Gubernatorial candidates and potential White House hopefuls
are embracing a total phase-out of ‘dirty’ fuels in coming decades.
Democratic candidates are no longer afraid of embracing the
war on coal and oil.
At least six Democrats running for governor this year have
embraced a goal of moving the U.S. completely to clean energy in coming
decades, as have potential presidential contenders like Bernie Sanders, Cory
Booker and Elizabeth Warren.
It’s a sweeping shift in energy policy, going well beyond
the Obama administration’s regulations of fossil fuels — and yet another sign
of the growing power of liberal ideas in the Democratic Party even as President
Donald Trump tries to push the nation to the right.
The candidates’ plans leave many details unfilled, and they
disagree on questions such as whether clean energy should include nuclear power
and natural gas. The strategy could also prove risky for Democrats competing in
energy-producing states such as Ohio, Pennsylvania and North Dakota.
But climate change activists say it’s encouraging to see so
many candidates championing a bold approach to solving one of the world’s
biggest problems.
“When lots of candidates in widely different political
environments are all running on a platform of 100 percent renewable energy, it
means that voters are telling them they want leaders who will help solve the
climate crisis,” former Vice President Al Gore told POLITICO. “So these
candidates have concluded correctly that acting on the climate crisis is a
no-brainer.”
Climate change allows Democrats to draw a sharp contrast
with Trump, who has repeatedly dismissed warnings from scientists about the
threat of already-rising seas and extreme weather. And where climate policies
based on cap-and-trade programs or carbon taxes may trigger voters' fears of
higher energy prices, Democrats can emphasize the jobs they say would come from
building millions of new wind turbines, solar panels and electric vehicles.
"Clean energy and clean jobs are good for the planet,
and they're just good business," Illinois Democratic gubernatorial nominee
J.B. Pritzker tweeted last
year.
Environmentalists say part of the appeal is the goal’s
aspirational nature, and that it allows Democrats to tout existing success
stories from the growth of renewable energy businesses, even in conservative
parts of the country. The goal also meshes with pledges by dozens of major U.S.
companies to switch to 100 percent renewable energy.
“I think the 100 percent metric is a good target setting and
then you can figure out how you get there — each part of the country would
probably have to get there a little different way,” said Ana Unruh Cohen,
managing director of government affairs at NRDC Action Fund. “That type of
vision is one that can have pretty broad support from sea to shining sea and
all the places in the middle.”
Supporters of fossil fuels counter that the 100 percent goal
is impractical and a recipe for higher energy costs. They argue that Democrats
running on the idea won’t be around when the downsides appear.
“They’re just being responsive to the donors and to the
environmental groups that are increasingly a powerful force in the Demcratic
Party,” said Tom Pyle, president of the libertarian-leaning American Energy
Alliance. “We haven't seen any of the pain of these policies yet.”
The plans that Democratic candidates have put forward
contain important differences, including how quickly they would move and what
they would define as a clean source of energy. In some proposals, existing
nuclear power plants and future natural gas plants that capture and bury their
carbon emissions count toward clean energy goals. In others, Democrats say only
truly renewable sources like wind, solar and geothermal should count.
Many of the plans also call for the rapid electrification of
the transportation sector, which the Environmental Protection Agency says accounted for the greatest portion of the
nation’s greenhouse gas emissions in 2016.
According to the Energy Information Administration,
renewables in 2017 accounted for 11 percent of U.S. energy consumption and
about 17 percent of electricity generation.
Democratic New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy made transitioning to
clean energy a key tenet of his successful 2017 race. Then in May, Murphy
signed legislation requiring 50 percent of energy sold in the state to come
from renewable energy sources by 2030. In addition, he issued an executive
order calling for the state to develop a roadmap for achieving 100
percent clean energy by 2050.
In Colorado, Democrat Jared Polis is championing a pitch to
transition the state to 100 percent renewable energy by 2040. That is an
aggressive goal for a state that today gets around 20 percent of its energy
from renewables, and the plan has helped Polis maintain strong support among
the state's environmentalists, despite grumbling among some activists over his
opposition to a ballot measure that would severely limit fracking.
And Pritzker says he
"will be committed to putting Illinois on track to acquiring 25% or more
of our energy from clean renewable sources by 2025 and 100% of our energy from
renewable sources by 2050." Today renewables provide 7 percent of net
electricity generated in the state, according to EIA.
