As a scientist and former clean-energy CEO elected to Congress on a protect-our-climate platform, Sean Casten is something of an anomaly in the U.S. House of Representatives. But he has gained the respect of colleagues for his command of energy issues and his willingness to listen.
Casten is a second-term Democrat first elected in 2018 in a formerly Republican stronghold district in the western suburbs of Chicago. He is also a fan of the Center for Inquiry and the Skeptical Inquirer, as he said at the start of his online Skeptical Inquirer Presents webinar on February 17. And he has learned early on that wit and humor can gain attention for needed policy advances.
Casten laughed as he told how he used rap music and pop culture references to get notice in the media for his campaign on behalf of the little-known Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, or FERC, “the most important agency you’ve never heard of.” His rap and use of bad dad jokes and references to Megan Thee Stallion may have made no sense to the “old white guys” (of both parties) on the House floor, but they got notice on TV for his campaign to fulfill a final commissioner position at FERC. “I got on Laura Ingraham of Fox News and The Daily Show on the same night,” he said, and that got people talking. That advanced the task of adding a commissioner so that FERC could get on with its job of overseeing and incentivizing clean energy for the nation’s electrical grid.
Casten took listeners on a quick, lively (really, he does not like to bore) tour of clean-energy issues, the ironies of opposing rules and regulations (“we are fighting each other”), and the hodge-podge of U.S. agencies—not to mention all the states themselves—that do their best to oversee individual aspects of energy policy without much overall planning. We need a national energy policy agency to provide coherence to the whole, he said: “We need to row in the same direction.”
Our European counterparts are way ahead of us there, especially in adoption of laws mandating use of clean energy, but the reasons are historical and geographical, as well as political, Casten noted. The United States, Britain, and France all created democracies around the same time, but in Europe it was in the context of a continent already fully populated. In the United States, we could just keep moving west when things got messy or crowded, never really confronting our issues.
FERC was founded in 1935 to help electrify the nation, and it did so well and in a really short time, Casten noted. Now we need it to do the same, substituting clean energy sources for the fossil fuel sources we have long relied on. And it all has to be done in a way that respects those whose jobs and livelihoods will be lost in the necessary transition. We have to look out for them, and the current administration’s Build Back Better legislation includes large amounts of money for that. Most important, he said, “We need a world that is not overheating.”
Our European counterparts marvel at how we “keep debating the physics” of climate change, but Casten said we no longer have time to do that. We have to replace polluting sources with clean energy very quickly, and, while we “need to be respectful,” we no longer have time to argue about the science, which is clear.
But, of course, that is easier said than done.
When Casten was asked if there has been any progress in reducing the partisan divides on this issue, he replied, “There is really a sad answer to that question.”
He noted that it was Republican administrations (Ronald Reagan, then George H.W. Bush) that implemented the Montreal Protocol, the first legislation to protect the atmosphere’s ozone layer against chlorofluorocarbons, which was supposed to be the model for future cooperation. But once Bill Clinton was elected, that all changed. When Newt Gingrich became speaker of the house, he and the Republicans decided that if Clinton was for something, they were against it.
It has been that way ever since. “The party has been completely hostile to climate change. … This has led us down this sort of rabbit hole, the fetishization of ignorance.”
For thirty years, any Republican who has cared about climate change has been shut out by his own party, Casten said. He knows there are colleagues of his across the aisle who are sympathetic toward climate issues. They say, “I just need the space to prove that you can win an election by being pro-climate. If we can do that for a few cycles.”
So, yes, there is some movement, and there are “some crazy deniers there too,” Casten acknowledges, but it does no good for him to actively call out their ignorance, which just causes everyone to retreat back into a shell. “I think there are more of them who are aware that they have been on the wrong side of this and don’t see a way to get it right.”