I spoke to Cheddar‘s Alan Neuhauser about green energy advocates’ efforts to identify GOP champions in the US Senate.
The Iowa senator, once a reliable partner for renewables like wind energy, is now off the market. That’s left green groups scrambling to find a new champion to help secure much-needed GOP votes – with remarkably slim pickings.“He was very reliable,” a renewable energy lobbyist said. “Now, I don’t know. The House has been a lot easier to identify Republicans who are interested and willing to go to bat for clean energy.”Liam Donovan, a Republican lobbyist specializing in tax policy and energy at Bracewell, offered a similar assessment:“On Senate Finance, where are your natural allies? No one obvious jumps out,” Donovan said.…
There are also signs of retrenchment, though. As the Trump administration has called for ending virtually all tax incentives for green energy and electric vehicles in its latest budget proposal, some Republican senators that once clearly supported certain green tax credits now appear to have hedged.“That’s what looms over all of this. We saw the way these negotiations played out and the apparent reluctance within the White House to really go there on any of these clean-energy issues. That’s going to color the willingness of some of these Republicans to engage on these issues this year,” Donovan said. “I don’t think Republicans are in the same place that they might’ve been when these incentives were originally enacted.”…
Renewable energy, electric vehicle and environmental advocates and trade groups hope that they might also be able to leverage so-called “technicals:” errors that are leftover from the 2018 GOP-led tax overhaul that have since hit retailers and restaurants especially hard. But the technical corrections alone, without other issues like biofuels, may not be enough – especially in the face of intense White House opposition to electric vehicles and renewable energy.“You’re not going to put things on the table that were non-starters the last time,” Donovan said.
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