Given the emotional reserve of a man whose aides once referred to as “no drama Obama,” the president is getting pretty fired up about energy.  On Wednesday this week President Obama concluded an all hands cabinet meeting at the White House by publicly declaring again his resolve to develop a “new energy strategy that the American people desperately want.”

“It is time for us to move to a clean energy future,” the president said, adding that “the entire cabinet here recognizes, with all the other stuff that they’re doing, that if we get energy right, an awful lot of things can happen as a consequence.”

The unscripted statement came eight days after the president delivered a formal Oval Office summons for a “national mission” to pursue cleaner sources of energy and new practices that limited carbon emissions.  The president’s “national mission” speech, in turn, followed five days after he alerted a bipartisan group of lawmakers and prominent business leaders that he wanted to “move much more aggressively on the energy agenda,”and three weeks after Obama told an audience in Pittsburgh that “the time has come, once and for all, for this nation to fully embrace a clean energy future.” Not since President Jimmy Carter delivered his famous and perceptive April 1977 address, during which he asserted that solving the energy crisis was the “moral equivalent of war,” has an American leader staked so much political credibility on a new national energy policy. And as energy historians are quick to note, none of President Obama’s successors, starting with President Nixon, achieved anything close to the alternative energy goals they pursued.

Will It Work Now?
The obvious question is whether economic, environmental, and social conditions are sufficiently different today than they were in any of the last four decades, and whether the country is experiencing enough urgency to seriously reckon with how it produces and uses energy.

There are no ready responses. The president’s critics in the energy industry and the Republican party have expressed hostility to Obama’s call to action and promised an aggressive counterattack. Some allies in the president’s party and the national media wonder if the White House and the nation have sufficient fortitude to accomplish such a significant adjustment in the country’s economic and environmental vector.

For his part, the president has vowed to “find the necessary votes” to pass a strong bill. And environmental advocates who’ve worked for decades to make the case for clean energy and climate action are pressing the Senate and White House to make sure the bill is comprehensive and includes credible measures to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases. In a capital city devoted to process as much as to politics, the gears of legislative action are grinding to life. The summer of 2010 is shaping up to be a new season for clean energy and climate action, a season that until April 20 was not at all clear would occur at all.

BP Disaster’s Legacy?
That day, of course, the Deepwater Horizon exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, killing 11 men. The blowout turned loose over 100 million gallons of raw crude with no end in sight.

President Obama understands the spill has pitched the country toward a new accounting of its devotion to oil. That involves carefully evaluating the deadening costs of a marine ecosystem deluged by oil, and the recklessness of heating the atmosphere with uncontrolled carbon. It also requires coming to grips with an economy distorted by the $400 billion-a-year price for imports that threaten U.S. security, as well as the essential values of choice and mobility that Americans are finding harder to attain.

It’s for these reasons that President Obama is embracing the moment, and is working with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid in what both hope will be a steady push to pass comprehensive legislation in the Senate before the August recess. A year ago, the House passed its version of an energy and climate bill that awaits a Congressional conference committee.

The Senate isn’t starting from scratch. Senator Reid and the president have asked lawmakers to choose elements of three proposals, draw up new provisions to reduce oil dependence and respond to the disaster in the Gulf, and introduce a new bill in mid-July. The three existing Senate proposals:

• In December 2009 Senators Maria Cantwell, a Democrat of Washington, and Susan Collins, a Republican of Maine, introduced the Carbon Limits and Energy for American Renewal (CLEAR) Act which would set up a program for cutting carbon emissions by selling “carbon shares” to fuel producers. Most of the resulting revenue would generate checks to every American to compensate for what the co-authors predict will be higher energy prices.  The proposal has attracted considerable support from environmental organizations, including 350.org, a global climate advocacy organization.
• In May 2010 Senators John Kerry, a Democrat of Massachusetts, and Joe Lieberman, an Independent of Connecticut, introduced the American Power Act, which seeks to cut carbon emissions, finance new clean energy and transit programs, and provides considerable financial and regulatory support to develop new oil and gas resources offshore, coal reserves, and nuclear power. Environmental organizations expressed support and said they wanted to fix provisions they didn’t like. Republicans said they would work to defeat the measure.
• In June 2010 Senator Richard Lugar, Republican of Indiana, introduced his Practical Energy and Climate Plan that proposes to increase vehicle fuel efficiency, develop cleaner fuels, increase energy efficiency in buildings, encourage more diversity in energy supply including more nuclear energy. The proposal also requires the government to enhance its ability to monitor and report the effect of the program on greenhouse gas emissions. The Lugar plan does not cap global warming pollution.

