Congressional Climate Camp #3: Lessons Learned from Past Congresses and Current Attitudes on Climate

Congressional Climate Camps
Find out more about the briefings in this series below:
Part 1	Budget, Appropriations, and Stimulus
Part 2	Federal Policies for High Emitting Sectors
Part 3	Lessons Learned from Past Congresses and Current Attitudes on Climate
Part 4	Federal Policy for Mitigation and Adaptation Win-Wins
Part 5	Understanding Budget Reconciliation

The Environmental and Energy Study Institute (EESI) is holding a Climate Camp online briefing series. We are going over the basics of the legislative process, highlighting key areas and opportunities for achieving near-term and long-term carbon reductions through policy.

Our third session looked at past legislative efforts to establish climate policy and the current political and public opinion environment on climate change, in order to explore the forces that are shaping current Congressional work to address the climate crisis.

EESI’s Congressional Climate Camp is designed for you to get the information you need, so watch the full session or skip ahead to what is most important to you.

Click below to go straight to the different highlights and sections. 

Key Turning Points in Climate Policy History with Kathleen McGinty

Climate Policy Then and Now: An Advocate’s Perspective with Tina Johnson

Current Attitudes, Polarization, and Environmental Policy with Dr. Laurel Harbridge-Yong

What Congressional Staff Should Know about Climate Policy with Dr. Ana Unruh Cohen

HIGHLIGHTS

Key Turning Points in Climate Policy History

Kathleen McGinty, Vice President of Global Government Relations, Johnson Controls

Q: What are key turning points in efforts to design and pass climate policies at the federal level? Why is this context important to understand today, when Congress is working to design and pass policies?

• Past policies are foundational to new action and thinking on climate change. It is exciting to see the clear maturation of ideas and how rich thinking has become.
• There are two foundational building blocks for environmental policy:
  • The work to address sources of environmental pollution with specific regulation.
  • Harnessing market forces to be aligned with what is needed for environmental protection. This originated with the Project 88 academic paper (published in 1988), which became central to the 1990 Clean Air Amendments and the Acid Rain Program. The idea of cap and trade was one of the original types of market mechanisms that could be harnessed to reduce emissions.
• The ‘greening’ of capital markets (and similar ‘greening’ in finance) can be traced back to policies from more than 30 years ago.
• Individualized pieces of regulation also remain foundational. While we use market mechanisms for some environmental challenges, we also need more targeted regulation for buildings, for example.

Q: For efforts like the Waxman-Markey bill and the Clean Power Plan that never became law, did they still have an impact on U.S. greenhouse gas emission reductions? If so, how did they have an impact without becoming law?

• These efforts were important because they solidified that climate is an environmental challenge that can be tackled with policy, at scale, and in ways that harness the forces of finance (instead of working against them). These insights and innovations remain at the heart of some of the most interesting environmental policies today.
• At the national level, we see things like clean energy standards being proposed that enable some tradability.
• At the local level, we see things like building performance standards. For so much time, we have focused on the big three (i.e., solar, wind, electric vehicles), but buildings make up 40 percent of greenhouse gas emissions.
• Assets like buildings are tough to ‘green’ with just a generalized market signal, so regulation is very important.

Q: What has shifted over time that makes it more possible now to advance climate policy at the federal level?

• Part of what has changed is that climate change is visibly a problem now, we are seeing the challenges more.
• COVID has emphasized the fragility of socioeconomic systems and political systems, and it has become easier to see the fragility of ecosystems.
• Polarization and partisanship around the climate issue are also a problem. We need to find common ground now to take real action.
• There have been advances in technology. For example, price points are becoming lower for energy efficiency, making it more accessible and easier to do.
• Companies are taking real and meaningful actions by setting climate goals like net-zero emissions. They are making changes to their assets, operations, and supply chains.
• The financial industry, including the biggest equity investors in the world, are making it clear that if companies do not have a net-zero plan and if their boards are not taking direct responsibility for these goals, then these investors will invest elsewhere. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is putting rules and regulation in place for mandatory disclosure of climate risks, which will reinforce that this is a C-suite activity to be taken very seriously.
• Corporate America is looking so differently at climate issues now; it can bridge the divide between Republicans and Democrats and enable common ground to be found.
• We are in a place today where the imperative for action has never been stronger.

