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2019

Why Beto’s Climate Plan Is So ‘Surprising’

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The first 2020 presidential candidate out with a comprehensive climate-change policy is… Beto O’Rourke?

I was surprised too. The former Texas congressman, whose campaign has previously been somewhat skimpy on policy proposals, debuted a $1.5-trillion proposal on Monday meant to rapidly move the economy away from fossil fuels and slow the advance of climate change.

“We will ensure we are at net-zero greenhouse-gas emissions by the year 2050, and that we are halfway there by 2030,” said O’Rourke in a video posted to Twitter. His plan calls climate change “the greatest threat we face—one which will test our country, our democracy, and every single one of us.”

O’Rourke says his proposal is the “most ambitious climate plan in the history of the United States.” If it becomes a reality, he won’t be wrong. There are a few different ways to address climate change through federal policy. The government can try to make carbon pollution more expensive. It can try to make clean energy cheaper. And it can actually buy things: solar panels, wind turbines, wholly new energy technology, and adaptations that will help people prepare for the worsened weather to come. O’Rourke’s plan tries to do all three at once.

On his first day in office, he says, he would reverse all of Trump’s climate orders, rejoin the Paris Agreement, and order the Environmental Protection Agency to restrict air pollution from power plants and car tailpipes again. (This would make carbon pollution more expensive.) He also promise a new $200-billion R&D program to study new zero-carbon energy and industry. (This would seek to make clean energy cheap.) And he would ask Congress to cut tax breaks for oil companies, using the resulting $1.5 trillion to fund new climate-friendly infrastructure. (That’s the buying things part.)

In fact, O’Rourke promises a creative new approach to buying things. His White House would connect $500 billion in federal spending to its climate goals. The federal government already tries to “buy American”; under Beto’s plan, it will also “buy clean,” favoring steel, glass, and cement produced in a climate-friendly way. Some scholars associated with the Green New Deal have proposed similar procurement programs.

Most significantly, O’Rourke says he would ask Congress to pass a “legally enforceable standard” that would force the United States to zero out its carbon emissions by 2050. What is this “standard”? Though the proposal’s language is cleverly vague, he seems to be describing some kind of carbon tax—his exact language is “a clear price signal to the market”—that scales up as the midcentury deadline approaches.

O’Rourke’s proposal goes much further than either Trump or Obama-era policy. Take his proposed advanced energy R&D program. The United States actually has an active energy R&D program, called ARPA-E or the Advanced Research Project Agency-Energy. President Donald Trump has proposed closing ARPA-E every year since he took office, but Congress has resisted him. ARPA-E now has a budget of $366 million—a record haul for the small agency.

That all-time record is also 550 times smaller than what O’Rourke is proposing. Beto says $200 billion is “an amount equal to what we invested in our nation’s journey to the Moon,” but I think that may actually understate its ambition: In inflation-adjusted dollars, $200 billion exceeds the size of the 15-year Apollo program.

O’Rourke nearly doubled his campaign’s policy content with the proposal. His new climate plan runs to more than 2,500 words. There’s only one page of his website devoted to policy, and it’s roughly 3,100 words long.

While other candidates have climate proposals in the works, O’Rourke’s is now the most detailed in the Democratic primary race. Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts has released a detailed proposal for public lands that overlaps with some of Beto’s climate agenda. (Both candidates—and many of their competitors in the field— would ban all new fossil-fuel projects on federal land, for instance.) Governor Jay Inslee of Washington, whose entire campaign is focused on climate change, is expected to debut his own climate proposals shortly.

The Beto climate plan seemed to catch many climate groups off-guard. Even Greenpeace USA, which calls for aggressive climate action, said in a statement that the plan “surprised” them and was “an important contribution.”

“I did not expect him to come out first with it, and I didn’t expect the rhetoric in it to peg so closely with the Green New Deal framing,” Greg Carlock, a policy researcher at Date for Progress, told me. “It sets at least an expectation that other candidates have to react to.”

While Carlock said the plan could be more detailed—he called its proposed $1.5 trillion in new funding “woefully inadequate”—it reflects “a good consensus that the U.S. has to do a lot more, a lot faster,” he said. He judged it to sit roughly between the climate policies adopted by President Barack Obama and those favored by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York.

One of the few groups to criticize the Beto plan: the Sunrise Movement, the youth-led activism corps that helped to launch the Green New Deal to national recognition last year. “He gets a lot right in this plan,” said Varshini Prakash, the group’s executive director, in a statement. But she said that O’Rourke should instead set 2030 as a carbon-free goal for the United States. (It is unclear that it is possible for the United States to meet the 2030 goal without a near-revolutionary upheaval in the national energy system.)
  
O’Rourke’s climate ambition is noteworthy in part because, as a candidate, he has not had the easiest relationship with the environmental left. Earlier this month, he declined to turn down money from fossil-fuel workers, saying only that he would decline donations from only oil executives, industry trade groups, and their political action committees. In December, the environmental nonprofit Oil Change USA said that O’Rourke had violated its No Fossil Fuel Money Pledge, kicking him off the list after he accepted too many donations over $200 from fossil-fuel employees.

The disagreement gets at a deeper problem: whether the national Democratic Party should treat the fossil-fuel industry like it once treated the tobacco industry—an evil enterprise and political enemy—or like it now treats the pharmaceutical industry—an important part of the economy that must be tamed and transformed. O’Rourke’s ambitious climate plan suggests that he thinks the latter is possible.

And Carlock said that, regardless, O’Rourke’s plan would needle other candidates into similar specificity. “If every candidate comes out with their vision, and we can debate that in the public sphere, that’s good.”




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