WASHINGTON, DC - Energy and Commerce Committee Republican Leader Greg Walden (R-OR) delivered the following opening remarks today at a Subcommittee on Environment and Climate Change hearing on “We’ll Always Have Paris: Filling the Leadership Void Caused by Federal Inaction on Climate Change."
Remarks as Delivered
Good morning, friend. Thanks for having this hearing as well. I think it’s important to point out a couple of things right out of the gate. The U.S. is still part of the Paris agreement and will be until 2020. The Trump administration negotiators were credited recently with helping forge a multinational agreement on how to measure emissions, so that all countries that are involved would have some higher level of confidence that each other were actually reducing emissions they said they were, and they got international credit for that.
I think part of what we’re after is again pursuing an agenda of U.S. innovation, conservation, adaptation, and preparation. We can lead the world in this space, and we should. We just don’t want to repeat the mistakes that others have made, in their laboratory work, if you will be trying to tackle this issue. They’ve had riots on the streets in France since November.
As consumers said, the direction France went with the high cost of gasoline was more than they were willing to bear. We need to keep consumers in mind in this discussion.
We’re ready to work on developing policies, in fact, I would say build on the policies of the last several Congresses in this space to make sure we have an electric grid that’s reliable and secure and has the capacity to be able to feed in the renewable energy.
We’ve been big advocates for battery storage enhancement. Indeed, in my district there’s a partnership between NextEra and PG&E to have one of the biggest battery storage energy sectors in the United States. It’s the biggest, it’s the first, and they will link renewable energy into battery storage to help bring more firm baseload power to the grid that will replace energy now generated from coal.
Our country invests in these national labs and helped develop this technology, and there’s more work to be done there.
We’ve learned, over the years, how these policies rapidly transform the nation’s electricity system-from a system designed for the economical and reliable dispatch of power to a system focused on meeting federal emission caps can have unintended consequences. This rapid transformation, which Congress opposed, would have driven out major sources of affordable energy, threatened reliability and security, and driven up consumer electricity bills.
To achieve the goals, I think we can all find some common ground along. We also have to make sure that we don’t encourage unintended consequences that could affect consumers negatively to the point that they riot in the streets, as they’re doing in France as well as put the grid in peril.
We learned that, even with the economically harmful impact of these and other policies targeting the fuels we use and cars we drive, the goals proposed by the Paris Agreement still could not be met. The policies, according to the Administration’s own estimates, could get maybe 60% of the way there.
And, I’m talking about the Obama administration now. Even Secretary Kerry noted at the time of the negotiations that if the United States, or even all of the developed world, cut their CO2 emissions to zero it would still not offset the emissions coming from the rest of the world.
So again, we can be a leader in developing new technologies that we should sell to the rest of the world to reduce their emissions. We got to be smart about how we do this.
In short, commitments in Paris were made without a clear plan to meet those promises, without a full view of the costs, and certainly not a plan that had broad bipartisan support of Congress. That’s what we’d like to see developed here, Mr. Chairman, a bipartisan plan going forward.
This focus on U.S. commitments in the Paris Agreement as a centerpiece of our nation’s climate policy kind of misses the point on what we should focus on if we want to make a difference in global emissions while strengthening the economy.
We should not lock ourselves in to a narrow vision of what is possible. We must consider the realities of global energy systems and the need for affordable, reliable energy access around the world.
We’re fortunate in America to have electrified nearly every home and business in the country. There are many parts of the world that seek electricity for the first time. They will not be denied that. So, let’s work with them to figure out how to do it in an environmentally sensitive way.
Let’s continue the work we have been doing in the past Congresses to reduce the barriers to innovation and enable the United States to deploy new technologies to drive our economic engines of the future and make realistic headway in curbing emissions, from advanced carbon capture to nuclear technology to innovative hydropower solutions.
And, we also have to look at things - I care passionately about in my district in Oregon - the IPPC report going back to 2007 said sustainable forest management would help. 68 million tons of carbon emissions from the fires in California last year alone. Now, not all those are forests. But there is a lot of work - that has been pointed out - that we could do to reduce the excess fuel load in our forests that would reduce emissions of more than just carbon, the other poisons that go up at the time, if we could come together in a bipartisan way.
So, Mr. Chairman, I look forward to working with you as we always do. I thank you for having this hearing. I yield back.