Q: From where you sit today at Johnson Controls, what are the priorities for federal climate policy?

• In terms of bipartisan action, there were terrific building blocks in the Energy Act of 2020, signed into law at the end of the 116th Congress; for example, it made tax incentives for energy efficiency permanent.
• In the 117th Congress, we are looking for these kinds of federal legislation:
  • A comprehensive decarbonization title in the infrastructure bill. If you want to build infrastructure that will help decarbonize the United States, then accelerated permitting should be available to get the infrastructure built quicker.
  • Federal legislation to green the grid. The Department of Energy can play an important role in expediting a green grid. We can incentivize carbon capture, direct air capture, and natural systems carbon capture.
  • Buildings have to be decarbonized and we need to see a push towards electrification in federal legislation. We need to mandate that buildings and equipment are efficient, smart, flexible, and can talk to the grid, so they become grid stabilizing rather than a potential problem area.

Q: Looking back at the history of climate policy, what are key takeaways for Congressional staff working on Capitol Hill today?

• There are tried-and-true tools that have worked efficiently to clean our environment and have also led to technology innovation and job creation.
• Today, there are new and different allies, like the business community and state and local governments, that, especially in the last four years, have jumped to the fore with innovative new tools.
• Employ new and innovative ideas. There is more than enough room to find common ground to advance climate solutions.

 

Climate Policy Then and Now: An Advocate’s Perspective

Tina Johnson, Principal, Johnson Strategy & Development Consultants; Director, National Black Environmental Justice Network

• Stakeholder engagement is important for improving policy decision making.
• Civil society stakeholders shape the direction and outcomes of processes. Whether you are working on Black Lives Matter, police reform, or climate change, these movements are rooted in the role of stakeholders and are designed to shape how our policies work for our communities.
• If we do not have stakeholders involved, politicians are just debating things without hearing from the people.
  • For example, during then Sen. John McCain’s 2000 presidential campaign, “Captain Climate” attended many of McCain’s events asking for his climate and environmental plan. McCain talked with the activist after the campaign and worked with then Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman to introduce the McCain-Lieberman Climate Stewardship Act.
• The cooperation of civil society with governments helps to achieve a lot through scientific analysis, communicating research implications, driving mobilization, cultivating coalitions, and narrative shaping. NGOs have become really important in this space.
• One pivotal moment in stakeholder advocacy was the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change’s (UNFCCC) 15th Conference of the Parties (COP15) in Copenhagen in 2009. Countries failed to come to a meaningful agreement. There was a failure of civil society at COP15 as well. Civil society played up the importance of a legally-binding deal at COP15, but did not back it up with a robust enough effort to change the politics on the inside of the negotiations. There was a deep fragmentation of civil society over fundamental issues—especially between climate justice and climate action coalitions. So, there was an absence of unified civil society voices providing consistent pressure. This failure forced the civil society community to reimagine its power and ability to influence policies.
• Another key moment in time was the largest climate march in history in 2014, which coincided with the U.N. Climate Leaders' Summit in New York. The march demonstrated how a moment could be built around influencing policy makers at the highest level.
• The 2014 New Climate Economy report created the conditions for the pivotal moments leading up to UNFCCC COP21 in 2015. In 2014, civil society achieved a great deal, including demonstrating public interest in climate action and ensuring the climate narrative was highly publicized on the front page of every newspaper to ensure that heads of state attending the summit knew they needed to demonstrate responsiveness to citizens.
• Post-Paris civil society efforts include The Greta Effect, Fridays for Future, and the Green New Deal, during which young people became increasingly involved in pushing for climate action.
• It is important to also look at the specific role of the environmental justice movement in environmental policymaking. The movement, which seeks to address the disproportional environmental degradation minority and low-income communities face, has been around since the 1980s. In 1982, Warren County, North Carolina, a Black community, spoke out against the dumping of thousands of tons of PCB-ridden soil in a nearby facility [PCBs are environmentally-toxic industrial chemicals whose production has been banned in the United States since 1978]. This event culminated in the publication of Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States in 1987. These environmental justice grassroots movements inspired Executive Order 12898, signed by the Clinton Administration, which established environmental justice offices in the Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Justice, and other federal agencies.
• The environmental justice movement is currently influencing the federal government’s work on equity and justice and has sparked a reckoning within the environmental movement to ensure that environmental justice is at the core of the framework we are developing.