Of late, political reporters are focusing on whether the president will take point or follow Senator Reid’s lead in shepherding a bill through the Senate, duplicating the president’s strategy during the bruising health care battle.

But that frame on an otherwise completely compelling political narrative is merely an exercise in Washington gamesmanship. In this instance, regardless of where the president situates himself, there is no mistaking where the urgency of the legislative initiative lies – in the BP Gulf disaster – and who’s driving hard to change the rules of the energy game – the president.

No Surprise, But A Big Blunder
Though the timing is almost serendipitous, nobody paying close attention to the president’s principles and values should be surprised. From the moment he announced his candidacy for president in February 2007, Obama has set very clear clean energy and climate goals in order to “be the generation that finally frees America from the tyranny of oil.”

For climate and clean energy advocates, that’s an interesting statement from a president who blundered into a March 31 announcement to expand the offshore territory suitable for new oil and gas exploration, calling it safe.

The president, though, has pushed the country closer — albeit not nearly close enough — to a clean energy economy, and taken more climate action than any American leader. The 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act included over $100 billion in public investment for clean energy, energy efficiency, and transit. The administration, under the authority of the Clean Air Act, has established significantly higher fuel efficiency standards for cars and light trucks, and stricter emissions standards for greenhouse gases that go into effect in 2012 and will save 1.8 billion barrels of oil and eliminate 900 million tons of carbon emissions in its first five years, according to the E.P.A.

The White House also is pursuing new regulations to limit mountaintop mining for coal, reduce the hazards of coal ash piles, increase energy efficiency in buildings, and promote cleaner and greener cities.

A comprehensive climate and energy bill that includes enforceable limits on carbon emissions is the single most important legislative tool to, in the president’s words, “turn this crisis of global warming into a moment of opportunity for innovation, and job creation, and an incentive for businesses that will serve as a model for the world.”

President Obama vows to get it done. Most Americans, judging by public opinion polls, understand the gravity of the moment and supports where he wants to go.

Related posts:

1. Gulf Oil Disaster Prompts Calls For Comprehensive Solution: President Obama and advocates press for new national climate and energy bill
2. Energy Independence Is Nation’s Most Elusive Technological Goal
3. Gamechanger? Kerry-Graham Op-Ed Supports Climate Energy Legislation

Of all the technological missions identified and pursued by the United States none has been as much of an abject failure as achieving energy independence. A country that at various historic inflection points crossed the nation with a unified rail line, developed the powerful bombs in the Manhattan Project that ended World War Two, and sent men to the moon with the Apollo program, has been consistently unable to close the gap between the energy it uses and the energy it produces.

Choice and mobility represent the central values of the American way of life. American allegiance to those two ideas is so powerful that assuring our energy supply has been deemed by the public and policymakers to be more significant than controlling where it comes from. The insatiable American appetite for energy, particularly oil, has made the United States more dependent on foreign supplies than any time in the nation’s 234-year history.

On Tuesday, President Obama was the latest American leader to call on the nation to “embark on a national mission to unleash American innovation and seize control of our own destiny.” But as the compendium of quotes below attests, that goal has consistently eluded American presidents that pursued it:

	“For decades, we have known the days of cheap and accessible oil were numbered…. Now is the moment for this generation to embark on a national mission to unleash America’s innovation and seize control of our own destiny.” - President Barack Obama (June 15, 2010)
	“This country can dramatically improve our environment, move beyond a petroleum-based economy, and make our dependence on Middle Eastern oil a thing of the past.” - President George W. Bush (January 31, 2006)
	“We need a long-term energy strategy to maximize conservation and maximize the development of alternative sources of energy.” - President Bill Clinton (June 28, 2000)
	“There is no security for the United States in further dependence on foreign oil.” - President George H. Bush (August 18, 1988)
	“We will continue supportive research leading to development of new technologies and more independence from foreign oil.” - President Ronald Reagan (February 18, 1981)
	“This intolerable dependence on foreign oil threatens our economic independence and the very security of our nation.” - President Jimmy Carter (July 15, 1979)
	“I am recommending a plan to make us invulnerable to cutoffs of foreign oil. … [a] new stand-by emergency programs to achieve the independence we want…” - President Gerald Ford (January 15, 1975)
	“Let us set as our national goal, in the spirit of Apollo, with the determination of the Manhattan Project, that by the end of this decade we will have developed the potential to meet our own energy needs without depending on any foreign energy source.” - President Richard Nixon (November 7, 1973)

