Team,

I described for you recently some of my progress on cleaning up the Supreme Court. Here’s one on the progress I’m making against climate polluters.

As you know, last year Congress passed the nation’s first significant climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act. I am proud to have shaped several of the key emissions-reducing provisions of the IRA, including a fee on harmful methane emissions from oil and gas facilities and several of the tax credits and other programs that will incentivize the deployment of clean energy here at home in Rhode Island and across our great country.

The IRA was a big step forward, but science tells us we must do more if we are to avoid the worst of the climate crisis. That’s why, in the last year-plus since the passage of the IRA, I have badgered the Biden Administration to pursue bold executive actions on climate and to rapidly implement the various provisions of the IRA. I am proud of their progress.

Shalanda Young and Ricky Revesz at the White House’s Office of Management and Budget have put out guidance that the “social cost of carbon,” soon to be determined at EPA, will be applied throughout the entire executive branch — in purchasing, permitting, licensing, pricing, and regulation. That becomes a requirement for executive agencies and creates a model for independent agencies to follow. A government-wide social cost of carbon blows a huge hole in the unfair free-to-pollute fossil fuel business model that is driving the climate crisis.

The social cost of carbon should soon conclude its Administrative Procedures Act journey through EPA this year, at the robust level of $190 per emitted ton of carbon dioxide or CO2 equivalent. It will make a big difference with methane leaks, for instance. $190 per ton does not quite reach the International Monetary Fund's estimate of $700 billion in annual harm in the United States from fossil fuel emissions, but it’s a big number and will make a big difference.

The methane leaks problem will also be addressed by a new feral (okay, that’s a typo — I meant “federal,” but I hope it’s “feral” so I’m leaving the typo) methane task force to use satellite detection of major methane leaks to respond with rapid enforcement shutting down the leak. If this is effective, it gives the U.S. credibility to go to the international community and ask for global methane leak detection and enforcement. Methane is a very dangerous greenhouse gas, so this would be big.

Speaking of the international community, I nudged the United Nations to require corporate attendees to disclose their “fossil fuel affiliations” as a condition of attendance at the upcoming climate conference, COP28, and worked with environmental groups to develop a disclosure template to make the requirement meaningful. We are in the bad spot we’re in because so many corporations and industries get away with bad behavior by hiding it, so transparency is actually a big deal.

Last, the Administration seems to be coming around on the idea of a carbon border tariff. The European Union's CBAM (“carbon border adjustment mechanism”) is law, and will put a tariff on carbon-intensive goods imported to the EU. American companies actually are winners under the CBAM (because Chinese tariffs will be so much higher that it should drive energy-intensive industries looking to export to the EU from China to the US), but we should still reduce or eliminate our tariff payments by stepping up ourselves. It will have massive global emissions reduction effects. We are making bipartisan progress with a recently announced Republican foreign pollution fee bill that creates negotiation space with my carbon border tariff bill, but there’s much the Administration could do on its own.

The upcoming COP would be a great place for the Biden administration to show more positivity about the CBAM, showcase its own government-wide social cost of carbon, press for global methane leak detection and enforcement, and lean in hard against corporate greenwashing and the climate denial apparatus.

If all this happens, and we implement the IRA effectively, a pathway to climate safety begins to emerge. If you can, please support our campaign so I can keep working to get the planet onto that path. [link removed]

Sincerely,

Sheldon



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