Can Weak Manchin Permitting Bill Be Strengthened?

After authorizing $370 billion in new funding for new, cleaner energy sources, Congress is turning to permitting reform: All the money in the world will not help if projects don’t have permission to build. Wednesday evening, Senator Manchin released proposed text for his permitting bill, which he apparently negotiated in return for his vote to authorize the energy funding. Unfortunately, the bill is not well-designed to speed up construction of new energy sources. But with a few strategic additions it could go a long way toward speeding up permitting to secure a cleaner, more reliable, and affordable energy future for the United States.

The biggest roadblock to energy sources is not financial; it is receiving permission to build. And many of the projects that we most need for a clean energy transition face particular permitting difficulties because they need permits from multiple states or local communities and the federal government. Our traditional energy commodities, oil and coal, are less dependent on building long-distance infrastructure because they can rely on existing railroads and pipelines, and they are easier to ship by multiple pathways using rail, road, and water transport. By contrast, cleaner energy products such as renewable electricity, natural gas, and hydrogen can only be shipped by new long-distance infrastructure.

Think of a long-distance power-line designed to bring renewable energy to market, a pipeline shipping natural gas to communities hoping to move away from coal, or a hydrogen pipeline designed to help replace fossil fuels. These linear infrastructure projects often need approvals from each state they cross and may also need approval from the federal government as well whenever they cross federal lands, borders, or streams.

There are two huge legal permitting challenges for these new cleaner energy projects.

So if we want to clean up our energy system and address the global energy crisis, which is causing energy shortages and price spikes around the globe, we need to speed up permitting. If the $370 billion authorized by Congress just goes to the few projects that would already have passed the permitting gauntlet, it will be money wasted. So we’ve seen a growing chorus of voices demanding reform to the permitting process to ensure this money isn’t squandered and that we can build a cleaner energy future.

The federal and state permitting challenges are linked because perhaps the most common proposal to speed permitting is to replace state and local siting processes with federal processes. For example, in 2005, the U.S. Congress gave the federal Department of Energy the power to designate areas that particularly needed more electricity transmission and gave the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission power to, in some circumstances, permit power-lines that hadn’t been approved by the states in those areas. Senator Manchin’s bill leans heavily on this method of speeding permitting: it gives federal government more power over permitting new power-lines and hydrogen pipelines.

The problem is that this is not an improvement at all when federally-approved projects are facing Kafkaesque challenges when they seek approval to actually build their projects. The energy sector where federal permitting is most common is in interstate natural gas permitting and these projects are routinely stopped by local objections even when they have federal approval. In fact, the two highest-profile recent gas pipeline projects—the Atlantic Coast Pipeline and the PennEast Pipeline—eventually had to give up on building their projects after years of expense and struggle, even though the federal government repeatedly backed both pipelines and both pipelines won blockbuster decisions in the U.S. Supreme Court.

If the Manchin bill passes as is, the gas pipeline industry can welcome the power-line and hydrogen industries to national regulation with this unwelcome news: “Even if the federal government backs you on every permit, and even if the Supreme Court backs you in every decision, no matter how long you wait, or how much you spend, states and lower courts will make life so difficult that your proposed project will never be built.”

The dysfunctions of federal permitting under court review are well known in energy policy. Congress’s 2005 grant of power to the Department of Energy and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission was eviscerated by two federal appeals court decisions over the next six years. This is why the single project that really will be helped by the current Manchin proposal is the Mountain Valley Pipeline. The bill makes special provision for this project, directing that all actions “necessary for the construction and initial operation at full capacity of the Mountain Valley Pipeline shall not be subject to judicial review.”

The Manchin bill does almost nothing to help other energy projects stop endless court demands for further environmental review. The bill does address some less important timing issues so it’s important to keep straight three kinds of time limits:

