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About True Lawyer
Founded by Shymane Robinson, True Lawyer is a Chicago-based real estate and trademark law firm serving clients nationwide. True Lawyer help transform the communities by helping investors accumulate, protect, and transfer wealth. In an age where Black wealth is reported to be $0 by 2053, True Lawyer has established it self as the go-to outlet for affordable flat rate legal services ensuring everyone has access to legal representation when acquiring real estate, starting a business, protecting their business, or transferring wealth.
Accumulating, Protecting, and Transferring wealth is the keystone to shorten the wealth gap in the black community. True Lawyer is one of few law firms that offer flat rate services and make legal representation accessible to clients who do not have deep pockets or qualify for pro bono services. Learn more at TrueLawyer.com
About Shymane Robinson
Shymane Robinson was raised in Chicago, IL. She is an accomplished attorney and real estate investor, and is passionate about helping clients create wealth through real estate and trademark law as it’s the keystone to building wealth. As a real estate investor and small business owner, she understands the importance of purchasing real estate or starting a business as the first step to establishing wealth.
Esteemed African-American Attorney, Shymane Robinson, has launched True Lawyer – a real estate and trademark law firm that helps transform Black communities by helping investors accumulate, protect, and transfer wealth. She started the law firm with both her best friend and sister… proving that women can successfully collaborate in business!
Shymane says that she decided to start her own law practice after her professor advised her she would have to choose between being a great lawyer or mother. “There was no way I could be force to choose between my career or being a great mother,” she comments. “It was at that moment that I knew big law was not for her and that ownership matter.”
With three years under her belt as the leader of True Lawyer law firm, Shymane has grown a widely successful national law firm that focuses on transforming communities by helping investors. She defines investors as anyone who spends money with the expectation of achieving a profit or future advantage.
In honor of Women’s Small Business month, her firm has made the official announcement to give away four free federal trademark applications; a value of over $1,000 each to help women-owned businesses protect their brand. One winner will be announced every Friday starting October 9, 2020.
Please follow the brand on Instagram @TrueLawyer_ to receive more information about this giveaway.
About True Lawyer
Founded by Shymane Robinson, True Lawyer is a Chicago-based real estate and trademark law firm serving clients nationwide. True Lawyer help transform the communities by helping investors accumulate, protect, and transfer wealth. In an age where Black wealth is reported to be $0 by 2053, True Lawyer has established it self as the go-to outlet for affordable flat rate legal services ensuring everyone has access to legal representation when acquiring real estate, starting a business, protecting their business, or transferring wealth.
Accumulating, Protecting, and Transferring wealth is the keystone to shorten the wealth gap in the black community. True Lawyer is one of few law firms that offer flat rate services and make legal representation accessible to clients who do not have deep pockets or qualify for pro bono services. Learn more at TrueLawyer.com
About Shymane Robinson
Shymane Robinson was raised in Chicago, IL. She is an accomplished attorney and real estate investor, and is passionate about helping clients create wealth through real estate and trademark law as it’s the keystone to building wealth. As a real estate investor and small business owner, she understands the importance of purchasing real estate or starting a business as the first step to establishing wealth.
In the 2000 US presidential election, the Democratic candidate got half a million more votes than the Republican. The Democrat lost. Sixteen years later, a similar thing happened again. In the US, if you run for president, it does not actually matter how many people in the country vote for you. What matters instead is an arcane system for selecting America’s head of state called the Electoral College.
The Electoral College is the reason the US has something called “swing states,” and it’s the reason those places get to decide the future of the country. It’s the reason presidential candidates rarely campaign in the country’s biggest cities. More recently, it’s also the reason that Republican candidates have been able to eke out victories in the presidential election without actually getting the most votes.
The Electoral College makes some Americans’ votes more powerful than others. In fact, that’s part of the reason we have it to begin with; in the country’s early years, the Electoral College helped give the votes of Southern white people more weight than the votes of Northerners. The idea at its core — that certain votes simply matter more than others — is baked into the American tradition. In the 2020 election, it may decide the winner.
