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March 20, 2023
Over the past two months, EESI has been running a four-part briefing series called Congressional Climate Camp to help get Congressional staff and other people working in the policy space up to speed with the legislative process and key opportunities for climate mitigation and adaptation action. This series covered four topics: budget and appropriations; public polling; non-CO2 greenhouse gases; and the implementation of the Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. We had 17 amazing speakers across the panels share their knowledge and expertise with our audience. In this episode of the podcast, Dan and Alison recap some of the series highlights and discuss major themes across the four briefings, featuring clips of the briefing panelists.
Show notes:
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Episode Transcript:
Dan Bresette: Welcome to The Climate Conversation. I’m Dan Bresette, president of EESI, back again for another episode. This time, I’m joined by communications associate Alison Davis. Hi, Alison.
Alison Davis: Hi Dan, happy to be here hosting the podcast with you. For today’s episode, we’ll be doing something a bit different. Hopefully some of our listeners already know about our Congressional briefing series, Climate Camp, which started in January and just wrapped up a couple of weeks ago. This four-part series covered the basics of the legislative process, highlighting key areas and opportunities for climate mitigation and adaptation policy. Today, Dan and I will be discussing the major themes and key takeaways. So if you attended some or all of the Climate Camp briefings, this will be a great recap. And for those who couldn’t fit it into their schedule, you’re in luck because we’re going to give you a great summary.
Dan: We don’t have a guest to chat with us today, but you can look forward to hearing nuggets of wisdom from several of our amazing Climate Camp panelists. Each one of the Climate Camp briefings—which included Budget and Appropriations, Public Polling on Climate Change, Non-CO2 Greenhouse Gases, and Implementing the Inflation Reduction Act and Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act—squeezed a lot of information into just an hour and a half per session. And now, Alison and I are going to distill the most important parts into about 30 minutes, so we’d better jump right into it.
Alison: Here is a quick overview for our listeners who are hearing about Climate Camp for the first time. The first session brought an audience of eager Hill staffers up to speed on the budget and appropriations process that is already underway for fiscal year 2024. Panelists demonstrated how the process plays out in practice and described how annual appropriations have been impacted by recent climate legislation. For the next Climate Camp session, we explored the public’s interest in seeing continued federal attention on climate change and dissected the latest opinion polls, with a particular emphasis on the implications for the 118th Congress.
Dan: The third session of Climate Camp focused on greenhouse gases and pollutants other than carbon dioxide that also worsen climate change—primarily methane, nitrous oxides, and fluorinated gases. Our panel of experts talked about strategies to limit their effects, with an emphasis on federal and international policy solutions like the Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol. In the final installment of the series, we brought together two panels for a substantive discussion on the Inflation Reduction Act and Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. The in-depth presentations updated our audience on the status of implementing these laws, described how state and local entities are accessing funds, and explained how Congressional oversight fits in.
Alison: Let’s kick things off with a discussion about environmental justice. Our team strives to incorporate considerations for environmental justice in every piece of content we produce, and our briefings are no exception. To provide an example, environmental justice issues were front and center in Jonathon Schuldt’s presentation in the public polling briefing. Jonathon drew from his work as the executive director of the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research at Cornell University, speaking extensively about how different groups of Americans perceive the unequal impacts of climate change hazards in the United States.
Jonathon Schuldt: It's really important to understand the variability that exists among groups in U.S. society. And here, I think it's important to recognize the inequities that surround climate change. We now know, there's good evidence to suggest that climate change disproportionately affects some groups more than others, specifically groups that are already disadvantaged by existing social and economic systems. And we see these climate change disparities not just between countries, but including within wealthy countries such as the U.S. where communities of color, Indigenous, and other socially disadvantaged groups not only are at higher risk of all kinds of environmental hazards—air quality pollution and the like from climate impacts—but also because of marginalization. They are less prepared for and equipped to deal with those risks when they encounter them. And so, with my collaborators, we've been trying to think a lot over the last few years, what implications these inequities might have for patterns we see in public opinion polling. So take for example, race and ethnicity. So this figure comes from a paper led by Matthew Ballew at Yale, and it summarizes a decade of data from the Yale and George Mason surveys. And this is essentially people's global warming risk perceptions broken out by race and ethnicity from 2009 to 2018. And what you see is as on every one of these risk perception measures, compared to non-Hispanic white respondents, non-Hispanic Black and Hispanic and Latino respondents report higher levels of risk perceptions. They report being more worried about global warming. They're reporting that it's already harming the U.S., not just the U.S. but will harm them personally, and so on. And this is a pattern that's remained largely stable over the course of that decade.
