to support the global youth climate strike. Employees at the company have put increasing pressure on Bezos and management to reduce Amazon’s carbon footprint — both its own emissions and the political impact its investments have.
“As employees of one of the largest and most powerful companies in the world, our role in facing the climate crisis is to ensure our company is leading on climate, not following,” reads a blog post from the group Amazon Employees for Climate Justice. “We have to take responsibility for the impact that our business has on the planet and on people.”
GOOGLE’S LARGEST RENEWABLE BUY: The technology giant is redoubling its push toward wind and solar energy — with what it says is the “biggest corporate purchase of renewable energy in history.”
Google is purchasing 1,600 megawatts of wind and solar energy, a buy that includes 18 energy deals across the world. “Once all these projects come online, our carbon-free energy portfolio will produce more electricity than places like Washington D.C. or entire countries like Lithuania or Uruguay use each year,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai said in blog post Thursday.
In the U.S., the technology company is buying 720 MW of solar across three states — North Carolina, South Carolina, and Texas. And the all-solar buy in the U.S. is deliberate, as the company sees the cost of solar continue to decline.
Google’s latest renewable buy matters not just for the effects on the company’s energy portfolio. But corporate renewable energy purchase can help drive demand for wind and solar, and further bring down the cost of the technologies.
US BIRD POPULATION HAS FALLEN BY 3 BILLION IN 50 YEARS: The U.S. bird population has decreased by 3 billion over the past half-century, according to a new report.
A coalition of ornithologists and government scientists studied the U.S. population of birds over the past 50 years and released the results of their work Thursday, concluding the loss of avian life constitutes an “overlooked biodiversity crisis.”
The research team cross-referenced decades of ornithologist notes on bird populations with satellite data that tracks “biomass” in the sky, or large flocks of birds when they fly. Using the data, the team measured a 14% decrease in the number of birds migrating in the past decade.
Bird deaths are increasing for a number of reasons, such as habitat loss from agriculture and pollution.
The Rundown
New York Times ‘Worse than anyone expected’: air travel emissions vastly outpace predictions
Bloomberg Trump invokes Taliban in latest deliberations over biofuel plan
Reuters The climate hunters: In the Arctic, three young women race to pursue an invisible threat — methane
Washington Post In Venezuela’s oil capital, life is a struggle. So is death.
Wall Street Journal PG&E bondholders ally with wildfire victims to propose new bankruptcy exit plan
Calendar
FRIDAY | SEPTEMBER 20
9 a.m. to 3 p.m. 37th & O Streets, N.W. Georgetown University, MSNBC, Our Daily Planet, and New York Magazine host the second day of “Climate Forum 2020” with presidential candidates from both parties.