  1. Time limit for the federal government to complete environmental review. The proposal directs a two year limit for environmental review of major projects and a one year limit for minor projects. Unfortunately, such deadlines are unenforceable—the federal government routinely misses even the statutory deadlines it is trying to meet. The deadlines may even be counterproductive if they encourage courts to stop projects and order further reviews because of concern that review was rushed to meet an artificial deadline.
  2. Time limit for plaintiffs to challenge a project after it receives its permit. This kind of “statute of limitations” is not harmful but of very little use. Smart plaintiffs hoping to stop infrastructure generally sue at the earliest opportunity because the best chance to stop an infrastructure project is before construction begins. So big projects are almost never held up by plaintiffs that waited years after the project was approved to bring their lawsuit.
  3. Time limit for courts to order more review on projects that have already been under review for years. Unfortunately, the Manchin proposal does not put any time limits on courts’ ability to hold up nationally-approved projects other than the Mountain Valley Pipeline. The federal environmental review law, the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), is a procedural statute simply intended to ensure the government did sufficient environmental review of a project. If the federal government has been reviewing the environmental consequences of a project for years and has approved it, and the court would still like more review, the court can order the government to do more review. But it is not reasonable to make a nationally-approved project, and all the consumers and producers that depend upon it, wait for the court and government to reach agreement on how much environmental review is enough.

The crucial importance of a time limit on judicial delay of projects is well explained in the Institute for Progress’s excellent recent report on “How to Stop Environmental Review from Harming the Environment“:

The time limit that would likely have a major impact on outcomes is restricting the ability of the courts to issue injunctions against projects that have undergone extensive environmental review under NEPA. This change would provide developers the certainty they need to invest in large-scale build outs of solar, wind, transmission and other clean energy infrastructure. Without a time limit on judicial injunctions, developers have a sword of Damocles perpetually hanging over their head, threatening the entirety of the project.

As it stands, the Manchin permitting proposal would be a serious lost opportunity that would be unlikely to significantly speed up construction of new energy projects. The focus on federalizing review of clean energy projects is particularly unhelpful when the proposal doesn’t address the problems that are making federal review the bane of energy project developers.

The good news is that the Manchin proposal could be improved relatively simply if it added limits on federal court and state delays on federal projects. Speeding up permits for nationally-approved projects would accelerate construction of all the new energy projects that it designates for federal review.

Supreme Court: EPA Can’t Cap Greenhouse Gas Emissions From Power Plants

The Supreme Court just decided “the most closely watched environmental case in decades,” West Virginia v. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. In the 6-3, opinion, the Court holds that the EPA cannot use Clean Air Act §111(d) to set power-sector-wide greenhouse gas emissions standards for state power plants. The Court also explains that the Major Questions Doctrine is crucial to this analysis and reflects both “separation of powers principles and a practical understanding of legislative intent.”

A Justice Gorsuch concurrence, joined by Justice Alito, lays out their view of history and application of clear statements doctrines and the major questions doctrine specifically. Justice Kagan wrote a dissenting opinion, joined by Justice Breyer and Justice Sotomayor.

The opinion can be found here: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/21pdf/20-1530_n758.pdf

As a reminder, here is a summary of how the case got to the court from a blog post and webinar I did last December, in anticipation of the Supreme Court argument:

Under the Clean Air Act, the Environmental Protection Agency regulates greenhouse gas emissions from various sources including new cars and new industrial sources. But a large proportion of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions come from existing sources, such as the nation’s coal and natural gas power plants, which provide over half of American electricity.

In 2015, the Obama administration issued a regulation for existing fossil fuel power plants under Clean Air Act §111(d), which allows the EPA to “establish a procedure” for each state to adopt “standards of performance” for existing sources of air pollutants. The administration called this rule the “Clean Power Plan.” It was controversial, in part, because it went beyond asking states to make their existing power plants run more efficiently. Instead, it went “beyond the fenceline” of the power plant to encourage non-fossil sources of electricity such as wind and solar power and shrink the fossil-fuel power sector.

The Clean Power Plan never went into effect because the Supreme Court stayed its implementation on February 9, 2016. The D.C. Circuit heard more than 7 hours of argument on the validity of the Clean Power Plan but never ruled on it because the Trump administration repealed it and replaced it with its own rule, which it called the “Affordable Clean Energy Rule,” and was limited to promoting efficiency measures at existing fossil fuel plants. The D.C. Circuit then heard 9 more hours of argument on this new rule, before striking it down on January 19, 2021. The court held that EPA’s authority was not so limited.

The Supreme Court granted certiorari to decide whether Clean Air Act §111(d) gives “the EPA authority not only to impose standards based on technology and methods that can be applied at and achieved by that existing source, but also allows the agency to develop industry-wide systems like cap-and-trade regimes.” The case is an important sequel in the Court’s lines of cases on how much deference executive agencies should receive to decide major questions of policy and whether Congress might authorize dramatic agency action from relatively obscure provisions—hiding an elephant in a mousehole.