Dan: Environmental justice was also a major topic during the briefing on implementation of the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. Dr. Henry McKoy Jr. led off the event with a deep dive into the process of getting funding from these major climate investments to communities at the ground level where it’s needed most. In his presentation, Henry spoke about the work being done at the Department of Energy’s Office of State and Community Energy Programs or SCEP, where Henry serves as director. SCEP is part of a concerted effort to expand the capabilities of states, local, and tribal communities to bring to life high-impact, self-sustaining clean energy transformations.
Dr. Henry McKoy Jr.: So how do we help communities rise in the process of making these investments? And so to that end, we are an entity that has almost 30 programs within the Office of State and Community Programs. So a key part of those 28 programs, as we take them as separate pillars, is to think about how do we work together and think about the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. So we think about this in a very holistic way. So the dollars that Congress has appropriated us are really leveraged and braided and brought together in a way that hopefully creates some really great emergence. Part of that is the Justice 40 Initiative. As many of you probably know Justice 40, President Biden signed the executive order a few days after taking office to say that 40% of these benefits should go to historically disadvantaged communities. So we take that seriously and we build that into everything that we do. We also look at how do we deploy clean energy technologies. A key part for us is thinking about this idea of looking at a community and think about how do we increase the overall capacity of that community to accept federal dollars and other dollars, information and knowledge, and technologies to really move those communities forward. So deploying clean energy really focuses on that. Simultaneously we want to catalyze economic development—it’s about jobs. It's about jobs, about jobs. And so a key part of this is how do we make sure that we're creating this connective tissue between the investments that we make in the local economy in a real way, that ties to that, but we also want to create ownership amongst communities, and certainly avoiding pollution through these place-based strategies, and reducing energy costs. There are so many individuals who are energy burden, we want to make sure that we keep that at the forefront of what we do and all that we do. And so SCEP looks at from a very holistic standpoint, how do we make these investments in these historically disadvantaged communities as well as much broader than that? We have $16 billion in our funding capacity. And so we know that we can make an incredible impact on that.
Alison: In that segment, Henry gave a fantastic overview of several ways that environmental justice communities can benefit from clean energy investments. But I’d like to hone in on what he said about avoiding pollution. Low-income people and people of color are more likely to live near environmental hazards, such as landfills or fossil fuel facilities. For more on this, let’s turn it over to Debbie Gordon, senior principal of Climate Intelligence at RMI, who also happens to be a member of EESI’s Advisory Board. Debbie spoke on the non-CO2 greenhouse gases panel about how methane leaks are an issue of environmental justice.
Debbie Gordon: So methane is natural gas. Methane is a gas. It's about 70 to 90% of what makes up natural gas. But then there's a lot of other stuff in that gas when it's emitted including impurities. And those impurities include carcinogens, V Tex, the benzene, the toluene, the xylene, ethylbenzene, those also come out of the ground. So this is as much a climate issue and an air pollution issue as it is an environmental justice issue. So going into methane, specifically focusing now on the oil and gas and the waste sectors. A really big part of what I do and I've been doing for a major part of my career actually is making emissions visible. We talked about this earlier with the panel when we were just chatting and we were surmising that air pollution was really the first to be solved over the last, really since the 70s, 1970s, or starting in the 50s in Los Angeles, because you could see it. But the problem with climate change is these gases are largely inert and invisible and odorless. And so it's made it a lot harder to appreciate the fact that they're a really big problem for our health, you know, for everything that everyone has been saying. But you can see on the left here, this is a satellite image of the Gulf of Mexico and offshore platform, which should be producing its oil and gas and not leaking its methane. Interestingly, NASA has developed now a way to see methane over water because the water reflects light and the instruments actually can't see through the reflectivity. So they cut it at an angle called glint mode and now we're starting to see and visualize methane over water, which is a huge breakthrough. And will really help.
Dan: Another major topic of discussion throughout the Climate Camp series was the makeup of the 118th Congress and the prospects for bipartisan climate policy. During the previous Congress, we saw unprecedented momentum on climate action in the form of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act, with additional support from the CHIPS and Science Act. The new Congress, however, seems unlikely to pass climate legislation matching that level of ambition, which is what we would need in order to meet the Biden-Harris Administration’s target of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 50 percent from 2005 levels by the end of this decade. During the budget and appropriations briefing, panelist Molly Reynolds, senior fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution, explained the challenges of a closely divided Congress and how this configuration has played out in recent history.