Millions turn to Vox each month to understand what’s happening in the news, from the coronavirus crisis to a racial reckoning to what is, quite possibly, the most consequential presidential election of our lifetimes. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower you through understanding. But our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources. Even when the economy and the news advertising market recovers, your support will be a critical part of sustaining our resource-intensive work. If you have already contributed, thank you. If you haven’t, please consider helping everyone make sense of an increasingly chaotic world: Contribute today from as little as $3.
It turns out that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) may still be reeling from that episode, when President Trump’s refusal to admit he was wrong ballooned into an actual scandal at one of the nation’s premier scientific institutions.
The New York Times reported this week that NOAA’s acting chief scientist, Craig McLean, who called out political interference during the ordeal, was removed from his post this month when he asked a new political appointee to acknowledge the agency’s scientific integrity guidelines. The guidelines prohibit manipulating scientific research for political ends.
The appointee, Erik Noble, a former White House adviser, was not pleased, according to the Times:
The request prompted a sharp response from Dr. Noble. “Respectfully, by what authority are you sending this to me?” he wrote, according to a person who received a copy of the exchange after it was circulated within NOAA.
Mr. McLean answered that his role as acting chief scientist made him responsible for ensuring that the agency’s rules on scientific integrity were followed.
The following morning, Dr. Noble responded. “You no longer serve as the acting chief scientist for NOAA,” he informed Mr. McLean, adding that a new chief scientist had already been appointed. “Thank you for your service.”
McLean is still at NOAA, but he’s been replaced as chief scientist by Ryan Maue, a former research meteorologist at the Cato Institute.
It makes sense that scientific integrity was front of mind for McLean when dealing with a political appointee. NOAA in general and McLean in particular have been forced to police the line between science and politics ever since Hurricane Dorian in 2019 galloped toward the Gulf Coast. Trump tweeted at the time that Alabama was one of several states “most likely” to be struck. The National Weather Service’s Birmingham, Alabama, office quickly responded that the state was emphatically not in the path of the storm.
In addition to Florida - South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama, will most likely be hit (much) harder than anticipated. Looking like one of the largest hurricanes ever. Already category 5. BE CAREFUL! GOD BLESS EVERYONE!
Alabama will NOT see any impacts from #Dorian. We repeat, no impacts from Hurricane #Dorian will be felt across Alabama. The system will remain too far east. #alwx
A few days later, McLean defended NOAA’s scientists, including researchers at the National Weather Service, and openly decried the interference from the White House in a statement.
It’s rare for a career employee at a government agency to publicly challenge political staff, which may be why a White House appointee at NOAA was so keen to remove him. And while the whole affair may seem silly, it has consequences beyond bruising the president’s ego.
Political interference, or even the appearance thereof, undermines the credibility of an agency like NOAA whose research is used to make life-or-death decisions, like who needs to get out of the path of a dangerous storm.
Now, even before an election, just as Hurricane Zeta, the 27th named storm of the Atlantic hurricane season, has left 2 million without power along the Gulf Coast, political staff are sidelining scientists at an agency tasked with staying ahead of natural disasters. And it’s likely more manipulation of science is in store if Trump wins a second term in office.
The Trump administration’s repeated attacks on scientific agencies weaken public trust
When his words didn’t match reality, President Trump tried to make reality match his words.
He responded with multiple tweets defending his statement that Alabama was in the path of Hurricane Dorian. He pressured his Homeland Security adviser to release a statement validating him. NOAA, the parent agency of the National Weather Service, issued a curt statement downplaying comments from its Birmingham station. Then, in the Oval Office, President Trump infamously presented a map of Hurricane Dorian’s path, but the forecast was doctored with a black line to include Alabama.
Altering an official weather forecast is actually illegal for a government employee, though it’s not clear who actually drew the black line on the map (it’s not clear whether it was drawn with a Sharpie, either).
In a September 10, 2019, statement, McLean criticized the decision to use NOAA’s press office to echo Trump and undercut the National Weather Service. “My understanding is that this intervention to contradict the forecaster was not based on science but on external factors including reputation and appearance, or simply put, political,” he wrote. “If the public cannot trust our information, or we debase our forecaster’s warnings and products, that specific danger arises.”
