U.S. House Energy and Commerce (E&C) Committee majority leaders should seek bipartisan efforts from members to tackle climate risks, said U.S. Reps. Greg Walden (R-OR) and John Shimkus (R-IL) last week.
The Republican lawmakers in a Feb. 13 letter said it’s imperative that America’s innovators develop next-generation technologies to improve the environment, create jobs and provide a healthy environment and they warned committee leaders against siding with their party on “costly and harmful” proposals.
“These are not mutually exclusive principles, and they are embedded in our approach to confronting climate risks. Let us work on them together,” Reps. Walden and Shimkus wrote E&C Committee Chairman Frank Pallone, Jr. (D-NJ) and U.S. Rep. Paul Tonko (D-NY), chairman of the E&C Subcommittee on Environment and Climate Change.
Both Reps. Walden and Shimkus, who serve in GOP leadership positions on the E&C Committee, wrote their letter following one of numerous E&C Committee climate change hearings. Many members on both sides of the aisle during the recent Feb. 6 hearing expressed interest in working together to find commonsense, bipartisan solutions to address climate risks, according to the lawmakers’ joint Feb. 14 statement.
“As we made clear during the hearing, there is broad bipartisan agreement that prudent steps should be taken to address current and future climate risks,” according to their letter. “What will be crucial going forward is rigorous examination of the costs, effectiveness, and economic impacts of any such policy steps proposed to address these risks. And we hope you will be open to scrutiny of these policies.”
Reps. Walden and Shimkus pointed out that Democrats on Feb. 7 introduced a bicameral resolution for the federal government to establish the Green New Deal, H.Res. 109 / S.Res. 59, which would call for a 10-year plan that moves U.S. power generation to 100-percent, zero-emission energy sources, among numerous other provisions. H.Res. 109 is supported by 68 Democratic cosponsors, while S.Res. 59 has garnered 11 Democratic cosponsors. No GOP members currently support either resolution.
At the same time, the E&C Committee is among several committees in the U.S. House of Representatives that are considering the resolution, while the U.S. Senate version is under review by the U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.
Reps. Shimkus and Walden noted that the Green New Deal would minimize the realities of current American and global energy systems.
“It ignores fundamental societal needs for affordable, reliable energy,” they wrote. “In fact, the plan dismisses clean energy technologies essential for any future energy system, and ignores practical climate solutions that we should be working together to promote.”
And even though the proposal “is billed as a solution to climate change,” according to their letter, the resolution also includes “numerous unrelated, prohibitively expensive policy goals,” including government-run health care and both guaranteed income and employment.
“We have serious concerns about the potential adverse economic and employment impacts of these types of measures,” Reps. Walden and Shimkus wrote.
The lawmakers urged E&C Committee majority leaders “to avoid entertaining or resurrecting policies that have been shown to be costly and harmful to consumer and worker interests and focus instead on the bipartisan policies that lay a path of progress towards cleaner energy while ensuring the expansion of economic prosperity and opportunities for American workers.”
Such a path forward, they said, would focus on decreasing regulations, while increasing consumer access to more available, cheaper and secure energy, a combination they said would provide Americans “the freedom to innovate and design new technologies and services to make our lives better.”