Among members of Congress, few have approached climate change with the experience and diligence of Democratic California Representative Scott Peters.
Peters spent decades as an environmental lawyer and Environmental Protection Agency economist prior to becoming a U.S. Representative. Now in his sixth term, Peters has put clean energy at the top of his priority list.
In today’s episode, Representative Peters joins hosts Julia Pyper and Emily Domenech to explore a range of topics: from the Supreme Court’s recent decision to strike down the Chevron doctrine, to his unexpectedly fruitful relationship with Republican Representative Bruce Westerman and how he believes a second Trump term could impact U.S. energy policy.
Peters, who serves on the House Energy & Commerce and Budget Committee, also digs into the details of his recent energy and climate related bills.
- The Fix Our Forests Act
- The Advanced Reactor Fee Reduction Act
- The SPEED and Reliability Act, which seeks to expedite the permitting process for new transmission lines
- The PROVE IT Act, which seeks to study the carbon footprint of twenty-odd industrial imports.
Credits: Hosted by Julia Pyper, Emily Domenech, and Brandon Hurlbut. Produced by Max Savage Levenson. Edited by Anne Bailey. Original music and engineering by Sean Marquand. Stephen Lacey is executive editor.
Political Climate is co-produced by Boundary Stone Partners, a leading bipartisan climate change strategic advisory and government affairs firm. Their mission-driven approach combines innovative solutions with expertise in technology, finance, policy, federal funding, and advocacy. Learn more and get in touch today at BoundaryStone.com.
Concerned about how the 2024 election might impact the programs, policies, and incentives that matter most to you? Let Boundary Stone Partners’ Climate24 service help you navigate the political landscape with their policy navigator tool, resources, and bespoke services. Learn more at BoundaryStone.com/Climate24.
Transcript
Julia Pyper: How did you celebrate Independence Day, Emily?
Emily Domenech: I went down to the beautiful Northern Neck of Virginia, which is out on the Chesapeake Bay. Visited my parents, did some good, saw some fireworks, rode a bike, kayaked on the water, all that good, all American summer stuff.
Julia Pyper: That sounds so lovely. Let’s see, I was still up in Canada for my summer vacation back home where my family is, but do not fret. My very American husband and son decked themselves out in American flag paraphernalia and made all the Canadians eat barbecue.
Emily Domenech: Hell yeah. Good. We’re going to have to get a picture of that.
Julia Pyper: Totally. My Arkansas husband, he was just out there fishing off the dock. He was so happy. I mean, one thing that’s great is Canada’s got a lot of rural area and you can go do a lot of the same things Americans love.
Emily Domenech: I was going to say, I bet it’s not that different than Arkansas. Honestly. Same type of people.
Julia Pyper: Yeah. He gets pumped about the fish he catches, riding ATVs, that whole shebang, so it’s great.
Emily Domenech: Hell yeah. We love it.
Julia Pyper: Freedom.
Julia Pyper: Welcome to Political Climate. I’m Julia Pyper. Among members of Congress, few have approached climate change with the experience and diligence of Democratic California Representative, Scott Peters. Peters spent decades as an environmental lawyer and environmental protection agency economist prior to becoming a US representative. Now in his sixth term, he has put clean energy at the top of his priority list. In today’s episode, representative Peters joins us to explore a range of topics from the Supreme Court’s recent decision to strike down the Chevron Doctrine to his new wildfire prevention and transmission permitting bills to how a second Trump term could impact energy policy. I’m joined by my co-host, Emily Domenech. Emily served as Senior Energy Advisor to Speakers of the House, Kevin McCarthy and Mike Johnson, and is now a senior Vice President at Boundary Stone. Hey Emily.
Emily Domenech: Hey. Thanks for being here today.
Julia Pyper: Thank you. Sadly, this week our co-host and dear friend Brandon Hurlbut is on vacation. Slacker. I just want to say I recorded the pod from my vacation, so weak sauce, Brandon.
Emily Domenech: You better have at least hung out with some celebrities that he can tell us about when he gets back.
Julia Pyper: Oh, I’m sure he will. He’ll have some tell-to-tell. Yeah, with some name dropping. But knowing in all seriousness, we miss his insights, his jokes, his ever-eloquent trolling. Have fun, Brandon. All right, now let’s get straight into our interview. For those who don’t already know, our guest, Scott Peters is a six-term Democratic congressman representing coastal San Diego and surrounding cities. Prior to joining Congress, Peters served as an economist for the EPA and an environmental lawyer. He currently serves in the House Energy and Commerce Committee, as well as the budget committee. In recent months, he has introduced several energy and climate-related bills, the Fix Our Forests Act, the Advanced Reactor Fee Reduction Act, and the Speed and Reliability Act, which seeks to expedite the permitting process for new transmission lines. On July 9th, Peters, joined by Republican Utah representative John Curtis introduced the house version of the Prove It Act, which seeks to study the carbon footprint of 20-odd industrial imports. Without further ado, representative Peters, welcome to Political Climate. Thanks so much for joining us.
