House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, flanked by Rep. Garret Graves and other clean energy allies, rolled out the first tranche of GOP climate bills, intended at carbon capture, one of the tools for managing emissions. “They’re positive, they fit in a conservative mantle,” House Energy and Commerce Ranking Member Greg Walden said of the bills, which include incentives for tree planting, carbon capture and sequestration, and R&D for carbon capture technologies. “They’re not regulatory, they’re not taxes. They’re good things we all ought to be able to embrace. But that doesn’t mean everybody’s going to embrace them. And that’s fine.”
Far right groups such as Club for Growth, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and the American Energy Association criticized the effort, calling it “a slippery slope to a slightly less intrusive Green New Deal.”
“The Democrats have trained everybody to think that the only people who care about climate change are the ones who engage in hysterical alarmism or engage in real high-minded but ultimately false aspirations of ‘we’re going to decrease this much’… but they forget about the actual solutions,” said Texas Rep. Dan Crenshaw. He is leading the bill specific to carbon capture R&D.
“What we did is entirely consistent with conservative ideology,” Graves noted.
Thanks to Axios for posting links to the drafts: Trillion Trees Act; Crenshaw’s R&D bill; Carbon Capture, Utilization and Storage Innovation Act; and the tax credit bill. (Once the measures are officially introduced, you can find the full text and cosponsor information on the handy website congress.gov.)