The League of Conservation Voters Action Fund says Gov. Kate
Brown in Oregon and gubernatorial candidates Tony Evers in Wisconsin, Gretchen
Whitmer in Michigan and Ned Lamont in Connecticut have also endorsed the policy
in response to a questionnaire from the group.
California this year passed the country's most sweeping
energy law, putting the state on a course to get 60 percent of its electricity
mix from renewables by 2030 and 100 percent from broader zero-carbon sources by
2050. Kevin de León, the Democratic former state Senate President pro tem who
is challenging Sen. Dianne Feinstein from the left, introduced and championed
the new law and told a newspaper in September that "I stand
strongly on 100 percent clean energy. I think it’s going to be a boom for our
economy." Billionaire environmentalist Tom Steyer attended the bill
signing.
Even if Democrats win one or both chambers of Congress this
year, they are unlikely to get much traction on any ambitious energy or climate
change bills while Trump is in the White House. But that hasn't stopped from
lawmakers from floating legislation calling for 100 percent clean energy.
Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) — a potential 2020 presidential
candidate — has unveiled legislation setting the goal of transitioning the
country to 100 percent "clean and renewable" energy by 2050 without
explicitly defining those terms. Sanders (I-Vt.) and Booker (D-N.J.)
co-sponsored it.
California Sen. Kamala Harris, another likely 2020 contender,
has not signed onto a bill, but she praised her state for "continuing to lead the way in
the fight against climate change" when its 100 percent clean energy law
passed earlier this year.
Merkley, Sanders and Warren (D-Mass.), another likely 2020
candidate, signed onto a 2016 resolution from Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) calling
for the transition to "100 percent clean, renewable energy."
House progressives, led by Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii),
are backing an even more aggressive bill, which calls for 100 percent
non-fossil fuel energy by 2035 and has the support of nearly four-dozen House
Democrats. A report from the groups Food & Water Watch and Climate Hawks
Vote said 38 non-incumbent congressional candidates would
back the House bill.
However, the idea does not enjoy universal support among
climate activists, including noted climate scientist James Hansen, who supports
charging a fee on carbon emissions and distributing the proceeds to the public.
In a column earlier this year, he warned that
"tricking the public to accept the fantasy of 100 percent renewables means
that, in reality, fossil fuels reign and climate change grows."
Academics have fiercely debated the feasibility of powering
the U.S. power grid by renewable power alone. Stanford professor Mark Jacobson
was lead author of a 2015 study concluding that wind, solar and hydropower could
fuel the U.S. grid by 2050 “with little downside.” That led to a peer-reviewed
critique from 21 academics questioning those conclusions and saying
the original paper contained “modeling errors, and made implausible and
inadequately supported assumptions,” while also noting that numerous studies
have found 80 percent decarbonization could be accomplished “at reasonable
cost.” (Jacobson sued over that rebuke and demanded its retraction before
ultimately abandoning the lawsuit this February).
But momentum has grown as increasingly large cities,
including Seattle, San Diego, Atlanta, Salt Lake City, Portland, Ore., and
dozens of others committed to transitioning to 100 percent renewable energy.
They were joined by more than 100 corporate giants, including Facebook, HP, Johnson &
Johnson, Kellogg’s, Lyft and Mars, who’ve made similar voluntary commitments to
power their operations by entirely renewable sources.
Many experts say the rapid deployment of renewable energy
resources is achievable, though it won’t happen overnight.
“A goal focused on achieving low or zero-carbon energy
targets, rather than just a certain amount of renewables, allows for the
broadest possible set of tools of technologies to be brought to bear on the
goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions,” said Jason Bordoff, former senior
director for energy and climate change in President Barack Obama’s National
Security Council and now the founding director of Columbia University's Center
on Global Energy Policy.
Some observers think the candidates are seizing upon a
transition to renewables already underway, but that completing it will be
harder in the coming years. But they acknowledge it's a politically popular
idea.
“Right now, gas has come into the generation mix to balance
renewables. Getting to 100 percent renewables means pushing gas out of the mix.
That’s a much bigger challenge,” said Kevin Book, managing director of
ClearView Energy Partners. “Over the next 35 years any degree of infrastructure
change is possible, but over any period of time no dramatic infrastructure
change is easy.”
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