Heating up
Friday, February 9, 2024?
In this week's newsletter: Pausing gas exports, boosting affordable housing, setting the presidential field?
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Energy’s heating up (pun intended)?
President Biden’s announcement in late January that the administration will temporarily pause Liquified Natural Gas exports, pending a review of their climate effects, has pushed LNG and its impact on our economy, the environment, and national security to center stage in Washington. The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee and a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee both held hearings on the pause this week, while House members sent two letters to Biden to express their concerns – one from more than 150 House Republicans (including party leaders), a second from seven Democratic and more than a dozen Republican members of the bipartisan Energy Export Caucus. Meanwhile, Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) says he’ll block all of Biden’s nominees to the State and Energy departments until he backs off of an “unjustifiably bad policy.”?
The United States is the world’s leading LNG exporter, and the Bipartisan Policy Center continues to believe the benefits of American natural gas are substantial. As Sasha Mackler , executive director of our energy program, wrote in The Hill a few days after Biden’s announcement, American natural gas is “lowering consumer and manufacturing costs, displacing higher-emitting coal, and enabling greater amounts of intermittent renewable energy to successfully operate on our electricity grid.” In addition, he wrote, LNG exports “are helping our allies in Europe break their addiction to Russian gas, limiting revenue for the Kremlin’s war on Ukraine, while substantially improving America’s balance of trade.”?
We’re concerned that, with the pushback from environmentalists to natural gas advocates, the issue has become politicized and created uncertainty for developers and investors. In his statement, Biden said the administration will use the pause to “take a hard look at the impacts of LNG exports on energy costs, America’s energy security, and our environment” and that the pause “sees the climate crisis for what it is: the existential threat of our time.” We think that such an assessment is a “prudent” step but, as Mackler wrote, it “should be conducted by our government experts prior to such a consequential policy decision and outside of election-year politics.”?
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Promoting affordable housing?
We were delighted to hear Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) discuss his Choice in Affordable Housing Act, which he has introduced with Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-ND) – and which we support . He discussed the legislation on today’s edition of “The Briefing,” our BPC co-branded show on SiriusXM (ch. 124). The bill would increase the supply of affordable rental homes for lower-income households by providing incentives to encourage more landlords to participate in the Housing Choice Voucher program.?
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Will “The Donald” be able to run??
One day after the Supreme Court heard oral arguments about a Colorado Supreme Court decision to strike Donald Trump from the state’s primary ballot for engaging in insurrection, Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold emphasized the need for a rapid decision, with ballots scheduled to go out to Colorado’s voters next week. Appearing on today’s “Ballot Box Briefing ”?segment on “The Briefing”,?Griswold expressed strong support for the Colorado court’s decision, despite the skepticism expressed by both conservative and liberal justices in their questioning.??
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