ConservAmerica Vice President for Government Relations Todd Johnston joined experts from the Electricity Consumers Resource Council (ELCON) and the Property and Environment Research Center (PERC) last week for a look at President Joe Biden’s energy policy plans hosted by the Heritage Foundation.
The webinar, “A First Look at Biden’s Energy and Climate Policies,” was moderated by the Heritage Foundation‘s Nicolas Loris.
A lot of game-changing decisions have already been handed down by the Biden administration. In less than two months, it has canceled the Keystone XL pipeline, re-entered the Paris climate agreement, reignited the conversation about the social cost of carbon, and prohibited oil and gas leasing on federal land.
The panelists agreed that generally, the best energy policy outcomes are typically consumer-centered decisions that result in more abundant energy, more choices, and lower costs. In contrast, the abrupt and somewhat arbitrary ending of oil and gas leases on federal lands, for example, have cost western states’ budgets more than $1.6 billion per year each.
One increasingly popular consumer-centered effort is the electrical vehicle (EV). The administration has said it wants to build 500,000 charging stations by 2030, electrify the federal fleet of cars, and enhance the supply chain for EV battery production.
However, Johnston raised concerns about such exuberance given the findings of ConservAmerica’s recent report on this issue, Slow Down: The Case for Technology Neutral Transportation Policy.
“Our top-line assessment is that electric vehicles will play an increasing role in the decarbonization of the transportation sector; there’s no question about that,” he explained. “But there are some very serious questions relative to cost, performance, supporting infrastructure, and the environmental footprint that remain to be worked out. At the same time, other vehicle technologies are making great strides in reducing emissions.”
The report suggests that if the ultimate goal is to decrease carbon emissions, mandating vehicle electrification and subsidizing electric vehicles may end up being among the most expensive and inefficient policies to adopt.
“We believe this is something that should be worked out in the marketplace, not through government interventions through subsidies and mandates and the like,” Johnston added.
This led the panelists to express their concern that, more broadly, such cases demonstrate the need to establish a clearer definition of decarbonization.
When policymakers talk about the issue, they often cherrypick from one of three fairly different distinctions — a blanket mandate for renewables; clean energy, which would include nonrenewable resources like nuclear energy; or a net-zero approach, which allows for modest carbon emissions to be neutralized through offsets.
“Investment in clean energy technologies seems to be something that folks on both sides of the political spectrum can rally around. The devil is in the details in what is defined as clean energy,” Johnston said.
Other practicalities were raised in the second half of the discussion, such as the inevitable need for regulatory reform, especially since planning, permitting, and building a clean infrastructure project can take more than a decade in some cases.
Of course, energy independence was a concern, at least with respect to the need for the U.S. to insulate itself from supply shocks. The administration’s moves so far don’t fundamentally alter demand. They simply shift supply, including potentially overseas.
Furthermore, Johnston warned of national security concerns around the energy transition with respect to our supply of critical minerals.
“China and other nations that are not necessarily friendly to our economic and national security interests are currently in control and/or developed most of the mineral resources that are needed for batteries and other components that would be needed for a major shift to EVs,” he said.
The discussion wrapped up with the panelists’ assessment of the political realities.
“I do think there’s going to need to be some compromise on both sides of the aisle to ultimately move forward with some policy that begins to take a major stab at this issue,” Johnston claimed.
“I am interested in regulatory reform, obviously, but there also needs to be some recognition that some of the policies that have been put forth on the left side of the political spectrum are incredibly costly and just not something that we can bear out through the legislative process we have currently.”
Archived video and audio recordings of the complete webinar are available here.