Sam Thernstrom is founder of the Energy Innovation Reform Project and worked at the Council on Environmental Quality in the George W. Bush Administration.
Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it, the saying goes. Which is fair — but it implies that mistakes remembered aren’t repeated, which sadly is not the case in Washington. Partisan loyalty means never acknowledging the ways in which your own leaders sell out your most cherished causes — even when they’re doing it again.
For three decades, Democratic presidents have been substituting empty gestures on greenhouse gas emissions for action — to the sound of cheers from climate advocates. It’s a win-win strategy: Democrats get the credit for ambitious climate aspirations without having to pay the price of achieving them.
In 1997, Bill Clinton allowed Al Gore to sign the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, despite a unanimous vote for a resolution in the Senate disapproving of its core structure. It was self-evident the Senate wouldn’t enact legislation implementing Kyoto — but Clinton paid no price for it. Climate advocates saved all their ire for his successor, George W. Bush, who was pilloried for ”withdrawing” from an unratified, unimplementable non-treaty.
Barack Obama promised legislation to limit emissions — until the Kerry-Lieberman bill failed in the Senate in 2010, at which point the party line suddenly became: “Thank God Congress didn’t enact any messy legislation, the Clean Air Act is the perfect tool!” EPA finalized the Clean Power Plan in 2015 and environmental advocates celebrated its historic, unprecedented nature — until the Supreme Court shortly after decided that the plan was out of bounds, an outcome that surprised almost no one who knew the underlying law.
Having seen how that played out, no one wants to repeat those mistakes — right?
As a candidate, Joe Biden promised to pass ambitious climate legislation, and in 2020-21, Democrats introduced several proposals in Congress, only to abandon them in favor of passing the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. The IRA had the virtue of needing no Republican votes but the defect of being a budgetary measure that could not establish new regulatory authorities. Without regulations, we can build new clean power but the old plants will keep polluting indefinitely.
No problem, declared the Administration; we’ll use the Clean Air Act. The power plant rule that EPA announced on April 25 closely resembles Obama’s Clean Power Plan in key respects — and it will almost certainly suffer the same fate because there’s no escaping the fundamental dilemma: EPA can promulgate weak regulations that are legally sound or tougher regulations that are not. The Supreme Court’s 2022 West Virginia v. EPA decision sent a clear message: the Clean Air Act’s tools for power sector emissions regulations are severely constrained; anything ambitious must come from Congress.
Mission accomplished?
West Virginia v. EPA’s message was unmistakable — but it fell on deaf ears nevertheless. The Biden Administration and Congressional Democrats are having a misplaced Mission Accomplished moment on power plant emissions limits, knowing it will cost them nothing since Republicans don’t offer meaningful competition on this issue. When the Supreme Court strikes down the latest EPA rule, will climate voters blame Biden?
In fairness, Biden has done more than just check the box on climate; the IRA is providing real money to spur clean energy on a large scale. But that’s not enough. Building clean is one thing but the heart of the challenge is the emissions from the existing fleet. Arguably the only real impact the Biden EPA rule will have (in the months it will be in effect before the courts intervene) is it provides a rationale for the Administration and Congressional Democrats to eschew any more ambitious agenda that might require stretching beyond their comfort zone to engage with the complex realities of an energy transition. It may be a climate emergency but this lets everyone off the hook of crafting realistic solutions.
In reality, EPA’s new power plant regulations likely won’t last the year and, while the IRA’s tax credits can buy down the cost of building clean energy — for as long as they last — they cannot replace a durable, efficient, well-designed regulatory (and deregulatory) structure governing the operations and lifespan of the nation’s existing electric power plants. We need legislation to structure the pace and circumstances of an energy transition, while facilitating necessary permitting and construction.
Democrats’ 2022 shift away from their longstanding effort to make dirty energy expensive in favor of a strategy of making clean energy cheap — embodied by the IRA — was the most important, positive development in climate policy in the last 30 years — and the opportunity it created is being squandered. The IRA was an enormous step in the right direction but without a coherent plan for decarbonization, it cannot succeed. The formula for a successful energy transition is to invest in clean energy innovation and commercialization in the short term — make clean energy cheap — while establishing well-designed regulatory structures to guide cost-effective deployment in the longer term.
Energy is the lifeblood of the American economy but we are forcing innovators, investors and power plant operators to live with perpetual regulatory whiplash, pulled back and forth by ever-shifting political and judicial forces. It’s a recipe for reliability risks, cost spikes and needlessly dirty energy. Congress needs to heed the Supreme Court’s call to do its job.
In 2020-22, several bills to create a clean energy standard for the power sector were introduced in both the House and Senate; all were abandoned after the IRA was enacted. When the current Mission Accomplished mirage evaporates, there is a bipartisan model for pragmatic power sector regulation for Congress to consider, combining innovation initiatives like IRA with well-designed regulations that define the path to a clean, affordable, reliable energy future.
Climate policy is hard and complex; to address it, we need well-designed policies enacted on a bipartisan basis, not continued efforts to apply outdated laws to novel problems.