Q: Can you give us an example of when climate has been strategically integrated with other issues in policymaking?

• California has integrated climate policy really well into the way it operates, whether it is through electric vehicles or greenhouse gas reductions, and it has taken the lead when the federal government has fallen behind.
• Many of the policies we see now do not take a multi-stakeholder approach into consideration. Some stakeholders cannot be more important than stakeholders on the ground who are taking the biggest hits when it comes to climate change and environmental issues.

Q: Over time, different stakeholders have been invited to the policy-making table. How has the landscape of advocates and stakeholders who are included early in the policy-making process changed? How should this landscape evolve?

• There is something to be said for the moments that humble people in the climate policy space, moments like the 2016 election. We went from an administration that was doing a lot on climate to another administration where the commitment for climate policy did not really exist. These moments make you think about the aspects of policies that do or do not meet the needs of different stakeholders, especially those at the forefront of climate impacts.
• Stakeholders, especially those on the ground, need to be engaged for policy conversations to mean something. They know what is best for their community, they know what their community needs. Stakeholders should see themselves genuinely represented in the policy outcomes. It should not just be a transactional relationship.

Q: What are the most important lessons you have learned about climate policymaking that are important for Hill staffers to take away from the conversation?

• Congressional staffers have a heavy lift and the issues are plentiful. I think the questions "is there equity?" and "is there justice?" need to be the framework for policy work. And we need to ask if people who will be most impacted by a policy have been consulted in a way that they are actually heard, not just in a way that allows policymakers to say that they heard them.
• Expand the ‘brain trust’ that you draw from to inform policy.
• There needs to be authentic engagement with stakeholders to design effective climate policy.

 

Current Attitudes, Polarization, and Environmental Policy

Dr. Laurel Harbridge-Yong, Associate Professor, Northwestern University

• Harbridge-Yong’s work suggests that compromises in Congress benefit legislators on both sides of the compromise. The idea that bipartisanship equates to bad politics is a misperception.
• Bipartisanship has value for Congress’s effectiveness. Most major laws pass with significant bipartisan support in both chambers. In terms of bills that have become law, bipartisanship’s importance is roughly the same now as it was 30 years ago.
• Successful bipartisanship entails working with party leaders early in the legislative process, as opposed to appealing to legislators in the minority party at the end of the process.
• Bipartisanship also has value for individual legislators, who see higher legislative effectiveness in both the House and Senate when they compromise.
  • House representatives who attracted a one standard deviation larger proportion of bipartisan cosponsors on their bills saw those bills receive eight to 14 percent more committee attention. Senators saw a 10 percent increase in the same scenario.
• Members of Congress with longer tenure can be better at building bipartisanship.
• Public approval is greater for compromise than for gridlock, according to a study by Harbridge-Yong. This is true for both consensus and non-consensus issues.
• Republicans and Democrats both increasingly support making environmental protection a priority, but a large gap still remains. In a study, 21 percent of Republicans and 78 percent of Democrats stated that climate change action should be a priority.
• Compromise boosts individual legislators’ approval ratings and votes among co-partisans, opposing-partisans, and independents alike.
• Compromise also boosts legislators’ approval ratings and votes among primary voters, strong partisans, donors, and Tea Party/Indivisible party voters. Only the most ideologically extreme voters do not change their evaluations of a candidate based on how willing they are to compromise.

