Published

1 year ago

January 22, 2024

Alice Rush

Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-ND) shared this photo of a meeting with North Dakota CCL volunteers in August 2023, where they discussed the PROVE IT Act.

PROVE IT Act passes Senate committee after months of CCL support

By Flannery Winchester

On January 18, the bipartisan PROVE IT Act passed the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee with a bipartisan majority vote of 15-4. How did it achieve this exciting milestone? With a boost from CCL, of course!

The bill would require the Energy Department to study the amount of carbon pollution released in the making of certain products made in the U.S., and to compare that to certain other countries. “PROVE IT” actually stands for Providing Reliable, Objective, Verifiable Emissions Intensity and Transparency.

We were keen to support this bill because it is an important step to using America’s trade policy to drive down global emissions. With this bill, Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-ND) explains, “Verifiable data will be a useful tool for our government to build the bonds amongst our allies while putting a spotlight on global polluters and adversaries like China and Russia.”

“If you believe China and India need to be dealt with to really get global emissions down, this is the way to do it,” cosponsor Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) agreed.

Let’s take a look back at this policy and how our support helped advance the bill.

Introduced with fanfare

Just days before CCL’s annual summer conference, on June 7, 2023, a bipartisan group of Senators introduced the PROVE IT Act in the Senate: Lead sponsor Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) was joined by Sens. Kevin Cramer (R-ND), Bill Cassidy (R-LA), Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Martin Heinrich (D-NM), John Hickenlooper (D-CO), Angus King (I-ME), Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI).

The Washington Post covered the introduction of the bill, speaking to CCL’s VP of Government Affairs Ben Pendergrass for the story. Ben weighed in on how the bill might move forward toward becoming law. Washington Post columnist Catherine Rampell gave her positive take on the legislation a few days later, calling the bill “an achievement in its own right.”

Since the introduction came just before our lobby day, CCL’s legislative staff included the bill as another option for a primary ask. Many of our 436 meetings on Capitol Hill included discussions of the bill, and at our lobby day reception that night, Rep. Scott Peters (D-CA-50) announced his intention to introduce a House version of the bill.

CCL volunteers spring into action

In July, we mobilized in support of the PROVE IT Act. Across the country, our supporters contacted their congressional offices in support of the Senate bill and to encourage the introduction of a House version.

We set a goal of 5,000 messages in support of the PROVE IT Act. True to form, CCL supporters blew that out of the water! Between July 11 and August 5 last year, we sent 14,666 messages to Congress about the PROVE IT Act.

By the fall, two more Senators had jumped on the bill as cosponsors: Sen. John Boozman (R-AR) and Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL).

Support in local media, education across the country

In early August, some of our Delaware volunteers — Peggy Schultz, Beth Chajes, Marty Hopkins, Charlie Garlow, and Phil Smith — wrote an op-ed about the PROVE IT Act, showing support for their Senator and the bill’s lead sponsor, Sen. Chris Coons. “This bipartisan bill will account for industrial carbon emissions — and help Delaware,” the headline reads.

When the piece was published, it caught the eye of another cosponsoring senator from a different state. That senator’s staff reached out to CCL’s legislative staff to say they had seen the op-ed, they really liked it, and they appreciated the education volunteers were doing about the PROVE IT Act in their community.

Over in North Dakota, constituents of Sen. Kevin Cramer (the other main sponsor of the bill) were also hard at work in their local media. Volunteer Moones Alamooti published a letter in the Jamestown Sun titled, “Prove It Act has many potential benefits for North Dakota.” Moones wrote that the legislation “represents a balanced approach to addressing climate change with the potential to bring about positive outcomes for North Dakota’s economy and environment.”

At the national level, CCL’s social media accounts continued to educate the public and generate more outreach to Congress in support of the legislation with explainer posts like this one:

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Citizens’ Climate Lobby (@citizensclimate)

And of course, we wouldn’t be CCL if we didn’t sink our teeth into all the nerdy details In August, CCL Research Coordinators Dana Nuccitelli and Rick Knight presented a volunteer training about the PROVE IT Act in the context of other trade and climate policy. Then earlier this January, Dana touched on the PROVE IT Act again when updating us about proposed carbon border adjustment and carbon tariff bills.

Targeted mobilization supported a successful markup

On Jan. 10, the Senate Environment and Public Works (EPW) Committee announced their plans to mark up and vote on the PROVE IT Act as soon as the following week. By Jan. 11, CCL staff had organized and launched a targeted mobilization for volunteers in the 19 states with senators on the EPW Committee.