Rep. Scott Peters: Thanks so much for having me, Julia.
Julia Pyper: Well, I did want to start with a bit of a scene setting question here, Congressman about some other personal experiences. And maybe going back even further, to what inspired you initially to get involved with climate and energy policy writ large? I know you’ve got even before you joined Congress experience working in this sector. So tell us a little bit about what inspired you to make this part of your life’s work.
Rep. Scott Peters: I was an environmental lawyer when I was practicing before I went into politics, and I got into that because I just saw, I saw that there were a lot of risks. What I learned was there’s sometimes more fighting than there needs to be to solve problems, and I just felt living in San Diego too, that the environment was such an important part of our culture and our lifestyle. The ocean was very important to us. I just started getting myself educated on sea level rise and wildfires and water supply and some of the things that affected San Diego when I was city council president there. And just, I’ve always been interested in, always thought I had something to contribute because I’ve fought some of these battles in the courtroom and thought that maybe as a lawmaker we could do a little bit better job of having effective laws that weren’t so cumbersome.
Julia Pyper: That’s a great segue to our next question.
Emily Domenech: I was going to say, it’s a good opportunity to talk about what you called “the biggest news story” right now, which is the Supreme Court’s Chevron decision. As a reminder for our listeners with its recent ruling, the Supreme Court eliminated the Chevron deference, a legal precedent from a 1984 case that gave federal agencies a degree of discretion in interpreting ambiguous laws in their areas of expertise. Sir, can you tell listeners why you think Chevron is so consequential, particularly as it pertains to climate and energy policy and what you think this decision means for those regs going forward?
Rep. Scott Peters: Well, Congress already has a hard time functioning. This could add a lot of burden to us. So just to reset, Emily, today, we will pass a law and we’ll direct an agency to come up with the numbers to implement that law. So for instance, take the Safe Drinking Water Act. So under that Safe Drinking Water Act, Congress prescribes we should have safe drinking water, but we leave it to the agencies to say, how many parts per million of this contaminant is safe in your drinking water? Imagine if now if we leave that blank, if the court says, no, Congress has to fill that in. I don’t think you want us, you don’t want Congress drawing some of those lines, we would lose all that expertise. I don’t think Republicans or Democrats think that’s a good idea and we’ll see how this plays out. But that’s the kind of thing we’re concerned about.
So if you want to regulate something like clean water, which everyone supports or you want to get into talking about climate and things like that, are we really going to ask Congress to get in the super weedy details of these regulations? It’s probably not something that’s going to work very well. The two things we may have to do is really buff up the expertise in Congress in our committees. Gosh, they’re already overburdened just with conceptual problems like we take up in Congress. Maybe we would take rules that agencies propose and legislatively, bless them, codify them. That’d be another option. But I just don’t think the Supreme Court has been very practical in this instance. It’s an ideological decision against big government, but we’re going to go from big government to big litigation because everything’s going to be in a lawsuit now.
Julia Pyper: It’s interesting to hear you say that because that was always my concern. You are the expert, sir. So that was what I took away from this Supreme Court decision is how does Congress become the expert in all matters, technical, science? I know Emily, you said in the past, this is good to have Congress have more skin in the game. I just wonder what that means in practice. How do you get to something like a parts per million number distinction in Congress when it’s already so difficult to get any bill across the finish line?
Rep. Scott Peters: And I think Emily would agree that Congress is full of people who are often well-intentioned, but they’re not experts. I mean, I practice environmental law. If you want to talk to me about the details of a subtitle D, Municipal Waste Landfill liner, I could do that peer to peer. I had litigation over that, but I don’t even know how to run a restaurant, what I offer about drug discovery or something like that. And I think that’s why we have this expertise in the government to help us fill in the details. This will really be potentially a big, big challenge for us in a way I think that’s much more broad than the attack had to be.
Emily Domenech: What do you say? Just one last thing on Chevron to the idea, the reaction we’ve seen from Senator Manchin say on how IRA isn’t getting implemented in the way that I intended. I think that’s where a lot of this kickback towards Chevron has come from and how do we solve that problem? How does Congress get better at building those guardrails so that it’s clear what they want the agencies to do? I think we’ve done better in perhaps the greenhouse gas space than we have in other spaces recently. But that’s, I think, the core problem.
Rep. Scott Peters: I think it’s a good point, and I do think, I know, I heard Garret Graves say similar things about the regulatory reform piece that we did, and he felt that President Biden added in a bunch of things that they hadn’t agreed to as he implemented it and that there are places where we probably have to be more specific. That’s a lesson we could have learned without the Chevron case though. Next time we have a deal with President Biden or with president, whoever, we’re going to say, and these are the only restrictions you can impose, but we didn’t need to upend 40 years of regulatory certainty to do a better job drafting that particular piece of legislation next time.