The opinion can be found here: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/21pdf/20-1530_n758.pdf

The Supreme Court emphasized that “the only interpretive question before” it was “narrow”: “whether the ‘best system of emission reduction’ identified by EPA in the Clean Power Plan was within the authority granted to the Agency in Section 111(d) of the Clean Air Act.” Some had thought it might explicitly limit the Chevron doctrine or return to the non-delegation doctrine. This is a narrower ruling, but may rule out some of the more aggressive steps the Biden administration might have considered to reduce sector-wide greenhouse gas emissions in areas such as utilities, refineries, and oil and gas development.

Build Up Before You Tear Down (or Subsidize): Easing New Energy Infrastructure

As energy prices have risen over the past 20 months, there has been growing clamor for solutions to make our energy system more affordable and more secure. Unfortunately, these discussions are often sidetracked by debates about 1) proposals to subsidize energy use to reduce its apparent costs and 2) debates about how quickly we should transition to cleaner energy sources.

The latest proposal is President Biden’s plan to suspend federal taxes on gasoline and diesel fuel for three months. These taxes help pay for the infrastructure—highways and bridges—that drivers use. Unfortunately, waiving this tax may not help drivers much because many refineries closed down in the last twenty months and the remaining refineries are already producing as much fuel as they can and barely keeping up with fuel demand. This shortage makes it very hard for refiners to lower prices. If they lower prices, more Americans will purchase fuel and we may actually run out of fuel supplies.

Ultimately, prices will only fall when there is enough energy production to comfortably meet energy demand. Unfortunately, our current approach to encouraging energy supplies is too reliant on tax breaks and dollar subsidies for new energy sources. The problem with these subsidies is that like the proposed “gasoline tax holiday,” they simply bid up the price for energy supplies if there are other roadblocks that prevent energy production.

As I explain in a recent op-ed in the The Hill:

The current challenge is securing investment in energy sources that could quickly ramp up supplies of reliable, affordable energy. Unfortunately, clean energy funding alone will not accomplish this. Investor hesitation is often driven less by pure financial concerns than by slow permitting processes that can delay or stop new infrastructure. Think of the 2009 stimulus, which put a record $8 billion toward high-speed rail, yet nothing has been built in America because of permitting delays — something that is holding up so many infrastructure projects around the country. 

James W. Coleman, Biden’s Approach to Climate Action Drives Energy Conflict, Not Cooperation, THE HILL, Jan. 26, 2022 (suggesting Carbon Matching Commitments as an alternative method of encouraging climate action)

Instead, government should focus on removing the permitting roadblocks that are holding up so much energy infrastructure. Easing permitting would help lower the cost of both oil and cleaner sources such as natural gas and renewables because they are often held up by the same roadblocks. As I explain in another recent op-ed:

The problem with arguments about the pace of the energy transition is that an orderly transition has two parts: first building new energy infrastructure and then restraining, and eventually retiring, older energy infrastructure.

One of the main reasons for the current crisis is that the world has gotten these two steps out of order. Governments and litigants have developed legal tools to stop new fossil fuel infrastructure. Think of the demise of the Keystone XL oil pipeline, the Jordan Cove natural gas export facility, or the Constitution gas pipeline. But we have not built enough geothermal and nuclear power, or enough new power lines to bring renewable energy to market.

In fact, the legal tools developed to stop oil and gas projects, such as expanded environmental reviews and state permitting challenges, are now used to stop the infrastructure that could bring clean energy to market. The focus on further subsidies to renewable energy is beside the point when what these maturing energy sources really need is permission to build power lines to take them to market.

James W. Coleman, How America Can Survive Ukraine War’s Gas and Oil Crisis – and Build a Stronger Energy System, FOX BUSINESS, Mar. 9, 2022

The important debates about the pace of energy transition will continue, but for now the urgent priority must be making it easier to build all kinds of energy infrastructure. That is the only way to see the return of abundant energy supplies.

Energy Tradeoffs Podcast #43: Eric Orts

Another Thursday, another EnergyTradeoffs.com podcast episode: This week, Eric Orts from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and David Spence talk about Eric’s research on “Climate Change and the Ethical Obligations of Business.”

