Although the election of Donald Trump came before this month’s United Nations climate talks in Baku, Azerbaijan, Biden administration officials and prominent Democrats gave speech after speech promising that the nation’s transition to renewable energy would continue. White House representatives touted the economic benefits of the billions of dollars in climate-related subsidies in Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, and officials from California and Washington pledged that individual states would continue the march toward net-zero emissions.
But the US officials with the most power over the country’s energy future did not arrive in Baku until the end of the first week of the UN conference, known as COP29. When Trump assumes the presidency in January, these five Republican members of Congress will enjoy unified control of the federal government, giving them wide latitude to write (or repeal) laws that will shape the nation’s climate future.
In a rousing press conference held just a few hundred feet from where international negotiators spent a week hammering out a transition away from fossil fuels, the GOP delegation delivered an aggressive message in support of oil, gas and even coal – all while framed by signs that say “United Nations Climate Change.” (The Congressional delegation is officially bipartisan, but the two Democratic Representatives in Baku did not attend the press conference.)
U.S. Representative August Pfluger, who represents Texas’ oil-rich Permian Basin and leads the GOP’s COP delegation, proposed that the U.S. should once again leave the 2015 Paris climate accord. As the leader of the House Energy Committee, Pfluger also emphasized the power of the incoming Congress to repeal key pieces of Biden’s climate policy (policies that were passed in part to bring the US within reach of the Paris Agreement’s goal of limiting global warming to less than 2 degrees Celsius). The press conference came across as a direct rebuke to the message delivered by the official US delegation.
“Last week, people in the United States overwhelmingly supported President Donald Trump’s promise to restore America’s energy dominance and restore the world to energy expansion,” he said.
The four other Republicans joining Pfluger on stage echoed this message with a grab bag of pro-fossil fuel positions. Troy Balderson, who represents a part of Ohio with abundant shale gas, mounted a defense of fracking. Morgan Griffith, a veteran representative from a coal-rich area in West Virginia, expressed support for so-called clean coal power equipped with carbon capture technology, as well as natural gas extracted from coal beds.
Jake Bittle
“An area that has natural resources should not be penalized for not looking at the opportunity to have a cleaner world,” Griffith said. This message echoes Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev’s statement to world leaders at the start of COP29, in which he called his country’s oil resources a “gift from God” and chastised the US media for referring to Azerbaijan as a “petrostate” has, since the USA itself is the world’s largest producer of fossil fuels.
The Biden administration and elected Democrats have argued at COP and elsewhere that the Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA, is in one sense too big to fail — in part because the hundreds of billions of dollars in manufacturing projects and tax breaks it unleashed flow to both Republicans and Democrats (and, in the case of the new manufacturing plants, are flows disproportionately into GOP congressional districts). Indeed, more than a dozen House Republicans have the room’s leader had already askedSpeaker of the House Mike Johnson, not to gut the law.
But none of those representatives were present in Baku, and the tone adopted by Pfluger and his colleagues was decidedly more hostile to the core components of Biden’s landmark bill. Although the bill was passed after US inflation had already peaked, Pfluger suggested that the Inflation Reduction Act’s renewable energy provisions contributed to the rising prices that angered US voters.
“The United States of America, like many other countries around the world, has seen this crazy inflation,” he said. “Decreasing that cost, we believe, has a very strong tie to energy – which unlocks affordable, reliable baseload capacity. If there are pieces and parts of the IRA that are not compatible with that, that will be looked at.”
Nevertheless, the delegation stopped short of advocating for a wholesale rollback of Biden energy policies.
“If there are pieces of the IRA that will support lower energy costs, help Americans, help our partners and allies gain access to affordable, reliable energy, then I bet those will stay in place,” Pfluger said.
The primary objective of this year’s COP is around develop an agreement on international climate aidwhereby rich countries will agree to transfer hundreds of billions or even trillions of dollars to poorer parts of the world to speed up their energy transitions and make them resilient to climate-driven disasters. During his first term as president, Trump proposed eliminating these kinds of obligations. When Grist asked Pfluger if he would support a renewed call from Trump to cut off this foreign aid, Pfluger did not rule it out. He also appeared to suggest that future climate aid would be possible to support Republican energy priorities.
“When it comes to climate finance, if something is inconsistent or not in support of lowering energy costs while reducing emissions, then you can bet this Congress is going to look at it,” he said.
After the press conference ended, Pfluger and his colleagues were mobbed by reporters from various countries before leaving for an event where they support for nuclear energy. The US State Department, which coordinates the country’s delegation in Baku, did not respond to a request for comment on the congressmen’s statements before publication.
