An Interview With Tom Carper (D-DE)

Tom Carper

Affable and moderate, Democrat Tom Carper of Delaware is a safe "yes" vote for the climate bill when it comes to the Senate floor next year. But he's also played an important role behind the scenes on the Senate environment committee on issues ranging from coal power to advanced nuclear technologies.

Speaking to Eli Kintisch of ScienceInsider, he underscored some of his pet issues, ranging from support for funding carbon sequestration with revenues from cap -and trade to his long-standing interest in nuclear power. And he warns that if the United States doesn't accelerate efforts to develop green power sources, with help from the carbon limits he hopes the United States will soon enact, the country could lose out to China, which he calls a "sleeping giant" in terms of renewable energy.

Q: You played a key role on the Environment and Public Works Committee in terms of speaking with coal-state lawmakers about the climate bill. What are the prospects for getting coal-state senators to support this bill when it moves to the floor?

T.C.: I suspect that some will and some will not. For those who end up supporting the bill, I hope they look back on the negotiations we had with the coal states in comfort, solace, and satisfaction in the give-and-take that we had and the willingness of the committee chair and the members of the committee not just to listen to the coal states but to act and produce a bill that reflects the concerns of coal states.

Q: What are some of the regional differences that will determine which senators support the bill and which do not?

T.C.: That's a great question. One factor that's going to be helpful will be how House [of Representatives] members in the coal states voted on the House-passed legislation. I believe that in a number of respects the Senate language going to the floor will be more supportive for clean coal and more likely to provide predictability for coal states and for coal-fired utilities. Businesses like certainty. And I believe we provide more of that in the Senate-passed legislation. If the House members from a coal state voted for the House bill, it's going to be hard for some senators to ignore what their House members have done. A good example of that is in Virginia, where [Representative] Rick Boucher [D-VA] played a key role in supporting the legislation. That makes it a lot easier for [Democratic] Senators Mark Warner and Jim Webb to actually end up voting for the legislation.

Q: One of your issues is reducing emissions from transportation. Do you think this Senate bill as it stands now does enough to encourage efficient transportation?

T.C.: I don't know that it does enough. If you think about where carbon dioxide emissions come from in this country, about 40% of it comes from utilities, largely coal-fired utilities. About 30% comes from other stationary sources. And then 30% comes from the cars, trucks, and vans we drive. In the House-passed bill, they used about 1% of the allowances to reduce emissions from the transportation sector. That's not a very good balance. What I sought to do with the help and support of my colleagues and committee chair is to ensure that we devote more allowances to the transportation sector. The last time we passed CAFE legislation 2 years ago, the President built upon that by moving the [deadline] from 2020 to 2016.

But the last time we did CAFE--in 1975--rather than seeing our gasoline consumption go down, it went up. [People bought] larger cars, and we just would go more. So we not only have to make more efficient vehicles in this country but to find ways to get people out of their cars and trucks and to utilize alternative forms of energy. That may in some cases mean mass transit, rail. It may mean walking paths, bike paths, it may mean all of the above--it may mean putting in a van pool.

Q: Delaware is a pretty suburban state. What kinds of things can your constituents do to drive less?

T.C.: We used a little bit of stimulus money in a park-and-ride 20 miles south of Wilmington. There's a lovely suburban community about a half-mile from this park-and-ride. In order to get to the park-and-ride, you need to get an indirect vehicular route. So we used some of the stimulus money to create a bicycle and walking path from the subdivision there to the park-and-ride. We increased frequencies of a bus service to the park-and-ride. A lot of people who live there didn't really think before about using the park-and-ride. Now they decided, well, I can see it over there--now I can take the bus, it's a lot cheaper than driving my car.

Also in Newark, we have a partnership with SEPTA, the Southeast[ern] Pennsylvania Transportation Authority, where they run trains from southeastern Pennsylvania into Delaware, but it kind of stops right there. In order to connect to the Maryland line, the MARC system, you have to drive 20 miles. There's a gap there. So among the things we can do is connect the dots.

Q: You've been among the proponents for nuclear power being part of the solution for climate change.

T.C.: There [are] some in the Senate who believe that pretty much all we need to do to meet our climate-change goals is just to build scores of new [nuclear] power plants. There are others [who] are concerned about it and feel anxious to build more plants. So the role I've sought to play is to try to say to those people who are not very supportive of nuclear power that if we're going to get 60 votes with a comprehensive, thoughtful policy to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, nuclear has to play a role. I worked with our committee chairman and fellow members to make sure that there is a nuclear title [on the Senate bill]. Maybe not a robust, vibrant title, but a realistic and meaningful title. And Senator [Joe] Lieberman [I-CT] and others and myself are involved in making that nuclear title more robust.

Q: What do you think about research into reprocessing spent nuclear fuel?

T.C.: What I hope to do on the floor is to use some of the revenues from the auction of the emissions credits to fund research into reprocessing. From what I can tell you, and from what I've learned from talking to people from around the world, I don't think that anyone has learned how to do reprocessing very well. We have Energy Secretary [Steven] Chu, who is a supporter of the robust nuclear expansion and believes that we need to invest significantly into research into reprocessing.

When I held a field hearing up at MIT, I learned two things: The cost of thorium is not prohibitive, there's plenty of it around, at a good price, and two, we have the ability to store spent nuclear fuel rods in ways that are safe and sound.

Q: I wanted to ask you about China's recent announcement about their intensity target. Some people feel it doesn't matter what China does in terms of whether the Senate is going to act, and some people think it does matter in terms of getting 60 votes.

T.C.: The short answer is yes, it does matter. The Chinese have sent us a very constructive signal that they're not going to have a "my way or the highway approach." Can we always encourage them to do more? Yes, we can. I find their pronouncements to be a source of encouragement.

The Chinese, for communists, are not bad entrepreneurs. There's a lot of money to be made on this, on the green economy, on green jobs. The Chinese are starting to wake up and smell the coffee. It's too bad. Because they might have been a sleeping giant on this.