Liam Denning, Columnist

This Celebrated Energy Bill Is Underwhelming

Congress has opted to acknowledge, but not actually tackle, climate change.

December 22, 2020 at 4:16 PM UTC

Liam Denning is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering energy. A former banker, he edited the Wall Street Journal’s Heard on the Street column and wrote the Financial Times’s Lex column.

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The energy bill attached to the relief package passed by Congress on Monday night is winning plaudits for its bipartisanship and climate-friendly measures. Not to be a Grinch this close to Friday, but I am reminded of one of my favorite tweets of 2020:

Don’t worry: The replies were replete with pithy explanations as to why this year’s performance on emissions wasn’t exactly worthy of celebration. But that’s not why I’m thinking of it. What gives that tweet real depth is the tacit acknowledgement that cutting greenhouse gas emissions is a worthwhile thing to do. By extension, that’s an acknowledgement that climate change is a problem worth fixing — an acknowledgement by the daughter of a president who doesn’t share that view.