This week, House Energy and Commerce Committee Republicans sent a letter to Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) administrator Michael Regan about their fears that transitioning to renewables will somehow make an already over-stressed U.S. power grid entirely unreliable. The lawmakers, who are more or less looking for an excuse to call on the Biden administration to ramp up fossil fuel production, freaked out over the potential of closing down coal-fired power plants. In their letter, they offer the example of the agency “deciding whether to revoke permits for upwards of 50 gigawatts of coal-fire generation to meet requirements of its coal combustion residual rule.” The rule is meant to address dangerous coal ash disposal methods that frequently harm marginalized communities, among other concerns.
Regan addressing a major environmental justice issue falls in line with his commitment to equitability, yet the GOP fears that power grid operators like Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO) will further fail customers because less coal-fired power will be available. They cite MISO’s own claims that eliminating more coal-fired generation pushes the operator “into dangerous territory.” House Energy and Commerce Committee Republicans claim that wind and solar power are simply too unreliable to replace good old-fashioned coal—a talking point that maybe had relevancy during the nascent years of renewable development. With better energy storage technology, that’s simply no longer the case.
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Proving how much of a poorly thought out talking point this is, the 26 Republicans who signed the letter offered Fox News an exclusive on it, which lawmakers then boasted about in a press release. Emissions are never mentioned and the only time the word “climate” comes into play is when it’s being used to rail against the Biden administration’s so-called “climate agenda.” The letters “EGU” are used to scare whoever the GOP thinks will read this drivel and want to join them in their entirely unfounded outrage, though EGU is simply an acronym for energy-generating unit. They nonetheless issued a series of demands about the EPA’s “EGU strategy” that included asks on broad information about “the reliable delivery of electricity” and pushed back on the EPA even being able to make decisions about the energy sector at all based in part on the recent Supreme Court opinion issued for West Virginia v. EPA.
Less surprising than the House Energy and Commerce Committee Republicans’ wild lack of knowledge about electricity generation is how much those lawmakers have benefitted from dirty energy. Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, the Republican head of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, has received more than half a million dollars in campaign donations from the oil and gas sector since entering politics. Insurrectionist superstar Rep. Debbie Lesko has racked up more than $77,000 in campaign donations from the sector. And Rep. David B. McKinley, who’s strangely an ardent supporter of all things coal—including coal ash—has benefitted greatly from the oil and gas industry donating more than $370,000 to his campaign. Money talks, and it’s easy to see what fossil fuel companies are telling these Republicans to do in order to keep up their symbiotic relationship.