Related posts:

1. Obama Vows To Go Where No Man Has Gone Before: Goal is to pass and sign comprehensive energy and climate legislation
2. In Cancun, Negotiators Search For Agreement While Their Nations Push In Different Direction
3. In Cancun, Negotiators Search For Agreement While Their Nations Push In Different Direction, Climate Action Hotline 11.22.10

By Keith Schneider
US Climate Action Network

On June 2, a day before BP announced it had sheared through a leaking pipe at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, one of the very few steps forward in the company’s 44-day campaign to staunch the worst oil disaster in American history, President Barack Obama pressed the nation to join him in viewing the catastrophe as a call to arms to pass comprehensive climate and energy legislation.

“If we refuse to take into account the full costs of our fossil fuel addiction – if we don’t factor in the environmental costs and the national security costs and the true economic costs – we will have missed our best chance to seize a clean energy future,” the president said during a speech at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. “The House of Representatives has already passed a comprehensive energy and climate bill, and there is currently a plan in the Senate – a plan that was developed with ideas from Democrats and Republicans – that would achieve the same goal.

“And, Pittsburgh, I want you to know, the votes may not be there right now,” Obama added, “but I intend to find them in the coming months. I will continue to make the case for a clean energy future wherever and whenever I can. I will work with anyone to get this done – and we will get it done. The next generation will not be held hostage to energy sources from the last century. We are not going to move backwards. We are going to move forward.”

Direct, Emphatic, Needed
The president’s remarks, the most direct and emphatic links he’s yet drawn between the BP Gulf disaster and the need for comprehensive legislation, seem plainly directed at opening a new narrative for national action in the Gulf disaster.

In response to demands that Obama “do something,” the president appears to be pivoting from treating the disaster as an exercise in environmental restoration. He is now calling for potentially momentous changes in attitudes and policy at a time of intense domestic interest about oil, the economy, and the environment.

“An America run solely on fossil fuels should not be the vision we have for our children and our grandchildren,” the president said at Carnegie Mellon. “We consume more than 20 percent of the world’s oil, but have less than 2 percent of the world’s oil reserves. So without a major change in our energy policy, our dependence on oil means that we will continue to send billions of dollars of our hard-earned wealth to other countries every month – including countries in dangerous and unstable regions. In other words, our continued dependence on fossil fuels will jeopardize our national security. It will smother our planet. And it will continue to put our economy and our environment at risk.”

Cheered By Advocates
Climate and energy advocates this week responded to Obama’s new urgency with proposals intended to move considerably farther in reducing fossil fuel consumption and climate change emissions than has been proposed in either the House bill passed almost a year ago, or the Senate bill introduced on May 12.

“The President’s speech in Pittsburgh yesterday was the lead story in today’s Washington Post,” said Dan Lashof, the director of the Natural Resource Defense Council’s Climate Center.  “And for good reason. Using the Gulf oil disaster as proof that we need to end our dependence on fossil fuels, President Obama made his strongest case yet for enacting comprehensive energy reform that includes limits on carbon pollution. And he committed to round up the votes in the Senate to ‘get this done.’”

John Podesta and Daniel Weiss of the Center For American Progress this week proposed a nine-step action agenda to change the rules of the game for oil development and use. Their proposal includes stepping up the administration’s new fuel economy regulations,  as well as electric vehicle production programs contained in last year stimulus bill to reduce oil consumption by 7 million barrels a day by 2030. That would mean cutting oil use by 37 percent from current rates of consumption. The CAP plan also calls for levying a fee on imported oil to direct new revenues to modern public transit, and to eliminate taxpayer subsidies for oil and other fossil fuel development, a goal embraced last year by leaders of the G20 group of nations.

