Environmentalists Demand Answers About Pennsylvania Governor’s Secretive Committee on Cap-and-Trade Program

Since before his election as Pennsylvania governor last year, Josh Shapiro has waffled on whether he’d support the state entering the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), an 11-state compact to reduce carbon emissions from the energy sector by requiring power plants to buy and trade carbon dioxide allowances for every ton they emit.

Now, in the wake of revelations that his administration has met behind closed doors with a committee that includes executives of several fossil fuel producers to discuss the controversial program, environmentalists in the Keystone State are demanding more transparency around the committee’s deliberations and are pushing for Shapiro to express his support for RGGI.
 

Join our email list to get the stories that mainstream news is overlooking.
Sign up for Capital & Main’s newsletter.

 
It’s now been four years since former Gov. Tom Wolf announced his intention to enter Pennsylvania into the regional cap-and-invest program via executive order. Had it gone through at the time, Pennsylvania would’ve been the first major oil-and-gas producing member. But it remains held up by litigation after facing separate opposition from GOP members of the General Assembly; now, advocates fear Shapiro’s committee of stakeholders could put the ultimate stop on the program.

In April, Shapiro’s office convened the RGGI committee without disclosing the names of the group’s members or offering opportunity for public comment.

A few months later, Inside Climate News reported that invitations to this committee were sent to at least five representatives from oil and gas entities. Following that reporting, a group of 15 grassroots environmental organizations sent a letter to the governor asking that the committee be disbanded, that debate around RGGI play out in view of the public, and that the administration “begin preparing RGGI for immediate implementation after it clears its court challenges.”

“Our elected officials are supposed to serve us,” Gillian Graber, co-author of the letter and executive director of Protect PT, an environmental organization based in Southwestern Pennsylvania, said in a statement. “We’re tired of them making decisions behind our backs, without our input.”

Power over the state’s entry into RGGI currently lies in the judicial — not executive — branch, as state courts have yet to rule on two objections to the program from a group of Republican legislators and a coalition of labor groups and coal plants. To the ire of a handful of GOP legislators, Shapiro’s 2023 budget assumed $663 million in income from the program, but his formal stance on the matter remains unclear.

It’s an open question what the executive branch will do with RGGI once the court cases are resolved. (Inside Climate News reported that the committee, the majority of whose members’ names were redacted from the results of a Right-to-Know request, has been meeting out of the public eye to “be independent and to have a real opportunity to reach a middle ground,” per a March 30 email written by a Shapiro staffer.)

In the meantime, say advocates, “the Shapiro administration should be focusing on defending RGGI in court.

“It is instead offering the corporations who would be regulated by RGGI an additional chance to kill the program,” their letter reads.

Those corporations whose members are part of the committee include Shell, represented by senior vice president Hilary Mercer; Constellation Energy, a fossil fuel-fired power plant operator represented by vice president Lael Campbell; CNX Resources, a well operator represented by director of government relations Zachery Smith; and Olympus Power, a coal-fired power plant operator represented by executive vice president Sean Lane (an executive from Olympus has in the past testified against RGGI). A lobbyist for the Pennsylvania Grade Crude Oil Coalition, which represents the conventional oil industry and has in the past publicly opposed RGGI, was also invited to the task force, per Inside Climate News.

Those companies, in all, spent close to $800,000 on campaign contributions in 2022 across state and federal elections — at the state level, much of this was spent on candidates for the General Assembly on both sides of the aisle. Constellation Energy, for its part, sent Shapiro’s campaign $10,000 last year.

The RGGI working group also includes at least two representatives from environmental groups — Penn Environment and the Natural Resources Defense Council; NRDC Eastern Region Director Jackson Morris is committee chair. Further, it is not uncommon for government committees that make decisions regarding the oil and gas industry to invite input from members of that industry. It’s less common for those committees to meet in private. Without any visibility around what happens at meetings of Shapiro’s RGGI committee, advocates fear that profit-oriented interests could exert undue influence without any public accountability.

And Tom Pike, environmental policy advocate with Protect PT, sees inviting companies with a financial stake in the matter as “really just a handout.”

“Inviting polluting industries to write their own regulations is not ‘pragmatism,’” the letter writers say. “It is surrender.”

Since its inception in 2005, RGGI has attracted 11 participant states from across the East Coast and prevented more than 73 million tons of carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere as of 2019. The way this works is twofold: Participants (power plants of 25 megawatt capacity or higher) must stay within a CO2 cap that declines over time and pay for allowances to cover their emissions at an auction, while the funds raised from the auction can be reinvested in renewable energy and other green projects.

Pennsylvania legislators have introduced bills that would earmark these collected funds for renewable energy projects and investments into communities home to retired fossil fuel facilities, low income communities, and communities of color that have been disproportionately affected by pollution, of which the commonwealth has quite a few. Combined with tax credits from the Inflation Reduction Act promoting the very same renewable technologies, these policies could have retrained workers at shuttered fossil fuel plants and helped facilitate the rollout of a clean energy economy in Pennsylvania — where currently less than 1% of power is generated from solar, for instance.

That failure to enter RGGI has also hurt the state’s finances. In August, StateImpact Pennsylvania reported that the commonwealth had foregone more than $1 billion by neglecting to participate in the last six RGGI auctions.

Protect PT was joined by Physicians for Social Responsibility Pennsylvania, FracTracker Alliance, the Climate Reality Project and 11 others in their call for greater transparency around the governor’s RGGI task force. Even writing and publishing their letter was a muddled process, they say.

“Because the group is secret, it’s not clear where to even send a letter objecting to its conduct,” Pike said in a statement.

“There’s no opportunity for public comment at a secret meeting,” he elaborated over the phone. “You can’t give public comments on not being allowed to give public comment.”

So, he and others toiled over where to address the letter before sending it to a group of emails within the Shapiro administration and hoping for the best.

For Pike and his colleagues, the best-case scenario is that RGGI survives court challenges only to meet unwavering support from the administration. But it’s possible that only one — or neither — of those things happens.

Joining RGGI is likely still not enough to forestall the worst impacts of climate change and to transition the state to a clean energy economy. Despite intense debate over the issue, some environmentalists see RGGI as a band-aid solution to the issue of fossil emissions, or as a distraction from more meaningful policy. “The consensus of the climate organizations,” Pike says, is that RGGI doesn’t go far enough. It only targets the power sector, does not stop growing off-grid emissions from cryptocurrency, and “has issues with equity and issues with completeness,” he says.

“It’s an incomplete solution, but it’s the only state-level policy aimed at reducing emissions that the state has ever really attempted,” Pike said.

And when it comes to fossil fuel companies rather than front-line communities deciding the state’s involvement in RGGI, Pike says, “We just felt that somebody had to say something.”

Copyright 2023 Capital & Main