How Ukraine and high gas prices could take us backward on climate change

How Ukraine and high gas prices could take us backward on climate change

Paul Waldman — Read time: 4 minutes

Under Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, Florida has become a hub of policy innovation, albeit of a particularly nightmarish variety. The Florida government has produced a “Don’t Say Gay” bill meant to terrorize teachers, a special police unit to investigate voter-fraud fantasies, and the state’s chief health officer telling parents not to vaccinate their children against a virus that has killed almost a million Americans.

The latest creative policy move comes on climate change, which is already hitting Florida particularly hard. State Republicans, working hand in glove with Florida Power and Light, the state’s largest utility (FPL is the hand, state legislators are the glove), have passed a bill undermining rooftop solar in the state.

It’s now on its way to DeSantis for his signature. Because it’s not like there’s a lot of sunshine in Florida.

While this bill was in the works for some time, it provides a window into how the war in Ukraine and high gas prices will affect energy politics in the coming years. This uncomfortable period will linger in our memories, and will likely push Red America and Blue America further apart.

The Florida bill was about net metering, which allows people who have rooftop solar systems to send surplus electricity they generate back to the grid and get credited on their bills. Net metering is extremely popular with both Democrats and Republicans (even if some of the latter are attracted to it more out of self-reliance than environmental concerns). It encourages more solar capacity by offering a financial incentive that helps defray the cost of installing a home-solar system.

But the Florida legislature’s bill slashes the rates at which customers with solar panels will be credited for the energy they send back to the grid, and allows utilities to impose fees and charges on those customers. The result will inevitably be fewer people installing solar systems, and more burning of fossil fuels.

The net metering bill was basically written by Florida Power and Light. Documents obtained by the Miami Herald showed that its lobbyist delivered the text to the state senator who would introduce it in the legislature; two days later FPL’s parent company also delivered a $10,000 contribution to her PAC.

In recent years as the climate crisis has intensified, opinion in the Republican Party on the subject has been divided into three camps. In one are those who sincerely want to do something about climate change, even if their proposals are relatively modest. At the other extreme are active climate deniers, who are a significant, if dwindling, portion of the party.

The largest group of Republicans is those who will reluctantly acknowledge that climate change is real, but don’t think we should do anything about it. While they don’t frame it this way, their actual position winds up being that we should make climate change worse by burning as much fossil fuels as possible while not moving in any active way to shift toward renewable energy.

This is the lesson they’re going to insist we all take from this year’s high gas prices and the instability in global energy markets produced by the Ukraine invasion: The only secure future we can have is if we focus intensely on producing more fossil fuels.

For instance, Donald Trump, the leader of the Republican Party, asked on a podcast what will happen next in Ukraine, responded, “We are playing right into the hands, the green energy, the windmills, they don’t work, they’re too expensive, they kill all the birds, they ruin your landscapes, and yet the environmentalists love the windmills.”

Or as South Dakota Gov. Kristi L. Noem (R) said, “President Biden’s Green New Deal destroyed our energy surplus and it turned it into an energy crisis.” You might be wondering how a bill that Biden doesn’t support could have accomplished something so dramatic without even being voted on, let alone put into law, but that’s just how sneaky those environmentalists are.

The point isn’t the accuracy of these bizarre lies, it’s that Republicans will keep repeating them. However Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war ends, the domestic lesson Republicans will take is that 2021 and 2022 increases in gas prices weren’t the result of the pandemic and choices made by oil companies and OPEC to limit production (the actual truth), but instead the fault of radical environmental policies.

So opposing renewable energy could become even more firmly embedded in Republican identity. That means the fallout from this period is likely to include a new wave of policy moves such as Florida’s in other Republican-run states, undermining renewables and promoting fossil fuels, even as Democratic states move in the opposite direction.

In the end, we could see another opportunity squandered as this moment results in retrograde energy policies in red states, and a country more divided than ever.

Watch the latest Opinions video:

When American Emad Shargi is taken hostage by Iran as a pawn in nuclear negotiations with the U.S., his wife and daughters must fight to free him. (The Washington Post)