Eric argues that major fossil fuel companies—the “carbon majors”—face a dilemma: they face an ethical imperative to address climate change but they also face a market imperative to maximize their profits. He argues that one way to address this dilemma is for the carbon majors to push governments to adopt stricter greenhouse gas regulations. If governments adopted a legal framework that adequately reduced carbon emissions, then energy companies could compete within this framework without violating their ethical imperative. Eric also argues that the investment community must accept that it is ethically bound to reduce carbon emissions and can no longer focus solely on maximizing economic returns.

The conversation builds on a working paper that Eric has written with Brian Berkey, which is titled “The Climate Imperative for Management.”

The Energy Tradeoffs Podcast can be found at the following links: 
Apple | Google

Energy Tradeoffs Podcast #41 – Sheila Olmstead

For this week’s EnergyTradeoffs.com podcast interview, we have David Spence interviewing Sheila Olmstead his colleague at the University of Texas, about Sheila’s research on “Carbon Taxes: The Evolving Conventional Wisdom.”

Sheila responds to the concern that a carbon tax would have a regressive impact on lower-income households by raising the price of energy. She explains that a carbon tax is actually less likely to have a net regressive impact on low-income households than other climate policies. Nearly all climate policies place disproportionate burdens on low-income households that spend a larger share of their income on energy. But a carbon tax produces revenue that can be used to offset or eliminate the costs it imposes on vulnerable populations. (And, of course, as I argue here on Greg Mankiw’s blog, it imposes more transparent burdens than other climate policies, which means that policymakers will be more likely to address those burdens on low-income households.)

Sheila also argues that a carbon tax would not have a major negative impact on the economy. And she argues that the negative impact of the tax on some fossil fuel sectors is a feature not a bug of a policy designed to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Sheila also argues that even if a carbon tax starts at $40 per ton, new research suggests that it should rise well beyond that. Finally, Sheila explains the controversy over whether governments that impose a carbon price should consider rolling back other climate regulations.

Sheila and David reference the Climate Leadership Council’s “Economist Statement on Carbon Dividends,” which was signed by all four former Chairs of the Federal Reserve, 27 Nobel Laureate economists, and 3,500 economists, including Sheila. 

The Energy Tradeoffs Podcast can be found at the following links: Apple | Google

Energy Tradeoffs Podcast #40 – Doug Kysar

This Thursday’s EnergyTradeoffs.com podcast is our 40th episode! It features Yale Law School’s Doug Kysar talking with University of Colorado’s Sharon Jacobs about his research on “Tort Law & Climate Litigation.”

Sharon and Doug first discuss the different types of climate litigation, including causes of action based on nuisance, arguments that the government holds the climate in trust for future generation, and claims that fossil fuel companies have misled investors and the public about the dangers of climate change. They go on to discuss the challenges of holding companies liable when greenhouse gas emissions were also caused by consumers around the world, and how that may prevent or dissuade judges from allowing these suits to go forward. Finally, they discuss the remedies that the various plaintiffs are looking for to protect them from climate harm.

The conversation builds on a 2017 article that Doug and Henry Weaver published in the Notre Dame Law Review, which was titled “Courting Disaster:  Climate Change and the Adjudication of Catastrophe.”

The Energy Tradeoffs Podcast can be found at the following links: 
Apple | Google

Energy Tradeoffs Podcast #33 – Michael Burger

Another week, another EnergyTradeoffs.com podcast episode. This week, Michael Burger of Columbia University talks with the University of Texas’s David Spence about Michael’s work on “Climate Litigation & the Green Transition.”

Michael and David talk about the variety of lawsuits that have been brought to try and hold fossil fuel companies responsible for the costs of climate change. (A chart collecting and organizing the wide variety of these cases can be found here.) Michael and David discuss the difficulty of finding just some companies liable for global climate change caused by many companies around the world. They also describe the possibility that climate change could be attributed to the consumers that burn fossil fuels rather than the companies that sell the fuels and how plaintiffs could draw analogies to lawsuits over tobacco, opioids, and guns.

The conversation builds on some of Michael’s recently published research including co-authored papers titled “The Status of Climate Change Litigation: A Global Review,” and “The Law and Science of Climate Change Attribution.”

