Climate bill bolsters Biden at COP27

by Rachel Frazin and Zack Budryk - 11/10/22 7:28 PM ET

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President Biden will speak at the U.N.’s global climate conference on Friday. Meanwhile, the administration is requiring the largest government contractors to set climate targets, and Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) is blocking a Biden nominee.

Welcome to Overnight Energy & Environment. For The Hill, we’re Rachel Frazin and Zack Budryk.

Biden preps UN climate address amid energy crisis

This year, President Biden heads to the United Nations climate summit armed with legislation to tackle one of the major issues he can trumpet: climate change.

The passage of the inflation Reduction Act gives Biden something concrete to point to in his speech Friday, a sharp contrast to former President Trump’s climate denial.

But Biden is also coming to the climate conference when much of the world’s attention is on energy security instead, and he may find some countries eager for the U.S. to keep up its status as a major fossil fuel producer — at least in the short term.

The plan for Biden’s appearance in Egypt:

Biden will give a special address at COP27 in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, on U.S. efforts to reduce emissions and help the vulnerable build resilience to climate change, a senior administration official told reporters this week.
He’s expected to tout the investments in the Inflation Reduction Act, which put nearly $370 billion toward energy and climate, largely through clean energy tax credits. He may also highlight the signing of a global climate treaty aimed at cutting pollutants used in refrigeration — though the U.S. was on track to already comply with its terms due to 2020 legislation signed by Trump.

Throughout his first two years in office, Biden has sought to restore the U.S.’s image on climate after Trump withdrew from the global Paris Agreement and falsely claimed that climate change was a “hoax.”

The passage of the climate bill will give him actual, concrete action to tout, with the legislation’s multiyear timelines guaranteeing some U.S. climate action at least in the medium term.

In 2021, the situation was different. While Biden said at COP26 he wanted to get the U.S. back on track, the prospects of significant climate legislation were very uncertain.

But Biden is still expected to garner some skepticism, especially around climate finance and the U.S.’s ability to uphold its commitments to other countries.

“On the international stage, I think there will be concerns about the ability of the Biden administration, despite its best efforts, to deliver on what it has pledged in terms of finance,” said Dan Lashof, director of the World Resources Institute, United States.

Biden: Biggest contractors must have climate plan

The Biden administration announced a new proposal on Thursday to require the largest recipients of federal contracts to both set targets to reduce their planet-warming emissions and disclose how much they are contributing to climate change.

Under the rule, companies that get more than $50 million in annual contracts from the federal government would be required to set “science-based targets to reduce their [greenhouse gas] emissions.”

These suppliers would also be required to publicly disclose their own emissions, emissions found in their supply chains and caused by their products.

Under the rule, midsize contractors — those receiving between $7.5 million and $50 million — would be required to disclose emissions stemming from their direct operations, but not their supply chain or products. They wouldn’t be required to set emissions reduction targets.

Some more details:

The new rule does not give a specific emissions reduction threshold that the biggest contractors must achieve.
Instead, it says that the goals must be “in line with reductions that the latest climate science deems necessary to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement” to limit warming to below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) and pursue efforts to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit).

The background:

The announcement comes as the Biden administration seeks to cut down emissions both in the country broadly and emissions that are caused by the government specifically.
He has also signed an executive order calling for the federal government to be carbon neutral by 2050 and cut its emissions 65 percent by 2030.
The issue of climate disclosures has been a hot topic in Washington: Earlier this year, the Securities and Exchange Commission proposed a rule that would require publicly traded companies to disclose their direct emissions and would also make companies reveal their product and supply chain emissions if those emissions are “material” to the business.

Manchin opposing Biden renomination of FERC chair

Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), who chairs the Senate’s Energy and Natural Resources Committee, has come out in opposition to President Biden’s renomination of an interstate energy regulator.

Manchin spokesperson Sam Runyon said via email that the senator is “not comfortable holding a hearing” on the confirmation of Richard Glick for another term on the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC).

Runyon’s brief email did not elaborate on Manchin’s reasoning.

Glick’s term on the energy commission expired over the summer, but he’s allowed to serve until the end of the year.

Manchin’s position, which was first reported by Bloomberg Law, comes amid both new tensions on energy issues between Manchin and Biden as well as opposition from Manchin to a high-profile climate action by FERC.

The president recently garnered Manchin’s ire when he said during a California speech that he wanted to shut down coal plants in favor of solar and wind energy. Following that speech, Manchin called the remarks “offensive and disgusting.”
The energy commission, meanwhile, also angered Manchin with a climate move earlier this year. In February, FERC said that it would consider pipelines’ contributions to climate change as part of their decisions on whether to approve them.

DOE STUDY: WORLD TO HIT 1.5 DEGREES OF WARMING

World governments have failed to cut emissions sufficiently to avert serious climate disruptions, a new study has found.

Commitments from national governments have made it “inevitable” that average global temperatures will cross the critical threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels, according to a landmark paper by the Department of Energy (DOE) published on Thursday in Nature Climate Change.

These findings now shift the focus to trying to limit emissions with the goal of keeping warming as close to 1.5 degrees as possible — while trying to find ways to drag warming back down, the DOE and its research partners at the University of Maryland and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) stated.

“Let’s face it. We are going to breach the 1.5 degrees limit in the next couple of decades,” coauthor scientist Haewon McJeon of the DOE’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory said in a statement.

“That means we’ll go up to 1.6 or 1.7 degrees or above, and we’ll need to bring it back down to 1.5. But how fast we can bring it down is key,” McJeon added.

IN CALIFORNIA: A ROOFTOP SOLAR PROPOSAL AND A PFAS SUIT

Rooftop solar: California’s future rooftop solar producers could receive less payback for the electricity they sell to the grid if a proposed decision from the state’s utilities commission goes on to win final approval.

The proposal, issued by the California Public Utilities Commission on Thursday, would revamp the state’s “net energy metering” solar tariff, which has enabled households to get credit on their electricity bills at retail rates and offset monthly energy expenses.
While existing solar customers would be able to maintain this arrangement for a “nine-year legacy period,” future customers would face different terms: rates that are tied to how much electricity is worth at a given time of day. They’d also be subject to a fixed monthly fee.

PFAS lawsuit: California on Thursday announced a lawsuit against manufacturers of so-called forever chemicals, accusing the companies of deceiving the public and endangering public health.

In a press conference Thursday, Attorney General Rob Bonta (D) announced the lawsuit, which names 3M and DuPont as defendants. Bonta alleges the two companies concealed health hazards associated with per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) from the public and continued producing them for public use. PFAS are detectable within the bloodstream of 98 percent of Californians, according to data collected by California officials.
In a statement to The Hill, a 3M spokesperson said the company “acted responsibly in connection with products containing PFAS and will defend its record of environmental stewardship.”

WHAT WE’RE READING

Rural ranchers face $4,000 proposed fine for violating state drought order (CalMatters)
The return of the American bison is an environmental boon — and a logistical mess (Grist)
A Planned Restart of a Crab Harvest Pits Conservation Against Industry (The New York Times)
African insurers take up climate change fight with $14 bln pledge (Reuters)

That’s it for today, thanks for reading. Check out The Hill’s Energy & Environment page for the latest news and coverage. We’ll see you tomorrow.