“The horrible BP oil disaster has reminded Americans that we must reduce our oil use,” Podesta and Weiss wrote. “We share the view that this presents an unprecedented opportunity to take bold action to achieve this goal.”

More Than What’s Been Done By White House So Far
The president’s speech also attracted fresh attention to the National Oil Savings Plan proposed by Brendan Bell, who directs the climate change program for the Union of Concerned Scientists. Bell’s proposal, which was distributed in Washington on May 21, projects reducing oil consumption 7.4 million barrel per day by 2030 by enacting new law and regulations that invest in modernizing and expanding  public transit, accelerating energy efficiency programs for buildings, expanding biofuels production, and going further than the administration already has in raising fuel mileage standards for light and heavy vehicles.

Obama introduced the new direction in energy and climate strategy last week when he met with Senate Republicans and, according to a White House statement, told them “that the gulf oil disaster should heighten our sense of urgency to hasten the development of new, clean energy sources that will promote energy independence and good-paying American jobs. And he asked that they work with him on the promising proposals currently before Congress.”

The president also toured Solyndra’s solar thin-film manufacturing plant in Fremont, California and noted that even as “we are dealing with this immediate crisis, we’ve got to remember that the risks our current dependence on oil holds for our environment and our coastal communities is not the only cost involved in our dependence on these fossil fuels.  Around the world, from China to Germany, our competitors are waging a historic effort to lead in developing new energy technologies.”

More Steps
White House advisors and aides on Capitol Hill said the president’s fresh focus on policy along with oil pollution has produced new momentum for a comprehensive climate and energy bill this year. Advocates said that to really make a difference in fossil fuel consumption and emissions reductions, the bill would need to incorporate the energy-saving ideas proposed by the Center for American Progress and the Union of Concerned Scientists, and add several more including:

1.     A strong national renewable energy standard, similar to those established by more than 30 states, to require utilities to generate a portion their power with wind, solar, geothermal, and other cleaner alternative energy sources.

2.     A cap on carbon that produces at least 80 percent reductions in emissions by 2050. The Senate measure proposed by Senators John Kerry and Joe Lieberman sets a goal of reducing emissions 17 percent from 2005 levels by 2020, which is generally viewed as a decent start.

3.     A provision that provides substantial funds for developing nations to adapt to climate change, preserve forests, and make the transition to a clean energy economy. The Kerry-Lieberman proposal on international climate finance calls for a roughly $500 million a year investment by 2019, which is seen as too little and too late.

4. Retain states ability to lead in reducing emissions and promoting clean energy. Innovative state programs provide effective models for other states and for federal action. Legislation must also retain the EPA ability to regulate global warming pollution. Clean Air Act requirements that coal-fired power plants achieve up-to-date performance standards for carbon dioxide are an important complement to a cap on emissions.

President Obama is scheduled to return to the Gulf coast on Friday, his third visit to the disaster zone in 5 weeks.

Keith Schneider, a journalist and communications strategist, is director of media and communications at US Climate Action Network. Reach him at kschneider@climatenetwork.org.

Related posts:

1. Gulf Disaster Approaches End as Senate Again Delays Energy Bill, Climate Action Hotline 8.6.10
2. Obama Vows To Go Where No Man Has Gone Before: Goal is to pass and sign comprehensive energy and climate legislation
3. Clean Coal? — Gillian Caldwell Engages President Obama

By Keith Schneider
US Climate Action Network

On Friday, May 21, President Obama gathered in the Rose Garden the chiefs of his transportation and environmental departments to take the next big step to leverage federal climate policy and clean energy investment to spur new job growth.

The president directed Transportation Secretary Ray La Hood and Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson to draw up new rules that make heavy trucks much more fuel-efficient and produce less global warming gases.

“This standard will spur growth in the clean energy sector,” Obama said. “We know how important that is. We know that our dependence on foreign oil endangers our security and our economy. We know that climate change poses a threat to our way of life. We know that our economic future depends on our leadership in the industries of the future.”