Emily Domenech: Do you think Congress will pass some sort of response to Chevron to this case?
Rep. Scott Peters: It’s hard to know exactly what that would be except if we took on codifying the existing regulations. I mean, maybe that’s something we could do, but the committee staff is going to have to be beefed up a lot if we’re going to try to do that. And then I imagine there’s going to be the potential to bring all of those fights that happen in comment periods and back and forth in regulatory review, they’re going to bring that to the correct congressional offices. It just seems to me that is a recipe for bringing the whole place to a stop.
Julia Pyper: Well, this is a cheery start to the discussion. Love it. Let’s move on to the Prove It Act. This is a bipartisan piece of legislation.
Rep. Scott Peters: This is good news, the Prove It Act.
Julia Pyper: This is good news. The Prove It Act stands for Providing Reliable Objective Verifiable Emissions Intensity and Transparency Act of 2024. You introduced this bill in the house with Republican representative John Curtis with a total of 19 co-sponsors, as I understand it. This bill complements a bipartisan senate version of the Prove It Act introduced in August 2023. The bill directs the Department of Energy in coordination with other federal agencies to study the emissions from certain industrial goods produced in the US compared to those imported from other countries. This includes aluminum, steel, plastics, petroleum products, solar panels, lithium ion batteries, and more.
The study is designed as I understand it, to provide detailed and transparent data on emissions, helping to hold countries with less stringent environmental standards accountable and by showcasing the lower emissions intensity of American products. You’ve made the case, sir, that the Prove It Act will bolster arguments for promoting US manufacturing and energy production over foreign competitors. However, I have to note that opponents would argue that this bill will lead to a carbon tax on imported goods at least, and possibly also on domestic products. So tell us a little bit more about the Prove It Act in your words and how would you respond to that argument from opponents that this could lead to carbon pricing, which has mixed popularity, let’s say?
Rep. Scott Peters: Well, the argument is ridiculous, but let me just talk a little bit about the act. All this is a study for us to get data on how clean American business is from a climate perspective compared to other countries. And that’s important for a couple of reasons, but primarily because we don’t have a carbon tax. So say if you’re Europe and you’re imposing $100 a ton on carbon, all of your manufacturers and businesses are bearing that cost, what you’re going to say is, “Well, that’s not fair to us.” We want to make sure that we adjust that at the border so that people who are competing against us trying to export into our country, there’s a level playing field. We’re going to be called on at the negotiating table to have information to counter that. And the reason we have to do this is precisely because we don’t have a carbon tax.
If we had a carbon tax, we’d say our number is 90 and we would compare that way, but we don’t have that number. So we want to do a sector-by-sector investigation of how our businesses are doing. I’ve heard American steel say that it’s the cleanest. Great, prove it. I’ve heard American gas say it’s cleaner than Russian gas. I believe that to be true, but I don’t have the data for that, and that’s not going to hold up in a negotiation. So that’s a really important thing. It’s just about providing data. And we have support from Democrats because they’re concerned about climate. We have support from the Chamber of Commerce. We have support in the Senate from the American Petroleum Institute. I think most people want the chance for American businesses to prove that we’re doing a better job and a cleaner job than other places, and we want that to be reflected in international trade.
For myself, Julia, I support a carbon tax. I thought that was a good idea. John Curtis does not support a carbon tax, and I wanted a carbon tax instead of the IRA approach of subsidies for particular industries because I think it would be a lot more efficient from a market perspective and a government perspective. We wouldn’t have to set up all these grant programs that we’re still working on, but that wasn’t in the cards. The Biden administration didn’t support it. Folks from Louisiana don’t like it. So the irony about this being a way to get to the carbon tax is that we’re really having to do this because we didn’t get to the carbon tax and there’s no connection between the two of them.
Julia Pyper: And just one clarifying question. We talk about the European Union. What is the negotiation setting that you see coming up where this data is going to be necessary? Is this happening today?
Rep. Scott Peters: Yeah. No, I can’t remember the exact time, but they let us know that in a period of time, a year or two, that they’re going to start talking about a border adjustment that would-
Julia Pyper: In Europe?
Rep. Scott Peters: Yeah, in Europe, that would affect American goods. And we don’t want our businesses who are investing in this to be disadvantaged. I’ll just give the example. For reasons of customer, demand from Japan, from South Korea and Europe, the natural gas industry has done a much better job of cleaning up fugitive methane emissions. They’ve developed technologies to measure it, to monitor it, ways to fix it, all those, and they claim, and I believe them. I don’t have any reason not to believe them that our gas is cleaner. I don’t have any reason to disbelieve that, but I just don’t have the proof. So the idea of this is to let’s get this information together in an official way so that when we talk to Brussels or Seoul or Tokyo that we have this information we can advocate for our own businesses.
