Tamar Hallerman
GHG Monitor
10/12/12
OBAMA, ROMNEY ADVISERS DEBATE CANDIDATES’ ENERGY, CLIMATE STANCES
An energy adviser for the Obama campaign is criticizing the Romney camp’s plans for blotting climate change as “not sufficient.” During an Oct. 5 debate of the candidate’s energy and environmental policy plans, Obama campaign surrogate Joseph Aldy said that Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s plan for combating climate change almost exclusively through R&D funding is not enough to mitigate the potential harm. “Continued scientific inquiry isn’t going to cut it. It’s not sufficient,” said Aldy, who previously served as a special assistant for energy and environment at the White House until late 2010. Aldy was disputing a plan put forward by former Bain & Co. staffer and Romney campaign Domestic Policy Director Oren Cass, who during the event said that while Romney agrees that climate change is occurring and that human activity contributes, he would not make the issue a priority and would instead rely on the private sector to invest in emissions mitigation technologies on its own accord.
In what could very well be the most in-depth discussion of energy and climate change issues on this year’s campaign trail, Aldy and Cass sparred over issues ranging from the Keystone XL pipeline to a carbon tax during the debate, hosted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Energy Initiative program. During the event, Aldy highlighted Obama’s leadership on climate change during the cap-and-trade debate in 2009 and at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change’s summit in Copenhagen that same year. He said that presidential leadership is needed on the issue. “To stand back and say, we’re not going to do anything, we don’t want to be a leader, we think that if we do anything here, it’s going to harm our competitive standpoint, it’s hard to reconcile that with the fact that you look at the first five months of this year for which we have data on our CO2 emissions, we’re actually back to our 1990 levels,” Aldy said.
‘Goodwill Gesture’ Needed for Obama to Move Forward on Climate Legislation
However, the adviser added that Obama will likely wait to introduce any major carbon legislation like a carbon tax until he sees bipartisan support or some sort of “goodwill gesture” from Congress to do so. Aldy criticized Congressional Republicans for withholding support for cap-and-trade and more recently a Clean Energy Standard without offering any comprehensive alternatives. “The President’s already put out two policies, and he hasn’t seen anything from the other side. So whether or not he would actually consider it I think is actually a more important question for whether or not the other side of the political aisle would consider it,” Aldy said. “It really starts to sort of beg the question of why would the Democrats and why would the president start to negotiate with themselves and then bring something forward when you have this kind of intransigence with this?” He added that without some sort of support from Congress, Obama will continue to use the Clean Air Act to help mitigate CO2 emissions, an approach that has been heavily criticized by Republicans and coal state lawmakers in recent years.
Cass said that Romney, in contrast, would aim to amend the Clean Air Act to bar the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating greenhouse gas emissions through that medium, codifying an approach the House passed last month. “The Clean Air Act is another thing that [Romney] thinks more broadly should be reformed to focus on the pollutants that are most important to preserving human health,” Cass said. He added that, if elected, Romney would also aim to kill EPA’s Tailoring Rule, recently upheld on technical grounds by a federal appeals court, as well as the recently-finalized Mercury and Air Toxics Standard, a rulemaking Cass described as “one of the most outrageously unjustified regulations this country has ever seen.”
Cass also underscored that Romney would only support climate policies that do not price carbon or hurt the economy. “When Governor Romney talks about a no regrets policy, what he means is the policies that we can pursue that will move forward, particularly with technological innovation, to find solutions without having negative effects on our economy in the interim,” Cass said. He added: “Governor Romney’s view is that the private sector can do the best job, that basic research funding is the appropriate role for government, and that more aggressive subsidization and investment by the government can in fact have a counterproductive effect on innovation in the private sector.”
Both Campaigns Continue to Tout Coal Support
Cass and Aldy both emphasized their respective candidate’s support of the coal industry, continuing rhetoric that both Obama and Romney have exhibited on the campaign trail in recent speeches and ads in coal-heavy swing states like Ohio and Virginia. Cass criticized the Obama Administration’s promulgation of EPA New Source Performance Standards for new fossil fuel-fired plants, which would essentially bar traditional unmitigated coal plants, as a back-door way to kill coal. “When the Obama Administration says clean coal, what they are talking about is carbon capture and sequestration, which is not commercially viable. So their definition of support for coal is to only support coal that we have no proof can be used. That is not frankly support for coal,” Cass said. He added that Romney supports other types of ‘clean coal’ technologies. “Governor Romney’s view is that coal, which can provide very cheap power, which is very important to large swathes of the economy and should be part of the equation,” he said. “Although this election season clean coal has made it back into the President’s language, the reality is that his proposal is to eliminate coal from our portfolio.”
Aldy, meanwhile, underscored the Obama Administration’s support of ‘clean coal’ and CCS projects through the stimulus bill. “The President made it very clear that he supports clean coal,” he said, referencing a recent Bloomberg New Energy Finance study that concluded that the world’s first large-scale CCS projects will likely be located in North America. He criticized Republican remarks about the Obama Administration’s so-called “war on coal,” and attributed to the recent coal-to-gas shift in the electricity sector as largely a result of cheap natural gas prices.
