Last week, on the 16th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, Hurricane Ida unleashed 150 mile-an-hour winds and slammed into New Orleans, super-fueled to huge size and rain-making power by the Gulf of Mexico whose temperatures are 3 to 5 degrees higher than the average just 30 years ago. In its wake, more than a million people in Louisiana and neighboring states have been left without water, power or air conditioning amid stifling hundred-degree heat. Then the remnants of Hurricane Ida delivered torrential rain and flooding in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York so intense it killed at least 40 people across the region while paralyzing New York City. Even before the Northeast flooding, economic costs from Ida were estimated to be $80 billion.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, another devastating year of fire fueled by climate change-exacerbated drought and high temperatures keeps getting worse. The massive Caldor fire, already more than 200,000 acres, has been roaring through the Lake Tahoe area, sending tens of thousands of citizens fleeing in chaos. Caldor was only the second fire in history to begin on the western slope of the Sierra Nevada mountains and cross to the eastern side. Last year alone, five of the ten largest fires in California history occurred, burning over 4.2 million acres, killing 30 people, and shockingly becoming the new normal.
Join the Progressive Policy Institute as we convene a virtual event on improving the siting opportunities for electricity transmission lines on September 14 at 10:00 AM ET. The event will generate a discussion focused on timely and critical questions including:
• What scale of the transmission line expansion is needed to fulfill President Biden’s goal of 100% clean energy from the electric sector by 2035?
• How do America’s current planning, siting and permitting federal and state laws and practices interfere with or enable this expansion?
• What are the prospects of addressing this challenge in the infrastructure bill or other legislative vehicles in Congress?
• What is the proper relationship between federal and state governments on electric transmission line planning?
Panelists:
• Donnie Colston, Director of Utilities, IBEW
• Bob Kump, President of Avangrid
• Sue Tierney, energy analyst and author of recent National Academy of Sciences Report
• Macky McCleary, Energy Consultant and former State of Rhode Island utility regulator
• Bill Parsons, Chief Operating Officer, American Council on Renewable Energy
Moderated By: Paul Bledsoe, Strategic Advisor, PPI
With a SPECIAL MESSAGE from U.S. Senator John Hickenlooper (D-CO)!
Today, the Innovation Frontier Project, a project of the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI), released a new report from Daniel Oberhaus, titled “Space Solar Power: An Extraterrestrial Energy Resource for the U.S.”
“As Daniel Oberhaus lays out in this fascinating report, space-based solar power is becoming an increasingly viable option for providing energy on Earth, in orbit, and for deep space exploration. The falling costs of solar power and vehicle launches allow for the creation of satellites that can collect energy from the Sun all day long throughout the year,” said Jack Karsten, Managing Director of the Innovation Frontier Project at PPI.
In his report, Oberhaus argues that space-based solar power (SSP) projects offer a solution to advancing both clean energy production and space exploration. Space-based solar power is renewable, cost-efficient, and could meet a substantial portion of the Earth’s energy needs, even in geographically distant locations. This could also provide a renewable energy source for moon bases and deep space missions.
Oberhaus’s report concludes that the U.S. must allocate substantially more human and financial capital to SSP as part of its national security, domestic energy, and space exploration strategies.
Based in Washington, D.C., and housed in the Progressive Policy Institute, the Innovation Frontier Project explores the role of public policy in science, technology and innovation. The project is managed by Jack Karsten. Learn more by visiting innovationfrontier.org.
The Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) is a catalyst for policy innovation and political reform based in Washington, D.C. Its mission is to create radically pragmatic ideas for moving America beyond ideological and partisan deadlock. Learn more about PPI by visiting progressivepolicy.org.
PPI Strategic Advisor Paul Bledsoe joined Charles Ellison on WURD Radio for a conversation about the human cost of climate change, cutting Trump-era policies around methane regulations, and President Biden’s efforts to include bipartisan climate policy in his infrastructure package, among other things.
As President Biden meets with European Union leaders in Brussels and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Geneva, the EU and U.S. determination to reduce greenhouse gas emissions remains high on the agenda. Yet, as part of it, a Cold War-style contretemps has flared up, centered on whether U.S. or Russian natural gas exports are cleaner in helping the EU eliminate coal and cut its climate emissions.