Three days later, Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm was in Ypsilanti, midway between Detroit and Ann Arbor, to praise executives of the Ford Motor Company. Ford is spending $10 million to retool one plant in Rawsonville to assemble battery packs for next generation clean vehicles, and $125 million more in another plant in Sterling Heights to build electric drive transaxles. The $135 million investment, made possible by $62.7 million in federal clean vehicle grants from Obama’s 2009 stimulus act, will lead to 170 new jobs, said Ford, and bring work currently occurring in Mexico and Japan back to the United States.

Not Willing To Just Cut Hair
“In a global economy we are fighting for every single job,” said Gov. Granholm.  “We are not going to turn our back on the manufacturing sector. We are not just going to be a nation that teaches each other to dance or cuts hair. We are going to rebuild this country by having a strong manufacturing sector. And it starts right here. “

The two ceremonies, occurring 500 miles apart, are the latest public manifestations of a little recognized but exceptionally productive political partnership between the president and Michigan’s governor that is reshaping the American vehicle manufacturing sector, and starting to produce big consequences for energy use, climate action, and job production.

Since Obama has taken office, Michigan has attracted roughly $6 billion in manufacturing investment focused on building batteries for electric vehicles. Last August, after the president announced that the Energy Department was awarding $2.4 billion in grants for battery development and manufacturing, Vice President Joe Biden personally travelled to the Detroit region to confirm that more than half, $1.3 billion, would be spent in Michigan and contribute to developing 19,000 new jobs.

LG Chem, the Korean battery maker, received $151.4 million from the Department of Energy for the $303 million battery plant it is building in Holland, near the Lake Michigan shoreline. The plant will manufacture the power packs for the Chevy Volt, the plug-in hybrid that General Motors says it will introduce later this year.  The LG Chem plant opens in 2012 and is expected to employ 400 people.

Johnson Controls received a $299.2 million federal grant to make nickel-cobalt-metal battery cells and packs, as well as produce battery separators in a plant it also is building in Holland, Michigan in a joint venture with Saft, the French battery maker. The project is expected to employ 550 people by 2014.

New Plants Across Michigan
In all 17 new battery plants are either under construction or nearing groundbreaking in Michigan, according to the Michigan Economic Development Corporation, a state agency. Toda America, a Japanese manufacturer of battery components, broke ground in Battle Creek in April for a $70 million plant, half of it financed by federal stimulus act funds, that will initially employ 60 people. A123 Systems, an innovator of battery technology incubated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is building two plants just outside Detroit.

It’s understandable that Granholm and auto industry executives are enthusiastic  about the state’s embrace of clean car technology. They also support, after decades of resistance, the new efficiency and emissions reduction rules. The regulatory standards have the effect of producing new markets and force vehicle manufacturers to modernize their thinking to compete. The convergence of new technology, new regulation, and big federal and state investments has produced several thousand new jobs announced to date. Each is viewed as precious in a state overwhelmed by the downsizing of the auto industry and a riptide of manufacturing job losses over the last decade.

In Washtenaw County, where Ford’s Rawsonville plant is located, 14,000 manufacturing jobs disappeared since 2001, according to county figures. The state has lost a total of 800,000 jobs since 2000, half of them in manufacturing according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Michigan has led the nation since the middle part of the last decade in the rate of joblessness, which currently measures 14 percent, but also is improving since it’s high of more than 15 percent late last year.

“These have been a really tough eight years for everybody. We’ve all gone through it,” said Granholm on Monday. Then, brightening, she added, “but today we are sending a message to the world. You can be competitive manufacturing in the US and in Michigan.”

Indeed, at times in her public appearances, Granholm appears almost giddy about the germination stages of what could be a new era of vehicle design and production in Michigan.

Big Markets For Electric Vehicles
First are the market analyses that consistently predict big domestic and global markets for clean vehicles. In 2009, Deutsche Bank estimated that global sales of electric, hybrid, and other alternative fuel and advance technology vehicles stood at 1 million and could rise to 1.3 million this year, a 30 percent increase. J.D. Power and Associates recently estimated that sales of hybrid-electric vehicles could reach about 1.3 percent of an estimated 67 million light vehicle sales worldwide this year.