The inspector general of the US Department of Commerce, which oversees NOAA, agreed. A report from the inspector general this summer found that NOAA’s credibility “took a serious hit” when top officials at the agency contradicted the National Weather Service’s Birmingham office:
The Statement undercut the NWS’s forecasts and potentially undercut public trust in NOAA’s and the NWS’s science and the apolitical nature of that science. By requiring NOAA to issue an unattributed statement related to a then-5-day-old tweet, while an active hurricane continued to exist off the east coast of the United States, the Department displayed poor judgment in exercising its authority over NOAA.
But the political pressure on NOAA was mounting before Sharpiegate and has been aimed at influencing the science that drives policy, particularly around climate change.
Since Trump took office, NOAA has not had a Senate-confirmed leader. Currently, Neil Jacobs, the acting Under Secretary of Commerce for Oceans and Atmosphere, is serving as NOAA’s interim administrator. Meanwhile, Trump has repeatedly made his disdain for climate change science clear. Shortly after taking office, federal agencies began removing references to climate change from their websites.
For the most part, scientists at NOAA continued doing their jobs but have collided with the White House at times. NOAA is one of the contributing agencies to the National Climate Assessment, a report mandated by Congress to assess the impacts of climate change on the United States. After the last installment highlighted the economic costs of climate change, Trump said he didn’t believe the findings — likely because they undermined his administration’s policies to boost fossil fuels and relax greenhouse gas restrictions.
Since the report is foundational to how the government plans for the future, the Trump administration is aiming to alter it during a second term by “removing longtime authors of the climate assessment and adding new ones who challenge the degree to which warming is occurring, the extent to which it is caused by human activities and the danger it poses to human health, national security and the economy,” according to the New York Times.
The Trump administration has already pursued a similar tack at the Environmental Protection Agency. The EPA ousted numerous independent scientific advisers and instead brought in researchers from the industries it’s supposed to regulate. The agency also placed additional restrictions on what kinds of research could be used to develop environmental regulations, making it easier to roll back restrictions and harder to come up with new rules to govern hazards to air, water, and soil.
And now we’re also seeing this manipulation play out in the Covid-19 pandemic. The White House has repeatedly interfered with and undermined guidance from public health agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Because Trump talked them up, the FDA granted emergency use authorizations to therapies like hydroxychloroquine and convalescent plasma despite weak evidence for their effectiveness.
The net result of all this manipulation is a loss of public trust, making it less likely that people will adhere to guidelines to protect them from disease or environmental dangers. And with the science itself being twisted to meet political ends, dirtier air and water due to weaker regulations, communities left more vulnerable in a disaster, as well as unready and risky approaches being deployed to deal with the Covid-19 pandemic may result.
The United States is in the middle of one of the most consequential presidential elections of our lifetimes. It’s essential that all Americans are able to access clear, concise information on what the outcome of the election could mean for their lives, and the lives of their families and communities. That is our mission at Vox. But our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources. Even when the economy and the news advertising market recovers, your support will be a critical part of sustaining our resource-intensive work. If you have already contributed, thank you. If you haven’t, please consider helping everyone understand this presidential election: Contribute today from as little as $3.
A solar photovoltaic power plant farm installation in New York. | Lev Radin/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images
A detailed road map for building a US energy innovation ecosystem.
“Innovation” is a fraught concept in climate politics. For years, it was used as a kind of fig leaf to cover for delaying tactics, as though climate progress must wait on some kind of technological breakthrough or miracle. That left climate advocates with an enduring suspicion toward the notion, and hostility toward those championing it.
Lately, though, that has changed. Arguably, some Republicans in Congress are still using innovation as a way to create the illusion of climate concern (without any conflict with fossil fuel companies). But among people serious about the climate crisis, it is now widely acknowledged that hitting the world’s ambitious emissions targets will require decreasing resource consumption, aggressively deploying existing technologies, and an equally aggressive push to improve those technologies and develop nascent ones.
There is legitimate disagreement about the ratio — about how far and how fast existing, mature technologies can go — but there is virtually no analyst who thinks the current energy innovation system in the US is adequate to decarbonize the country by midcentury. It needs reform.