President Putin recently asserted, without providing any evidence, that Russian natural gas exports are low-emitting. American officials, including Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, contend Russian gas is the “dirtiest form of natural gas on Earth.” While offering no new analysis of Russian gas, the Biden team has provided detailed data on U.S. gas emissions.
Getting to the bottom of these claims is crucial to informing Europe’s way forward on the role of gas imports in meeting growing electricity needs while also achieving aggressive near-term climate goals. Accurate data on gas emissions should also influence the EU’s broader climate and geopolitical strategy during its clean energy transition, including any role for the nearly completed Nordstream 2 gas pipeline from Russia to Germany.
The Russian government has systematically prevented measurements of emissions from its gas sector for many decades. What evidence there is suggests Russia operates a leaky, antiquated, unregulated system with high fugitive emissions of methane of at least 5 to 7 percent of total gas volume. Since methane has 85 times the warming potency of carbon dioxide, natural gas with leaks or fugitive emissions during production and transport of more than 3.5 percent is worse than coal from a climate perspective. This means the EU’s single largest source of gas has significantly higher greenhouse gas emissions than the coal it is meant to replace.
Many climate advocates wish for an entirely renewable energy-powered EU electricity sector, but recent trends suggest that natural gas will play a major role in EU generation for years to come, since it stabilizes Europe’s power grid as increasing amounts of intermittent wind and solar power are used and current baseload power from coal and German nuclear energy is curtailed. In 2019, the last year of full pre-pandemic demand, natural gas was the largest source of electricity in the EU. More than 60 percent of EU gas was imported, with Russian gas providing about 45 percent of total EU gas.
A major 2019 study by the U.S. National Energy Technology Laboratory finds Russian gas piped to Europe has up to 22 percent more greenhouse gas emissions than European coal. U.S. liquified natural gas (LNG) delivered to the EU, in contrast, has up to 56 percent fewer total emissions than EU coal, the report shows. Overall, natural gas production in the United States has fugitive emissions of 1.4 percent of total gas volume, according to analysis from the Environmental Protection Agency done during the Obama administration.
The U.S. is also acting to lower methane emissions from its gas still further. Congress recently voted to restore Obama-era methane regulations former President Trump had repealed, mandating 45 percent economy-wide methane reductions below 2012 levels by 2025, and requiring oil and gas companies to check every six months for methane leaks and plug them within one month. The Biden administration has committed to even deeper methane cuts, particularly from oil and gas development — and proposed a crash $16 billion program to plug unused or abandoned gas wells and limit gas flaring. The EU imported 36 percent of U.S. LNG gas in 2019, although from a very low baseline, and even higher amounts last year.
A study by the European Parliament called “Energy as a Tool of Foreign Policy of Authoritarian States, in particular Russia” found Russia “uses gas supplies to punish and to reward….supply disruptions, price discounts or hikes, and alternative transit routes such as Nord Stream 2 and Turkish Stream, are used by Russia to further its foreign policy ambitions… The lack of transparency about Russia’s energy policy decisions contributes to this.” The study also analyzed the extraordinary reliance of Moscow on the European market for funding its autocratic government, “One-third of Russia’s natural gas production is exported. Almost all of which, some 87% in 2016, goes to Europe.” More than 40 percent of the Russian government budget comes from oil and gas exports revenues.
The EU, the world’s largest importer of gas, is clamping down on methane, too, and by the end of the year is expected to propose environmental standards. Those standards will initially apply only to gas developed within the EU, but may eventually include imports. In the meantime, the Nordstream 2 pipeline from Russian to Germany could be fully operational by the fall, with the potential to lock-in decades of methane-laden gas that will break the EU’s greenhouse gas emissions budget.
The EU should insist on uniform monitoring, reporting, and verification of natural gas emissions from all its import sources, procedures which over time should become the norm globally. The EU, U.S. and others should work together to standardize these measurements as quickly as possible. Otherwise, along with its already high geopolitical costs, the EU’s continuing addiction to high-emitting Russia gas will continue to weigh down Europe’s climate efforts, as well.
Paul Bledsoe is a professorial lecturer at American University’s Center for Environmental Policy and a strategic advisor at the Progressive Policy Institute. He served on the White House Climate Change Task Force under President Bill Clinton, as an Interior Department official, as well as a U.S. Senate and House of Representatives professional staff member.