DTT Global Manufacturing Industry group estimates that by 2020, electric vehicles and other “green” cars will represent up to a third of total global sales in developed markets and up to 20 percent in urban areas of emerging markets. “The drive for e-mobility is on the rise and not only affects the automotive industry, but also other related industries such as energy & resources,” Martin Hoelz, Deloitte Germany partner and Global Automotive Affinity Group Leader for DTT Global Manufacturing Industry group, said in a news release.

Ford alone plans to launch five new all-electric or hybrid gasoline-electric vehicles in the U.S. by 2012 and in Europe by 2013. One is an electric commercial van, the Transit Connect. Two others are plug-in hybid electric sedans.

The second reason for Granholm’s fervor about clean vehicles is the daring new clean energy and climate policies that the Obama administration is steadily delivering to support them. She has personally played a big role in that delivery system.

A Partnership Between Governor and President
Following her 2006 re-election on a promise to produce new jobs, the two-term Democrat seized on clean energy to leverage Michigan’s heavy manufacturing prowess. Michigan approved a renewable energy standard that required utilities to generate 10 percent of their power with clean sources by 2015. It established a 21^st century jobs fund that provided millions for job growth, a good share focused on attracting clean energy development. And it set aside $1 billion for tax incentives to lure battery makers.

In 2008, candidate Obama campaigned on a message that envisioned a transition to the low-carbon economy that would wake up American industrial innovation, generate jobs, make the nation more secure, and reduce the threat from climate change. He introduced his New Energy For America strategy in August 2008 in East Lansing, Michigan, a state that embraced the same ideas and had a governor who could deliver the votes to help send him to Washington.

Their relationship, at least in public, seems genuinely warm. Granholm is routinely on the White House list of candidates for the Supreme Court. Obama is a regular visitor to Michigan, appearing with Granholm most recently on May 1 (see pix with University of Michigan President Mary Sue Coleman on right) to deliver the commencement in front of 90,000 people at the University of Michigan, the largest crowd the president has addressed since the Inauguration.

The partnership, in policy terms, has been substantive in ways little noted in Washington or the nation. The Obama administration has passed legislation and administrative rules to support the development of a clean vehicle manufacturing sector that Granholm is determined to base in Michigan.

The 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act contained over $3 billion for clean vehicle development including $2 billion for battery development, and $1.3 billion for electric and alternative fueled vehicles. Energy Secretary Steven Chu has sent Michigan substantial funds from a $25 billion clean vehicle manufacturing account approved late in the Bush administration. The Obama administration also has supervised the $50 billion investment that taxpayers made to keep GM and Chrysler in business, making it much easier to direct the companies to pursue new product lines since the U.S. essentially owns both.

Rules To Spur Markets, Protect The Planet, Grow Jobs
The president and his advisors, lastly, are ordering up the administrative rules to ensure that the next generation of vehicles do more with less. A year ago, Obama directed Secretary LaHood and Administrator Jackson to develop rules for improving fuel mileage and reducing greenhouse gas emissions in light cars and trucks beginning with the 2012 model year. The government issued the rules on April 1 and the EPA estimated the new standards would save 1.8 billion barrels of oil from 2012 to 2016, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 900 million metric tons.

Both are significant. The annual fuel savings, nearly 400 million barrels, represent roughly 7 percent of all the oil used in America in 2006, according to the World Bank. The emissions reductions, roughly 180 million tons annually, represent over 3 percent of all carbon emissions the U.S. produced in 2006. Last year in Copenhagen and elsewhere, the administration said it wanted to cut greenhouse gas emissions 17 percent from 2005 levels by 2020. The clean vehicle rules will help the U.S. reach that goal.

The new heavy truck rules that Obama ordered last week should also produce substantial fuel and emissions savings. Heavy trucks, according to industry analysts, consume more than two million barrels a day, or about 12 percent of current daily use in the United States, and produce a fifth of greenhouse gas emissions related to transportation.

“America has the opportunity to lead the world in the development of a new generation of clean cars and trucks through innovative technologies and manufacturing that will spur economic growth and create high-quality domestic jobs, enhance our energy security, and improve our environment,” the president said in a memorandum accompanying the May 21 Rose Garden ceremony.

He added in his public remarks: “I believe that it’s possible, in the next 20 years, for vehicles to use half the fuel and produce half the pollution that they do today. But that’s only going to happen if we are willing to do what’s necessary for the sake of our economy, our security, and our environment.”

