Newly former Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Chair Tom Carper (D-Del.) may be departing Congress, but he told The Hill he’ll “never retire” and plans to continue working on climate-related issues.
In an interview on the penultimate day of his more than two decades in the Senate, the 77-year-old said that he hopes to keep working to “make sure that our children and grandchildren are going to have a planet to grow up on.”
With the second Trump administration set to take over, he expressed concerns about the president-elect's anticipated efforts to roll back climate regulations.
He particularly called Trump’s plans to roll back electric vehicle standards “crazy” because vehicles make up a major share of the nation’s total planet-warming emissions.
But he also said he expects the administration to run into trouble if it tries to repeal some of the climate-friendly incentives passed under Biden because of jobs they created in Republican-held districts.
“Just as market forces helped save the Affordable Care Act and make it permanent, I think the same market forces will go a long way toward saving our efforts to address climate change,” he said.
Carper has been a senator since 2001, serving alongside then-Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.) for several years, and before that was Delaware’s governor.
He has been head of the Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee since 2017.
In that role, he took on the Trump administration’s deregulatory agenda. Under the Biden administration, Carper helped work on both the Inflation Reduction Act, which included massive investments in low-carbon energy sources, and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.
He was also one of several lawmakers who worked on recently collapsed efforts to pass legislation to speed up the buildout of the nation’s energy projects.
While they couldn’t reach a bipartisan agreement, Carper said “we laid the groundwork” for the next Congress. He similarly said he hopes that negotiations for legislation aimed at addressing toxic “forever chemicals” will eventually “bear fruit.”
However, representing the business-heavy Delaware, Carper is considered a moderate and has at times bucked his party. Notably, he was one of eight Democrats who, in 2021, voted against raising the minimum wage to $15 per hour.
Asked about that vote, he said “I think as a party, we should be the party of work ... and we should be encouraging people to get the kind of tools that they need in order to be able to get into the workforce and make a difference in their lives.”
Taking a page from his former colleague Biden, Carper also stressed the importance of making the political personal in getting climate action done.
He cited this approach in his partnership with Louisiana firebrand Sen. John Kennedy (R) that ultimately led to a phase-down of highly potent planet-warming hydrofluorocarbons.
“When I found out that his middle name was Neely, I told him that my father-in-law —his name [was] Neely,” Carper said. “ I've never called John Neely Kennedy — I've never called him John. I always call him Neely.”
“We just ... ended up being friends and having a trusting relationship,” he added.
Carper doesn't yet have firm plans on what he plans to do next. But he expressed particularly hope to find work at the intersection of climate change and jobs, saying that as the younger generations "grow up and grow older, I want to make sure they have jobs.”
“I think there may be opportunities for me," he said. "It may be in the private sector, it may be in [the] nonprofit sector.”
