Tonko must go big — really big — on green energy plan
When it comes to tackling the climate crisis, the first names that come to mind might be Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-cortez or Sen. Bernie Sanders, who have popularized the term “Green New Deal.” But when it comes to actually passing climate legislation, a key national power broker is closer to home: Rep. Paul Tonko.
In Washington, most bills need to move through relevant House committees first before they even have a chance of passing on to the Senate. As chair of the Climate Change Subcommittee of the Energy and Commerce Committee, Tonko will have considerable influence over looming decisions about what Democrats will do about one of the greatest threats humanity has ever faced.
Tonko said recently that he “felt really excited" about this opportunity, and with good reason: Donald Trump is gone, and Democrats are in control of the House and Senate. If there was ever a time to introduce bold legislation that moves the nation off fossil fuels to renewable energy, it would be now.
Unfortunately, leading House Democrats, including Tonko, aren’t thinking big enough. This month, they unveiled a revamped version of a
bill they introduced last year called the CLEAN Future Act. The new bill has been improved somewhat, matching President Joe Biden’s climate goals: 100 percent clean power by 2035, and “net zero” greenhouse gas emissions by the 2050. But it’s still nothing close to what is necessary to prevent climate chaos.
Ramping up our clean energy production is necessary, but it’s not enough if we don’t stop burning fossil fuels. In fact, the fine print of Tonko’s bill tells us that what they consider “clean” might not be necessarily so — it could be dirty and dangerous fracked gas. The CLEAN Future Act tries to greenwash fossil fuels like fracked gas by suggesting that, some years from now, it could be paired with unproven carbon-capture technologies.
This is unfortunate. Any serious plan to fight our climate crisis must stop the extraction and burning of fossil fuels — and that means a national ban on fracking, fossil fuel infrastructure, and the export of oil and gas. That’s why climate activists across New York are laserfocused on stopping new pipelines and fracked-gas power plants: We know that we can’t make serious progress unless we put a stop to projects that would have us hooked on fossil fuels for decades.
The CLEAN Future Act also includes a dubious pollution trading scheme that backers claim is necessary to reach their “net zero” goal. But these programs give fossil fuel corporations a get-out-of-jail free card: Instead of reducing their climate pollution, they would pay a small fee to buy the credits for carbon reductions that are supposedly being done somewhere else by someone else. The bill also promotes industrial agriculture by considering factory farm biogas — the technology that captures and processes methane created by massive manure ponds — a clean energy source.
The truth is that the most effective climate policies do not involve creating confusing and ineffective market mechanisms or waiting on the development of carbon-capture technology. The best policies are often the simplest ones, like a strong national clean energy standard without loopholes for polluting industries like factory farms, and a ban on fracking and a halt to fossil projects like the proposed Danskammer power plant in Newburgh.
The fundamental truth of fighting climate change is that we must stop extracting and burning fossil fuels as soon as possible, not waste time creating credit-swapping schemes and offsets markets, or hope that carbon-capture fantasies become reality. While Tonko has said that the CLEAN Future Act will “be our template” for climate action, much bolder proposals, thankfully, will be introduced in Congress. Tonko can do better than the CLEAN Future Act, and for the sake of preventing climate catastrophe, the science is clear that he must.