With our online action tool and script, volunteers placed 194 calls to committee members. Two of those committee members who received calls, Sen. Alex Padilla (D-CA) and Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ), signed onto the bill as cosponsors less than a week after our mobilization began.

Then on Jan. 18, the committee marked up and voted on the bill. It passed on a bipartisan basis, earning even more Republican support than expected. E&E News characterized the support from Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) and Sen. John Boozman (R-AR) as “something of a surprise.”

Not to us — we know that when enough constituents ask their lawmakers to act, it moves the needle!

We will keep you updated about the next steps for the PROVE IT Act and how you can support its progress. Stay tuned!

The post PROVE IT Act passes Senate committee after months of CCL support appeared first on Citizens' Climate Lobby.

PROVE IT Act passes Senate committee after months of CCL support

Greenhouse Gases

CCL applauds 21 Republicans for supporting clean energy tax credit support

Published

1 day ago

March 24, 2025

Alice Rush

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CCL applauds 21 Republicans for supporting clean energy tax credit support

March 12, 2025 – Citizens’ Climate Lobby is very encouraged to see 21 House Republicans sign onto a letter in support of America’s clean energy tax credits.

Jennifer Tyler, CCL’s Vice President of Government Affairs, said, “More and more Republican House members are recognizing that clean energy tax credits are benefiting their districts — and that constituents and businesses don’t want to lose them. It’s clear that these policies are delivering real economic value in communities nationwide.”

The letter, led by House Climate Solutions Caucus co-chair Rep. Andrew Garbarino (R-NY-02), was signed by 20 of his fellow House Republicans: Reps. Amodei, Bacon, Bresnahan, Carter, Ciscomani, Evans, Fong, Houchin, Hurd, James, Joyce, Kean, Kiggans, Kim, LaLota, Lawler, Mackenzie, Miller-Meeks, Newhouse and Valadao.

“We have 20-plus members saying, ‘Don’t just think you can repeal these things and have our support’” for the larger budget reconciliation package, Rep. Garbarino told Politico.

That’s a bigger group than the 18 Republicans who sent a similar letter last fall.

In last week’s Conservative Climate Leadership Conference and Lobby Day, 50 right-of-center climate advocates from CCL visited 47 Republican offices on Capitol Hill to reinforce that message.

These grassroots volunteers “found that Republican offices are receptive to the case that these tax credits have spurred unprecedented private investment, driven innovation, and created well-paying jobs across the country,” Tyler added.

CONTACT: Flannery Winchester, CCL Vice President of Communications, 615-337-3642, flannery@citizensclimate.org

###

Citizens’ Climate Lobby is a nonprofit, nonpartisan, grassroots advocacy organization focused on national policies to address climate change. Learn more at citizensclimatelobby.org.

The post CCL applauds 21 Republicans for supporting clean energy tax credit support appeared first on Citizens' Climate Lobby.

CCL applauds 21 Republicans for supporting clean energy tax credit support

Greenhouse Gases

50 grassroots conservatives visit Capitol Hill to support clean energy tax credits

Published

1 day ago

March 24, 2025

Alice Rush

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

50 grassroots conservatives visit Capitol Hill to support clean energy tax credits

March 10, 2025 – Last week, conservatives from across America gathered in Washington D.C. for Citizens’ Climate Lobby’s fifth annual Conservative Climate Leadership Conference and Lobby Day.

After receiving communications training from CCL staff, 50 right-of-center volunteers visited 47 Republican offices on March 5.

“I think this is one of the most impactful things that we do,” said Drew Eyerly, CCL’s Action Team Director, in CCL’s national volunteer call sharing highlights and reflections from the event.

Eyerly remarked on Republican offices’ enthusiasm for speaking with CCL volunteers, often giving them more time than originally planned. “They’ll say 10 minutes, and those meetings will turn into 20 to 30 minutes,” he reflected. “Just really, really great conversations.”

Those conversations centered on one main ask: For Republican lawmakers to protect America’s clean energy tax credits.

“As we talk about how competitive American businesses can be in clean energy and how many jobs it can bring to their district, the members are much more open to that discussion,” said Jennifer Tyler, CCL’s Vice President of Government Affairs.

This week, Citizens’ Climate Lobby launched a new action for volunteers around the country to call Republican members of Congress about the clean energy tax credits, reinforcing our recent lobby day message.

Volunteers will be back on Capitol Hill this summer for CCL’s annual Summer Conference and Lobby Day in late July.

