Over the past few weeks, climate change has become the focus of the Democrat presidential primary race. Most serious candidates have released a climate plan and CNN held a 7 hour town hall style meeting devoted to the topic.
Compared with the non existent climate position of President Trump all the Democrat positions are ambitious and far reaching. Even without the contrast to the Trump strategy there are key themes that echo through the proposals from all the major candidates.
The starting point for all plans is commitment to the Paris agreement and its key target of keeping warming to below 1.5 degrees C. This means achieving significant emissions reductions by 2030 and net zero emissions by 2050. To meet this timetable, transformation of the power generation will need to lead the way with electrification of the transport sector not far behind.
All the major Democrat candidates have publicly signed on to the 2050 Paris target and will seek to eliminate coal and gas from US power plants and gasoline from its vehicle fleet. Compensation is a common theme – both for displaced fossil fuel industry workers and members of communities who have been the historic victims of these industries. In a sign of how far things have moved since the days of the Obama administration, the “all of the above” approach to the power sector has transitioned into a debate on whether nuclear power is in or out and the suggestion that gas can be used as a bridge fuel has been replaced by plans by some candidates, most notably Senator Warren, to ban fracking.
An important area of divergence, which will no doubt get more scrutiny when the debate moves beyond the primary stage, are differences in the expected costs, the proportion to be made directly from the federal treasury and how the various plans will be paid for.
Unlike the ALP position at the last Australian election (1), the Democrat candidates are currently happy to talk about costs. Even the most centrist candidate Joe Biden is promising to spend US$1.7 trillion of public money in a US$5 trillion plan which contemplates tax incentives to promote private, state and local investment. A mix of public and private funding is a common funding mechanism among the candidates – an approach endorsed in the US$9 trillion plan released several months ago by the now ex candidate Jay Inslee who retains his position as the notional Democrat leader in climate policy development.
In funding terms, the Sanders plan (2) is an outlier – at US$16.3 trillion it is clearly the most expensive and also the only one that excludes significant private investment. The full US$16.3 trillion will come directly from the public purse. A direct consequence of this is that the federal government will expand its existing Bureau of Land Management hydropower operations into wind and solar generation as well as battery storage. Under this plan, the US government will own and operate much of the nation’s generation capacity with an expectation that as a not-for-profit, the public will see markedly lower power costs. While the plan has attracted criticism by rejecting technologies endorsed by the IPCC, such as nuclear and carbon capture, it has attracted a lot of publicity and is not unsurprisingly popular among progressives. For the historically minded, the Sanders plan looks a lot like a rerun of the 1930’s battle that pitted FDR and the Tennessee Valley Authority against Wendall Wilkie and the Commonwealth and Southern over the 1935 Public Utility Holding Company Act. A comparison, one suspects, sits well with the Sanders team.
So where will the candidates get the money from? The various plans provide some answers – in part, common “go to” sources like increased taxes and reduced unemployment benefits from the creation of millions of new, high paying jobs as well as health savings from cleaner air and water. These types of calculations have been used before – the former a common trickle down benefit of policies like the recent Republican tax cuts and the latter as a standard EPA calculus in any number of new regulations.
More specifically all the plans seek to make the rich and the guilty pay. Taxes for corporations and the wealthy will be increased, including by the repeal of the recent Trump tax cuts. There is strong support for targeting the fossil fuel industry with increased fees and litigation to extract payment for past damage. Perhaps echoing the 2008 Obama remark about bankrupting coal plant owners it seems the fossil fuel industry is to fund its own demise.
On climate policy it seems clear that no candidate is seeking an advantage through a more centrist, less ambitious, lower spending position that could be pitched as more electable in the general election. Candidates who may have taken this route have mostly dropped out and those seeking differentiation from the pack, like Bernie Sanders, are in fact going in the opposite direction. While climate is currently providing fewer sparks among the candidates than healthcare and immigration the position being staked out by all the Democrat candidates mean there will be a very sharp contrast in the run off with President Trump.