Q: What factors sabotage compromise? Are these factors more common at the beginning of deals, or do risks form as a compromise tries to endure political pressures?

• Legislators have a perception sometimes that primary voters will punish them for making compromises. There is not actually a lot of evidence for that.
• Stakeholders can be more focused on principles than on pragmatism. For legislators, pragmatism—what can incrementally be done to move policy toward the party’s goal—is often what is needed. Interest groups, both early in the process as well as late in the process, can prove stumbling blocks here. When nothing is done instead of an incremental approach, perfect can become the enemy of the good.

Q: Has your research found any tension between what an individual legislator feels is in their best interest with respect to their constituents versus what the party is hoping to achieve? Are there some issues that allow legislators more flexibility to become compromisers?

• It depends on whether their party is in the majority or minority, and on whether they have a unified government or a divided government. When a government is divided, neither party cares as much about getting stuff done, and they can focus a lot more on messaging priorities. In these cases, the parties do not necessarily care about compromising. With a unified government, the majority party does have an incentive to govern and produce a record of success, even if it is more incremental. They may be particularly attentive to the needs of the more moderate members and the pivotal legislators needed to make deals. There also might be legislators on the more ideological wing of the party who do not want to work with the party leaders, who get frustrated by all the concessions that are being made to get pivotal legislators onboard.

Q: How does polling affect how politicians position themselves in deciding if compromising is in their interest?

• We have pretty good public opinion polls at a national level, maybe even at a state level, but at a district level, we do not have good polling. As a result, legislators and their staff end up relying more on the people who contact them, but we know that the people who contact offices are not a random sample of their constituents. We have evidence that suggests that their voices still end up being disproportionately important.
• Fifty-eight percent of state legislators thought that their primary voters were either somewhat or very likely to punish them for compromising on policy. When we surveyed their primary voters, we found that primary voters on average still favored the compromise. Work by other political scientists found that Congressional staffers’ perceptions were more extreme than the public’s actual policy preferences, and they had bigger misperceptions the more they had contact with interest groups.

Q: What advice would you give to staff who are about to start working on climate policy in order to navigate bipartisanship over the course of the Congress?

• The first point is that building bipartisan coalitions and compromises can be good for policymaking and good for politics. It can help Congress as a whole pass legislation, it can help individual legislators develop a record of legislative success, and it can be good for legislators electorally.
• The second point is that legislators and their staff should do more to seek out the opinions of a broader group of constituents, rather than just those who call their offices or subscribe and respond to constituent newsletter polls.
• The last thing is that sometimes negotiations that lead to successful compromises have more success if some parts of those negotiations are conducted in private. Transparency is often touted as a gold standard in the policymaking process, but I think that we should make it more acceptable that some elements of these negotiations happen behind closed doors, allowing the stakeholders to come together and hash out details. Elected officials should still be on the record with roll-call votes to ensure they are held accountable for their decisions.

 

What Congressional Staff Should Know about Climate Policy

Dr. Ana Unruh Cohen, Staff Director, House of Representatives Select Committee on the Climate Crisis