CONTACT: Flannery Winchester, CCL Vice President of Communications, 615-337-3642, flannery@citizensclimate.org

###

Citizens’ Climate Lobby is a nonprofit, nonpartisan, grassroots advocacy organization focused on national policies to address climate change. Learn more at citizensclimatelobby.org.

The post 50 grassroots conservatives visit Capitol Hill to support clean energy tax credits appeared first on Citizens' Climate Lobby.

50 grassroots conservatives visit Capitol Hill to support clean energy tax credits

Greenhouse Gases

DeBriefed 21 March 2025: Germany’s climate win; Conservatives’ net-zero row-back; Key messages from major UK climate conference

Published

5 days ago

March 21, 2025

Alice Rush

Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.

This week

Germany’s €100bn climate funding

BILLIONS IN FUNDING: Germany’s parliament on Tuesday voted to create a €500bn defence and infrastructure fund and relax “constitutionally-protected debt rules”, the Guardian reported, with “the last-minute backing of the Greens” in return for “guarantees that €100bn of the funds destined for infrastructure would be allocated for climate and economic transformation investments”. The deal came following “clumsy” initial negotiations from Germany’s chancellor-in-waiting, Friedrich Merz, Bloomberg said. It reported that the Greens “finally came around” after Merz’s negotiators “conceded to their key demands”, which also included adding Germany’s 2045 climate-neutrality target into the constitution.

TAKING CLIMATE ‘SERIOUSLY’: The Greens said in a statement on social media that the agreement “finally takes the challenges of the future seriously”, according to the New York Times. Paula Piechotta, a member of the Greens in the German Bundestag, told the German newspaper Tagesspiegel that the deal was a “great success for democracy in our country, for sustainability and intergenerational justice”. The newspaper added that the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) and the Left party, “unsurprisingly”, criticised the agreement.

UK opposition breaks cross-party climate consensus

BREAKING AWAY: In a speech, Kemi Badenoch, leader of the UK opposition Conservative party, said it was “impossible” for the UK to meet its net-zero target by 2050, marking a “sharp break from years of political consensus”, BBC News reported. She did not offer an alternative target for the goal, the broadcaster said, quoting her telling reporters that if the Conservatives “do find a target is necessary, then yes we will have one”. Badenoch “failed to cite any evidence in support” of her arguments, according to a factcheck published by Carbon Brief, which concluded that much of the existing evidence “contradicts” her claims.

TORY BACKLASH: In response, Conservative former prime minister Theresa May, who was responsible for passing the 2050 target into law, warned the move “will hurt future generations and cost Britons”, the Times reported. The Confederation of British Industry (CBI) also criticised the speech, warning that “now is not the time to step back from the opportunities of the green economy”, according to the i newspaper. In the Daily Telegraph, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard said Badenoch’s “rant comes close to political tragedy”.

Around the world

CARNEY CUTS: New Canadian prime minister Mark Carney removed the country’s “consumer carbon tax”, CBC News reported, adding that the policy had been a “potent point of attack” for his political opponents.
GREENPEACE BILL: Greenpeace has been ordered to pay $660m in damages over its protests against the Dakota Access pipeline in 2016, which could “bankrupt its US operations” if upheld, the Financial Times said.
UK-CHINA FORUM: The UK and China agreed to establish an “annual climate dialogue”, with the first meeting to be held in London later this year, the Times reported.
CHEQUES AND BALANCES: A US judge has “temporarily barred” attempts by the Trump administration to recoup at least $14bn in “grants issued by the Biden administration for climate and clean-energy projects”, the Washington Post said.
EXTREME HEAT: “Severe heatwave conditions” have begun affecting several areas across India “unusually early in the season”, the Hindustan Times reported.
SOUTH AFRICAN SUPPORT: The EU will fill a “$1bn hole” in South African’s “just energy transition partnership” left by the US, the Financial Times reported. The US is also “stalling” $2.6bn of climate finance for South Africa, Bloomberg said.

152

The number of “unprecedented” extreme weather events that occurred in 2024, according to the World Meteorological Organization’s State of the Climate 2024 report. Heatwaves were the most common type of unprecedented events – defined as events “worse than any ever recorded in the region” – followed by “rain or wet spells” and floods.

Latest climate research

New research in Climate and Development explored how environmental justice featured in the climate action plans of rust-belt cities in the US, finding that few “provided enough details” to determine if it was a priority.
A new Science Advances study identified “increasing storminess” in the south-western Caribbean, which was attributed to “industrial-age warming”.
Marine heatwaves are now 5.1 times more frequent and 4.7 times more intense since records began, new research in Communications Earth & Environment found.

