E&E News: New Democrats Pitch Party Leaders on Climate Legislation
Rep. Derek Kilmer (D-Wash.), a leader of the New Democrat Coalition, on Capitol Hill. Francis Chung/E&E News
The 104 House members of the New Democrat Coalition want party leaders to schedule votes on climate legislation — specifically, legislation being backed by the centrist contingent.
The New Democrat Coalition will today send a letter to Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) asking them to prioritize, for floor consideration in the coming weeks and months, some of a slate of bills it has endorsed to combat climate change.
The letter comes as Pelosi, Hoyer and other members of leadership are looking to determine which environmental legislation to bring to the floor, either as stand-alone bills or incorporated into larger legislative vehicles, including the next phase of federal coronavirus relief.
Leaders have said their "road map" on this front will be the 547-page report released last month from Democrats on the House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis, which identifies dozens of bills as good starting points for addressing various elements of the issue.
Some of the report's ideas already ended up in the House Democrats' massive infrastructure package, H.R. 2 (E&E Daily, July 2).
According to a Democratic aide familiar with discussions between the New Democrats and leadership, the coalition's letter was timed to coincide with deliberations about which other climate bills could hit the floor before the end of the year. The aide noted the New Democrats are hoping to appeal to leadership's pragmatism.
The vast majority, if not all, of the coalition's endorsed bills were included in the select committee report, which Republicans dismissed on the spot as a partisan document that would never become law.
Republicans did, however, note at the time of the report's rollout that the pandemic has necessitated the need for "bipartisan recommendations to increase the resilience of our communities and address global emissions — while strengthening the American economy and getting families back to work" (Greenwire, June 30).
In the letter to Pelosi and Hoyer, obtained early by E&E News, New Democrats wrote that the 23 climate bills they have endorsed this Congress are "forward-looking, politically durable solutions, many of which have bipartisan support."
"The [select committee's] report is a critical step forward for our nation and the global community," the letter continued.
"The New Democrat Coalition looks forward to building on this work to make immediate progress towards our decarbonization goals, face the reality and magnitude of the crisis, and accomplish real, tangible, legislative progress."
Ready for action?
The New Democrat Coalition's endorsed bills embrace the objectives of its climate policy platform, which it unveiled last summer (Greenwire, Aug. 7, 2019).
The principles of this platform include making the United States a global leader in fighting climate change, investing in communities in need of relief related to climate change and embracing a "climate-forward" economy that incentivizes environmental stewardship.
A good place to start, New Democrats contended in their letter today, is with any of the seven largely noncontroversial bills that have already been passed out of the committees of jurisdiction.
"The New Democrat Coalition has been leading the way in pursuing actionable and ambitious policies to combat climate change, and we urge House Leadership to take up the bills endorsed by the Coalition," the group's chairman, Rep. Derek Kilmer (D-Wash.), said in a statement yesterday to E&E News.
"The NDC will continue working with our colleagues to develop and pass forward-looking policy solutions to meet the crisis with the urgency it demands."
These bills are:
· H.R. 4091, from Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Texas), which would boost funding for a federal program working to develop, among other things, clean energy technologies.
· H.R. 3597, from Rep. Ben McAdams (D-Utah), which would reauthorize a federal program working to develop solar energy technologies.
· H.R. 2156, from Rep. Matt Cartwright (D-Pa.), which would speed up the disbursement of $1 billion to communities harmed by the decline of the coal industry.
· H.R. 2088, from Reps. Greg Stanton (D-Ariz.) and Marc Veasey (D-Texas), which would increase funding for a federal program that gives block grants to local jurisdictions working to develop and implement energy efficiency projects that in turn create jobs.
· H.R. 4230, from Rep. Sean Casten (D-Ill.), which would authorize and expand research into new technologies to reduce emissions from industrial sources.
· H.R. 3623, also from Casten, which would require public companies to disclose to the Securities and Exchange Commission more information regarding their emissions and contributions to the climate crisis.
· H.R. 2986, from Casten and Rep. Bill Foster (D-Ill.), which would support grid-scale energy storage research and development.
By: Emma Dumain
Source: E&E News
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