Interview: Rep. Doyle on Getting Support for a Climate Bill

Grist (9/29, Gertz) – Doyle, a senior member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, was an early critic of the Waxman-Markey climate and clean energy bill.  But he eventually emerged as a major supporter of the legislation, brokering components that would benefit the industrial and manufacturing sectors and whipping up votes that helped the bill squeak to passage in June. [Exurbs of a Grist Interview:]

Q. Your district is rich in coal and steel, and yet you brought many important constituents around to supporting the House climate and energy bill.

A. When this bill was first introduced in the House, I heard from the industries, and they were panicked that this was going to devastate the steel industry [and] jobs in western Pennsylvania…It was really out of those discussions that the Doyle-Inslee amendment was born in the House, which basically says to our industries that if they become more efficient and lower their carbon footprints and do that better than the sector average, we would reward that, and we’d do it in a way that was WTO compliant.  We’re saying to steel, “We’ll give you the level playing field you need until such time that we get agreements with other countries that you’re competing with.”

Q. What’s your answer to people who say the government has no business mandating carbon pricing and green building standards?

A. We have building standards for earthquakes in the West Coast, and building standards for hurricanes in the East Coast.  Why don’t we have building standards for having buildings that produce energy, instead of using so much energy?  Because energy isn’t cheap any more.

Q. Going greener has helped Pittsburgh retain manufacturing jobs and revitalize the city’s economy—cleaning up brownfields, reclaiming the waterfront for the public, building green, and now bringing wind power jobs to the steel industry.  What’s next?

A. We have a national energy lab.  We have Alcoa.  We have PPG doing some state-of-the-art things in photovoltaics. Right at Carnegie Mellon, Volker Hartkopf is constructing a [six-story, 7,500-square-foot] building that will be a net energy producer, not user.  He’s using a lot of the materials and research that’s coming out of institutions right here in Pittsburgh to do that. We see this going on in our region, and we say, “Why shouldn’t Pittsburgh be the place where we do this kind of stuff, and produce these materials?”