The Energy Tradeoffs Podcast can be found at the following links: 
Apple | Google

Energy Tradeoffs Podcast #22 – Leah Stokes

Happy new year! For this week’s EnergyTradeoffs.com podcast interview, we have David Spence interviewing Leah Stokes, from the University of California – Santa Barbara about her research on “The Politics of Technology Transitions.”

Leah and David discuss politically sustainable methods of accomplishing an energy transition, focusing on Leah’s research on the history of policies supporting renewable and zero-carbon technologies. She traces a trajectory for transition that begins with subsidies to nurture new technologies until they are politically potent enough to take on incumbent industries. Leah and David also discuss Texas’s support for solar and wind power.

The discussion builds on three papers that Leah has recently published with co-authors: “The political logics of clean energy transitions,” “Politics in the U.S. energy transition: Case studies of solar, wind biofuels and electric vehicles policy,” and “Renewable Energy Policy Design and Framing Influence Public Support in the United States.”

The Energy Tradeoffs Podcast can be found at the following links: Apple | Google

Energy Tradeoffs Podcast #13 – Eisen & Welton

In this week’s EnergyTradeoffs.com podcast interview, the University of Richmond’s Joel Eisen and the University of South Carolina’s Shelley Welton talk with David Spence about their research on “Net Metering & the Value of Distributed Solar Generation.”

David, Joel, and Shelley discuss hot-button questions about net-metering, which effectively pays homeowners with rooftop solar the retail price for the electricity that they provide to the grid. This price is higher than that received by other power generators. Net metering offers environmental benefits but imposes costs on other electricity users. David kicks off the discussion by addressing the common question whether net-metering is regressive and segues into a discussion of the broad array of studies on the effects of net metering.

The interview builds on Joel & Shelley’s just-published article in the Harvard Environmental Law Review, which is titled “Clean Energy Justice: Charting an Emerging Agenda.”

The Energy Tradeoffs Podcast can be found at the following links: 
Apple | Google

Comparing Candidates’ Climate Plans

Tonight, CNN will air seven hours of back-to-back townhalls from the ten top Democratic candidates on their climate plans. So far coverage of these plans has focused on initiatives that would require Congress to pass new laws, such as various versions of the “The Green New Deal,” proposals to take over or clean up the power sector, and plans to spend trillions fighting climate change. None of these proposals would pass the Senate in anything like their proposed form.

If you want to understand what the candidates would actually do on climate, you should focus on three things:

  • How they would change federal permitting of oil and gas extraction and transport;
  • How much they hope to spend on climate change; and
  • How they approach tradeoffs between climate regulation and the economy.

Here’s a guide to what the candidates have said on these issues and the key questions that should be asked of their plans in coming months.

  • How Candidates Would Change Federal Oil & Gas Permitting

By far the most important question for the candidates on climate change is how they would use existing presidential authority—particularly through executive orders. The candidates can be held to these promises because they don’t require any action from Congress.

By contrast, all the candidates’ proposals for legislation would need to be passed by the Senate, which currently has a Republican majority. Even if the Democrats somehow gained a Senate majority next year, they would still need to win over moderate Democrats such as Joe Manchin who famously won his seat by shooting President Obama’s cap-and-trade bill to advertise his opposition to climate regulation. There are no such obstacles to executive authority so the most important question for candidates is how they’d use it.

The most important executive action proposed to date is Vice President Biden’s plan to ban “new oil and gas permitting on public land and water” by executive order on his first day in office. This would have three dramatic effects:

  1. It would ban new oil and gas leases across all federal land, including centers of the energy industry such as the Gulf of Mexico.
  2. It would ban new drilling on existing leases, because every new oil and gas well needs a permit.
  3. It would ban new oil and gas pipelines from Canada and to Mexico, because these require a federal permit. It would ban new liquefied natural gas exports to Europe and Asia. And it could even ban new domestic pipelines, because even intra-state pipelines typically cross federal streams and rivers, which a fully comprehensive permitting ban would forbid.

So Biden’s ban would entirely shut down the oil and gas industry on public lands. And it would choke off the private energy industry by cutting off the new pipelines and gas export facilities that it needs to get its products to market.

The argument for this ban is that the world needs to leave oil and gas in the ground to meet its goals of limiting climate change to 2 degrees Celsius. No major oil producer has ever considered shutting in an economic resource of this size—the United States is the world’s largest producer of oil and gas and is in the middle of history’s biggest oil boom—so this would be a truly dramatic commitment to climate action.

