Though the election of Donald Trump has loomed over this month’s United Nations climate talks in Baku, Azerbaijan, Biden administration officials and prominent Democrats have given speech after speech pledging that the nation’s transition to renewable energy will continue. White House representatives have touted the economic benefits of the billions of dollars in climate-related subsidies in Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, and officials from California and Washington have pledged that individual states will continue the march to net-zero emissions.
But the U.S. officials with the most power over the country’s energy future did not even arrive in Baku until the end of the first week of the U.N. conference, which is known as COP29. When Trump assumes the presidency in January, these five Republican members of Congress will enjoy unified control of the federal government, giving them wide latitude to write (or repeal) laws that will determine the nation’s climate future.
In a swaggering press conference that took place just a few hundred feet from where international negotiators have spent a week hashing out a transition away from fossil fuels, the GOP delegation delivered an aggressive message in support of oil, gas, and even coal — all while framed by signs that said “United Nations Climate Change.” (The Congressional delegation is officially bipartisan, but the two Democratic Representatives in Baku did not attend the press conference.)
U.S. Representative August Pfluger, who represents Texas’ oil-rich Permian Basin and is leading the GOP’s COP delegation, suggested that the U.S. should once again exit the 2015 Paris climate agreement. As the leader of the House of Representatives’ energy committee, Pfluger also emphasized the incoming Congress’ power to repeal key pieces of Biden’s climate policies (policies that were passed, in part, to get the U.S. within reach of the Paris agreement’s goal of limiting global warming to less than 2 degrees Celsius). The press conference came off as a direct rebuke to the message delivered by the official U.S. delegation.
“Last week, people in the United States overwhelmingly supported President Donald Trump’s promise to restore America’s energy dominance and lead the world in energy expansion,” he said.
The four other Republicans joining Pfluger on stage echoed this message with a grab bag of pro-fossil-fuel stances. Troy Balderson, who represents a part of Ohio with plentiful shale gas, mounted a defense of fracking. Morgan Griffith, a veteran representative who hails from a coal-rich area of western Virginia, expressed support for so-called clean coal power outfitted with carbon capture technology, as well as natural gas mined from coal beds.
Jake Bittle
“An area that has natural resources should not be penalized for not looking at the opportunity to have a cleaner world,” said Griffith. This message echoed Azerbaijani president Ilham Aliyev’s statement to world leaders at the start of COP29, in which he called his country’s oil resources as a “gift from God” and chastised the American media for referring to Azerbaijan as a “petrostate,” given that the U.S. itself is the world’s largest producer of fossil fuels.
The Biden administration and elected Democrats have argued, at COP and elsewhere, that the Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA, is in a sense too big to fail — in part because the hundreds of billions of dollars in manufacturing projects and tax breaks that it unleashed flow to Republicans and Democrats alike (and, in the case of the new manufacturing plants, are flowing disproportionately to GOP congressional districts). Indeed, more than a dozen House Republicans have already asked the chamber’s leader, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, not to gut the law.
But none of those representatives were present in Baku, and the tone adopted by Pfluger and his colleagues was distinctly more hostile to the core components of Biden’s landmark law. Though the bill was passed after U.S. inflation had already peaked, Pfluger suggested that the Inflation Reduction Act’s renewable-energy provisions contributed to the soaring prices that angered American voters.
“The United States of America, like many other countries around the world, has seen this crazy inflation,” he said. “Lowering those costs, we believe, has a very strong tie to energy — unleashing affordable, reliable baseload capacity. If there are pieces and parts of the IRA that are not compatible with that, that’s going to be looked at.”
Nevertheless, the delegation stopped short of advocating for a wholesale repeal of Biden energy policies.
“If there are pieces of the IRA that will support lower energy costs, helping Americans, helping our partners and allies have access to affordable, reliable energy, then I bet that those will stay in place,” Pfluger said.
The primary goal of this year’s COP is to develop an agreement on international climate aid, whereby rich countries will agree to transfer hundreds of billions or even trillions of dollars to poorer parts of the world to speed their energy transitions and make them resilient to climate-fueled disasters. During his first term as president, Trump proposed zeroing out these sorts of commitments. When Grist asked Pfluger if he would support a renewed call from Trump to cut off this foreign aid, Pfluger did not rule it out. He also appeared to suggest that future climate aid might go to support Republican energy priorities.
“On climate finance, if something is not congruent or not in support of lowering energy costs while reducing emissions, then you can bet that this Congress is going to look at that,” he said.
After the press conference ended, Pfluger and his colleagues were mobbed by reporters from several countries before leaving for an event where they touted their support for nuclear energy. The U.S. State Department, which is coordinating the country’s delegation in Baku, did not respond to a request for comment about the congressmen’s statements before publication.