President Biden has issued a bold pledge to cut the greenhouse gas emissions that increasingly endanger our livelihoods, health and security — reducing U.S. emissions by 50 percent below 2005 levels over the next decade. In his recent address to Congress, the president showcased how his infrastructure proposal, the American Jobs Plan, will help prioritize investments toward a sustainable, clean energy economy. In particular, Biden highlighted building new electric transmission lines as central to U.S. goals, declaring, “the American Jobs Plan will create jobs that lay thousands of miles of transmission lines needed to build a resilient and fully clean grid.”
This commitment to modernizing our electricity transmission is crucial. Reducing greenhouse gases will require ramping up renewable energy sources such as wind, solar and hydropower, deploying electric vehicles and cutting methane from natural gas. But transmission lines must be built to deliver this cleaner electricity to customers who often live distant from the cleanest, low-cost energy sources.
Our current electricity grid is old and outdated, getting a dreadful C- rating from the American Society of Civil Engineers this year. We must update our transmission system to be more resilient against more frequent severe weather events climate change is causing, better able to repel cyber-attacks and to carry more clean energy so our citizens have reliable sources of power.
But here is a sobering reality — these ambitious clean energy goals will not be successful without a strong commitment by federal and state governments, and local communities, to support the construction of necessary transmission infrastructure. The “not in my backyard” sentiment, often stoked by misinformation campaigns, ends up placing barriers to creating long-term energy and climate solutions.
Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson recently held a conversation on climate change and energy technology at the New York Economic Club with Bill Gates, where transmission infrastructure was called out as one of the key challenges to a clean energy future. “There are days when I see…the pace of innovation and I feel, wow we can do this,” Gates said. “Then there are days when you look at like how [hard] it is to get transmission permitted in the U.S. and how that is just a conundrum that we don’t have a clear plan for.”
He was referring in part to a specific project underway in Maine — the New England Clean Energy Connect line — that will bring 1,200 megawatts of clean, low-cost baseload hydropower from Canada into Maine and New England. Experts at the Maine Department of Public Utilities have found the project will cut about 10 percent of the region’s carbon pollution emissions from electricity, the equivalent of reducing all the pollution from 700,000 cars every year. Just as important, the Maine independent experts found that the project would save consumers in New England $388 million each year in electricity costs over the next 15 years.
The New England project is a leading example of the clean energy infrastructure upgrades being championed by Biden, since the hydropower is an on-demand but clean back-up source for renewable energy — when wind isn’t blowing hard enough or sun isn’t shining enough to satisfy all electric needs.
Construction on the New England power lines has begun, but a major new obstacle has been placed in its path. In a case of moving the goalposts after the game has started, project opponents, funded in part by fossil fuel companies with legacy energy interests, have put a measure on the 2021 Maine ballot to retroactively prohibit the siting of a crucial segment of the line. The measure will also require an affirmative vote of the Maine legislature on all large-scale future transmission projects.
Opponents are spreading misinformation to Maine voters about the project’s environmental impacts, which are minor (two thirds of the line will be built in an existing transmission corridor, while the other one third will pass through land whose primary use is commercial logging). Low-income consumers will particularly benefit due to a $40 million low-income customer benefits, and rural Mainers will benefit from a $15 million broadband fund to bring high speed internet to homeowners that currently aren’t well served. If the ballot referendum passes, it will likely cripple this key project and have a chilling effect on the potential for new transmission projects in the region and the nation. This is no way to create a modern electric grid and clean energy economy while meeting the urgent climate change crisis.
Congress should consider legislation to provide greater federal siting authority to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission for projects like these that are clearly in long-term national security, climate protection and consumer interests. A recent National Academy of Sciences report on achieving net zero U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 found that new siting and permitting for transmission must be pursued to “put in place, in a timely fashion, the kind of high-voltage interstate transmission system that is needed for deep decarbonization.”
As the president and Congress contemplate investment priorities for a more sustainable energy future, we must come together to support the infrastructure needed to deliver these benefits to consumers, our economy and our climate. America’s future investment in infrastructure and the clean energy economy cannot afford to be held captive by roadblocks from narrow, single-interest groups. Our people are counting on action now to lower energy prices, create good jobs and leave a cleaner world to future generations.