What kind of reform? Here, as in other areas of climate policy, there is increasing alignment across the left-of-center spectrum. Two recent reports illustrate this.
The first — a report so long they’re calling it a book — is from a group of scholars at the Columbia University Center on Global Energy Policy (CGEP), led by energy scholar Varun Sivaram; it is the first in what will be three volumes on what CGEP is calling a “National Energy Innovation Mission.” The second is from the progressive think tank Data for Progress, on “A Progressive Climate Innovation Agenda,” accompanied by a policy brief and some polling.
Both reports accept the International Energy Agency (IEA) conclusion that “roughly half of the reductions that the world needs to swiftly achieve net-zero emissions in the coming decades must come from technologies that have not yet reached the market today.” There are reasons to think this might be an overly gloomy assessment, but whether it’s 20 percent or 50 percent, aggressive innovation will be required to pull it off.
Both reports set out to put some meat on the bones of a clean energy innovation agenda. And they both end up in roughly the same place, with roughly the same set of policy recommendations. With a bigger team and more resources, the CGEP report is inevitably bulkier and more comprehensive, so I’ll mostly follow along with it, but the Data for Progress report adds a few key elements that we’ll touch on below.
There are five basic reforms involved in developing an innovation system that can decarbonize the US by midcentury: It needs to be bigger, better targeted, broader, more stable, and more equitable. But the politics of clean energy innovation matter too, and so we’ll also look at the prospects for a potential President Joe Biden administration.
US public spending on energy innovation is paltry
Today, the federal government spends less than $9 billion annually on energy innovation, “less than a quarter of what it invests in health innovation and less than a tenth of what it invests in defense innovation,” says CGEP.
Roughly 80 percent of the money goes to the Department of Energy; the rest goes to a grab bag of agencies including the Department of Agriculture and NASA.
US energy research and development (R&D) spending spiked after the 1970s oil crisis, but when oil prices fell and President Reagan came along, it plunged, and as a percentage of US GDP, it has never recovered.
And just as public R&D spending “crowds in” private investment in a virtuous cycle, the loss of funding leads to a vicious cycle. “Starting in 1984,” CGEP writes, “private funding for energy RD&D [research, design, and development] and US energy patents declined for the next two decades.”
Still today, what private investment there is in clean energy is overwhelmingly focused on mature technologies that are market competitive. In 2019, just 10 percent of private investment in clean energy went to innovative companies; the bulk was financing for projects like wind and solar farms, from established market players.
And venture capital isn’t stepping up either. “In 2019, VCs invested just $1 billion into US energy companies,” CGEP writes, “compared with about $20 billion for health care deals and $70 billion for information technology firms.”
In 2015, the US made a promise to the world, as part of the international Mission Innovation compact, to raise energy R&D spending to $12.8 billion annually by 2021. It remains billions of dollars short.
As IEA’s report makes clear, even the Mission Innovation target is grossly inadequate to the task. The US is only about 15 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. One of its primary roles in the climate fight must be putting its incredible intellectual and engineering might behind innovation, to drive down the costs of technologies other countries need to get on a sustainable path.
“The single most important thing that the United States can do to advance progress on climate change,” Sivaram says, “is launch a national energy innovation mission.”
UCS
The US energy innovation budget should triple or quadruple
One of the primary lessons CGEP draws from historical examples of government R&D is that “scale matters.” It cites defense and health spending, which have created expansive innovation ecosystems that encompass the entire development process, from lab to market, and are at least somewhat self-sustaining and insulated from ongoing political interference.
“Federal support for energy innovation has not attained this scale,” CGEP writes, “and as a result, enjoys neither a thriving and self-sustaining innovation ecosystem nor sufficient political independence to tolerate failures in the portfolio.” (Imagine how the health system would look if every failed drug were treated like Solyndra.)
The first order of business in creating an adequate innovation ecosystem is simply spending more money on it.
Data for Progress recommends “slightly more than a three-fold increase in R&D spending and a four-fold increase in RD&D spending by 2030.”
CGEP emphasizes a more specific near-term target: $25 billion by 2025 (roughly tripling the current budget, which would still put energy innovation at about half what the US spends on health innovation).