That message has reached deep into Michigan’s reviving vehicle manufacturing sector. Lenawee Stamping, a producer of metal stamping and welded fabrications is expanding a plant in Tecumseh to accommodate more production of GM’s clean electric vehicles and produce almost 140 jobs. Magna Holdings of America, a designer and manufacturer of automotive components and systems plans to invest $49.2 million to expand its operations in four Michigan cities to produce electric car systems and 500 more jobs, according to the Michigan Economic Development Corporation.  Tenneco Automotive, which makes emission and ride control products, is spending $15.6 million in Michigan to manufacture next generation emissions systems that help manufacturers comply with the new federal rules and generate 185 new jobs.

During a conference call with reporters on Friday after the White House announcement, Gov. Granholm praised the new standards and said Michigan was starting down the low-carbon path with promising results. “We are particularly pleased that it will be one national standard and not a patchwork of state by state regulations. That sends the right market signals,” Granholm said, adding that her state is on its way to becoming the “world capital of electric vehicles.”

Related posts:

1. Petition Urges Michigan Energy Company to Look Beyond Coal
2. Congress Holds Key to Creating Green Jobs
3. Billion Gallon Challenge and Other Hot Pubs

On March 17, two weeks to the day before President Barack Obama laid out a new plan to expand offshore oil exploration in the United States, a government auction of federally controlled oil and gas reserves in the Gulf of Mexico was held at the New Orleans Superdome.  It took just a few hours for 77 energy companies to pledge $1.3 billion to the U.S. Treasury to look for oil and natural gas across a 2.4 million-acre expanse of bottomlands 200 miles from shore, and in most cases thousands of feet below the surface.

The lease sale, one of the most lucrative on record, bolstered the Gulf’s global reputation as one of the hottest deepwater oil and gas plays on Earth. The Gulf of Mexico is responsible for a quarter of the 5.5 million barrels of oil produced daily in the U.S., according to the Department of Energy. And of the 1.4 million barrels produced daily in the Gulf, 1.1 million barrels comes from under 100 deep sea production platforms. The Interior Department predicts that by the end of the decade, deep sea production in the Gulf could reach nearly 2 million barrels a day.

Though offshore oil production is dangerous – 165 people died when an offshore platform exploded off the coast of Scotland in 1998; 10 more people were killed in a drilling rig explosion off the coast of Brazil in 2001 – a kind of Titanic syndrome had set in with Gulf coast oil explorers. The high-tech, semi-submersible, nearly $1 billion floating drilling platforms that operated in the deep Gulf waters were seen as too big, too modern, too well-equipped to fail.

Moreover there is so much oil (and natural gas) beneath the deep Gulf bottomlands – 85.9 billion barrels of oil, according to several estimates – and so much money to be made at $70 to $100 a barrel, that downplaying the risks made economic and political sense. Federal drilling permits obtained by developers normally did not require extensive and time-consuming analysis of the environmental risks, the government has acknowledged.

On April 20, an explosion and fire aboard Transoceans’ Deepwater Horizon drilling platform, which was operating under contract to BP, killed 11 workers. The accident provided the latest unmistakable evidence of the workplace hazards of deep sea exploration. Then two days later, on Earth Day’s 40^th anniversary, the Deepwater Horizon sank and simultaneously produced an oil slick that the government says is growing by about 5,000 barrels of oil daily.

America Awake?
By any measure, the Gulf spill has reawakened the nation and magnified the human, environmental, and political consequences of oil production, especially from such treacherous places as the deep ocean. But the spill has not yet made clear what, if anything, the nation is prepared to do in response.

There is no longer much reasoned debate that America’s devotion to fossil fuel, and especially to oil, has contributed to dangerous energy insecurity, rising atmospheric concentrations of global warming pollution, increasing costs, decreasing incomes, and a ferocious national recession.

President Obama on April 30 announced he would suspend his March 31 decision to open new areas to offshore exploration pending a full investigation of the Deepwater accident. In the Senate, where a climate and energy bill has been delayed because of partisan infighting, lawmakers debated whether the Gulf spill would 1) break or 2) cement the deadlock.

