| | | | | |  | | By Matthew Choi | With help from Annie Snider and Karl Mathiesen. Editor's Note: Morning Energy is a free version of POLITICO Pro Energy's morning newsletter, which is delivered to our subscribers each morning at 6 a.m. The POLITICO Pro platform combines the news you need with tools you can use to take action on the day's biggest stories. Act on the news with POLITICO Pro. | | | — Senate Democrats are picking themselves back up and pushing ahead on the Build Back Better Act, with a floor vote slated for early this year to get everyone's stance on the record. — House progressives are done waiting, and they're urging Biden to take executive action to forge ahead on his climate goals. But an upcoming Supreme Court case could erode the administration's ability to regulate power plant pollution. — We are now in a midterm year, meaning slim odds of a major post-BBB climate bill and Democrats calculating their climate strategy in the event of another GOP shellacking. HAPPY NEW YEAR AND WELCOME TO MONDAY! I'm your host, Matthew Choi. I hope you all had a restful holiday season. It's time to get back into the swing of things. Congrats to Delia Patterson of the American Public Power Association for knowing Neptune is the smallest gas giant in our solar system. For today's trivia: What hymn was used in the score of "True Grit" (the Coen Brothers' version)? Send your tips and trivia answers to mchoi@politico.com. Find me on Twitter @matthewchoi2018. Check out the POLITICO Energy podcast — all the energy and environmental politics and policy news you need to start your day, in just five minutes. Listen and subscribe for free at politico.com/energy-podcast . On today's episode: The Puerto Rican grid experiment. | | | | | | | NEW YEAR, NEW BBB: It's time to pick back up where we left off. Democrats aren't giving up hope on passing major climate legislation after Sen. Joe Manchin threw up his arms just before Christmas and put the breaks on his party's reconciliation bill. There were numerous points of contention between the centrist West Virginian and lawmakers pushing for the spending package, including on extending the child tax credit, methane fees and the overall impact of nearly $2 trillion in spending on the nation's long-term economic health. President Joe Biden said over the holiday break he's not admitting defeat. Senate Majority Chuck Schumer plans to still bring the package to a floor vote early this year to get Manchin's position on the record and "keep voting on it until we get something done." And the stakes are high for Democrats to pass something quickly: With midterms coming up, the window may be closing to pass major climate legislation at the scale and timing needed to reach Biden's emissions goals. Meanwhile, House Progressives are pushing for Biden to use executive action to get the ball rolling while the reconciliation bill lags on the Hill. "The legislative approach, while essential, has no certainty of timing or results — and we simply cannot wait to deliver tangible relief to people that they can feel and will make a difference in their lives and livelihoods," the Congressional Progressive Caucus wrote in a statement just before Christmas. The caucus said it planned to release a "comprehensive vision for this plan of action" in areas including climate change as well as the Omicron Covid wave. That regulatory strategy will get some scrutiny early this year, with the Supreme Court planning to hear arguments in a case that could undermine EPA's ability to regulate power plant emissions under the Clean Air Act. Republicans and coal backers are urging the court to rule that the agency overstepped its bounds under the Obama-era Clean Power Plan, with 91 GOP lawmakers (including 47 senators) writing in an amicus brief that "Decisions regarding greenhouse gas emissions and the power sector are major policy questions with vast economic and political significance. Only elected members of Congress, representing the will of the people, may decide these questions." THE SOLAR STRATEGY: If the U.S. is to reach Biden's target of generating 40 percent of its electricity from solar power by 2035, it's going to need to super-charge an industry that's already seen some pretty strong growth over the past 15 years. And it's places like Dalton, Georgia, where that will need to happen. Pro's Gavin Bade traveled to Georgia to see the 700-worker strong Hanwha Q Cells plant that is the largest of its kind in North America. But it will take more than 100 more plants of that size to meet Biden's solar goals, Gavin reports. It's also a sign of a divergence from past Democratic and Republican administrations — who promoted free global trade — in a bid to tie clean energy development with domestic job creation as well as weaning off of dependence on a Chinese-dominated supply chain. The politics of it all: That could be an attractive political calculation for that type of industrial policy, Gavin reports. "It would be political malpractice to be thinking about the kinds of investments that we're asking for, and Congress is contemplating, without writing American workers and American families into that script," a senior White House national security official told Gavin. "That's a really important element of the theory of the case that gets this over the finish line." Read more from Gavin. But if the legislative agenda stays limping, that could also pave the way for a progressive primary challenger in 2024, POLITICO's Holly Otterbein reports, which would portend bad news for Democrats — no president with a serious primary challenger has ever won reelection. But don't expect a challenge from any name-brand elected progressives, who have largely stood by Biden is pushing forward his agenda. Read more from Holly. | | | | STEP INSIDE THE WEST WING: What's really happening in West Wing offices? Find out who's up, who's down, and who really has the president's ear in our West Wing Playbook newsletter, the insider's guide to the Biden White House and Cabinet. For buzzy nuggets and details that you won't find anywhere else, subscribe today. | | | | | | | | WOTUS ON THE DOCKET: The Biden EPA is targeting February for the unveiling of its approach to the long-running battle over which streams and wetlands should be subject to Clean Water Act protection. The agency moved last month to formally take the Trump-era Navigable Waters Protection Rule off the books (although it hadn't