That target is high enough to bulk up the energy R&D portfolio, CGEP argues. It matches a bottom-up analysis of funding needs; research shows that “funding in roughly this range will translate into net economic benefits and rapid technological progress”; and it would bring US public investment in energy R&D to roughly the same percentage of GDP as China’s. At the same time, history shows that spending of that level can be profitably and economically deployed by agencies to accelerate innovation. Contrary to conservative myth, the federal government is pretty good at this.
The previously mentioned health and defense innovations ecosystems have produced dozens of products and services that have spilled over into other sectors. Defense R&D yielded semiconductors, computers, and GPS systems. Biomedical R&D produced the biotech industry. “Science supported by NIH,” CGEP writes, “underpinned every single one of the 210 new drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration from 2010 to 2016.”
Federal R&D spending works. And it draws in private capital. “It’s been shown that government R&D in clean energy technologies redirects private R&D away from fossil fuel technologies and into clean energy,” Sivaram says.
But the full potential of federal innovation spending is only unlocked at scale. That means lots more money, quickly.
Federal innovation money should be targeted at the neediest sectors
Data for Progress is blunt: “Existing innovation programs are not designed to address climate change,” but rather to boost US fossil fuel supply.
For one thing, Department of Energy (DOE) R&D spending is concentrated on the power sector, while the bulk of US emissions come from fossil fuel combustion in transportation, buildings, and industry.
What’s more, the bulk of DOE R&D spending goes to nuclear power and fossil fuels, despite the fact that the IPCC (and everyone else) expects renewable energy to be the backbone of a decarbonized energy system.
Both Data for Progress and CGEP recommend that funding priorities shift away from individual fuels, especially fossil fuels, toward energy applications with large potential emission reductions.
CGEP suggests a focus on 10 particular “technology pillars.” (In the report, each pillar is accompanied by a helpful summary of recent initiatives around it and some recommendations for new initiatives to boost it.)
It will not be enough, however, to target money at early-stage research alone.
Federal innovation money should be spread out more broadly
Too often, those who tout “innovation” seek to confine R&D money to early-stage research, as though the market will take it from there. Extensive experience and analysis shows that is false.
In fact, research shows that R&D is vital to driving technologies down the cost curve, not only in the lab stage, but when crossing the “valley of death” between lab and market and when scaling up to full market maturity. All those graphs you see of solar, wind, and battery costs falling? It’s not just scale, or “learning by doing,” that’s driving those cost reductions. The graphs rarely show it, but behind almost every new technology that reaches broad market scale there is consistent innovation-boosting policy help, at every stage.
Different policies help more during different stages, as the stylized chart below shows.
Today, public funding for innovation is overwhelmingly focused on early-stage research.
The underfunding of demonstration projects is particularly acute, since private capital is often leery of investing in high-risk projects where knowledge spillovers make it difficult to capture all the benefits. “As a result,” CGEP writes, “a yawning valley of death can swallow firms that lack the capital to demonstrate promising clean energy technologies that they have developed.”
Right now only 5 percent of federal energy R&D spending goes to demonstration projects, and most of that is for advanced nuclear. CGEP recommends that the government “fund demonstration projects across the ten technology pillars at a level of at least $5 billion per year by 2025.”
To spend this money, the government should create a central financing authority. Data for Progress recommends a national Green Bank; CGEP mentions a possible Clean Energy Deployment Administration. Either way, a central, accountable authority should dispense and track grants and loans.
And the government should join “technology push” policies focused on early research with “market pull” policies that draw demonstrated technologies into market scale. Options include “carbon pricing, clean electricity standards, fuel economy standards, targeted tax incentives, and more,” CGEP says. This will help government spread investment more broadly across the technology development curve.
The funding should also be spread more broadly across agencies and programs to exploit synergies among agencies and better protect funding from political interference. “Many other federal agencies have missions that align with advancing energy innovation,” CGEP notes. It cites the Department of Defense, NASA, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (within the Commerce Department), and the Department of Agriculture, among others.
