Speaker Nancy Pelosi and nearly two dozen House Democrats barnstormed global climate talks here Tuesday, claiming that “America is back” in the effort to slow global warming, even as their party remains divided over a $1.85 trillion budget bill upon which their climate agenda depends.
Pelosi noted that she was accompanied by a record number of lawmakers attending a UN climate summit and said they had flown to Glasgow, Scotland, “ready to take on the challenge, to meet the moment.”
But they have not yet.
The stalled legislation includes $555 billion in tax credits and incentives to promote wind and solar power, electric vehicles, climate-friendly agriculture and forestry programs, and a host of other clean energy programs.
Those measures would bring the country about halfway to President Joe Biden’s goal of cutting the country’s greenhouse gas emissions by 50 per cent - 52 per cent from 2005 levels by 2030.
Pelosi said it would be “the most ambitious and consequential climate and clean energy investment of all time.”
She said House lawmakers intended to pass that bill next week, but a handful of moderate Democrats have raised concerns about its price tag. Meanwhile, the legislation has been held up in the Senate largely because of objections of one Democratic senator, Joe Manchin of West Virginia. Manchin’s state is a coal and gas producer, he has personal financial ties to the coal industry, and he has said he opposes policies that would harm fossil fuels.
Pelosi noted that last week Congress had approved a $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill that includes billions of dollars to help fortify communities against the impacts of climate disasters. But the money and policies to cut the emissions that are causing global warming are embedded in the legislation that has yet to pass.
In a series of meetings and speeches, lawmakers said they felt the weight of expectations from the rest of the world.
Of all nations, the United States has pumped the most carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere — pollution that is trapping heat and driving up average global temperatures.
It has also promised to act on climate change, only to fall short several times in past decades. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., who was among the lawmakers traveling with Pelosi, said countries should hold the US to account for its promise to significantly reduce emissions from the burning of coal, oil and gas.
“We have to actually deliver to get the respect internationally,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “We have to draw down emissions in order to get credit for being committed on climate change.”
Ocasio-Cortez, a co-sponsor of the Green New Deal, was surrounded by security as she walked the cavernous tented hallways of the summit, quickly drawing the attention of a crowd of activists who wore masks declaring themselves “climate feminists.”
Rep. Sean Casten, D-Ill., said Congress had been making “excuses” for inaction on climate change ever since the Clinton administration accepted the world’s first global climate treaty, the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, only to see the Senate fail to ratify it.
“The rest of the world is sitting there and saying, ‘We’ve heard this story before. Your words are beautiful, but we’re watching your feet,’” Casten said, adding, “All of us are going to be furious if the Senate drops the ball” on the $1.85 trillion package.
There is an outsize level of attention in Glasgow to political machinations over the legislation pending in Washington. One activist Tuesday who followed Ocasio-Cortez through the halls at the summit, Pamela Elizarraras, 24, from Mexico, said it had been frustrating to watch the climate legislation founder.
“They have so much power,” Elizarraras said of the United States. “It’s really important for them to really step it up.”
An earlier wave of lawmakers traveled to Glasgow last week to make a similar argument that the United States was back in the climate fight, after four years of global disengagement under the Trump administration.
That group was heavily Democratic but included a handful of Republican House members and a lone Republican senator, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska.
The Republicans said they may disagree with Biden’s policies but they were concerned about climate change, even if they did not support a move away from fossil fuels, which scientists say is needed to avert climate catastrophe.
“Republicans care deeply about this earth,” said Rep. John Curtis, R-Utah.
“We may not have learned how to talk about it,” he said, “but I promise you we care and we’re serious about being part of the solution.”
Other Republican attendees in Glasgow included Reps. Dan Crenshaw of Texas and Mariannette Miller-Meeks of Iowa, and representatives from conservative groups.
Murkowski, in an interview, said she, like other Republicans, did not intend to vote for the $1.85 trillion bill that contains the president’s climate agenda. But she said she did not object to clean energy tax credits.
The presence of Republicans was a shift from 12 years ago when Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., traveled solo to a UN climate conference to object to climate science and declare “there’s not a chance in the world” the United States will pass legislation to tackle global warming.
Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, said at the summit he has been encouraged by the number of Republican lawmakers who are willing to discuss serious climate policy. The bottom line, though, is that United States needs to reduce the use of fossil fuels, he said.
“If you don’t agree on that, then you’re playing word games,” Schatz said.
Biden has made climate action central to his presidency. If the pending legislation passes, analysts say, it will get the US about halfway to the president’s targets. The rest will depend on a combination of things that are outside of Biden’s control, like the markets and regulations that could be overturned by the courts or reversed by a future administration.
Michael Regan, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, said in an interview Tuesday that he would announce before the end of the year a “suite” of new policies to draw down emissions from electric utilities. After transportation, the power sector is the second-largest source of emissions in the United States.
The Supreme Court is poised to weigh whether the EPA has the authority to regulate the emissions of greenhouse gases. The decision from the conservative-leaning court could deliver a blow to the agency’s ability to tackle climate change. Regan said he was not planning to wait for a ruling before issuing new power plant regulations.
“We have pens to paper right now,” he said.
Ocasio-Cortez said the US and other developed nations must take even greater action on global warming.
“We’re here to push,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “It’s time for us to reexamine our first-world and global governments, to reexamine their priorities about what is possible, and really try to push them on the boundaries of that.”
She credited activists with pressuring the Biden administration to be more ambitious on climate change and talked about her own role protesting the development of gas pipelines.
Tuesday was “gender day” at the summit, and Pelosi noted that women faced particular dangers in a warming world. Climate change “is the existential threat of our time,” she said. “It’s a threat multiplier that amplifies and accelerates existing inequities. Eighty percent of people displaced by climate change globally are women.”
Outside the climate summit, the streets of Glasgow have been filled with protesters, many of them young women. Ocasio-Cortez said she hoped to spend some time with the activists while in Glasgow and thinks their presence has kept the pressure on the decision-makers.
And she had a message for them: “Stay in the streets and keep pushing,” she said with a wink.
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