Can the US reach Biden’s climate goal without the CEPP?
Last week, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) finally stopped playing games and said that he will not vote for a budget reconciliation bill that contains the Clean Electricity Performance Program (CEPP).
You can read my interview with Sen. Tina Smith (D-MN) for more on the CEPP and this post to understand why it is so centrally important to serious climate policy. I won’t get into all those arguments again. Suffice it to say, it’s a good policy and losing it is bummer.
Insofar as Manchin has offered any reason for killing the CEPP, it is an alleged concern over “using taxpayer dollars to pay private companies to do things they’re already doing.”
But that is just incorrect.
Utilities are not “already doing” what the CEPP requires, i.e., increasing their share of clean energy 4 percentage points year-on-year, every year. Only a tiny handful of the nation’s thousands of utilities are on that trajectory.
The sector as a whole is slowly decarbonizing, but the whole point of the policy is to accelerate the process to meet US carbon targets.
Manchin knows that. It’s precisely what he’s trying to prevent. He told CNN flat out, “I'm not going to sit back and let anyone accelerate whatever the market's changes are doing.”
Why not? Well, he wants to keep fossil fuel power plants open, which is incompatible with Biden’s publicly stated goal of 50 to 52 percent carbon reductions from 2005 levels by 2030.
Manchin is standing up for local fossil fuel interests (including his own) against the president, 49 of his colleagues in the Democratic caucus, a majority of legislators in the House, a majority of voters, and even a majority of West Virginia voters.
He also wants to slash the child tax credit. He’s just a jerk. It is what it is.
At this point, it’s unclear what will and won’t survive into the final Build Back Better Act (or whether there will be a final bill at all). Reports are that staffers are scrambling to find ways to make up the lost emission reductions through other policies.
The question is, how big of a hole are they trying to fill? How big a hit is it to lose the CEPP?
A few analyses released in the past week are helpful in getting our heads around this.
Energy Innovation says the loss of CEPP could cost the bill up to 35% of its emission reductions
The first is from research firm Energy Innovation, which uses its Energy Policy Simulator to determine how much emissions would be reduced by the policies in the House Democrats’ version of the Build Back Better Act and the bipartisan infrastructure bill that was passed by the Senate over the summer.
Obviously, predicting circumstances a decade hence is a fraught undertaking. Energy
