Source: United States Senator Kevin Cramer (R-ND)
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WASHINGTON – U.S. Senator Kevin Cramer (R-ND) joined Nick Sobczyk at the Axios Pro Energy Policy Launch Event for a fireside chat on carbon border adjustment mechanisms (CBAM), the Fair Access to Banking Act, and permitting reform. Excerpts below.
On CBAM:
“[My colleagues and I] have talked about a series of CBAM ideas… I believe we’ll find enough common ground among all of [the CBAM proposals] to do one of them in a bipartisan way.”
“Why I think [my approach] is the most likely to move forward is it’s the simplest. If you start talking about domestic carbon pricing, you’re telling people we’re going to raise the price on everything you buy, everything you grow, everything you produce, everything you manufacture, and people intuitively feel that’s unfair because we already impose a lot of costs on the production of carbon-intensive products in our country.”
“We have great regulatory certainty, oversight, and high standards for manufacturing carbon-intensive products, including electricity. […] I don’t think we should punish ourselves anymore. I think we should recognize that, and then we should have a carbon border adjustment mechanism that, I don’t want to say ‘punishes,’ but at least presents an incentive to polluters, and makes them catch up to us, instead of us competing with them unfairly.”
Senator Cramer penned an op-ed on the European Union’s unilateral CBAM in December 2022. Click here to learn more.
On the Fair Access to Banking Act:
“[The bill] simply states if you’re FDIC-insured or a taxpayer-backed financial institution, you cannot categorically exclude entire industries because they’re out of favor with the Left. In some cases, [financial institutions] have some legitimate institutional investors who want that. On the other hand, they’re getting all this loud noise in their left ear from an Administration and a political power base that’s forcing them into it and they don’t really hear a lot of noise on the other side. So, I’ve become the loud noise in the right ear. The question is, do I see the banks responding? I do.”
“I invited all [the leaders of America’s largest banks] to North Dakota – a few have taken me up on it – and demonstrated for them projects like carbon capture utilization and storage, hydrogen projects, even things like the use of nitrogen development for fertilizers… the kinds of things that help them and help me. In other words, showing them fossil fuel solutions that meet their climate goals. Because right now, everybody thinks about climate and how to deal with it, and they pick fuel sources they like and fuel sources they don’t like, instead of focusing on the emissions, which is the issue.”
“Every banking decision should be based on the merits of that decision and how it does for the economy and your bank and your shareholders, not what some group wants.”
On Permitting Reform:
“Whether it’s developing an offshore wind project, or an onshore wind project, or a solar project on federal lands, or whatever the case may be… the siting and production of it, the movement of the product you’re producing, and then of course, the allocation of costs – these are all regulatory things in the way of the Green Movement just as much as they are in the [way of the] fossil industry. So, there’s common ground.”
“The hang up has been – particularly in the Senate, where Democrats have a majority – is they want to take the things like the Inflation Reduction Act, the Green New Deal, and they want to accelerate all of that development. They want to figure out a way to do an electricity transmission requirement, which allocates the cost for every little project to the entire state or region or country. That’s just fundamentally wrong. It doesn’t work, I’m a former energy regulator.”
“House Republicans Cathy McMorris Rogers, Chair of the Energy and Commerce Committee, and Representative Kelly Armstrong, Vice Chair of the committee, started a serious process to put together permitting reform the way they’d like to see it, I would encourage them to find some Democrats […] and let that be the starting point. Then give it over to [the Senate], and we’ll start working as people who care about energy dominance in this country, the national security ramifications of that, rewarding the excellence of American-produced energy and products, and tweak it. Maybe we can find enough common ground to get a product we could pass in the Senate, send it back into the House, and they could accept it as a victory. I do think [permitting reform] is an area where there are enough stakeholders on all sides that maybe that’s what will make it happen.”