Molly Reynolds: We live in an era of small Congressional majorities. The Republicans currently enjoy a five-seat majority in the House—that's about the same size as the Democrats’ majority was in the House in the last Congress. Last Congress, Democrats had an even 50-50 tie in the Senate. Now, as Senator Sinema continues to organizationally associate herself with the Democratic caucus, they have a 51-vote majority. But we have small majorities, and we have really polarized parties. The parties in both chambers are quite far apart from one another. And when you put these things together—especially but not exclusively in the Senate—you end up with a situation where it's really difficult to adopt individual appropriations bills on the floor of the Senate. When the Senate wants to consider appropriations bills, it's really attractive to party leaders to do them either all in one omnibus package or in several, say, minibus packages because it is difficult to build those coalitions in an era of small majorities and the filibuster and polarized parties. We also right now have a divided government, and we have a particular flavor of divided government, with the house controlled by Republicans, the Senate controlled by Democrats, a Democratic President in the White House. But that produces just really different spending priorities across that set of actors and here I want to talk a little bit about some relevant previous experiences. First in 2011, where we had this same configuration and we had a new House Republican majority that had been fueled by the Tea Party wave in 2010. Again, that wave was much larger than the wave we ultimately saw in 2022, but there are some similarities with kind of a resurgent new Republican House majority. In 2011, House Republicans initially tried to play hardball on some continuing resolutions in early 2011 for ultimately coalescing around a position where they were going to insist on any debt ceiling increase would be matched dollar-for-dollar by spending reductions in the 10-year budget window. Ultimately, the negotiations in 2011 produced what's known as the Budget Control Act, which capped discretionary spending and created what we now refer to as a super committee, which tried and failed to produce additional deficit reduction. The two parties, I think, learned really different lessons from this experience. On one hand, I think Republicans saw it as one of the few times where they really sort of held out for change and got something, and we can sort of debate the long-term consequences of the Budget Control Act. But I think Republicans see it one way, and I think Democrats see it as an example of why you should not let Republicans take the government hostage. I will say from an institutional perspective, that's also a really important reminder that budget agreements are only as good as the political will that remains to enforce them.
Alison: Towards the end of her presentation in the climate law implementation briefing, Sarah Kline, a consultant at the Bipartisan Policy Center, touched on how this might affect programs in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.
Sarah Kline: The purchasing power of a dollar today is not what it was in November of 2021. So how do folks handle that? There is an upcoming Congressional debate over spending in fiscal year 24 and future fiscal years. We don't know if the Infrastructure Law programs are going to be kind of swept up in that or not, but that is also something folks should definitely be aware of. I think if these challenges can be overcome—and I know that everyone is working hard to make sure that they are—this bill promises real progress in meeting our infrastructure needs and the future climate needs of the country.
Dan: It can be pretty difficult sometimes to feel optimistic about the potential of the 118th Congress to find common ground. But the public polling briefing highlighted areas where the constituents represented by Members of Congress tend to be in agreement across party lines. This is significant because support for smart climate policy among the general public could help to encourage policymakers on the Hill to reach certain compromises. When legislators face re-election every two years like in the House, or every six years like in the Senate, they’re beholden to the changing tides of public opinion, particularly among younger people that make up the new voting pools. Speaking from her experience as the director of Science and Society Research at Pew Research Center, Cary Funk focused her presentation on public opinion polling along party lines.
Cary Funk: When we look at a lot of different ideas around climate policy proposals, and when you do this by political party, of course there are wide differences, but you can still find areas of bipartisan agreement. A lot of times those will line up with, let's say, proposals that the GOP leadership put forth. So you see, the idea of planting a trillion trees to absorb carbon emissions is popular almost universally. And the second row, the idea of providing incentives for carbon capture technology, also garners a majority of both Democrats’ and Republicans’ support. I would, you know, point out the obvious, that this data is from May of 2022, and of course these policy proposals change over time, views change over time. And you know, one thing we've noticed, let's say in particular around the carbon capture technology proposal is a kind of a little bit of a downward trend among Republican support. It’s still seven in 10 as of this data, but that was down eight percentage points from 2020. So we do have our eye as well on kind of what's shifting there among Republicans in particular where we're seeing more change. Now, I also want to kind of underscore, I think one of the things our panel will do is underscore, that these are very broad party coalitions and people are not monolithic. So one thing we want to think about is also major differences, especially among Republicans, by age or generation. We don't talk as much about that among Democrats, because younger and older Democrats tend to be very closely aligned on climate policy issues, so it just doesn't percolate up. But among the GOP, we often see older Republicans offering especially strong support of things like increasing offshore oil and gas drilling, increasing coal mining. And in this data, you see that as well. Republicans under age 30, in particular, are showing a higher level of support for pretty much all of these policy proposals. The top one there 58% of younger Republicans saying they would support incentives for hybrid and electric vehicles. One thing we like to point out is also just compare on the right we're not saying 58% is the same as 84%. There's still a pretty big difference between younger Republicans and Democrats. But you do see this pattern pretty often. So we have our eye on how that is shaping things as well.
