In the past few years, conservative rhetoric has gone head to head with conventional science, with COVID, vaccines, and climate change (among many others) causing friction between the Republican party line and the truth. But during a speech on the floor of Congress late last month, U.S. Rep. Doug Lamborn (R-CO) seemed confident that the science backs up his GOP colleagues’ approach to energy policy.
“What should be clear in this debate is that Republicans are the ones who know how energy works, and we’re passing legislation,” Lamborn said. “H.R. 1 is this serious legislation.”
The topic of the day: a GOP bill titled the “Lower Energy Costs Act,” designated H.R. 1. The bill, which is also sponsored by U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO), aims to increase oil and gas development across the U.S. by waiving federal regulations meant to protect the environment and mitigate the effects of global climate change. If passed into law, H.R. 1 would also limit presidential authority to place moratoriums on fracking or restrict oil and gas development on federal land.
At the end of March, the bill passed through the GOP-controlled House of Representatives, mostly following party lines.
During his remarks, Lamborn was adversarial towards those who advocate for oil and gas to be phased out in favor of renewable energy sources, including some of his Democratic colleagues. At one point, he seemed to imply that those voicing credible concerns about the long-term impacts of fossil fuels are not “intelligent” enough to see the value in continuing to rely on natural gas.
“An intelligent person would think, ‘Why invest in affordable – why not continue to invest in affordable and proven technology while we’re waiting for these alternatives [wind and solar] to become viable?’ And they might be in the future, and that’s great,” Lamborn said. “But right now, that’s only 10% of our national electric production.”
Lamborn referenced the statistic of wind and solar energy combined only amounting to 10% of U.S. energy production multiple times in his five-minute speech.
It’s unclear where he got that data from; the most recent statistics from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) put wind and solar’s total contributions at a comparable 13.5% as of this February.
But those numbers don’t hold true across every state. In Lamborn’s home state of Colorado, EIA reports that renewables made up a more significant 35% of total energy generation. That number seems likely to increase in the near future – for example, Colorado Democrats recently introduced plans to incentivize increased use of green energy by offering around $120 million in new tax credits.
The question remains: why do renewables account for so little of America’s energy production? Lamborn claimed this is a result of green energy being less reliable and affordable than natural gas.
“And instead of making existing technology more affordable, this administration and its allies in Congress dumped billions of dollars into technologies that cannot provide reliable and dispatchable energy to even a fraction of the country,” Lamborn said. “So this so-called solution has done nothing to lower costs for the average American. We have higher costs. There’s more potential for rolling brownouts. This is the best that my friends across the aisle can do.”
California, which is the top U.S. producer of renewable energy as of 2021, has been a frequent target of gas advocates following a series of power grid failures. California energy authorities have argued that the outages were instead more likely due to a record-shattering heat wave intensified by climate change, rather than renewables being inherently unreliable as Lamborn and others claim.
In fact, the science may point in the opposite direction. Multiple countries across the world have successfully switched a majority of their electricity production away from oil and gas. Of these countries, data from the World Bank showed that Denmark, Germany, Sweden, and Iceland all experienced significantly shorter grid interruptions than the U.S. in 2020.
There is still room for debate, though. Norway, for instance, had longer grid interruptions than the U.S. in 2020, but those numbers were lower in 2018 and 2019.
Other countries, like Nicaragua, Uruguay, and New Zealand, all of which have also made efforts to switch to renewables, performed significantly worse than the U.S. But these countries exist in the Global South, which the United Nations-backed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has reported to be at greater risk of incurring negative impacts from climate change, much like those that exacerbated power failures in California.
That leaves Lamborn’s other concern: the claim that renewable energy is not affordable. Here, he called attention to central functions and services in everyday American life that could suffer from high energy costs.
“Maintaining affordable energy is crucial to our way of life,” Lamborn said. “It is what keeps water treatment plants open, it’s what keeps hospitals open, it’s what keeps traffic lights, libraries, schools, trucks, ships, and airplanes operating. When the cost of power of these essential processes go up, costs go up. If a grid shuts down, everything relying on it goes down.”
What Lamborn does not say is that renewable energy is often cheaper than oil and gas. A 2019 report from the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) indicates that onshore wind and solar are actually getting cheaper to use year by year.
Meanwhile, gas prices in the U.S. have risen in the past few years. In 2022, the price of gas was extremely volatile, hitting a record-breaking $5.02 per gallon in June. Lamborn and other Republicans claim that deregulating the oil and gas industry and allowing more drilling would reduce gas prices and bring relief to everyday Americans. However, Colorado Newsline reported last year that these companies have more drilling permits than they are using – and, moreover, that they are choosing not to drill in order to keep prices high and funnel profits into buybacks for investors.
Lamborn addressed the dearth of unused permits in his remarks, and said the federal government should do more to encourage companies to drill.
“Republicans also aren’t neglecting permitting realities by ignoring unused drilling permits, we simply recognize that these permits on their own are not enough to generate investment and production, especially when this administration is doing everything it can to discourage the producers of conventional energy,” Lamborn said.
U.S. President Joe Biden has indicated that he plans to veto H.R. 1 if it manages to pass the Democrat-controlled Senate.
