US Climate Official Says Record Oil Eases Shift To Clean Energy

(Bloomberg) --Record oil and gas production under President Joe Biden has enabled the US to smoothly transition toward cleaner energy and fight climate change without driving up prices, a top White House adviser said Wednesday.

The administration’s approach to cutting greenhouse gases has been to ensure there is “energy availability for the demand that exists on the market today — no shocks, no upward price pressure,” Ali Zaidi, the White House national climate adviser, told Bloomberg TV when asked about climbing US oil and gas production at the COP29 climate summit in Azerbaijan.

“That is a facilitator of decarbonization, not something that slows it down,” Zaidi said.

Biden has prioritized spending and policy to help propel a shift to low- and zero-emission energy sources, driving record investment to the sector. At the same time, domestic oil and gas production has climbed to record levels, making the US the world’s top producer.

Zaidi suggested that’s not a record to run from, even at the UN climate talks a year after nations committed to transition away from fossil fuels.

“It doesn’t matter what your energy mix is today — we can all travel the distance and get there and keep 1.5 degrees within reach,” he said.

Zaidi and other US officials are working to reassure foreign leaders that the country’s long-term climate progress will not be shaken, despite President-elect Donald Trump’s vows to once again withdraw the country from the Paris Agreement and roll back regulations critical to meeting the nation’s carbon-cutting commitments.

Zaidi argued that a building political economy around clean energy investment in the US will help ensure the durability of the country’s transition, insisting there’s an “irreversibility of our momentum here.”

That trajectory has been shaped by a trillion dollars of private investment and capital intensive projects being built across the country, he said. “There is a singular focus in the private sector, in labor and industry, to seize this opportunity, and the US is going to keep rushing to do that.”

Zaidi wasn’t entirely sanguine. In a separate interview with Bloomberg, he expressed concern about the US’s ability to “sustain the manufacturing renaissance that’s taken off” in the past few years.

“We know that federal policy is so critical to incubating that industrial capacity buildout,” he said. “And in a couple of key areas, I think we might fall back if policy is reversed.”