• Every policy affects the climate and can bring benefits to it. This is especially the case with energy policy, which affects emissions, and disaster bills, which form the basis of resilience and natural hazard responses.
• The 2000s saw consistent climate legislation.
  • In 2005, the Energy Policy Act (P.L. 109-58) was passed.
  • In 2007, the Energy Independence and Security Act (P.L. 110-140) was passed.
  • In 2008, Congress increased fuel economy standards and passed a long-term solar tax credit that was instrumental to solar energy’s growth.
  • The 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (P.L. 111-5) encouraged clean energy.
  • The American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 (H.R. 2454), also known as the Waxman-Markey Bill, passed the House but ultimately failed to move through the Senate.
• Opportunities for legislative action fell off in 2009 and 2010 when support for a climate bill faltered. With Republicans in control of the House of Representatives in 2011, the Obama Administration pivoted to executive action and developed the Clean Power Plan with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which was finalized in 2015. The Clean Power Plan was largely unwound by the Trump administration.
• Despite the lack of a dedicated climate bill in the last 12 years, Congress has legislated on climate.
  • The Energy Act of 2020 (part of P.L. 116-260, the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2021) extended clean energy tax credits and regulated hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), which are potent greenhouse gases, that, if abated, could help avoid half a degree Celsius of global warming.
  • On the adaptation and resilience side, the Disaster Recovery Reform Act of 2018, part of the FAA Reauthorization Act of 2018 (P.L. 115-254), put in place the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) Program within the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which provides pre-disaster mitigation funding for communities.
• Climate has now been pushed to the forefront of the legislative agenda by added advocacy from traditional and new voices. The advocates of environmental justice, who have often been local forces in the past, are now forming strategic partnerships that have input at the federal level.
• We are now a dozen years deeper into the climate crisis than when the Waxman-Markey Bill failed to pass, but we are also that much deeper into clean energy development and deployment.
• The reconciliation process, just used to pass the American Rescue Plan of 2021 (P.L. 117-2) with a simple majority in the Senate, will not allow for a comprehensive response to climate change, but it could bring key investments, like clean energy tax credits and investments in existing programs in the Departments of Energy, Interior, and Agriculture.
• With President Biden pivoting to the Build Back Better strategy, there is hope that bipartisan infrastructure bills will pass.
• Dr. Unruh Cohen has two reading recommendations:
  • Patrick Reis’s article in Rolling Stone that discusses the Waxman-Markey Bill.
  • Christopher Leonard’s book Kochland, which has chapters about climate and energy.

Q: Last Congress, you were part of the Select Committee on the Climate Crisis that produced a report following a pretty comprehensive stakeholder engagement process. How did you navigate the stakeholder engagement process for that report and what did you learn from that?

• In the fall of 2019, we put out a request for information. It was a 13-question letter, and we got over 700 substantive responses to that. Our team used that as a launching pad for some additional conversations. We stopped counting at 1,000 stakeholder meetings. That was really a part of how we were able to be successful.

Q: How do the legislative and executive branches work together to produce big bills? When has legislative and executive interaction been fruitful?

• Ideally, Congress works in a complementary fashion to the executive branch. Sometimes, the administration sets up something creative that we want to end up legislating on. One example of that would be the Electrify Africa legislation, which sprung out of the Obama administration's work in Africa, with a program called Power Africa, and ultimately led to bipartisan legislation passed in 2015.
• Post Hurricane Sandy, the Obama administration held a resilience competition and requested proposals from across the country. They had as many red states as blue states engaging. This helped to inform the development of FEMA’s BRIC program in 2018. Resilience is another example where we have some bipartisan agreement.

Q: The past matters, and what happened in previous Congresses is relevant today. What is your advice for staff about when past matters the most, and is there a limit to that?

• The past matters. At some points it does tend to fade away, but it is hard to say when that is. There have certainly been valid critiques of cap and trade and states that have implemented it have made changes to their programs, but people still think it would be a helpful policy. One thing I think people forget about the Waxman-Markey Bill is that it was not just cap and trade and standardizing electricity. There was a lot it tried to do for buildings and transportation emissions. A lot of that is front and center in the policies we are trying to move today.
• We are at the point where we need to reevaluate what the best policies are to help us reduce emissions. Sadly, we have been pretty negligent on adaptation and resilience for all of these years. We really need to get going on that in a comprehensive way.

 

Highlights compiled by Jocelyn Rendon and Rachel Snead.