Just before the spring recess, House Republicans celebrated the passage of H.R. 1, the Lower Energy Costs Act, before it likely gets tied up in the Democratic controlled Senate.

What You Need To Know

  • Democrats and Republicans in Congress are grappling over competing energy proposals

  • House Republicans recently passed H.R. 1, the Lower Energy Costs Act, a key priority of the recently elected majority; Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said last month that H.R. 1 is "dead-on-arrival" in the upper chamber, and President Joe Biden vowed to veto it should it reach his desk

  • Two Democrats are countering with a proposal that would focus on speeding up permitting of clean energy projects

  • One expert told Spectrum News that neither proposal completely addresses the country's energy issue

The bill, which was a major legislative win for House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., and his Republican caucus, “focuses on two main priorities: increasing the production and export of American energy and reducing the regulatory burdens that make it harder to build American infrastructure and grow our economy.”

“No longer will the governor of California buy oil from Putin, you can actually buy it in his own state, because we can produce what God has plenished us and blessed us with here in America, we can produce our own energy, all of the above here in America,” said McCarthy at a press conference celebrating the bill’s passage in the House in March.

But one California Democrat is sounding the alarm, saying there is in fact nothing to celebrate with this energy package.

“H.R. 1 really is an oil and gas bill developed by a handful of fossil fuel lobbyists. It's their wish list,” countered Rep. Mike Levin, D-Calif., who has become known as a clean energy and environmental hawk for his oceanside district.

“I think for some in the Republican Party who are all too eager to do the bidding of the fossil fuel industry, they may see it as a last gasp attempt to try to undo the progress that we made in the past couple of Congresses with the Inflation Reduction Act, which is the biggest climate bill in the history of the United States," he added.

Levin is introducing his own bill in response to H.R. 1 with Rep. Sean Casten, D-Ill., called the the “Clean Electricity Transmission Acceleration Act of 2023.”

The bill, which has yet to be introduced, will focus on speeding up permitting of clean energy projects.

In an outline obtained by Spectrum News, the “Clean Electricity Transmission Acceleration Act” would give new authorities to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), such as establishing an Office of Electricity Transmission within the commission, which would require FERC “to consider the economic, reliability, and climate benefits of transmission projects.”

“It's not going to happen overnight, but in the future, we can have an electrified future where we're more, they're more predictable costs associated with our energy consumption. And I think that's ultimately what Californians are embracing,” said Levin. “What I want to do is figure out how we accelerate that transition to a more sustainable future that will be good for the planet, but also good for our economy as well.”

But Ed Hirs, an energy fellow at the University of Houston, says the issue is not so black and white.

“Neither of these bills really accomplishes what the author's my thing would like to do, which is work to restore American energy independence, which we really haven't had since the early 60s, and then reduce our greenhouse gas emissions,” said Hirs. 

“The Lower Energy Costs really just repeats a lot of the Republican mantra for the last seven, eight, ten years. It doesn't really state anything that's new or novel. Perhaps a prohibition against Communist Chinese Communist Party owning anything is new, because the Chinese state oil companies have been instrumental in developing a lot of the oil and gas resources in the Permian Basin,” Hirs concluded after analyzing H.R. 1 and the CETA Act outline.

“The Democratic response is, 'We're going to try and do this in a way that we can reinvent electricity markets, because when you add all the components up, that's what it points to trying to determine what the cost of carbon is, and then bringing that into a rate base analysis,'" Hirs added. "And that's a little naive.”

Hirs, who teaches courses on energy economics, suggested a simpler solution: putting a carbon tax on oil and natural gas wellheads and at mine entries.

“This is where we can actually accomplish an account for the cost of carbon really simply and very easily. We already have the infrastructure in place to collect taxes on production of fossil fuels,” explained Hirs. “Let that filter through the economy because foreign way, no one's going to change their behavior until it winds up showing up on the pump or the electricity meter.” 

“There's no reason in the world that in a nation that wants to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions, a pickup truck is the best selling vehicle across America,” Hirs added. “More than a dozen years ago, my colleagues and I advocated for return to Eisenhower's oil import quota. Eisenhower put this in place in 1959 because he could see that in the future, the U.S. would become reliant upon nations that are not necessarily friendly to us, or their cheap oil, they can produce oil more cheaply than we can in the United States ... the Saudi wells are much more productive than our wells."

"The only way to entice, to give incentive to an oil and gas producer to bring more oil out of the ground domestically, is to have a higher price," Hirs said. "So restricting imports is the way to go about doing this.”

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said last month that H.R. 1 is "dead-on-arrival" in the upper chamber, calling it an "unserious proposal for addressing America’s energy needs."

"Republicans’ so-called energy proposal is as bad and as partisan as it gets. H.R. 1 will lock America into the most expensive and volatile dirty sources of energy, and will set America back a decade or more in our transition towards clean, affordable energy," Schumer said on the Senate floor last month, adding: "This package is a wish list for Big Oil, gutting important environmental safeguards on fossil fuel projects, while doing none of the important permitting reforms that would help bring transmission and clean energy projects online faster."

Even if it had a chance in the upper chamber, President Joe Biden had already said he would veto the bill, as it would undo a great deal of the environmental efforts put in place with Democrats’ Inflation Reduction Act last year.

As for Levin’s CETA bill, once introduced, it would be an uphill battle to get it through the Republican-controlled House in the first place.