Congress passed a clean energy bill and no one noticed

Maybe the bill’s sponsors should have run onto a baseball field.

Image by C-SPAN

Last week, eight climate protesters ran onto the field during the Congressional Baseball Game, wearing “End Fossil Fuels” t-shirts. I was there. It was interesting. It was provocative. Almost everyone (myself included) gasped and took their phones out to record.

It was also perfectly designed to grab media attention — and it did. The stunt (which resulted in the protesters’ arrests) was covered by outlets ranging from Politico to Deadline, including ABC, NBC, BBC, The Washington Post, and a long list of others.

According to a database maintained by Internet Archive, the protest received a total of 16 mentions across the three major cable news channels: 10 from Fox, five from CNN, and one from MSNBC.

This week, Congress almost unanimously sent a bill to President Biden’s desk that will actually contribute to ending the use of fossil fuels in the United States. It didn’t receive a single mention from any of the cable news networks. Neither the New York Times nor the Washington Post covered it. Ditto the Associated Press or the Wall Street Journal. Politico and Axios did both cover the legislation, but only in posts on their expensive policy verticals, each of which cost several thousands of dollars a year, rendering the coverage inaccessible to the average reader.

Personally, I think it’s crazy that eight random protesters — who will have approximately zero impact on public policy — commanded more attention than a major piece of bipartisan legislation backed by 89% of Congress. I also think it’s representative of a media ecosystem that, frankly, is sometimes failing its audience, the American people. So, today, I’m going to do the one thing I can to address this glaring coverage gap: I’m going to tell you about the bill. Let’s dive in.

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One reason the bill may have been so under-covered is, admittedly, it was a little hidden. The measure was buried inside the Fire Grants and Safety Act, an anodyne bill to reauthorize a variety of federal grants for local fire departments. Even Politico Playbook, the daily bible for Beltway insiders, called it a “piece of small-bore bipartisan legislation” affecting fire safety — without noting the major clean energy policy change tucked within.

But, out of the 93 pages of the Fire Grants and Safety Act, only three are actually devoted to fire grants and safety. The real meat of the legislation starts on Page 4, where the text of a whole separate bill begins: the Accelerating Deployment of Versatile, Advanced Nuclear for Clean Energy Act, or — because Capitol Hill is a sucker for a good acronym — the ADVANCE Act.

The ADVANCE Act is designed to do exactly what its full title suggests: expand America’s nuclear energy capacity, in order to revive a domestic industry and to reduce planet-warming carbon emissions.

Before we look at its proposed solution, let me catch you up on the problem.

The U.S. was an early leader in civilian nuclear energy — best signified by Dwight Eisenhower’s famous “Atoms for Peace” speech — but America’s nuclear sector is being quickly outpaced by China and Russia. According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, since 2000, China has completed 52 new nuclear reactors, with 23 under construction; Russia has completed 13, with three under construction; and the U.S. has completed three, with none under construction. (Bill Gates’ nuclear power plant in Wyoming had a “groundbreaking” last week, but its construction permit has still not been formally approved.)

This causes issues on a few fronts:

• National security: It cedes a major geopolitical advantage to America’s adversaries, as more countries will become reliant on China and Russia for their energy needs, potentially allying more countries with the two nations right when the U.S. is trying to build a united front against them.

• Economic: The Commerce Department estimates that civilian nuclear energy will be a $500-740 billion market over the next decade. America’s lack of new reactors means it will lose out on a huge share of that growing market. The U.S. is also shuttering more plants than it’s building, which means a loss of jobs. Conversely, Commerce estimates that the U.S. could generate more than $100 billion in new exports and thousands of new jobs by building more reactors.

• Electrical power: Demand for electricity is skyrocketing in the U.S. and our power grid is struggling to keep up. Nuclear plants currently generate nearly 20% of U.S. electricity, which means building more plants will be needed to keep up with demand. In addition, America’s fleet of reactors is rapidly aging and being pushed to their limit. They will need reinforcements to continue providing the country with as much electricity as it is accustomed to.