And finally, funding should be spread across institutions, from national laboratories to universities, private sector companies, and state and local governments. Government partnerships with industry are a major feature of the German innovation system, which features 66 German Fraunhofer Institutes that focus practical research on various industrial challenges. And it is well understood that innovation proceeds faster in research “clusters,” where labs, universities, and firms work in close proximity. The federal government can work with local and regional authorities to help build those clusters.
And again, it comes back to scale. “To sustain academic, industrial, and federal laboratory complexes,” Sivaram says, “a threshold level of investment is needed across all parts of the chain, to support this interplay between R&D and manufacturing.”
Federal innovation funding should be steady and flexible
The scale of US defense and health R&D spending produces predictability — the institutions it has created are at least somewhat self-sustaining. Energy R&D, on the other hand, has been subject to continual boom and bust cycles, which inevitably disrupt research.
To scale up innovation as fast as needed, the government should “signal its long-term commitment to increasing annual energy RD&D funding over the next decade, even after reaching the target of $25 billion by 2025.” Researchers and industries need to be able to rely on it.
And agencies should rigorously collect and analyze information, to foster transparency and increase trust among policymakers and the public so that funding survives swings in politics.
Finally, innovation funding should be flexible and adaptive, based on ongoing research, forecasting, and expert opinion. If some technologies fall in cost faster (or slower) than expected, agencies should be able to course-correct and redirect funding.
“If, for example, the commercial cost of producing clean hydrogen falls rapidly over the next decade,” CGEP writes, “it could make sense to redouble investments in RD&D to use hydrogen as a feedstock to decarbonize industrial processes.” Conversely, if hydrogen proves resistant to cost declines, it might make sense to channel more money to biofuels and battery chemistries.
Steadiness and predictability are the key, though: “At a high level,” CGEP says, “policymakers must stick to their roadmap for ramping up the federal budget for energy innovation.”
Federal innovation funding should be spent equitably
The CGEP report contains several references to “inclusive economic growth” and lots of ideas for how federal partnerships with states and localities could foster it, but the Data for Progress report has a full and separate section on equity, which gathers key recommendations in one place, so let’s take a look at them.
The first and arguably most important recommendation is that federal innovation programs be explicitly redirected toward addressing the climate crisis, which crucially involves environmental justice. Energy innovation programs should “prioritize projects that improve social and economic equity, including through business models that allow for communities to lead, own, and benefit from clean energy projects,” Data for Progress writes. And it should seek to avoid exacerbating other inequitable environmental hazards in its quest to reduce emissions.
Second, Data for Progress argues that the federal government should direct at least 40 percent of climate-related investments (including those on innovation) to “disproportionately burdened communities” that have historically suffered from “systemic racism and structural inequity.”
Billie Weiss/Boston Red Sox/Getty Images
A sign reading “Climate Justice Now” is placed in front of the Citgo Sign in Kenmore Square on August 10, 2020, at Fenway Park in Boston, Massachusetts.
Third, it argues that the government should prioritize projects in communities dependent on the fossil fuel economy, which could be hard hit by a wholesale transition to clean energy. When DOE is making research grants or funding demonstration projects, it should “consider the extent to which these programs can enable communities historically dependent on fossil fuels to benefit and diversify their economies.”
Fourth, the government should bulk up workforce redevelopment efforts aimed at clean energy jobs. And fifth, it should expand international cooperation on climate initiatives that can help address global inequities.
This focus on equity throughout the innovation ecosystem, says Jake Higdon, a climate analyst at the Environmental Defense Fund and one of the authors of the Data for Progress report, is crucial to “garnering more engagement and ownership over innovation from the progressive caucus.”
The politics of clean energy innovation in 2020
Another difference between the two reports is that Data for Progress’s is explicitly framed as advice to Democrats for when and if they get power.
As it shows in its accompanying polling, this is good politics for Dems. A narrow (51 percent) majority of the public supports investing $1 trillion in green energy innovation.
Data for Progress
(Note how big the “don’t know” category is, especially among independents. There is lots of room for persuasion here.)
And larger majorities would prefer to invest in clean energy tech over more military weaponry.
