With Their Big, New Climate Plan, Congressional Republicans Intentionally Miss the Point

For Earth Day, Congressional Republicans rolled out a suite of climate proposals intended to be their answer to Joe Biden’s proposals and the Green New Deal. Their plan, the Energy Innovation Agenda, was stitched together from an assortment of bills previously introduced by House Republicans.

This is the first time in recent history that Republicans have really lined up behind a big climate plan. While support of the Energy Innovation Agenda is certainly not universal in the GOP conference, it is reasonable to think of it as the current GOP plan given its broad leadership support. The Agenda is backed by GOP leader Kevin McCarthy and the ranking Republicans on all relevant committees: the Select Committee on the Climate Crisis, Energy & Commerce, Natural Resources, Science & Technology, Transportation & Infrastructure, Agriculture, Foreign Affairs, and the House Republican Policy Committee. The Party has a plan, and this is it.

The first several times I read through this plan, I felt a hard-to-place sense of frustration. I am glad that the GOP is engaging on climate policy, a party undercurrent slowly gaining momentum for the past few years. But this plan feels totally disconnected from the challenges we currently face and their potential solutions. It seems like climate policy from a world without climate change. With its limited ambitions and many extraneous goals, the Energy Innovation Agenda is wont to leave its readers wondering, “Is this it? Did I miss something?”

In this post, I will give a brief overview of what the Republicans are proposing and why the final product feels so bizarre.

The Energy Innovation Agenda

The table below lists the six planks of the Energy Innovation Agenda and a short summary of their policy proposals. The full proposals are outlined pretty succinctly on the Agenda web page. And for a Republican defense of the overall plan, I recommend the video below by Garret Graves, the top Republican on the Climate Crisis Committee.

The Republican Climate Plan

As the name suggests, the Energy Innovation Agenda is in favor of technological innovation, at least rhetorically. Policy proposals on that front are a bit sparse, and much less than Biden’s American Jobs Plan. Also with heavy rhetoric but slim policy is nuclear power, a favorite of climate-minded Republicans. (I could, and probably will, write a whole post on the culture war vs. policy dichotomy around nuclear power.) The areas of heaviest policy focus in this plan are natural gas and “natural solutions” concerning logging, farming, and forest management.

Needless to say, this is a very short overview of the policies. If you want to learn about the actual nuts and bolts, I suggest going through the actual proposals and looking up relevant issues covered by the Congressional Research Service.

Why This Plan Feels A Bit Off

When thinking about this plan and the slow entry of Republicans into this political space, I try to imagine how the GOP can be a responsible, constructive actor in climate policy. Of course, such a climate-minded GOP would propose emissions-reducing policies based on conservative values and preferences. Different than the Democrats, for sure, but still working off of shared goals or motivated by the same problems. To see this type of conservative party in practice, you could look at the UK Conservatives, Canadian Conservatives, and German CDU.

But there’s something off about the Energy Innovation Agenda. For the past decade, the GOP has been dominated by climate deniers. And although this plan shows that outright denial is no longer in vogue, it also shows that Republicans have still not fully come to terms with the reality of climate change. They are simply not talking about policy like a party that has

To better articulate this, I have identified the following three areas in which the Republican plan really misses the point.

There is no main emissions goal

Other climate plans, such as the many Democratic plans and and those of the three conservative parties I mentioned earlier (UK, Canada, Germany) are centered around reducing greenhouse gas emissions. It’s right at the heart of these plans — you can’t miss it. Since the Paris Climate Agreement, these goals have been organized around a few lodestars: net zero by 2050, 1.5 or 2 degrees, 50 percent by 2030, etc.

But the Energy Innovation Agenda is lukewarm at best when it comes to emissions as the big goal. The plan’s web page introduces it by highlighting the goal of “a cleaner, safer, and healthier environment,” which is almost specific to climate, but not quite. Kevin McCarthy’s introduction to the agenda makes some reference to decreasing emissions, as do a few of the individual proposals. But these references are alongside many other goals, such as competing with China, shrinking “big government,” and achieving energy independence (which I’ll discuss later). The concept of reducing emissions is present, but it is one consideration among many.

There is definitely nothing like a 2050 net zero goal, which is the reduction required to meet the Paris Agreement target. Republican leaders have explicitly rejected that aim. In the time frame contemplated by the Energy Innovation Agenda, these policies will simply never lead to net zero emissions, period. Having the concept of net zero entirely absent really makes this Agenda stand out.

