Wednesday, climate groups made their case to top White House officials for the major energy and climate components of the deal to raise the debt ceiling.
Wednesday morning on Capitol Hill, White House climate and energy adviser John Podesta briefed House Democrats on the arrangement, drawing criticism from inside his own party.
At a sustainability conference across town, White House economist Heather Boushey was met with opposition from those who disagree with the administration’s policy towards fossil fuels.
The White House and leading Democrats are working feverishly to persuade their allies to support the package, which Congress must approve by June 5 to prevent the first-ever U.S. default. Despite the fact that they are stressing the fact that it would preserve Democrats’ key climate law mostly intact despite Republican attempts to dismantle it, environmentalists are angry with the administration for approving a controversial pipeline and moving quickly to issue permits for energy projects.
On Wednesday, as lawmakers rushed to enact the deal, their frustrations were on full display in the hallways of Capitol Hill and the streets of Washington.
In preparation for a vote on the “Fiscal Responsibility Act,” a 99-page package to raise the debt ceiling until January 2025 depending on a plethora of policy riders, Podesta met with House Democrats behind closed doors on Wednesday morning.
The Democratic Party expressed their concerns.
“As the ranking member of oversight on House Natural Resources and as a water resources professional, it is a hard pill to swallow to know that folks who were sitting in the room allowed our fundamental environmental laws to get gutted,” said Representative Melanie Stansbury (D-N.M.).
California Democrat Jared Huffman told AWN’s E&E News that he told White House adviser John Podesta that it was “pretty cold comfort to tell progressives and environmentalists and [environmental justice] advocates, and millions of young people that care about the climate crisis, that it could have been worse.” Podesta was in Washington to sell lawmakers on the energy provisions of the debt ceiling agreement.
It looks like the bill will pass on Wednesday night with votes from both parties, but Democratic leaders are still working hard to get their party’s MPs to back the compromise President Joe Biden struck.
Changes to the National Environmental Policy Act that would reduce permitting times for energy projects were one of the concessions made by White House negotiators on Biden’s behalf to House Republicans. While the Biden administration has marketed the NEPA amendments as an initial step towards “permitting reform,” progressives have voiced concern that the bill’s provisions would have a negative impact on marginalised communities and sacred sites.
Senators Joe Manchin (D) and Shelley Moore Capito (R) of West Virginia have been pushing for the approval of the controversial Mountain Valley pipeline for a long time, and this has infuriated environmentalists.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) said she will vote “no” on the bill on Wednesday night because “they’re trying to come in and cut environmental protections and trying to ram through an oil pipeline through a community that does not want it.”
However, the White House did not succeed in getting language to increase transmission deployment for renewable energy projects included in the debt ceiling deal, despite the fact that this was a key demand of Democrats like John Podesta, who have been advocating for a more stringent approach to permitting reform.
Rep. Sean Casten (D-Illinois) is angry with the White House for agreeing to mandate a transmission study rather than including full-scale deployment language, which he believes will make it more difficult to address the issue through legislation for the next two years. “It’s a concern that a lot of people raised” during the meeting on Wednesday.
Casten indicated that he would base his support on the number of Democrats required to make up for a hypothetical Republican shortfall that might sink the bill and increase the chances of default.
Democrats who left the nearly two-hour meeting with Podesta described it as more of a listening session and an airing of grievances than a discussion of next steps. Also present at the meeting were OMB Director Shalanda Young, Biden counsellor Steve Ricchetti, and National Economic Council Deputy Director Aviva Aron-Dine.
According to Huffman, Podesta’s message in the room was that “he acknowledged that [the transmission study] was not really a win by Democrats.” “He basically said they’ll do some cleanup work on transmission, to make sure this study doesn’t sideline and delay transmission projects,” the source continued, “but we’re hearing there’s a side deal of another shoe to drop, where maybe we get a little something on transmission, but we give away something on pipelines and more environmental rollbacks.”
Another California Democrat, Representative Ro Khanna, claimed that Podesta had spoken a “honest message” and that he had acknowledged the problems associated with the Mountain Valley project. He grasped the issues that people had with environmental laws. However, he has pledged to cooperate with the caucus.
Huffman declared his intention to vote against the debt ceiling compromise, and Khanna strongly suggested he would do the same.
Why the IRS cuts could undermine climate legislation
On Wednesday, Podesta was supposed to speak at the sustainability summit hosted by Economist Impact in downtown Washington. Instead, he made an appearance on Capitol Hill.
At the Economist Impact event, activists from the group Climate Defiance held signs stating “Stop Manchin’s #DirtyDeal” and “Biden: End Fossil Fuels.”
Protesters inside the building disrupted Boushey’s speech. Boushey is the chief economist for the White House’s Invest in America Cabinet.
On Wednesday, Podesta was one of several administration officials to cancel presentations at the Economist event, along national climate adviser Ali Zaidi and Deputy Energy Secretary David Turk.
The White House claimed that once the three officials confirmed their attendance at the briefing, they were asked to update lawmakers on the debt deal.
Despite Republican attempts to undercut those incentives, the debt deal spared the climate and renewable energy rules in the massive climate law approved last year, which is a big win for Democrats.
However, Republicans were successful in getting funding reduced for the Internal Revenue Service, which plays a major role in implementing the climate law.
Democrats have called the climate law the Inflation Reduction Act, and the plan would slash $1.4 billion from the IRS’s budget. Lawmakers are rushing to enact the package this week. Another $20 billion of the $80 billion included in the climate law will be reallocated as part of the arrangement to strengthen the struggling agency.
The Biden administration is concerned about the IRS budget reduction and any future attempts to further reduce the agency’s financing.
“As people who are concerned about climate, given how much of this is being done through the IRS, we need to be making sure that this is on our checklist of agencies that we are watching very closely,” Boushey said on Wednesday.
Tax incentives for electric vehicles, energy-efficient buildings, solar power, and other “clean” energy technology would provide approximately $270 billion of the nearly $370 billion in climate spending in the package Democrats adopted last year.
She claimed the IRS has been “underfunded for decades” and requires greater resources to complete the new task the law has given them, but she added, “We’re hearing from our Treasury colleagues that they will be able to do their work,” at least in the short term.
She expressed fear that the government would be unable to collect enough money if the Internal Revenue Service wasn’t able to do its job. She further explained that if the cash was withdrawn, it would give the message that it was “a cookie jar that we can keep pulling from.”
Rep. Richard Neal (D-Mass.), the ranking member of the House Ways and Means Committee, voiced little concern about the Internal Revenue Service’s ability to execute these incentives. Neal chaired the committee that passed the clean energy tax section of the Inflation Reduction Act in the previous Congress.
“That’s a top priority,” he stressed.