Paul Bledsoe is strategic advisor at the Progressive Policy Institute and professorial lecturer at American University’s Center for Environmental Policy. He served on the White House Climate Change Task Force under President Bill Clinton.
Join the Progressive Policy Institute for a conversation with PPI’s Paul Bledsoe, climate leaders, and Congressman Jim Himes (CT-04) on ways America can finance new, innovative investments in clean energy projects across the country.
WHEN: Wednesday, June 2, 2pm ET
KEYNOTE ADDRESS: Rep. Jim Himes (CT-04)
PANEL: PPI’s Paul Bledsoe and Bryan Garcia, President and CEO of the Connecticut Green Bank
When I think about climate change, I think about my brother-in-law Tillman.
Tillman spent his career with Big Oil. He travelled the world finding places to drill, baby, drill. He’s now comfortably retired in Dallas, Texas. And he’s a Republican.
You may suspect he’s a climate-change denier.
Wrong.
Tillman has a PhD in geology from UNC. He’s smart and studious. Some years back, he delved into a study of climate change.
Like most geologists, he concluded it’s real – so real he tells his eight grandchildren that the family’s vacation home on North Carolina’s Outer Banks may be gone when they’re his age. “Act now,” he writes, “to slow the change and preserve this wonderful place.”
The question is whether we – the world, the nation and North Carolina – will get real about fighting climate change.
In North Carolina, environmentalists want Governor Roy Cooper to join Virginia and 10 other states to our north in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI, like “Reggie”). The other states are Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island and Vermont.
Under RGGI, a power plant has to buy an allowance for each ton of carbon dioxide pollution it emits into the atmosphere. Allowances can be bought and sold in a regional auction, which helps to keep costs down. The number of available allowances is reduced over time to reduce pollution.
Duke Energy’s Roxboro plant
The goal: reducing carbon emissions from power plants 70% from 2005 levels by 2030.
Advocates say RGGI is North Carolina’s least expensive and most efficient option – and the only action the Governor can take without the legislature. They fear the legislature will let Duke Energy adopt a less ambitious carbon-reduction plan.
The Southern Environmental Law Center, on behalf of Clean Air Carolina and the North Carolina Coastal Federation, has petitioned the state Environmental Management Commission to adopt rules so North Carolina can join RGGI:
“The threat to North Carolina from global climate change is real, it is present, and it is getting worse…. Sea levels have risen and continue to rise. Extreme precipitation has become more common and will be even more common in the future. The intensity of hurricanes and the frequency of other severe storms will increase. Flooding will increase, but so too will droughts and wildfires. Each of these changes will hit our most vulnerable residents hardest. Unabated, climate change will exact substantial costs on our environment, our economy, and the lives of all North Carolinians.”
President Biden has set an ambitious national goal: an overall 50% reduction in emissions from power plants and transportation by 2030. Joining RGGI would jibe with Biden’s goal and allow North Carolina to do our part, environmentalists say.
The New York Times said Biden’s plan “would require rapid and sweeping changes to virtually every corner of the nation’s economy, transforming the way Americans drive to work, heat their homes and operate their factories.”
Polls show that Americans, especially young people, believe climate change is real and that real action is needed. Yet, there is a stubborn resistance, much like the resistance to masks and Covid vaccines.
Climate-change deniers rely on scare tactics, not science. They claimed Biden’s climate plan cuts “90% of red meat from our diets by 2030.”
No, it doesn’t.
Biden framed his plan not as cutbacks and restrictions, but as an economic engine. He said it would create “millions of good-paying, middle-class, union jobs” – building a resilient electrical grid, cleaning up abandoned oil and gas wells and abandoned coal mines, building electric vehicles, installing charging stations and building clean-power plants.
Even as President Biden prepares to host a White House global climate summit on Earth Day, April 22, new science shows that the climate crisis is accelerating and demanding greater emergency measures. Activists have urged Biden to pledge carbon emissions cuts of as much as 50 percent below 2005 levels by 2030, to stay on track with the key goal of net zero carbon emissions by 2050.
