White House official: Corporate tax reform should boost green energy

A White House economic adviser said Thursday that any overhaul of the corporate tax code should provide a lift for green energy technologies.

“The first headline of corporate tax reform will not be ‘corporate tax reform for the clean energy economy.’ But the way that corporate tax reform gets done could have a dramatic effect, long-term, [on] the incentives for investment in the United States for ... technologies and renewable technologies,” said Brian Deese, deputy director of the National Economic Council.

“We have got to keep an eye on those things and got to make that a priority,” added Deese, speaking at a forum hosted by The Atlantic and The National Journal.

Rep. Dave Camp (R-Mich.), the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, and Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) are both advocates for reforming the corporate and individual tax codes.

But a number of hurdles remain. The Hill’s On the Money blog has more on that here.

Deese, who noted that President Obama wants to see corporate tax reform, did not lay out specific proposals.

But he noted that Obama had been “adamant” that the recent year-end compromise over tax rates include an extension of the production tax credit for wind energy projects, which it ultimately did.

Decisions that affect clean energy should not be "overlooked" in fiscal policy debates, Deese said.

Elsewhere in the interview, Deese talked up a stimulus-law program that provided $2.3 billion worth of tax credits for domestic projects to manufacture green energy-related components.

The White House has in recent years called on Congress to make a new round of credits available.

The White House has also for years been pushing, unsuccessfully, for the repeal of billions of dollars' worth of fossil fuel industry tax incentives.

Bernie Becker contributed.