CERAWEEK: US climate goals, energy security not mutually exclusive: McCarthy

The Biden administration's climate ambitions for the US do not need to come at the expense of energy security and exclusively from federal regulations, White House National Climate Adviser Gina McCarthy said March 4.

Although the administration will use its regulatory authority to cut greenhouse gas emissions, the government is ready to invest in decarbonizing the energy sector, including through research and deployment of new technologies and federal clean energy procurement, McCarthy told a virtual audience at CERAWeek by IHS Markit.

"We are not going to be shy about the opportunity of investment and be smart about where the key levers are, and really the big key levers in 2030 [are] the auto sector and the utility sector and we're going to look at working with both of those," McCarthy said, referencing the year by which many countries have agreed to emissions cuts under the Paris Agreement on climate change.

US President Joe Biden has made climate action a central plank of his domestic and international agendas.

Since taking office Jan. 20, he has re-entered the US in the Paris agreement and issued executive orders aimed at achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions economywide by 2050 and decarbonizing the power sector by 2035. Some of his early actions took aim at the oil and gas industries, with Biden canceling a presidential permit for the Keystone XL crude pipeline, and the Department of Interior temporarily suspending new leases for oil and gas output in federal areas.

Those policies have stoked GOP and industry concerns over the fate of the oil and gas sectors and higher dependence on imports. But McCarthy said climate ambitions and energy security are not mutually exclusive, and that technologies such as carbon capture can be part of the solution.

"We're not in a zero-sum game here," she said. "It's not think about one and it's at a detriment in terms of our ability to invest and get excited about a full range of opportunities."

McCarthy said the Biden administration is "not going to go down the road of getting to zero [emissions] if that means we're impacting our safety, our health, [the] viability of our essential services." But she emphasized that "we do have to think about all of these things and mix and match them, while at the same time reducing the emissions on the whole as quickly as we can."

More than regulation

To get to net-zero emissions, McCarthy said the US faces more than a regulatory challenge.

"Standards are great, but this is bigger than that," she said. "I'm not asking [utilities and automakers] to take on the world. I'm asking them to tell us what they see the world looking like and how we can work together."

The Biden administration has been meeting with "all of the major utilities," according to McCarthy, and the central question is how quickly the clean energy transition can happen without threatening grid reliability. Major power outages in Texas after a recent arctic cold snap have shown that robust transmission and grid interconnections are a "fundamental need in the United States that the federal government should be investing in."

But she said new regulations alone are not the only way to support the industry's transformation.

"We're not just going to talk about strategies to regulate," she said. "We're going to talk about if we're asking you to achieve certain levels, what are we going to put on the table like we're supposed to do as grownups to say that the federal government will be there to support you."

That same approach will apply to the US automotive sector as it seeks to lower emissions and compete with other countries producing electric cars and related critical minerals.

"We want this to be part of an overall strategy to invest in our manufacturing sector again and to do it smartly and have the federal government be a partner in how to do that," McCarthy asserted.

Few hints on Paris commitments

After officially rejoining the Paris agreement Feb. 19, the US is expected to announce its nationally determined contribution to the pact when Biden hosts an international climate summit in April.

Under the Obama administration, the US committed to slashing economywide emissions by 26% to 28% from 2005 levels by 2025 as part of the Paris deal. But climate scientists have urged a more ambitious 50% reduction by 2030 to be carbon-neutral by 2050.

At the CERAWeek event, McCarthy did not provide details on what the US commitments could be, but said, "we've gotten a lot of hints from our allies about what we need to do to get back in action."

She did not specify which allies, but the European Union is aiming to be carbon neutral by midcentury, a goal that aligns with Biden's own ambitions for the US.