Emily Domenech: So I want to follow up with two things. One, I will note that the National Energy Technology Lab, the DOE National Lab that focuses on fossil energy has done a number of studies comparing the carbon intensity of US Natural Gas to Russian Natural Gas and others around the world. So we do have some data in the natural gas sector, but I’ll give you that we’re missing that data in many other places. The one question I’ll ask you, and I’m a big fan of John Curtis. I worked with him a ton on the Conservative Climate Foundation and many other groups. I think he’ll make a wonderful senator from Utah, but he’s representing a pretty small group of Republicans. Do you think that this is a bill that has a serious legislative future or is it dead on arrival in perhaps your committee? The Energy and Commerce committee?
Rep. Scott Peters: You said it’s a small number of Republicans. It passed out of the Senate Committee. It’s going to pass the Senate, and I don’t really think there’s real opposition. The people who are opposed to it, maybe trying to peddle some goods that wouldn’t do that well if they were analyzed. But like I said, we have a lot more support than we do detractors and pretty optimistic about this one.
Julia Pyper: Let me ask quickly, do you see the US passing a carbon tax, let’s call it in our lifetimes?
Rep. Scott Peters: Well, look how young you are. I’m hopeful.
Julia Pyper: Oh gosh, yeah. This filter on the Zoom is really helping me.
Rep. Scott Peters: Let’s go with your lifetime, not my lifetime. I still think it makes a lot of sense, but it’s just not in the cards right now, so I don’t know.
Julia Pyper: Makes sense.
Emily Domenech: So let’s move on to my favorite topic, the forestry side of your work. Last month, you and Republican representative Bruce Westerman introduced the Fix Our Forest Act. This is, I think, one of many of your bipartisan efforts with Chairman Westerman and I would love to know a little bit more about how you built that partnership and how you all work together across committees. But why did you see the need to bring up this bill? Why now? What’s the purpose? And do you think that there’s hope to get this to the house floor?
Rep. Scott Peters: Well, I’ll tell you the story, Emily, how I got started with Bruce, if you give me a minute. I was on a flight back from overseas and he sat down next to me on the plane, introduced himself, “I’m Bruce Westerman, I represent Arkansas.” It turns out he went to the Yale School of Forestry for a graduate degree. He knows more about forestry than anybody in Congress. And he said, “I want to tell you the story of the Sequoias.” I said, “Let’s hear it.” He said, “Well, for 1,200 years we didn’t lose the Sequoia to fire until 2017.” What happened was in 2017, one of the shade tolerant trees like a fir tree or a pine tree, grew up next to the Sequoia and conveyed the fire into the canopy. The only place that’s vulnerable for sequoias for fire is at the base. They need fire to open their seeds, but we haven’t allowed natural fire to burn.
And so this tree was able to grow up next to the Sequoia, convey the fire up and kill it. And since then we’ve lost 19% of the Sequoias. We’re going to lose the Sequoias if we don’t do anything. And I said, “Well, Bruce, what do you think we should do?” He said, “Two things. One is you have to invest money to go into those 60 groves where the Sequoias are and restore the conditions that would’ve existed had natural fire occurred over the last century. Which means you have to thin them out. And also you have to do it quickly. The second thing you had to do is permit form because you can’t do a four year study on each grove because you just don’t have the time. You have to do some sort of targeted exemption.” And we came up with this bill that did those two things called Save our Sequoias, SOS. And we had all the support of the Democrats, by the way, in California, the environmental groups in California, the Redwoods League was very excited. The tribe was excited. They thought it was good.
When we brought it to DC, of course it changed NEPA in a way that people were just flabbergasted by the environmental community. They sent me an awful screed. The environmental groups that had worked for me didn’t want their names on it all of a sudden. But any change to NEPA was a slippery slope and we couldn’t do it. And we’re talking about the Sequoias here. We’re talking about changing the environmental laws to save these magnificent trees. The whole reason the Sierra Club got started, and so I found it very ironic. The fun thing was we couldn’t get a hearing in front of the democratically controlled natural resource committee. But when we changed Congresses, the committee chairman was all of a sudden Bruce Westerman. So we got a hearing. He did the smart thing, he brought the Redwoods League. The California environmental groups were supportive. The tribe, they called a witness, a forestry person who was against the bill. He heard the testimony in that room and changed his mind. I wonder, have you seen that happen? He changed his mind.
Emily Domenech: Never.
Rep. Scott Peters: I said, “This is why it’s the right thing to do.” And all of a sudden, all those people, we thought that we had three votes. Everybody else was scared by the environmental groups who thought NEPA was delivered on tablets by Moses instead of Congress in 1970. But when he changed his mind, the bill came out of committee on voice vote, so unanimous vote. So I really liked working with Bruce and we thought there’s other issues in forestry that really need to be taken care of. And now look, why do I care about it? Wildfires have become the biggest source of pollution, climate pollution in the state, bigger than the power sector. I think more particulate pollution than transportation. And because we have suppressed fire for so long, natural fire, we don’t have normal fires anymore. We have catastrophes, whether it’s ignited by a wire from a utility or by a gender reveal party, which happened once in California.
