Briefing Series: Congressional Climate Camp

Congressional Climate Camps

Find out more about the briefings in this series below:

Lessons Learned from Past Congresses and Current Attitudes on Climate

• Our first session drew on examples of funding for climate, energy, and environment programs to bring the budget process to life and show how it plays out in practice. 

• The annual appropriations process begins with the president submitting the annual budget, which recommends spending levels for federal programs and agencies. This usually happens on or before the first Monday in February, but budget submissions are often delayed, particularly in presidential transition years.

• The budget and appropriations process is critical to Congress’s role and its engagement with the administration. Each appropriations subcommittee has a lot of power and covers different jurisdictions.

• A stimulus package should include funding for state and local governments, which can be powerful delivery mechanisms for stimulus money. State agencies can effectively distribute federal funds and deliver them with locally appropriate outcomes.

• This second session of the Congressional Climate Camp briefing series discussed the sectors with the highest greenhouse gas emissions and highlighted policy mechanisms to reduce emissions in each sector—power generation, industry, buildings, transportation, and agriculture.

• Implementing regenerative agriculture to mitigate GHG emissions will limit the effects of climate change.

• The future of electric power in the United States consists of creating holistic solutions in electrical energy that can be rapidly adopted and scaled. We need technology to transform the sector to a low-carbon system that is also reliable, resilient, and affordable. This requires fundamental rethinking, innovation, policies, and investments.   

• Policymakers seeking to decarbonize buildings have set three goals: retrofitting six million buildings, training the workforce to know how to build efficiently, and investing in technology and RD&D.

• The options to decarbonize industry are relatively few and comparatively expensive. The most viable low-carbon heat applications and sources include hydrogen, electricity, biomass, and carbon capture and storage.

• We should approach transportation projects through two lenses: equity and climate change. Doing so encourages a different type of decision-making than what has occurred historically.

• Our third session looked at past legislative efforts to establish climate policy and the current political and public opinion environment on climate change, in order to explore the forces that are shaping current Congressional work to address the climate crisis.

• Past policies are foundational to new action and thinking on climate change.

• The environmental justice movement is currently influencing the federal government’s work on equity and justice and has sparked a reckoning within the environmental movement to ensure that environmental justice is at the core of the framework we are developing.

• Compromises in Congress benefit legislators on both sides of the compromise. The idea that bipartisanship equates to bad politics is a misperception.

• Our fourth session looked at a suite of climate solutions that simultaneously reduce greenhouse gas emissions and increase resilience to climate impacts. Briefing speakers discussed how these solutions also advance environmental justice, job creation, and conservation.

• The best way to make our coasts more resilient is to work with nature with living shoreline projects, not against it with structural projects.

• A diverse set of solutions from the agricultural sector can help adapt to environmental changes, including solutions like conservation agriculture, farm irrigation efficiency, regenerative annual cropping, grassland protection, and plant-rich diets at the consumer level.

• Buildings made with mass timber offer multiple benefits: carbon sequestration in the wood, energy efficiency, avoided use of carbon-intensive concrete and steel, forest restoration, and recyclable materials if the building is ever taken down. 3D modeling and other advanced techniques make it possible to build more efficient buildings with less waste.

• As we work to dismantle the system built on the consequences of extraction, exploitation, and oppression of certain people, we must do so in a way that well-intended efforts do not have unintended consequences. The only way we can do that is by making sure that we have everyone at the table.

• Our fifth and final session looked at budget reconciliation, an oftentimes difficult-to-understand process that allows Congress to pass laws related to taxes, spending, and the debt limit with only a majority vote in the Senate (instead of a filibuster-proof 60-vote supermajority). 

• Budget reconciliation as it came to be used looks very different from how it was first conceived in the 1974 Congressional Budget Act (P.L. 93-344). In the 2000s and 2010s, reconciliation became more of a one-off process to pass party priorities.

• Reconciliation is about budgetary changes. The briefing covers what is clearly allowed, what is not allowed, and what falls in the gray areas under the budget reconciliation process.

• The Byrd Rule limits how reconciliation is used. It prohibits the Senate from considering extraneous items as part of a reconciliation bill or resolution. The presiding officer, with advice from the Senate Parliamentarian, decides whether an item is extraneous.

• Each time Congress does a budget resolution, it can be followed by up to three reconciliations surrounding spending, revenue, and debt limits. It takes a lot of time to do reconciliation and strategize priorities across issues.