Such longer-term goals are crucial, but they risk distracting us from the importance of taking swift and effective action right now. If we don’t, mid-century deadlines may be too late. Former secretary of state John F. Kerry, Biden’s climate envoy, puts it this way: “Scientists tell us this decade, 2020 to 2030, must be the decade of action.” But why this decade? Because leading studies now find that fast-rising temperatures over the next 10 years have a high chance of triggering potentially uncontrollable warming. By as early as 2030, if left unchecked by new actions, global average temperatures will increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. Temperatures that high have a strong chance of setting off tipping points in key natural systems — like melting Arctic sea ice and Siberian tundra, or destabilizing the Amazon or Gulf Stream ocean currents — causing self-reinforcing, cascading warming that will be far more difficult to stop.
If temperature rise is allowed to reach 2 degrees Celsius, nearly a dozen additional tipping points could be triggered, further destabilizing climate systems and making hard-earned emissions reductions around the world much less effective at limiting warming. These higher near-term temperatures would also cause far more massive effects in the United States and globally in the next few years: crippling heat waves, catastrophic hurricanes, storms and flooding, rampant wildfires, water shortages, crop losses, and many other brutal events that would exact an immense human price in death and displacement, as well as economic costs in the trillions.
Tonight, theProgressive Policy Institute’s Center for New Liberalismhosted Representative Scott Peters (CA-52) for a Twitch Town Hall on climate change and how the center-left can approach the climate crisis in a productive, pragmatic way.
“Climate change is an existential threat, and we need to use the full range of policy tools available to address it. The Center for New Liberalism appreciates Congressman Peters for joining us ahead of Earth Day to talk about a radically pragmatic approach to reducing emissions and saving our planet,” said Jeremiah Johnson, Policy Director for the Center for New Liberalism.
Representative Peters has advocated for a novel three-pronged approach to fighting climate change: instituting a carbon tax, regulating and reducing emissions of so-called “super-pollutants” such as ozone and black soot, and removing existing carbon from the atmosphere using “carbon capture” technology.
The Center for New Liberalism is a digital-first public policy organization dedicated to using grassroots networks and digital media to advocate for liberalism in this new age of populism. It reaches tens of millions of people a month through social media, podcasting, video and streaming, in-person and digital events, and more. The Center for New Liberalism is a project of PPI, and has two primary initiatives: the Neoliberal Project and Exponents Magazine. To learn more visit: centerfornewliberalism.org.
The Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) is a catalyst for policy innovation and political reform based in Washington, D.C. Its mission is to create radically pragmatic ideas for moving America beyond ideological and partisan deadlock. Learn more about PPI by visiting progressivepolicy.org.
In recent weeks, a mini-Cold War has threatened to break out, with the American officials of all types becoming increasingly critical of authoritarian actions by both China and Russia. “This is a battle between the utility of democracies in the 21st century and autocracies. We’ve got to prove that democracy works,” President Bidenstarkly declared at his first Presidential press conference recently, just the latest in a series of tough statements the Administration has directed at Beijing and Moscow.
And yet, just hours after Biden’s press conference, the White House quietly tendered invitations to Chinese President Xi and Russian President Putin to attend Biden’s Earth Day climate change summit on April 22. The reason is simple: The world needs China, by far the largest climate emitter, and Russia, the fourth largest, to reduce their emissions to prevent climate catastrophe.
When asked how America expects to gain climate concessions from China amid trade and other conflicts, Climate Envoy John Kerry suggested that climate could be “compartmentalized” from human rights and trade disputes. As unlikely as this may seem, there is in fact significant precedent for it. For decades, the USSR and U.S. conducted nuclear weapons summits and other negotiations even as they pursued proxy wars around the world, and indeed experts have compared climate change diplomacy to nuclear negotiations. China and the U.S., of course, began their modern day relationship in the shadow of the Vietnam War. This week finds Kerry in Beijing attempting to gain a more serious climate commitment from China ahead of the White House climate change summit on Earth Day, April 22.
President Biden’s bold plan to give America a shot at overtaking China in the race to electric cars and trucks is hitting a couple of speed bumps.
The first is China’s dominance of the raw materials needed to scale up electric battery production for U.S.-made cars and trucks. The second is a standoff between two South Korean battery makers for pole position in the burgeoning U.S. electric vehicle market.
Biden’s proposed American Jobs Plan throws a lot of good ideas and money at the first problem. It may take some presidential jawboning to resolve the second.