I mean, the conditions are, it’s a catastrophe. It’s driving insurance rates up, it’s creating a lot of pollution. People are dying, people are losing their homes. And so I wanted to help him with this too. And so we did the Fix Our Forest Act, which will really just allow the Forest Service to do its job. It overturns a case called Cottonwood, which if you had a forest plan with one minor defect, the Cottonwood case said, “If you found a defect in the forest plant, you’re going to stop everything else in the whole forest plant for this one defect, and it’s going to also figure out some good things to do with the biomass that we take out of these forests as we make them healthier.” Again, we passed that bill out of the National Resources Committee on voice. Still some concerns by some Democrats and some of the litigation reform we did, but no one wanted to vote against the wildfire bill at this point, and we’re hoping that we can get both those bills across the finish line this year.
Julia Pyper: So I just want to pull the thread on something you’re describing there with respect to the Fix Our Forest Act about how environmental groups themselves have to evolve, maybe their views of environmentalism as we try to tackle not only mitigating climate change, but adapting to it as we are here with wildfires. You talked about poor land management. I wonder if you could opine a little bit more on how you think the environmental movement, how you maybe see it evolving or you maybe think it should evolve you yourself being an environmental lawyer, as we try to grapple with the new context that we’re living in. I imagine this comes up on other issues as well.
Rep. Scott Peters: You hit the nail on the head and it’s a whole context change. So NEPA was passed in 1970 before the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act, and the idea of NEPA, the National Environmental Policy Act was it says, all it says is look, before you federal government make a decision that affects the environment, you have to explain the effects of the environment and see if you can look at the alternatives and see if you can avoid them. But that’s all it is. You basically have to do a study. And we were fighting against making a lot of mistakes. We were building a lot of stuff that was dirty, and we didn’t want to do that anymore. So we went on defense, we said, slow down, let’s understand this stuff before we approve it. And that was the right response back then. Over time though, NEPA has become the most litigated environmental statute where a NEPA environmental impact study that happens under NEPA can take years to do, and then the ensuing litigation can be four years too.
So it’s holding up a lot of things. And the problem is now it’s holding up the stuff that we as climate activists want to get done. Because we’re not on defense anymore, we’re on offense. We have to build a lot of stuff. We have to build a lot of transmission, offshore wind, utility scale solar, hydrogen pipelines, direct air capture. We have to build a lot of stuff. And every permit delay is delaying climate action. So we need to modernize those laws to help us go from defense to offense. And people say, well, what about bad projects so that we’ll go faster? But think of it this way, about 85 or 90% of the energy projects that want to get built that are in line to get built are non-emitting. Make everything faster, give up the 15 and get your 85. What I say is, the second time that happens at a casino, you get kicked out.
That’s a good deal. So just make everything go faster. And it’s really hard to get people to wrap their head around that because we’ve just never done it that way. And we can’t imagine letting the government do its job. We have to modernize the laws, the environmental laws today to deal with the environmental problems of today. And that means we’ve got to make everything go faster. We say that climate is a crisis. We say we’ve got 10 years to make all the decisions. We say we got to 2050 to get to net zero, but on this schedule, we will not make our numbers. And so something’s got to give and I think it should be process.
Emily Domenech: So before we jump off of NEPA, I want to just follow up and ask you about, we obviously, as you mentioned, we interviewed your Republican colleague, Garret Graves for one of our previous episodes, and he obviously argued pretty strongly that the White House’s most recent permitting policy, the NEPA 2.0 Rule could actually slow down this process. What do you make of his argument? Do you agree? Disagree? How can we fix it?
Rep. Scott Peters: I think he’s got a point because we talked about trying to get one study, but really we haven’t really, in that particular bill, we didn’t really cut the process in a way that we should. And anyway, it was timid. There was a lot of hand-wringing over it, but it doesn’t really cut the timelines in the way we need. I mean, think about this, we’re probably going to see the incentives in the IRA bring 30 to 60,000 new projects, and we’re all going to have to fit them through that same small funnel of studies that, and these are environmental projects, these are pro-environment projects that we want to build. The stuff’s not going to get built, and we don’t build more wires to connect wind and solar to. We’re just not going to have that stuff. So I think I share Garret’s frustration. I think he made a good-faith effort to work with the administration to make things go faster. But I don’t think anyone is reaching far enough. I think we’ve got to be much more radical than we’ve seen so far.
Julia Pyper: So you, sir, introduced, we’re part of the introduction of the Speed and Reliability Act. Tell us a bit about that and how does that differ from the Biden administration’s approach to permitting reform?
