Doomed Bloom Raskin- POLITICO

MANCHIN’S POWER MOVE — President Joe Biden’s back-burnered bid to put a climate champion in charge of bank oversight just fell off the stove entirely.

The culprit? Sen. Joe Manchin, of course, who cited “rising inflation and energy costs” in coming out yesterday against Federal Reserve nominee Sarah Bloom Raskin. (And yes, those are the very same rising prices that Manchin himself said last week he was willing to tolerate as the price of cutting off Russian oil imports.)

It’s not “news,” per se: Manchin had signaled as much last week when he told the Senate Banking Committee to “take a win” by jettisoning Raskin and moving forward on the other four nominees. But it’s a victory for GOP senators who put a hold on Raskin’s nomination weeks ago as they fretted over what she might do to steer banks away from fossil fuel investments.

While the energy implications of Russia’s war against Ukraine are still playing out, this is an early sign that the shift to renewables may get shafted: GOP concerns about Raskin’s climate plans have been bubbling under the surface the whole time, and high energy prices gave Manchin the peg he needed to stick the fork in.

The White House and Senate Banking Committee Chair Sherrod Brown are still holding out hope of advancing Raskin’s nomination. Without Manchin, they’ll need support from at least one Republican — and two of the most likely prospects, Sens. Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins, aren’t on board, as Avery Ellfeldt reports for POLITICO’s E&E News.

“They won’t have me,” Murkowski told E&E’s Jeremy Dillon on whether she would offer her support. “Not this Republican, and I’d be hard pressed to offer up anyone else. I think she is a flawed nominee.”

Without Raskin as vice chair for supervision, the Fed could lack high-level expertise and attention on executing Biden’s push to consider climate-related financial risk, a theme that she’s emphasized in her writing and speeches.

Fed Chair Jerome Powell and Fed Governor Lael Brainard have also embraced analyzing banks’ climate risk exposure, but Raskin’s “fluency with the issues is what is really important,” said financial stability expert Hillary Allen, a law professor at American University. Without her de ella at the Fed, “it’s quite likely we wo n’t have the focus we need on how banks are vulnerable to physical and transition risks.”

Are you thinking about your own climate risk exposure when making financial decisions? Drop us a line.

Team Sustainability is editor Greg Mottdeputy editor Debra Khanreporters lorraine woellert and Catherine Boudreau and digital producer jordan wolman. Reach them at [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] and [email protected].

Thanks to Victoria Guida, Burgess Everett, Ximena Bustillo and POLITICO’s E&E News’ Avery Ellfeldt, Jeremy Dillon, Heather Richards, Jael Holzman and David Iaconangelo for pitching in today.

Want more? Don’t we all. Sign up for the Long Game. Four days a week and still free!

FIRE WORK— The Great Resignation is complicating the Biden administration’s efforts to combat increased wildfires, our Ximena Bustillo reports.

The Forest Service is finding “continued decline of folks to do the work” of fighting fires and managing forests, despite a pay hike to $15 an hour, according to the minutes of a call last month with agency officials across the West. Hiring managers are finding it tough to compete with higher wages in many states.Housing is also a problem.

The labor shortages could affect not only this fire season, but the administration’s broader 10-year plan to reduce the risk of huge blazes by treating 50 million acres of land through prescribed fire, forest thinning and other techniques.

“The 10-year plan for fire and fuels mitigation efforts, it’s like having a brand new truck and no gas when you don’t have the workforce to go out and do this stuff,” he said Joseph Landburga Forest Service assistant fire manager.

The Agriculture Department pointed to a new interagency workgroup that’s meeting through May on a new pay structure for wildland firefighters, as required by last year’s bipartisan infrastructure law.

Another superb quote: “It’s kind of like this two-headed monster of a problem right now because at a time when we’re trying to ramp up our fuels treatment and deal with the catastrophic fires that we’re seeing due to climate change, we’re also hemorrhaging the very people that are supposed to be doing this work,” an Arizona-based wildland firefighter told Ximena. “And society is changing at the same time and people are starting to understand their worth a little bit better. So it’s a really crazy time for wildfire to be so out of control. And it scares a lot of us.”

IT’S ELECTRIC — Good news for electric vehicle adoption right now: High gasoline prices matter much more to prospective EV buyers than high electricity prices, according to a new working paper by economists at the University of California, Davis.

Researchers crunched gasoline and electricity price data from across California and found that a 40-cent-per-gallon increase in gas prices increased EV demand by 57 percent. An equivalent increase in electricity prices — 5 cents per kilowatt hour — only reduced EV demand by 8 percent.

There are caveats, including the fact that prices of raw materials that go into EVs are also spiking, and that EVs might not be perfect substitutes for gas guzzlers because they may be driven less.

Still, the “results suggest that there will be a lot more people out shopping for EVs because of high gas prices,” economists James Bushnell, Erich Muhlegger and David Rapson wrote.

DRILL BITS — Speaking of responses to Russia, Republicans’ argue that Biden has enabled Putin by reducing petroleum production doesn’t work, broadly — production has been rising since Biden took office.

But after spiking last year, federal drilling leases on public lands are now down significantly, according to an analysis by Heather Richards for POLITICO’s E&E News.

The Bureau of Land Management in January approved just 95 permits for oil and natural gas wells across federal lands in the United States, an 85 percent drop from a peak of 643 issued last April.

Companies, meanwhile, are sitting on unused permits. Sixty percent of federal acreage leased to oil producers isn’t being tapped, according to the BLM.

NOTHING DOING — While human rights concerns led Congress to crack down last year on solar imports from China’s Xinjiang province, no similar move is afoot for cobalt from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, as Jael Holzman and David Iaconangelo report for POLITICO’s E&E News.

The DRC, sometimes called the “the Saudi Arabia of the electric vehicle age,” produces about 70 percent of the world’s cobalt. The Biden administration has refused to rule out the existence of forced labor there, which is what led to last year’s Xinjiang ban.

But given the country’s dominance, auto and technology companies are effectively stuck sourcing from the DRC, advocates say, until engineers figure out how to make cheap cobalt-free batteries.

“There’s just no appetite in America for this at the moment,” he said Anneke Van Woudenbergexecutive director of UK-based human rights organization RAID.

— Farm-to-fork could fall by the wayside as the The EU pivots to “food sovereignty.”

— Tesla’s German gigafactory will be a test“,”link”:{“target”:”NEW”,”attributes”:[],”url”:”https://www.economist.com/business/2022/03/05/will-elon-musk-change-germany”,”_id”:”0000017f-8ed2-d12b-afff-afd69f4c0003″ ,”_type”:”33ac701a-72c1-316a-a3a5-13918cf384df”},”_id”:”0000017f-8ed2-d12b-afff-afd69f4c0004″,”_type”:”02ec1f82-5e56-3b8c-af6e-6fc7c8772266″} “>will be tested of Elon Musk’s anti-union leaningsthe Economist reports.

— Tree planting is all the rage“,”link”:{“target”:”NEW”,”attributes”:[],”url”:”https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/14/climate/tree-planting-reforestation-climate.html”,”_id”:”0000017f-8ed2-d12b-afff-afd69f4c0005″ ,”_type”:”33ac701a-72c1-316a-a3a5-13918cf384df”},”_id”:”0000017f-8ed2-d12b-afff-afd69f4c0006″,”_type”:”02ec1f82-5e56-3b8c-af6e-6fc7c8772266″} “>all the rage, but not all trees or locations are created equal, the NYT points out. Fire-prone eucalyptus is a commonly grown offender.