Alison: These trends among younger Republican voters offer hope for future progress on climate policy, but we can’t wait for younger members to be elected to Congress before building on the accomplishments of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act. So how can we hope to inspire compromise in the current Congress? The final major Climate Camp theme we’ll be discussing today may be the answer to that question—and that’s public health. NPR’s Deputy Senior Supervising Climate Editor, Neela Banerjee, who spoke alongside Cary on our public polling panel, explained how health consequences of extreme weather are impacting public opinion.
Neela Banjeree: The other really compelling thing that the poll showed us was the impact extreme weather has on the health of Americans. We carve this out as health, but when you think about the way our healthcare system is set up, it's also a financial problem. One in four respondents said that they suffered serious health issues. We did not ask for how long, but when you think about it there's mold from flooding or hurricanes, wildfire smoke, stress, interruptions in care for illnesses like kidney disease or cancer if you've been displaced from your home, and certainly the stress of facing financial hardship could be a health issue as well. The biggest single health impact, of course, is heat. And it's not just that, you know, it makes you miserable. But then it can cause lasting damage to your body like your kidneys, for example, even if it doesn't kill you. That terrible heat dome that we had in the Pacific Northwest a few years ago, climate scientists have shown that it was much more likely because of climate change. So this is actually a story that was about air conditioning and how air conditioning is a health issue because you're getting heat waves in parts of the country and parts of the world that aren't used to heat waves, so people don't have air conditioning in their homes. And so, given the hazards and the risks, and really the pain that people are facing from extreme weather, it led us to ask everybody else, Do people want the government to act to change this, and if so, how? So people who experience extreme weather are much more willing than those who haven't—yet—to support policies that both help communities adapt to climate change and cut the emissions driving climate change.
Dan: Many people are beginning to understand the urgency of the climate crisis because extreme weather and other climate change impacts are already causing public health issues that simply cannot be ignored. So from a public health perspective, certain climate mitigation and adaptation policies will soon have a universal appeal—regardless of party lines—if they don’t already. One big focus of climate-related health issues is air pollution which was a major topic of discussion at the briefing on non-CO2 greenhouse gases and pollutants. Panelist Susan Anenberg, Chair of the Environmental and Occupational Health department at the George Washington University Milken Institute School of Public Health, did a deep dive on the health impacts of air pollution caused by black carbon and methane.
Susan Anenberg: Short lived climate pollutants—these refer to species that are both climate-warming agents and air pollutants. And when I say species, that just means chemical components that we're releasing into the air. So these are chemical components. These are pollutants that are both climate-warming agents and health damaging air pollutants. I'm gonna focus specifically on black carbon. Black carbon is a part of fine particulate matter or PM 2.5. PM 2.5 is a regulated air pollutant in the United States and around the world. We have national ambient air quality standards or NAQS that the EPA sets and it is a major contributor to the burden of premature mortality as well as cardiovascular disease and stroke. And I will also talk about methane, because methane is a precursor to tropospheric ozone, that’s ground-level ozone—not the stratospheric ozone that Gabby was just talking about, the ozone hole. That's the good ozone, we like that ozone that protects us from UV radiation. Methane is a contributor to ground-level ozone that is a key ingredient of smog. When we breathe this in, this has damages for human health as well. These have different sources, and methane itself is a greenhouse gas, and ozone is a greenhouse gas, so methane sort of has this dual impact on the climate, as well as the health damaging contribution to ozone. When we think about the health damages of black carbon as a component of PM 2.5 as well as ozone produced from methane or really any other source, there's a pyramid of effects of air pollution on human health. The most severe effect is premature mortality. But that's really just the tip of the iceberg. There's a whole range of other non-fatal effects like emergency room visits, hospital admissions, heart attacks, doctor's visits, school absences, lost workdays, respiratory symptoms, asthma attacks, and even subclinical effects. These are effects you wouldn't see a doctor for, but they still are contributing to your ill health. And at the subclinical effects, the bottom of this pyramid, we have the largest range of the population that's affected. The best resource to go to—if you're interested in the health consequences of air pollution—the best resources are the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Integrated Science Assessments or ISAs. They produce these on a five-year cycle as part of the National Ambient Air Quality Standards reviews. And they're really comprehensive scientific literature reviews by the scientific staff at the EPA. And I've just listed here the health outcomes that are determined either to be causally associated or likely to be causally associated with these air pollutants and the most recent ISA. So for PM 2.5—which again, black carbon is a component of—we have cardiovascular effects, respiratory effects, nervous system effects, cancer, and of course premature mortality. For ozone, we have respiratory effects, cardiovascular effects, and also premature mortality.