Rep. Scott Peters: We’re talking not just about climate action. We’re talking about for the first time in the United States, the US is going to see a spike in demand for electricity. We have more manufacturing coming, we’re electrifying stuff. But these AI centers, the data centers are huge consumers of energy and we’re going to have to build a lot more generation and transmission. The estimates out of Princeton were that if we don’t triple the size of the grid by 2050, that we’ll lose 80% of the climate benefits of the IRA because we won’t have any way to move sunshine, electrons from Arizona to Chicago. So there’s a system for inter-regional transmission that’s set up now where the government is supposed to designate quarters and then people are supposed to build in these quarters. It’s existed since 2005, not one line has been built, but the Speed Act would say is let’s provide an alternative to that mechanism.
And if an entrepreneur, some business person sees that there’s a demand that he or she could fill by building an interstate line, have them, map it out, have them, and then we would designate that as in the national interest. In other words, let the market tell us what the government’s not telling us. Let the market tell us where these lines should go. And frankly, there’s some utilities that don’t like the competition, but that would be a better way, I think, to figure out where the line should go in response to market demand and the opportunity for generation than having the government do it, which we’ve already seen, even though we’ve bolstered it a little bit, it’s just not generating answers quickly enough.
Emily Domenech: Do you think on the transmission issue, do you think that that national approach is what’s holding us up? Would we maybe be better served by some more regional bills that address some of those utilities that drag their feet a little bit?
Rep. Scott Peters: I don’t think it’s an either or at this point, given what we have to build. I don’t think there’s anyone who’s analyzed it. It doesn’t think we need a ton more transmission. Some of that, Emily, by the way, can be done by reconductoring and by improving the technology along existing lines. But I don’t hear anyone say that that’s the whole thing. So you may not have to have tripled the number of wires, but you’re going to have to have much more capacity. And the grid now is old, small and dumb, and if we want to compete against China, it’s got to be new, big and smart, and we all ought to be pitching in on how to invest to make that happen.
Emily Domenech: On that note, on new, big and smart, you were a part of the effort that built towards the recent Advance Act that passed in the Senate looking to modernize our approach to nuclear energy, particularly with the NRC, with your Advanced Reactor Fee Reduction Act. Can you give us a little context? What are the fees we’re talking about? What kind of impact do you hope this bill will have and what’s your hope? You talked about AI and the demand for energy. Do you think that that will drive some more development in the nuclear space?
Rep. Scott Peters: I hope so. I think there’s a lot of promise for new nuclear technologies. Smaller reactors generate less waste, could in theory even be moved to where the data center might be. But the problem is the regulation is just so difficult. And when someone told me it was the fees, I said, oh, that’s a joke. But it’s not because the fees get up into the millions of dollars. And I understand we have to really understand this technology as it emerges, but once we understand it, we ought to really make an effort to deploy it much faster. And so actually the committee was surprisingly unanimous in the need to help nuclear energy get back on the ground because it needs to be American. It’s clean, it’s baseload power. There seems to be a bipartisan interest in it as a part of the solution.
Emily Domenech: Yeah, I was amazed that the Senate bill, the vote was I think 88 to two with only Senator Sanders and Senator Markey voting no, and I laughed because it’s exactly what you said about how that legacy environmentalist was very much a, we need to be careful about what we build and we need to be slower and we need to be more thoughtful. And I see it as a little bit of the last generation of folks who think that way and maybe hopefully we can change things in the future because there’s a new bipartisan interest in it.
Rep. Scott Peters: We do nukes all the time on nuclear subs, small modular reactors. We understand it pretty well, and it shouldn’t be that challenging to deploy.
Julia Pyper: I think carbon capture and sequestration, you’re seeing an evolution among environmentalists, particularly carbon removal. It used to be just we have to mitigate, mitigate, mitigate. Now we’re coming around to, okay, well we have these emissions in the atmosphere. How do we actually remove them? And I think we’re seeing evolutions in real time around several of these issues as the climate crisis frankly becomes more dire.
Rep. Scott Peters: Yeah. Well, I think yes, when I came into Congress, there’s a lot of skepticism on the left about nuclear and carbon capture. Carbon capture was seen by the way people were suspicious that it was a substitute for decarbonization. But we’ve set the goal in 2050 at net zero, not zero, net zero. And the reason we set it at net zero is because we understand that carbon management and sequestration and utilization, all of those technologies should evolve. And I think Julio Friedmann, the Carbon Wrangler from Columbia University, he thinks that carbon management will be eight to 12% of the total solution. So it’s a really significant contributor. When the technology is new, it’s more expensive, but if we provide some commitments, if you can get to these numbers, we’ll buy it. Advanced market commitments like that, I think it would incentivize development of new technologies, and that’s a really important part of the solution.