China is by far the world’s biggest maker and consumer of electric vehicles (EVs), with sales of over one million a year. (America lags well behind, but it’s some consolation that Tesla, a U.S. company, ranks second in EV sales in China.) With the aid of generous government subsidies and ample supplies of key ingredients like lithium, nickel, cobalt and graphite, China also accounts for 75 percent of global EV battery production.
The president’s $2.3 trillion infrastructure and jobs plan shows his administration is serious about challenging Beijing for economic leadership. Included in this amazingly ambitious package is $174 billion to galvanize the U.S. EV industry. That money would be used to create incentives for state, local and private efforts to build 500,000 EV charging stations around the country over the next decade, retool gas-burning auto plants to build EVs, and create a more robust domestic supply chain for EV equipment and batteries.
It will take a strong push from Washington for the United States to catch China. Although U.S. and foreign automakers are duly pledging to step up U.S. EV production, only two percent of the 270 million vehicles on our roads are electric. Biden says the federal government can set a brisker pace by converting its enormous fleet of 650,000 vehicles from gasoline to electric engines. His plan also will replace 50,000 diesel transit vehicles and switch at least 20 percent of the nation’s school buses to electricity. Crucially, as PPI has long advocated, it boosts consumers’ incentives for buying EVs.
In addition to creating thousands of well-paid manufacturing jobs, the White House plan is intended to help the United States meet its commitments under the Paris climate accords to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Since cars and trucks are responsible for 60 percent of U.S. emissions, a wholesale shift to EVs is essential to reach Biden’s audacious goal of decarbonizing the U.S. economy by 2050.
But the president’s vision of a U.S. manufacturing revival built around clean energy fuels and technologies depends on ramping up domestic electric battery production, which is where a simmering intellectual property dispute between South Korean rivals LG Energy Solutions and SK Innovation comes into play.
In February, LG won a ruling at the U.S. International Trade Commission that SK Innovation had stolen and copied elements of its battery technology. The ITC ordered SK to stop importing battery components into the U.S. The company, which is building a $2.6 factory in Commerce, Georgia to supply hundreds of thousands of batteries to Ford and Volkswagen, says it will have to abandon the plant unless President Biden overrules the ITC decision.
LG Energy, which already manufactures batteries in Michigan as well as South Korea, has launched a joint venture with General Motors, which is converting its shuttered Lordstown, Ohio auto plant to EV production.
The feud between the two big battery makers confronts Biden with a Hobson’s choice between abandoning America’s commitment to protecting intellectual property rights around the world, or losing thousands of jobs in Georgia, a formerly red state he won by less than 12,000 votes in 2020. Arguing that the nation’s interest in revving up battery and EV production should take precedence over a foreign company’s IP rights, lobbyists for SK, as well as Georgia’s two Democratic Senators, reportedly are pressuring Biden to override the ITC ruling before the April 11 deadline for doing so expires.
Biden, however, may have other options. One is to bring all the parties to the White House for a presidential jawboning session. The goal would be to convince Ford and Volkswagen to abide by the ITC’s decision, which would put irresistible pressure on SK Innovation to settle the dispute with LG Energy, lest it be excluded from the nascent U.S. EV market. A solution might entail direct compensation to LG or a licensing agreement to use its technology.
A successful exercise of moral suasion by President Biden could yield the best of all outcomes. It would buttress intellectual property protections, which are essential to U.S. technological innovation and entrepreneurship, while allowing both LG and SK to join Tesla and other U.S. firms to compete in supplying high-quality batteries to U.S.-made EVs.
By shifting EV battery production from Asia to the United States, the president would let China know it can no longer coast to the finish line in an intensifying global race to dominate electric cars, trucks and buses.
President Biden has set the ambitious, important climate goal of achieving net zero emissions from the nation’s electric power sector by 2035. Already, natural gas has played a key role in lowering U.S. carbon dioxide emissions in the past 15 years, in part by displacing higher emitting coal. But gas, which still provides more than a third of America’s electricity, must play an even greater part in America’s decarbonization plans going forward.