• Climate: Nuclear power plants produce electricity by splitting atoms, not by burning fossil fuels. That means nuclear energy produces zero greenhouse gas emissions, making it the largest domestic source of clean energy in the U.S. Last year, nuclear energy provided 48% of America’s carbon-free electricity. Many climate scientists agree that if the U.S. is to transition away from fossil fuels, nuclear energy — which is easier to scale than other clean energy sources — will have to play a major role.

So, now it’s time to delve into the ADVANCE Act. What does the bipartisan bill actually do to address these problems?

A few things. One of the main barriers to building nuclear power plants in the U.S. is the lengthy permitting process that new projects must go through. The ADVANCE Act would streamline the permitting for new reactors, directing the understaffed Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to hire more personnel and to speed up its approval process while maintaining safety standards.

In particular, the permitting process would be made easier for new reactors being built at the sites of former fossil fuel facilities and existing nuclear facilities, since they are already connected to the grid.

In an attempt to further jumpstart the American nuclear industry, the legislation would also reduce the fees charged by the NRC to companies trying to license advanced reactors, addressing another barrier for entry for new projects.

Another key problem for nuclear in the U.S. is our paucity of small modular reactors (SMRs), which are known as “fourth-generation” nuclear reactors. According to a recent report, the U.S. lags 10 to 15 years behind China in building these reactors, which are smaller and more efficient than their predecessors. Gates’ Wyoming plant is set to be the first in the U.S. to utilize this next-gen technology, but it will be many years before it opens.

To encourage more of these advanced reactors, the ADVANCE Act would create a prize program to incentivize companies that deploy these new technologies. (Gates’ project stands to benefit in this regard, as well as from the provision about projects on existing fossil fuel sites. His reactor is poised to be built on a former coal plant.)

The NRC will even be directed to change its mission statement, “to include that licensing and regulation of the civilian use of radioactive materials and nuclear energy be conducted in a manner that is efficient and does not unnecessarily limit…the benefits of civilian use of radioactive materials and nuclear energy technology to society.” The commission will be required, in its very mission, to move more hastily and to take into account the benefits of nuclear projects, not just the risks.

The bill’s authors hope that these steps will combine to allow America to quickly build a host of new advanced nuclear reactors, creating new jobs while also closing a crucial gap with Russia and China and weaning the U.S. off fossil fuels.

To be clear: the ADVANCE Act — and nuclear power — is not without its critics. Many environmentalists view nuclear power as dangerous, pointing to disasters like Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima, each of which resulted in the release of radioactive material. Those fears are why America stopped building new nuclear reactors in the first place — and why the NRC’s permitting process is so comprehensive. As a result, there are many activists who oppose the ADVANCE Act, believing that it will relax regulations that keep Americans safe and make it too easy to construct risky nuclear reactors.

This is a valid point of view, and it’s not my belief that the ADVANCE Act should be covered uncritically. I simply think it should be covered. Pieces of legislation, like this one, that could dramatically alter American energy production, deserve to be debated out in the open, and media coverage plays a key role in facilitating that. In this case, especially when the bill could lead to action on an issue — climate change — that so many Americans care about, it’s hard not to conclude that many news outlets failed their audiences, declining to cover a bill simply because it came with very little drama or partisan rancor.

Of course, here at Wake Up To Politics, I believe that bills that unite the two parties — especially when they substantively address an important problem — are exactly the ones most deserving of coverage. After all, how will Americans’ declining trust in government — and widespread view of Congress as hopelessly dysfunctional — ever recover if no one lets them know when Congress is, well, functional?

In this case, the level of bipartisan agreement was pretty striking. The Fire Grants and Safety Act, with the ADVANCE Act included, passed the House in a 393-13 vote in May and passed the Senate in an 88-2 vote this week. The biggest clean energy bill since the Inflation Reduction Act passed both chambers of Congress with a mere 15 dissenters. (The IRA, of course, was the product of many twists and turns and much intraparty bickering, guaranteeing it all the dramatic coverage that the relatively easily-passed ADVANCE Act lacked.)

Personally, though, I find the qualitative signs of common ground just as heartening as the quantitative. What do I mean by that? Usually, with bipartisan pieces of legislation, members from the two parties come to the cause for different reasons and spin the bill very differently, even when voting for the same measure. I’ve noted this before, most recently in the context of the bipartisan border security bill.