Julia Pyper: Now I want to level up a little bit and ask you Congressman about working across the aisle. So you’ve worked on a lot of bills that have bipartisan support. A lot of folks listening to this show will have tracked those. Often what comes up though is Congress says, good luck. These bills don’t ultimately pass and become law. Reconciliation was the tool that Democrats used to get the Inflation Reduction Act across the line. Of course, there was the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law as well. There was the CHIPS Act. So it’s not as though bipartisanship is dead, but I think there’s a general chill on the idea that you can work across the aisle in good faith these days, but you’re one that shows it’s possible. Tell us a little bit about what happens behind closed doors. Is bipartisanship alive in ways that maybe we don’t see reflected in the media, or is it really going by the wayside?
Rep. Scott Peters: First of all, the media doesn’t love it. It’s manifestly obvious. But also, let’s also keep in mind what the limitations are on reconciliation. You can only deal with outlays and revenues and reconciliation. So you can set up the IRA set of incentives. You could have done a carbon tax, you could do taxes, but you can’t deal with methane regulation, you can’t deal with forest regulation. A lot of the stuff we’re doing in a bipartisan way, you can’t set up a trade regime. You can’t build out transmission. None of that can happen in the reconciliation setting, reconciliation that you have when you have the house, the Senate, and the presidency under one party. So you have to be bipartisan. And really the math is not difficult. It’s 218 votes in the majority votes in the house, but you need 60 votes in the Senate to get anything done.
That’s always going to involve both parties and you need a president to sign it. A president’s always going to be comforted by having both parties behind it. And so to me, I don’t like waste my time on doing a lot of messaging bills or just talking to people who agree with me because the job happens when you get things done. Sometimes that means talking back to your own people. I believe that’s when leadership starts, when you talk back to your own people, but also listening to people who disagree with you and figuring out where there’s points of agreement. So it’s been really rewarding to work with folks like Bruce Westerman and Garret Graves and John Curtis, Jodey Arrington on debt and deficit issues. We don’t vote together a lot, that’s for sure, but we found places where we think we can work together, and that’s the fun of it. And I always say, I come to Washington to get things done. I’m from San Diego. I’m not here for the weather.
Julia Pyper: Can I ask a pointed question on that? Do you think there are leaders on the Republican side? I just think of the fact that some of the climate champions on the Republican side of the aisle have either retired from Congress, decided not to run again, Garret Graves being one of those. Carlos Curbelo comes to mind, a representative from Florida formerly. Are there other champions to work with on the climate energy issues across the aisle going forward? And maybe some names we haven’t heard of yet.
Rep. Scott Peters: Well keep an eye on Andrew Garbarino, the co-chair of the Climate Solutions Caucus, which is bipartisan. I think there are other folks, look, we’re going to have to find more. We’re going to find more people on both sides who want to work on bipartisan solutions, who are able to say, I got 90% of what I wanted, but I’m still going to vote for it even though I have to give up to 10%. And I think we’ll keep looking. I’m sorry about some of the people who are retiring. I think this can be a hard job for folks, and it takes a lot of patience. It takes a long time to get stuff done, but I think it’s an important time, and I believe that everyone, just about everyone who comes to Congress doesn’t come here for their Instagram account, but clearly people who make noise and there’s incentives for people to make noise and throw rocks at the other party. You could see that in internet fundraising. But a lot of us are fish swimming under the waves trying to get our work done. And that’s the orientation of most people, I think.
Emily Domenech: That’s encouraging to hear, and it’s something I say a lot to people that every member of Congress has something they care about deeply that they’ll work with anybody on, and you just have to figure out what that thing is. I want to move on a little bit to when we look ahead to the next Congress and the future of the IRA and what does that look like? We’ve talked a little bit on this show about how polls show that most Americans are unaware of the impact of the IRA. And we’ve also talked about on this show how we have lots of people, I think it’s like 60% of Americans will say they support investments in renewable energy, they support clean energy, they support reducing emissions. But if you ask them if they would pay for it, 70% of Americans will say they wouldn’t pay $10 more on their electric bill. So how do we change this discussion so people can connect those two issues? And frankly, what do you think that means for the future of some of these policies?
Rep. Scott Peters: It’s hard to do with voters, but if you think about the cost of doing nothing, that has a cost too. But you have to make investments as a country in energy to be safe and to be competitive. And I think we have to be honest with people. It’s not free.
Emily Domenech: I appreciate your emphasis on reliability though, because I think that’s something that appeals, that’s something that is a real tangible thing that appeals to both sides of the aisle and it often gets lost in the mix. We have one side really focused on climate and one side maybe really focused on cost and the reliability piece might be the thing that helps bring us together on this.
Rep. Scott Peters: I agree. And I think I look at Texas, I think Texas is interesting. They have the closest thing to a free market and energy of any area, and they’re building more wind than anybody else. They’re about to pass California in solar. They have a lot of nuclear, obviously they have oil and gas and it’s not ideological. People need more power. And in a lot of ways, solar and wind were already cost competitive before the IRA, but the IRA puts the thumb on the scale. So there’s a lot of incentive to do that, and Texas is taking advantage of it. That’s great. But they still had an issue with reliability themselves. And so it is a problem we have to continue to work at. If we focus on reliability, I think a lot of the other things will fall into place.
