House Republicans Take A Victory Lap In Baku – CleanTechnica

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If anyone had any doubts about climate policy once the new administration in the US takes over in January, the behavior of five Republicans in the House of Representatives at a press conference in Baku last week left little to the imagination. As reported by Jake Bittle for Grist, at a swaggering press conference just a few hundred feet from where international negotiators had spent a week hashing out a transition away from fossil fuels, the GOP delegation delivered an aggressive message in support of oil, gas, and even coal. Officially, the delegation is bipartisan, but the two Democratic Representatives who went to Baku did not attend this particular press conference.

Texas representative August Pfluger, who represents communities in the Permian Basin where oil and gas activities are prevalent, is leading the GOP presence at COP 29. He suggested the US should withdraw from the the 2015 Paris climate agreement again, as it did during the first Trump administration. Pfluger is the head of the House energy committee. During the press conference, he emphasized the power of the new Congress to repeal key pieces of Biden’s climate policies which were enacted in an effort to bring the US closer to meeting the commitments it made in Paris in hopes of limiting global warming to less than 2° Celsius. According to Bittle, the press conference came off as a direct rebuke to the message delivered by the official US delegation to this year’s international climate conference.

Republicans Boast In Baku

“Last week, people in the United States overwhelmingly supported President Donald Trump’s promise to restore America’s energy dominance and lead the world in energy expansion,” Pfluger said. The four other Republicans joining Pfluger on stage echoed this message with a grab bag of pro-fossil-fuel stances. Troy Balderson, who represents a part of Ohio with plentiful shale gas, mounted a defense of fracking. Morgan Griffith, a veteran representative who hails from a coal-rich area of western Virginia, expressed support for so-called clean coal power outfitted with carbon capture technology, as well as natural gas mined from coal beds.

“An area that has natural resources should not be penalized for not looking at the opportunity to have a cleaner world,” said Griffith. How exactly burning coal leads to a cleaner world is a bit mystifying, unless one fully embraces carbon capture technologies that today are little more than hype, hope, and empty promises. The carbon capture trials that have taken place so far have been spectacular (and expensive) failures. Even the ones that have been a little bit successful are finding the cost of their operations to be around $300 for each ton of carbon dioxide removed.

Why not just put a global price on carbon dioxide emissions of $300 a ton and be done with it? That way, Adam Smith’s unseen hand would work its magic and burning fossil fuels would quickly become economically untenable. Republicans are fierce supporters of the free market — except when it is contrary to their best interests. Then they want nothing to do with it, which makes Griffith’s arguments little more than bald faced lying, Then again, lying is what current Republicans do best as they seek to break democracy for their own selfish benefit. The message the Republicans in Baku last week was echoed by Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, who told world leaders at the start of COP29 his country’s oil resources were a “gift from God.” He also chastised the American media for referring to Azerbaijan as a “petrostate,” given that the US itself is the world’s largest producer of fossil fuels. He does have a point there.

The Fate Of The IRA

The Biden administration and elected Democrats have argued at COP 29 and elsewhere that the Inflation Reduction Act is too big to fail because of the hundreds of billions of dollars in manufacturing projects and tax incentives that it makes possible flow to Republicans and Democrats alike. In fact, in the case of the new manufacturing facilities, the bulk of those benefits are flowing to GOP congressional districts, Bittle points out. More than a dozen House Republicans have already asked House Speaker Mike Johnson not to gut the law. None of those Representatives were present at COP 29 in Baku last week, however.

The tone adopted by Pfluger and his colleagues was distinctly more hostile to the core components of Biden’s landmark law. Though the bill was passed after US inflation had already peaked, Pfluger suggested that the Inflation Reduction Act’s renewable energy provisions contributed to the soaring prices that angered American voters. “The United States of America, like many other countries around the world, has seen this crazy inflation,” he said. “Lowering those costs, we believe, has a very strong tie to energy — unleashing affordable, reliable baseload capacity. If there are pieces and parts of the IRA that are not compatible with that, that’s going to be looked at,” he said. Nevertheless, the delegation stopped short of advocating for a wholesale repeal of Biden energy policies. “If there are pieces of the IRA that will support lower energy costs, helping Americans, helping our partners and allies have access to affordable, reliable energy, then I bet that those will stay in place,” Pfluger said.

Lying Liars & The Lies They Tell

What he did not say is that Republican messaging prior to the election suggested to voters that the IRA was responsible for high energy prices. That message was amplified by social media platforms like X that allowed Russian bots to influence the flow of information during the campaign. This is the second time Vladimir Putin has helped Trump get elected, but ordinary Americans appear to be untroubled by that information. When our ancestors railed against communism, Americans recoiled in horror at the thought of the Red Menace. Today, most American voters are unconcerned about Russian interference in the internal affairs of the nation. Go figure.

The primary goal of COP 29 is to develop an agreement on international climate in which wealthy countries will agree to transfer hundreds of billions or even trillions of dollars to poorer nations to speed their energy transitions and make them resilient to disasters resulting from a warming planet. During his first term as president, Trump proposed zeroing out those sorts of commitments. When Bittle asked Pfluger if he would support a renewed call from Trump to cut off this foreign aid, Pfluger did not rule it out. He also appeared to suggest that future climate aid might go to support Republican energy priorities. “On climate finance, if something is not congruent or not in support of lowering energy costs while reducing emissions, then you can bet that this Congress is going to look at that,” he said.

The Takeaway

Republicans in Congress seem to think they have been given a mandate by American voters to prolong the hegemony of oil, methane, and coal. Like the president of Azerbaijan, they passionately believe those fuels are gifts from God meant to be enjoyed by all humanity. Or maybe they just want to keep the money those fuels provide flowing into their pockets. Readers will need to make up their own minds on that subject. What seems clear is that despite their publicly expressed loathing of anything and everything associated with Joe Biden and the Democrats, red state leaders are going to twist themselves into pretzels trying to keep the flow of cash from the IRA coming while continuing to insist those dastardly Democrats never did anything right. Interesting times ahead.