BURSTThe polarized atmosphere around U.S. energy and climate policy hides a broadly popular path forward, key policymakers said Tuesday at The Hill's Energy and Environment Summit in Washington.
Despite disagreements — over fossil fuels’ role in meeting growing demand, the need for urgent climate action and support or opposition to President Trump — speakers at the event found broad consensus on the issues.
As congressional Republicans and the secretary of Energy push to slash Biden-era clean‑energy tax credits to pay for Trump’s party-line tax bill, Rep. Randy Weber (R‑Texas), Sen. Ed Markey (D‑Mass.) and other leaders urged keeping the Biden‑era credits and speeding infrastructure build-out.
“We could use an ‘all of the above’ bill which says, ‘Look, make the permitting good, whether it's nuclear, whether it's wind, solar, natural gas' — let's make sure it’s streamlined and clean as much as possible,” Weber said.
Markey, while warning against corporations “running roughshod over communities,” argued lawmakers must “try to accelerate” ongoing energy projects.
Speakers said that many of the short-term projects are almost by necessity going to be renewable — such as solar energy with battery storage — because of the rapid fall in price for those systems, and the recent bottleneck of supply chains that supply parts for gas power plants.
Across the board, attendees argued for a broad shift back toward the middle on climate action, a topic which they agreed the ascendant right wing of the Republican Party has largely ceded to the left — helping create a feedback loop of partisanship.
Referring to climate, Heather Reams of the center-right Citizens for Responsible Energy Solutions said, “You can use the C-word without checking your Republican bona fides."
The main difference, Reams argued, was not whether climate was a key issue to solve, but whether it should be addressed using a left- or right-wing policy playbook — an observation that hearkens back to the 1990s, when then-President George H.W. Bush helped kick off the U.N. Climate Change (COP) conferences and Republicans still embraced the idea of carbon pricing.
As such, conservative members took some subtle swipes at the president. Weber pushed back on Trump’s attacks on electric vehicles, and the administration’s suits against Democratic-led states for their climate policies.
“Have you read the 10th Amendment?” he asked. “All power not delegated to the U.S. government should go to the states. If California wants to say you can't buy gasoline vehicles anymore after a while, that's up to California.”
Reams, meanwhile, argued that the Trump administration had veered from an “all-of-the-above” approach on energy to the same “best of the above” approach Republicans accuse Democrats of supporting.
Trump has declared a climate emergency, seeking to ramp up domestic production, while simultaneously undercutting renewables, in particular wind power.
The proposed elimination of the Biden tax credits has provoked alarm across the political spectrum. Analysis by left-leaning climate advocacy group ClimatePower found eliminating the credits could cost nearly 400,000 jobs, largely in Republican districts — and that 60,000 jobs have been lost amid Trump's attacks on renewables.
Twenty-six Republican members, including Weber, signed on to a May letter calling on Congress to preserve Biden-era credits aimed at shoring up the nuclear industry. And 21 members, largely a different group, signed a March letter calling for the preservation of tax credits aimed at encouraging wind and solar manufacturing.
“Congress is a stimulus-response institution,” Markey said, of the impact of proposed cuts on local districts and the congressional members who represent them.
“There's nothing more stimulating than your local mayors and ... governors calling you to say, ‘What are you doing? You're ruining a plan that we had in our state to become the leader in batteries or solar panels, or an electric vehicle manufacturer.’”
But Pavan Venkatakrishnan, infrastructure fellow at the center-left Institute for Progress, said for those tax credits to yield true potential, it has to become easier to build energy projects.
“The data shows that 80 to 90 percent of the emissions reductions potential of the Inflation Reduction Act will be wasted if we do not have permitting reform," Venkatakrishnan said.
“You can provide tax credits across the board, but unless it’s possible to permit a project, those credits are ultimately useless.”