Julia Pyper: It’s all part of the same discussion. Absolutely. Well, rounding the bend here, I have to get your thoughts, sir, on what comes next to Emily’s point. Looking forward, what do you believe the threat of a second Trump presidency is to climate energy issues from a Democrat perspective, or not just a Democrat perspective, let’s say an environmental perspective? Do you think that threat is real or can the clean energy brace itself for a second Trump presidential turn to the White House?
Rep. Scott Peters: Well, I mean, president Trump is not a subtle man, and he’s come pretty hard after our engagement in international affairs, which I think is really detrimental, taking us out of the discussion around the Paris Agreement. If you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu, is that the phrase?
Julia Pyper: Yup.
Rep. Scott Peters: We need to be in that room and we need to be in that room advocating for American business and American interests, but also for the deployment of American technologies that are being developed here to help the energy transition that’s going to go on in the rest of the world, whatever we do. So I think it’s really mindless to take ourselves out of that discussion. Do you call it climate change a hoax? That’s fine, but I don’t think anyone believes that anymore. I mean, people are facing drought or extreme heat. I think they understand at least the need for adaptation measures, but probably are open to wondering what can we do to be part of the solution to help stem this?
And so from a climate perspective, I think it would be pretty dire. Not that the Biden administration has been perfect, like I said, I think we should have a foreign policy that’s really focused on keeping dirty coal in the ground around the world as other countries become prosperous. It’s in our national interest and in our planet’s interest to make sure that that coal doesn’t get burned, that we provide alternatives. I would like to see the Biden administration do more of that, but if Trump disengages, I don’t think he’s going to be any better. And I just think the whole tone of his discussion that it’s some political construct is going to be really destructive for us.
Julia Pyper: I’ll go to the last question. You have a final thought, Emily?
Emily Domenech: I was going to say my take away from that perspective on the presidency is that that just puts all the more pressure on Congress to actually move forward with some of these solutions.
Rep. Scott Peters: Emily, by the way, I think that’s part of the thing, it’s durable because everything that’s one party is immediately subject to attack by the other party in the next presidential. And that drives businesses crazy, whether it’s the Trump tax plan or whether it’s the IRA, people want certainty and bipartisanship brings a lot more of that than reconciliation.
Emily Domenech: Totally. I joked at the beginning of the Biden Administration that I was just dusting off my talking points from the Obama administration because it was the same stuff. We’re like Clean Power Plan 2.0. Let’s go.
Julia Pyper: All right, final question here. So our audience is made up of folks who work in clean energy and energy writ large, either at companies in the policy realm, some folks on Capitol Hill, I know in state legislatures including university students who are just entering the workforce. I guess what’s a thought you’d want to leave this audience with? A lot of them are in the trenches working on a lot of the same issues we talked about on the podcast today. I guess is there either a message for them or a place you would direct everyone’s energy and their own personal energy as we think about the next phase of climate energy policy here in America?
Rep. Scott Peters: Well, from a government perspective, I would like everyone working in energy to explain to people in government, if we’re making it hard for you, I think that the best thing you can do as a person who’s looking at how to engage with the government is think of yourself as an educator. And we have 435 members of Congress, 535 with senators. We all have different backgrounds. I don’t think just about anyone was involved in building out energy and deploying clean energy. Tell us what we’re doing wrong, how we can make it better. I think what I’d really like the message to be is how slow stuff is. And if it was up to me, I would comb through the entire federal government and make everything go faster. The great things we’ve done in this country, whether it’s the interstate highway or a highway system or sending someone to the moon.
I just can’t imagine that those kinds of things being done under this regulatory regime. And if we think we’re going to do this energy transition in a couple of decades, when one power line takes 10 years to build and seven years of that is processed, we’re just fooling ourselves. And I think that the people who you engage with who are trying to make that happen should speak up. Tell the environmental community, tell your members of Congress, your state legislators, tell the business groups, let’s get together and fix this. Because if we want America to compete, we got to do a lot better job with this. We’re stuck in the mud with a lot of this.
Julia Pyper: That was US Representative Scott Peters of California. Sir, thank you so much for joining us.
Rep. Scott Peters: Thanks for having me. It was great. Enjoyed it.
Julia Pyper: Thank you so much, sir. And that’s it for the show. Political Climate is a co-production of Latitude Media and Boundary Stone Partners, Max Savage Levenson is our producer. Sean Marquand is our technical director. Stephen Lacey is our executive editor. You can get all of our show notes and transcripts at latitudemedia.com. And if you want us to talk about a specific topic, please email us at politicalclimatepodcast@gmail.com. Please feel free to help spread the word about Political Climate on LinkedIn, X and beyond. I’m Julia Pyper and we’ll be back next week with our dispatch from the Republican National Convention.
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