You would probably expect a similar dynamic here, with Republicans extolling the ADVANCE Act as a boon to national security and domestic industry, while Democrats praise it as a tool to combat climate change. But take a look at how Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV), the ranking member of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee and the ADVANCE Act’s lead Republican sponsor, described the bill on the Senate floor this week:

Republicans and Democrats recognize that the development of new nuclear technologies is critical to America’s energy security and our environment. Today, nuclear power provides about 20% of our nation’s electricity. Importantly, it’s emissions-free electricity that is 24/7/365 days a year. Not only is it necessary to continue developing and deploying more nuclear energy reactors from an energy and environmental standpoint, it is also vital to our national security and it’s good for the economy… The ADVANCE Act does just that.

And then see how Sen. Tom Carper (D-DE), the chair of the Environment and Public Works panel and the bill’s top Democratic sponsor, talked about the measure in his own floor speech:

The ADVANCE Act will strengthen our energy and our national security and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, as well as creating thousands of new jobs while growing our economy. I’m not sure what our colleagues would call that in their states, but in Delaware, something like that, we call that a “win-win-win” situation.

(At this point, I should pause to note the chemistry and physics at work here. Chemistry: per E&E News, Carper and Capito bonded over their shared West Virginia roots. Physics: they previously attempted to attach the ADVANCE Act to other must-pass bipartisan packages. Finally, the fire safety bill emerged as a vehicle that would allow the measure to easily pass without eating up more precious floor time.)

Majorities of Americans regard both China and climate change as important threats facing the U.S. Imagine if they knew that, this week, Democratic and Republican lawmakers both explicitly centered both threats to jointly advance a bill focused on another priority that a bipartisan majority of Americans support. Democrats talked about countering China; Republicans talked about countering climate change; a major bill is about to become law.

Now imagine if news like that received one-tenth of the coverage devoted to more flashy events, like the congressional baseball protest or the recent war of words between Marjorie Taylor Greene and Jasmine Crockett. Carper and Capito didn’t call each other names — they did something much more newsworthy: they compromised. And America’s environment, economy, and security could stand to benefit as a result. The news media urgently needs to develop the muscle of not only talking about Congress’ failings, but also its “win-win-wins.”

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Thank you so much for reading and for a great first week on Substack. I’ve been blown away by all your support.

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More news to know.

• Politico: Supreme Court rejects bid to preempt wealth tax

• AP: Trump dwarfs Biden in latest fundraising numbers in show of political force after felony convictions

• NYT: Judge in Trump Documents Case Rejected Suggestions to Step Aside

• Reuters: U.S. and China hold first informal nuclear talks in five years

• Axios: U.S. to deliver air defense systems to Ukraine by delaying shipments to allies

• NBC: Trump floats green cards for noncitizen college graduates

• ABC: Biden campaign picks right-side podium for CNN debate, Trump will have the last word

• WaPo: Robert Winnett will not join The Post as editor

Plus, more news from Capitol Hill: Bipartisan groups of lawmakers introduced bills designating Russia as a state sponsor of terrorism, boosting ethics disclosures for presidents and their families, combatting deepfake revenge porn, and officially naming the bald eagle as America’s national bird. (Apparently it isn’t already!)

• This week’s award for best legislative acronym: Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) introduced the NO Stool in Herds’ Troughs Act, which would prohibit factory farms from adding animal excrement to livestock feed, a practice that has been linked to the avian flu outbreak. That’s right: he introduced the NO SHT Act.

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Daybook.

White House: President Biden is at Camp David prepping for next week’s debate. Vice President Harris will travel to New York City, where she will deliver remarks at an event hosted by UNITE HERE, nation’s largest hospitality union; tape an interview with Mika Brzezinski for “Morning Joe”; and participate in a campaign fundraiser.

Congress: The Senate is on recess until July 8. The House is on recess until Tuesday.

Supreme Court: The justices are poised to release opinions at 10 a.m. ET. Rulings on several major cases have still yet to be released, including Trump v. United States (presidential immunity), Fischer v. United States (January 6th obstruction), Idaho v. United States (emergency abortions), and United States v. Rahimi (gun rights).

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Thanks so much for reading. I’ll see paid subscribers in your inboxes on Sunday and free subscribers in your inboxes on Monday. Have a great weekend!