Right now, gas uniquely supports the expansion of renewable energy by providing an instantly dispatchable source of electricity. Unlike coal and nuclear plants, natural gas power plants turn on and off within minutes, allowing the grid to quickly match supply and demand even when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining. As a U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory report has noted, this unique flexibility of natural gas generation thereby facilitates the steady expansion of renewables.
Yet as we move toward decarbonization, maintaining an affordable and reliable grid is becoming more exacting, due to increased frequency of extreme weather events and the rapid growth of intermittent and variable wind and solar power. Retaining sufficient natural gas generation to backstop wind and solar power will reduce costs and increase reliability compared to a grid that relies entirely on renewables, or often more expensive electricity storage. Given these realities, demands to ban shale gas development and fracking are not consistent with an economically balanced approach to decarbonizing the electric grid, as President Biden and other administration officials have repeatedly noted.
Major electric vehicle announcements by President Joe Biden and General Motors are being hailed as a turning point in the transition to widespread EV production and deployment in America. This matters greatly, because this crucial technology can both jump-start U.S. manufacturing to ease the economic and jobs crisis, and rapidly reduce emissions that cause climate change.
But there are still serious barriers to EVs. By far the biggest is the lack of American consumer demand for electric vehicles.
PPI President Will Marshall welcomes Congressman Conor Lamb of Pennsylvania’s 17th District to the PPI Podcast, just days after Rep. Lamb’s dramatic floor speech following the insurrection in the Capitol, in which he lambasted Republicans for supporting the Trump lies that inspired the assault, plus his thoughts on impeaching the president again.
Rep. Lamb shares how he and Biden won their elections in the crucial swing state of Pennsylvania, and the critical importance in that state of energy issues — including Biden’s opposition to a ban on natural gas drilling and a balanced approach on energy which helped him flip Pennsylvania back to blue.
The conversation shares the need for a new Democratic approach on energy and climate that recognizes that natural gas is speeding the deployment of renewable energy to the grid; and that our goal should be decarbonizing the economy, not abolishing fossil fuels precipitously, which would cost many Pennsylvania and other energy state workers their jobs and damage their economy.
In gas-producing counties in Pennsylvania, Joe Biden gained enough votes over Hillary Clinton alone to wrest the state from Donald Trump. He improved on Clinton’s margin in these counties by three points (Biden -15 / Clinton -18), counties that represent 40% of the state.
In our pre-election polling in these Pennsylvania extraction counties, even as Trump held an eleven-point lead in them, voters wanted Biden’s “middle ground” energy policy.
Our September poll showed that:
These voters take climate change seriously and want to transition to renewable energy, just like Joe Biden.
Most (69%) voters in these gas-producing counties believe that climate change is a very serious or somewhat serious problem.
People see fossil fuels as a bridge to renewable energy, not a permanent solution. Which of these comes closer to your view?
The United States should use some fossil fuels as a bridge to renewable energy sources but work to eliminate it: 55%
The United States should continue to use fossil fuels for the foreseeable future: 29%
The United States should immediately transition to 100 percent renewable energy: 11%
They don’t want to immediately move away from natural gas.
80% support an energy plan that includes a role for both gas and renewable energy,
They strongly oppose “an immediate ban on all natural-gas extraction in the United States” (19% support / 77% oppose) and “an immediate ban on all fracking in the United States” (32% support / 64% oppose).
83% call natural gas a “big jobs provider in Pennsylvania”
These voters mostly didn’t buy Trump’s argument that Biden was “anti-energy”.
Only 48% of voters agreed that “Joe Biden is just like the liberal socialists in his party who want to pass the job-killing Green New Deal, kill the energy industry in our state, and drive up energy costs”.
After hearing Joe Biden’s actual energy policy—that he wants to “continue to use natural gas, he does not support an immediate ban on natural gas or fracking, and that he will pass a law to guarantee that we only use energy sources that do not contribute to climate change by the year 2050”— voters said they support it on balance (50% support / 46% oppose).
Progressive Policy Institute commissioned ALG Research to conduct this poll to assess the electoral landscape in Pennsylvania and understand voters’ attitudes towards energy policy and climate change. The survey consisted of N=500 likely 2020 general election voters in Pennsylvania, and it included an oversample in gas-producing counties which meant we interviewed 317 people in those counties. The overall margin of error is + 4.4% and in gas-producing counties is +5.5%.