actually been in use since a federal judge in Arizona threw it out at the end of August). Expect a proposed rule that aims to cut a middle path between the Trump rule and the Obama administration's sweeping Clean Water Rule. Regan has said he sees flaws in both, and wants a "durable" definition -- though count ME as skeptical that such a thing exists without further opining from the Supreme Court. STREAMLINING PERMITS: The Army Corps of Engineers last week reissued 40 nationwide permits and one new one allowing developers to proceed swiftly with a variety of projects having only a minimal impact on streams and wetlands protected under the Clean Water Act. The permits largely hew to those proposed by the Trump administration in September 2020, with a handful of changes to strengthen scrutiny, for instance of coal remining activities. The Biden administration was facing a March deadline for reissuing the permits, but has said it will review the entire slate of streamlined permits, including the 12 that were reissued by the Trump administration in its waning days and have drawn opposition from greens and congressional Democrats. PFAS PETITION GRANTED – SORT OF: EPA has partially granted a petition from six North Carolina groups asking that the agency use its powers under the Toxic Substances Control Act to require PFAS manufacturer Chemours to conduct health and safety testing on 54 of its chemicals that polluted hundreds of thousands of residents' air, water and soil for years. EPA said it would require testing of seven of those PFAS as part of initial testing orders it plans to release early this year, and potentially add nine additional chemicals later. The approach is part of the agency's National PFAS Testing Strategy announced in October, which groups the thousands of individual chemicals into categories with the goal of extrapolating data on individual PFAS to cover their full category. EPA called this "a strategic and effective use of limited resources to address the data gaps associated with thousands of individual PFAS." "We're livid," said Bob Sussman, who was Obama's No. 2 at EPA and is now representing the North Carolina groups along with a powerhouse team of scientists. The groups had asked EPA to require the company to conduct comprehensive testing on the full suite of chemicals, including on mixtures of PFAS that polluted thousands of residents' water supplies for years, as well as epidemiological studies of health effects on the local population. Extrapolating from data on different chemicals using complex computational models is a "highly theoretical and unproven approach," the groups argued in a statement. CCUS PROJECTS TO NOWHERE: DOE invested nearly $700 million in carbon capture and sequestration projects that were ultimately unsuccessful under the 2009 stimulus package, the Government Accountability Office found, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence. The office recommended stricter congressional and DOE oversight on similar investments going forward, especially with over $10 billion authorized for new emissions technology. DOE's Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations plans to "develop an appropriate action plan to address the GAO recommendations." Read more from S&P here. WHERE TO PLUG IN: Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg are teaming up on the administration's electric vehicle build out, particularly focusing on charging stations after the bipartisan infrastructure package offered $5 billion toward EV chargers throughout the country. Speaking with the Washington Post , Granholm and Buttigieg said the new chargers won't just be replacing gas stations but will also be able to be sited directly in areas where they live and work. Low-income housing, grocery stores, fast food restaurants and rural stretches were drivers may have "range anxiety are all prime spots, the secretaries said. | | | DON'T LOOK UP: The biggest holiday movie release for 2021 was a climate change movie. After (perhaps even before) watching "Don't Look Up," climate scientists and activists said they just felt "so seen " by the film's depiction of two scientists (played by Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence) trying unsuccessfully to warn a venal, late-capitalist world of an "extinction-level" comet heading for Earth. The allegory with the non-response to global warming is not subtle — "Big Short" director Adam McKay and journalist-turned-Bernie Sanders adviser-turned-screenwriter David Sirota want you to know what this is about. Not since Al Gore's 2006 film "Inconvenient Truth" has a climate movie reached a huge mainstream audience in this way. As of Friday, Netflix said Don't Look Up had clocked more than 111 million viewing hours. Also it came out in a week that saw winter wildfires in Colorado — proving there's never an off-topic moment to drop a climate film. The reviews have been icy. But the response to the response confirmed that reality is only vaguely less absurd than it appears on the screen. Immediately the film became a shibboleth for climate tribalism. People canceled their subscriptions to newspapers whose journalists thought the film (unlike the comet) failed to hit its mark. Film reviewers were accused of being "jaded" or unable to handle the criticism the film makes of, well, all of us. | | | | BECOME A GLOBAL INSIDER: The world is more connected than ever. It has never been more essential to identify, unpack and analyze important news, trends and decisions shaping our future — and we've got you covered! Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, Global Insider author Ryan Heath navigates the global news maze and connects you to power players and events changing our world. Don't miss out on this influential global community. Subscribe now. | | | | | | | | — Sam Mintz, a former Pro Transportation reporter, is joining RTO Insider as a New England correspondent covering the region's grid and climate policy. | | | — "This tree has stood here for 500 years. Will it be sold for $17,500?" via The Washington Post. — "Greta Thunberg on the State of the Climate Movement," via The Washington Post Magazine. — "Chile Writes Its Constitution, Confronting Climate Change Head On," via The New York Times. — "A Bad Year for Hydrogen Stocks Was a Good Year for Hydrogen Companies," via The Wall Street Journal. THAT'S ALL FOR ME!
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