(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)

Captured

The UK’s high electricity prices are primarily driven by gas prices, according to an analysis published by Carbon Brief, with the UK typically seeing gas set electricity prices 98% of the time – compared to an average in the EU of 40%.

Spotlight

Chatham House talks climate and resilience

Carbon Brief outlines key takeaways from Chatham House’s climate and energy summit.

Chatham House, the UK’s leading international affairs thinktank, held its annual summit on climate and energy on 18-19 March. This year’s theme was: “Securing a resilient future.”

Carbon Brief attended the conference, where speakers including COP30 CEO Ana Toni, UK climate envoy Rachel Kyte and Moroccan minister for energy transition and sustainable development Leila Benali shared their thoughts on encouraging and enacting climate action.

Climate backlash

A sense of urgency permeated discussions at the summit, underpinned by concerns over growing anti-climate narratives.

Toni argued climate scepticism proves climate action is on the right track.

She said: “First people ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you – and this is where we are – then we win.”

COP30 CEO Ana Toni and UK climate envoy Rachel Kyte at Chatham House. Credit: Anika Patel, Carbon Brief

Other speakers said that increasing support for climate action by building new norms and creating overlapping interests could also be effective strategies.

Former US climate envoy Todd Stern pointed to increasing adoption of electric vehicles, while ClientEarth CEO Laura Clarke raised the example of community-owned renewable power.

Fretting over finance

Clean Earth Gambia founder Fatou Jeng warned that climate finance, as ever likely to be an important issue at COP30, has “not progressed much”.

“Blended finance” – using public money to leverage private funds – was heavily criticised in several panels. Ben Parsons, a partner at consultancy firm Oaklin, noted that only 72 such deals were agreed in 2024.

Speakers agreed that innovative mechanisms to derisk climate finance were needed, with Morocco’s Benali critiquing “exclusive” and inflexible private financing options.

Ndongo Samba Sylla, head of research and policy at International Development Economics Associates, argued that using local currencies would significantly boost climate finance.

Resilience through renewables

A key benefit of the UK’s “climate leadership”, Kyte argued, is that the energy transition will “make British people more secure”.

Parsons said the argument – recently deployed by Conservative leader Badenoch – that the energy transition replaced reliance on Russian fossil fuels with reliance on Chinese technology was incorrect.

“Fossil fuels are fuel – they require constant replenishment. Renewables are infrastructure,” he said, adding that arguably the UK should be accelerating its deployment of clean-energy technology.

On cybersecurity challenges in renewable power systems, Alex Schoch, vice president and group director of flexibility and electrification at Octopus Energy, argued that the key issue is how renewable energy “hardware” is managed, rather than where it is sourced from.

Parsons agreed, noting that the UK’s current power system has “plenty of cybersecurity vulnerabilities in it today”.

He said: “We have to make sure we’re putting [cybersecurity strategies] in place…But I don’t think that goes hand in hand with thinking we should avoid buying renewables from certain parts of the world.”

In a session on energy security in war-time Ukraine, held under the Chatham House rule, participants noted that the country was a case study for the importance of energy security.

Speakers said that since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, attacks on thermal power plants have seen growing use of low-carbon energy – particularly distributed solar.

Watch, read, listen

ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM: The Columbia Energy Exchange podcast explored how the new Trump government underpinned discussions at the energy industry event CERAWeek.

‘CONFLICT BLINDSPOT’: A new report by ODI found that “less than 10% of international climate finance” in 2022 went to fragile and conflict-affected countries.

METHANE INACTION: Leading supermarkets in the global north are “failing to address the methane pollution in their supply chains”, according to a study covered by Desmog.

Coming up

24-26 March: 16th Petersberg Climate Dialogue, Berlin, Germany
24-26 March: IPCC lead author meeting for methodology report on inventories for short-lived climate forcers, Bilbao, Spain
24-28 March: 20th session of the UN FAO commission on genetic resources for food and agriculture, Rome, Italy
25 – 28 March:First G20 climate and environment sustainability working group meeting, online

Pick of the jobs

ClientEarth, lawyer or legal consultant, energy systems, Asia | Salary: 455m-585m Indonesian rupiah. Location: Jakarta
European External Action Service, policy officer for green diplomacy | Salary: Unknown. Location: Brussels
Bloomberg, climate reporter | Salary: Unknown. Location: Hong Kong
The Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, project manager | Salary: £42,679-£51,000. Location: London