Alison: Because of the inherent connection between human health and the environment, the Environmental Protection Agency is widely regarded first and foremost as a public health agency. Let’s hear from Angela Jones from the budget and appropriations briefing about Congress’s priorities in terms of EPA funding. You’ll notice that the issues mentioned are all adjacent, if not directly related to, matters of public health. In her presentation, Angela was drawing from her experience as an analyst in environmental policy at the Congressional Research Service.
Angela Jones: In recent years, a number of EPA funding issues have been the subject of Congressional debate and reflected in appropriations bills and the explanatory statement. So these issues are likely to continue to be the subject of discussion in the 118th Congress and fiscal year 2024 appropriations. So some selected examples I have up here—this is not intended to be a comprehensive list of potential issues, there are many—these are just some examples, including financial assistance, as I mentioned. So Congress appropriates funds to EPA to support the agency's primary responsibilities in coordination with states and tribes. So the adequacy of the funding of these financial assistance and grants has been a perennial issue. Just as one example, the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2023. Congress appropriated funding to EPA for multiple water infrastructure programs intended to address concerns about the condition of the nation's local drinking water and wastewater infrastructure and the financial challenges that communities are facing in this. Another issue is PFAs. So policymakers and various stakeholders urge federal agencies, including EPA, to act more quickly and more broadly to address PFAs, which is a group of fluorinated compounds used for various purposes. So current law authorizes specific criteria to regulate or take other action on PFAs. Also, the adequacy of funding to remediate or clean up contaminated sites has been a long-standing issue among states, local governments, and communities located near contaminated sites, and other stakeholders. As well, air quality and climate change, several EPA air quality and climate change activities typically receive a lot of attention in annual appropriations discussions. These activities include things like regulations under the Clean Air Act to address emissions of greenhouse gases, air pollutants and climate change science and adaptation. Also environmental justice. In recent explanatory statements, Congress has actually supported increased funding to EPA for environmental justice-related activities and programs. And so the amount of funding for these programs which actually span across the agency continues to be an issue of interest.
Dan: Well, that brings us back full circle to the theme of environmental justice. You know, Alison, it has been really fun listening back to all these clips from these incredible presentations during our Climate Camp. We came up with the idea of Climate Camp during the pandemic so a little more than two years ago because we weren’t able to get up to Capitol Hill and do all of the outreach and welcome to Congress meetings that EESI is known for. So we came up with this idea of Climate Camp to be a sort of substitute to help get new staff up to speed on the issues quickly or to help staff that have been around for a while but are new to climate policy. We had the opportunity to do Climate Camp in person this year, and it has been really great. A lot of staff are coming to multiple briefings, we are getting a huge turnout in our online audience as well. We’ve been really just enjoying the networking opportunities that come after the briefing. And it is safe to say that a lot of our audience has really enjoyed the fact that we have donuts in the back of the room. So, Climate Camp is our first briefing series of the year, but it won’t be our last. We will be getting into Farm Bill briefings in a couple of weeks, which is really exciting. We will be getting into programs the Department of Energy around energy efficiency and nuclear energy. We are looking at briefings in the lead up to COP28 which will take place toward the end of November this year. So we have a lot to come and I’m really looking forward to it. But I can’t think of a better way to start the new year than Congressional Climate Camp. If you liked what you heard today, I hope everyone will go online and check out the briefings and review all the presentation materials. We owe a huge debt of gratitude to our panelists for bringing all this great information to us.
Alison: I completely agree. And speaking as someone who is relatively new to the environmental movement, I found this whole series to be really helpful in filling in some knowledge gaps that I had and I think that I hope this series is equally helpful to Hill staffers in particular, whether they are new to the Hill or new to environmental issues. It will be really helpful to people who want to hit the ground running. If you want to learn more about EESI’s work on Congressional climate education, head to our website at eesi.org. Also, follow us on social media @eesionline for all of our recent updates. The Climate Conversation is published as a supplement to our bi-weekly newsletter, Climate Change Solutions. Go to eesi.org/signup to subscribe. Thanks for joining us and see you next time!
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