Our three counterexample conservative parties all center emissions goals in their plans. The British Tories and CDU aim for net zero by 2050, while the Canadian Conservatives vow to meet Canada’s Paris Agreement Nationally Determined Contributions by 2030.

The policies don’t match up with our current needs

We can move on from the fact that this plan isn’t explicitly oriented around emissions reductions. That still might be the ultimate effect of the policies, right? Well, eh. Sort of? This is perhaps the most bizarre part of the Agenda. For a plan that purports to address climate change, its aims are largely disconnected from the driving forces behind climate change.

What I mean is this: if all of these policies were implemented, GHG emissions wouldn’t really change a lot. These proposals either focus on relatively insignificant issues or barely nibble around the edge of important things. We can think about this in terms of where our emissions come from. The chart below breaks down US emissions by sector.

US emissions by sector (2019)

So if Republicans passed the Energy Innovation Agenda, how would this picture change? The largest sector, transportation, is virtually ignored by the GOP plan. If I stretch, I can maybe see their relatively modest R&D expansions helping with the tougher puzzles in this space, such as zero-carbon air travel. But there is no policy promoting the adoption of electric cars. Nothing for public transportation. Certainly no urbanism to reduce overall transportation needs. The largest source of our emissions goes essentially unanswered.

Electricity is another big piece of the puzzle, accounting for a quarter of emissions. The most promising GOP proposals here are those supporting hydro power and hydro storage, but it’s not clear how much expansion would result from lighter permitting and licencing requirements. The big winner from Republican electricity policies would be natural gas, but gas has essentially accomplished its climate mission by knocking out coal. What remains for gas — which is a huge climate problem — is to be replaced by zero-carbon sources.

US power mix

The most befuddling area for me is nuclear. Conservatives frequently use nuclear power as a culture war cudgel against liberals. But when it comes time for the Republican climate plan, what do we get? Establish a uranium reserve and support World Bank financing of other countries’ nuclear programs. The Energy Innovation Agenda also includes some op-eds about nuclear and a bill that was already signed, but those are the only two new proposals. The challenges facing US nuclear are many and severe. If you want more nuclear in the United States, these Republican proposals simply won’t cut it.

In the interest of brevity, I won’t detail how our conservative counterexamples more directly address the sources of emissions. But you can look at the Canadian, British, and German plans to see that they do.

Energy independence is a bigger focus than clean energy

Perhaps this is politically necessary to get the conservative base invested in environmental policy, but the Energy Innovation Agenda deploys a lot of nationalistic rhetoric. The plan says that America’s scientific leadership “is being challenged now by the Chinese Communist Party,” so we need to fund R&D. We need to mine our own critical battery and solar panel minerals so that we don’t allow “longstanding overreliance on China to go unchecked.” And we need to establish a nuclear reserve because “we rely heavily on foreign sources of uranium.”

Whether it is good or not to have energy independence, that’s not climate policy. Needless to say, much more relevant to the climate is the carbon intensity of energy sources. But when the Energy Innovation Agenda justifies its support of natural gas, nuclear, and mining, it relies primarily on these national security arguments. To me, this seems like a clear indication that Republican politics is not ready to pursue climate benefits in their own right. While they may not deny the existence of climate change, Republicans now disregard climate impacts in favor of other outcomes in selling their energy policies.

While other conservative parties, and even the Democrats, hold up non-climate benefits for their climate policies, their plans are still communicated primarily as climate/energy policies. They are energy policies that create jobs, or decrease air pollution, or so on. But for the moment, the GOP seems unable to promote their ideas as first and foremost climate-oriented.

Conclusion

The Energy Innovation Agenda definitely represents a new era in Republican climate politics. It is a step firmly in the right direction, but I hope it is just one step of many to come. As it stands, these policies are simply not compatible with the health of the world. Global warming is unique among problems in that as it persists, it accelerates in severity and threatens to eventually speed totally out of our control. The world needs the United States on this issue, and the US can’t keep going on with one of its two parties acting at best neglectful and at worst actively destructive on this issue.

Last Earth Day, the GOP was lead by the world’s worst climate denier. This Earth Day, they released an insufficient plan. Maybe in a few years, the Republican Party will be a fully capable partner in this fight.