On Thursday evening, Neil Chatterjee announced on Twitter he was no longer chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, saying Trump replaced him with fellow Republican James Danly. Chatterjee will still stay on as a commissioner of the five-member panel.
The move comes just weeks after Chatterjee and his agency cleared the way for regional power administrators to put a price on carbon dioxide emissions.
Chatterjee, a Trump-appointed Republican who has served on the FERC since 2017, was among the commissioners who voted in favor of allowing electric grid operators to implement carbon pricing schemes set up by states.
In an interview, Chatterjee said he thought he may have been removed from the post because his recent actions “aggravated somebody at the White House, and they make the switch.”
“If that’s the case, that’s being demoted for my independence,” he said. “I’m quite proud of that, and will wear it as a badge of honor.”
Many economists — including conservative ones — consider imposing a tax on every ton of heat-trapping carbon dioxide put into the air to be the most effective way of addressing runaway climate change.
Chatterjee, who once served as an energy adviser to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), agrees with that sentiment. “I made very clear early on in my tenure,” he said, “that I was concerned about climate change and wanted to take concrete steps to mitigate carbon emissions. But I did not believe in heavy-handed regulations, subsidies or mandates.”
In mid-October, he voiced support for a price on carbon, saying it did not “degrade market efficiency” like other anti-pollution regulations can. But he added the FERC was not taking “proactive action to set a carbon price” — leaving that instead to states governments.
FERC is an independent agency that regulates a broad portfolio of activities, including the electricity grid and interstate natural gas pipelines. Many experts regard the agency, which has a low profile compared to the Environmental Protection Agency and other bureaus, as key to cutting greenhouse gas emissions from the power sector.
Both the White House and McConnell’s office declined to comment on the demotion.
Rich Glick, the lone Democrat on the FERC, praised Chatterjee in a statement for “his willingness to ignore party affiliation and work with me on several key initiatives.”
FERC may be a tool for Joe Biden to combat climate change.
Should the Democratic presidential nominee win the White House, he may rely on the agency to help achieve perhaps the most important goal of his climate plan — ending the U.S. power sector’s contributions to rising global temperatures by 2035. That will be especially true if his party does not the recapture the Senate majority as well.
“Without the control of the Senate, which it looks likely he won’t have, Biden is likely to look to FERC and its Democratic chair to achieve many of his climate and energy goals,” said Christine Wyman, a lawyer at Bracewell LLP, a law and lobbying firm that represents energy companies.
It is possible for Democrats to retake the Senate now that two races in Georgia are moving to runoffs. Both Democrats would have to win those runoffs, and Biden would have to be confirmed as president to allow his vice-presidential candidate, Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.), to break ties.
But congressional Republicans also have the chance to lock in a GOP majority in the next few weeks. This summer, Trump put forward two nominees — Democrat Allison Clements and Republican Mark Christie — to fill two vacancies on the five-member commission. But the Senate has yet to vote on the appointments.
If the Senate used the dwindling days of 2020 to approve those picks, Republicans could potentially maintain a majority on the commission into part of the next president’s term.
FERC is designed to have no more than three members from the sitting president’s own party.
Power plays
EPA Chief of Staff Mandy Gunesekara spread conspiracy theories about vote counting.
“How many democrat votes do you think will be discovered tonight while the counting is suspended?” Gunesekara tweeted on Wednesday. The tweet appeared to feed into an unsubstantiated theory of voter fraud pushed by Trump and members of his campaign.
While the president lead the vote in Pennsylvania on Tuesday and Wednesday, Biden took the lead with continued counting on Friday morning. Polling experts say the shift toward the vice president in early and absentee ballots was largely predicted beforehand based on partisan divisions in voting behaviors this year.
Gunesekara told E&E News that she was tweeting on her own — not on the agency’s — time. “I’ve taken leave and am spending my personal time working alongside dedicated patriots to keep this country on the path of greatness,” she said by text message.
Twitter appended a fact-checking note to another one of Gunesekara’s tweets, noting the content is “disputed” and “might be misleading” about the election. The tweet in question endorsed a claim that Trump ballots in Arizona were being rejected because of the use of Sharpie pens, which were sometimes provided to voters by election officials.
Officials in Arizona’s Maricopa County issued a statement assuring voters ballots filled in with Sharpies were being counted. The Election Integrity Partnership, a coalition of research groups focused on combating election misinformation, said there fears about Sharpies were baseless. In the rare case that ink bleeds through and cannot be counted by machines, there are procedures for hand counting the ballots.
A Colorado ballot measure to reintroduce wolves passed by a razor-thin margin.
The measure requires Colorado Parks and Wildlife to create a plan for reintroducing gray wolves in the western part of the state, where they were hunted to extinction in the 1920s.
“Few issues raise hackles in the West more than wolves. Farmers, ranchers and hunters fear the return of wolves could damage rural economies that are based on livestock and hunting. Advocates who have pushed to introduce and protect wolves in Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, New Mexico and Arizona argue that Colorado is a final step in a 40-year effort to return wolf populations that were hunted into extinction in the 1920s,” the Colorado Sun reports.
The measure was too close to call on Tuesday and Wednesday, but opponents admitted defeat Thursday as election results indicated a narrow victory. Votes on the initiative fell largely along urban-rural lines, with voters in more than three dozen rural counties opposing the measure.
The initiative makes Colorado the “first state to reintroduce wolves at the direction of voters rather than federal wildlife biologists working under the Endangered Species Act,” the Colorado Sun writes.
Minnesota’s state legislature probably will remain divided by party, scuttling clean energy plans.
Republicans seem set to maintain control of Minnesota’s state Senate with a two-seat majority, while control of the state House will remain with the state’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party (DFL), which is allied with the national Democratic Party, according to election results on Thursday.
That divide will make it difficult, if not impossible, for Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) to push forward a plan for 100 percent renewable energy by 2050. The governor proposed climate targets as part of a clean energy plan in 2019 but was met with resistance from GOP legislators.
Minnesota was not the only state legislature where Democratic hopes were dashed. Democrats also failed to flip the North Carolina legislature. Although clean energy has some bipartisan support in the state, Republican control of the legislature could make it harder for lawmakers to follow through on 2018 clean energy targets set by Gov. Roy Cooper (D).
Voters overwhelmingly backed public parks.
“On Nov. 3, voters approved nearly $3.7 billion in new funding for parks, public lands and climate resilience through various local ballot initiatives, according to an analysis from the Trust for Public Land,” E&E News reports.
The Trust for Public Land, a nonprofit organization dedicated to creating parks and conserving land, supported two dozen conservation measures in 11 states, all of which passed.
Some of the conservation-related measures included a $735 million school bond in Oakland, Calif., that could go toward transforming asphalt-covered schoolyards into green spaces, and a local property tax in Portland, Ore., aimed at increasing funding for parks and recreation that will benefit communities of color and low-income families. In Montana, a ballot initiative to legalize and tax marijuana will direct revenue to conservation and public lands. Michigan passed a constitutional amendment aimed at increasing the amount of oil and gas royalties that go toward state parks. The measure was widely, but not universally, supported by environmental groups in the state.