The argument against Biden’s ban is that there are far less economically damaging ways to cut U.S. carbon emissions. As I explain in this new op-ed, this ban would cause serious economic pain to Americans. And a ban on new fossil fuel transport would cut off U.S. gas more than oil—oil can easily be shipped by rail, truck, barge, or tanker but gas can only be shipped on pipelines or as liquefied natural gas. And U.S. gas exports are bringing huge environmental benefits to the world by replacing dirtier fuel sources in places with air quality problems, so Biden’s ban could damage the global environment.

Here’s a chart of the Democratic candidates climate policies, ordered by their current standing in national polls. (This is drawn from the candidates websites and their responses to questions here and here.) As you can see, many of the top candidates also support a ban on federal oil and gas leasing, but many have not said whether, like Biden, they would ban all new permitting—including new wells on old leases and new international and domestic pipelines. This is the single most important issue for the candidates to discuss in tonight’s town halls and it should be the focus of savvy reporters’ questions moving forward.

I am keeping this chart updated as candidates and climate plans evolve. (Last Update 3/1/2020)

  • How Much Candidates Would Spend on Climate Change

Although new spending requires congressional action, Congress must regularly reach agreement with the President to fund the federal government, which gives a new President some leverage to spend money on his or her priorities. The Democratic candidates have widely varying goals on climate spending, from Mayor Buttigieg’s plan to spend $25 Billion per year on green research & development to Senator Sanders plan to spend $16.3 Trillion to transform the energy economy.

To understand those massive numbers, let’s put them in context. There are 128 million American households. So Mayor Buttigieg is planning to spend $219 per household per year and Senator Sanders is planning to spend $127,344 per household. Vice President Biden’s plan to spend $1.7 trillion would be $13,281 per household.

Another way to put those numbers in context would be to look at the magnitude of the climate harm they are trying to avoid. There are many estimates of the harm from climate change, but last year’s Nobel Prize winner said the present value of that harm is about $25 trillion and that optimal climate regulation could lower that cost by about $10 trillion. The U.S. estimates that it will experience 7-23% of the cost of climate change, so very, very roughly speaking, optimal climate regulation could save the U.S. a couple trillion dollars.

It would be helpful to hear more about how the candidates will prioritize their climate and environmental spending. If Congress will only give them so much money, would they prioritize spending it on research & development, on climate change projects abroad, or would they consider other environmental issues such as improving air quality and removing lead from the water and soil? This should be a secondary focus of reporters’ questions.

  • How Candidates Would Balance Climate Regulation and the Economy

So far, the candidates have said little about how they would balance their climate and economic goals, in part because media coverage has focused on the Green New Deal, which asserts that there is no tradeoff between environmental and economic goals. But a new president would make countless decisions on how much to cut greenhouse gas emissions from cars, from power plants, and from industrial sources using existing regulatory authority. So we need to know what the candidates will do when their economic and environmental goals come into conflict.

As I explain in this podcast with UCLA’s Ann Carlson, the fundamental innovation of the Green New Deal is that it promises to achieve environmental and economic goals simultaneously. It will remove 100% of greenhouse gas emissions from the power sector in ten years. And it will “guarantee[] a job with a family-sustaining wage, adequate family and medical leave, paid vacations, and retirement security to all people of the United States.” What it doesn’t say is what it will do when those goals come into conflict.

There are many possible ways to manage tradeoffs between the environment and the economy. Historically, environmental laws have often mandated the cleanest technology that is “available” or “demonstrated.” And government regulators have interpreted those standards as requiring that industry cut emissions as much as it can without risking plant closures or job losses.

Another way to manage environmental and economic tradeoffs is with carbon pricing: a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade system. These systems make polluters pay for their greenhouse gas emissions. But if a product is so valuable to society that consumers are willing to pay the cost of manufacturing it plus its environmental cost, then they can still purchase it.

Almost all the candidates have said they support the Green New Deal, but they should be asked how they will balance their climate and economic goals. Will they use traditional standards that asks the fossil fuel industry to clean up but doesn’t shut it down? Or do they think that industries should only survive if they can pay the price of their carbon emissions? Or, like Vice President Biden, do they think that some industries should be shut down regardless of the cost? These questions arise every day for climate regulators so reporters should ask the candidates how they will manage these energy tradeoffs.

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