Data for Progress
Bipartisan public support, Higdon says, “is all the more reason for progressives, who are concerned about the climate crisis and see it as an intersectional issue, to be engaging very deeply on setting the terms of the innovation agenda.”
CGEP, by contrast, is insistent that for public innovation spending to reach the scale, breadth, and resilience it needs, there must be a bipartisan consensus supporting it. “Any policy that is to last for decades in the United States must withstand shifts in partisan control of the presidency, the Senate, and the House of Representatives,” it writes, “not to mention periods of divided government.” It cites the Cold War consensus and the more recent consensus around biomedical research.
No such consensus has formed around energy — Reagan theatrically rejected Carter’s calls for more thoughtful energy policy — but CGEP claims the outlines of one are beginning to take shape.
“This is a pocket of resistance among congressional Republicans against the Trump administration,” Sivaram says. In each of the last four years, the Trump budget proposed significant cuts in clean energy programs, including Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy; each time, cuts were rejected. “Instead,” CGEP writes, “federal funding for clean energy RD&D has risen by about one-third during this period.”
The report also cites the American Energy Innovation Act, co-sponsored by Sens. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, a Republican, and Joe Manchin of West Virginia, a Democrat. As chair and ranking member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, they wrangled the interests of some 70 senators into a single bill that boosts R&D funding for a range of technologies and funds 17 demonstration projects. (Sivaram says he was “dismayed” when the Sierra Club and the Union of Concerned Scientists denounced the bill for directing too much funding to fossil fuel technologies.)
Caroline Brehman/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images
Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV), left, speaks to Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) during a Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee hearing on the FY2021 Interior Department budget in Washington, DC, on March 10, 2020.
There’s a bipartisan group of legislators behind the “Endless Frontier Act,” which would set up a directorate in the National Science Foundation to fund 10 technology research areas (including advanced energy) to the tune of $20 billion a year, and another bipartisan group behind the House Nuclear Energy R&D Act, which would refocus DOE’s nuclear energy program on next-gen reactors.
Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) called for a “New Manhattan Project” for clean energy research. Even Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) has hopped on board the innovation train. The Bipartisan Policy Center has an American Energy Innovation Council stocked with CEOs who support energy innovation.
It’s not so much the climate angle that draws conservative support, Sivaram says, as the economic development angle and the competition-with-China angle. And that might be enough. “The whole reason I devoted the last six months to doing this is I think it can actually happen,” he says, “and it’s not going to require a signal change in how the government works, compared with all the other climate plans.”
He acknowledges that implementing the recommendations in CGEP’s report will probably require a new presidential administration, but he insists that it “does not require a substantial change in the makeup of Congress.”
I do not share Sivaram’s optimism. CGEP’s report concludes with three recommendations for immediate action: The president should launch a National Energy Innovation Mission, Congress should increase energy RD&D funding by 30 percent in 2021, and the US should reassert its international leadership on energy innovation.
If I were a gambling man, I would bet that US conservatives will condemn any mission launched by a President Joe Biden as a wasteful government boondoggle. I would bet that, to the extent they are capable, they will deny him any major legislative victories in Congress, including a big clean energy bill. And I would bet that any attempts to reestablish US commitment to clean energy on the international stage will be dogged by Republican assurances that, should they retake power, fossil fuels will once again be in the driver’s seat.
Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images
Republican loyalties are not subtle.
The political history of the past few decades reveals that the far right’s hold on the GOP and its near-religious devotion to opposing anything Democrats do or say steamroll any glimmers of bipartisan consensus. Partisanship is stronger than any other force in US life.
Republicans may support channeling federal energy innovation money to fossil fuel companies and fossil fuel communities, but recent history suggests that they simply will not go beyond that to any perceived progressive priority. Bipartisanship, with today’s GOP, means the portion of Republican priorities that Democrats are willing to support.
But I am a pessimist! Perhaps Sivaram is right. There’s no harm in trying.
Either way, it is good to see the left side of the aisle getting serious about the details of a federal energy agenda. And it is good to see that on this subject, as in other parts of climate policy, there is substantial overlap among centrists and progressives. If Biden finds himself in the Oval Office, he will have a broadly popular and extremely detailed road map.
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Who are you?
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