It is clear the United States needs a new energy policy.  The devastating spill has heightened awareness on Capitol Hill to the dangers of U.S. dependence on oil.  Democratic Senators Robert Menendez and Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey, and Bill Nelson of Florida held a news conference this week to alert their colleagues that including additional offshore oil exploration has no place in a comprehensive climate and energy bill.

Halting the Spill

In the Gulf, BP says it is moving as fast as it can to plug the well and on Wednesday the company announced that it had stemmed one of three leaks in the pipe that once attached the well to the Deepwater drilling platform. Fishing in the coastal waters, some of the most productive fishing grounds on the planet, has been suspended. Meanwhile the governors of Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, and Florida expressed concern about the expanding spill, which was drifting closer to their shores.

USCAN will closely follow the events surrounding the oil spill, with a particular focus on what effect, if any, it could have on action in Washington to develop and approve a climate and energy bill fit for the 21^st century.

Source: Minerals Management Service

Related posts:

1. Spill Baby Spill: Climate Action Hotline, Apr. 30
2. Gulf Oil Disaster Prompts Calls For Comprehensive Solution: President Obama and advocates press for new national climate and energy bill
3. Arctic Spill Response and Other Hot Reads

The accelerating consequences of the warming Earth, the hazards associated with increasing reliance on fossil fuels, the promise of big clean energy projects, and the difficulties in advancing a national climate and energy policy fit for the 21^st century came into sharp focus today in Washington and across the nation.

In Boston, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced that aftter nine years of public confrontation, the United States had reached a decision to approve crucial permits to build 130 utility-scale windmills off the coast of Nantucket in Massachusetts. The Interior secretary’s decision, according to U.S. regulators, may help speed construction of the first offshore wind farm in the United States. But that is not at all assured as an alliance of local environmental organizations and Indian tribes who see the windfarm as an intrusion vow to press their opposition in the courts.

Salazar’s announcement was made within minutes of a statement by the U.S. Coast Guard, which was preparing to ignite a portion of the huge oil slick from last week’s explosion and sinking of the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig to test whether burning some of the crude might prevent oil from reaching the Louisiana Coast.

In Washington, a new EPA assessment of how climate change is affecting precipitation, growing seasons, bird migrations, and 21 other indicators served as a kind of insistent background music to the raw and clamorous political combat that has blocked a trio of Senators from New England and South Carolina from introducing of a bipartisan climate and energy bill they have worked on for months.

There is still no clear indication that the disruption that caused the delay this week  – a bid by the Democratic Senate majority leader to consider immigration reform before the climate and energy bill — will be resolved. But news organizations are reporting that the draft bill has been sent to the EPA for analysis, a crucial step required for full Senate floor debate.

Bound Up In The Ropes of Economic, Political Circumstance
Though today’s events occurred separately, they nevertheless formed the political, environmental, and scientific boundary lines of an era of economic transition that is leadng the U.S. to a place it has rarely been before – uncertain, wavering, and for every potentially small step forward, three steps are in retreat in the face of onrushing risks. Those include what the EPA on Tuesday called “indisputable evidence” that human activities are producing sweeping alterations to the planet’s environment.

The federal approval of the Cape Wind project in Massachusetts, and the test burn in Louisiana served as the big climate and energy news of the day. Arguably, though, the more durable and significant advance of the week was the EPA’s new assessment, “Climate Change Indicators in the United States,” which was released on Tuesday.

“Over the last several decades, evidence of human influences on climate change has become increasingly clear and compelling,” said the report’s authors, which included five U.S. departments and agencies, six American research universities, three non-profit organizations, and contributions from government researchers in Japan, Australia, and Bermuda. “There is indisputable evidence that human activities such as electricity production and transportation are adding to the concentrations of greenhouse gases that are already naturally present in the atmosphere. These heat-trapping gases are now at record-high levels in the atmosphere compared with the recent and distant past.”

Indicators – Not Good
The EPA study, which was made public a week after the State Department released a 193-draft report that argued climate change posed a grave threat to the global economy, describes the accelerating consequences in the United States and globally of a warming planet. Those include rising sea levels, melting glaciers, lengthening growing seasons, intensifying lethal storms,  steadily raising temperatures, aggravating heat-related illnesss, draining snowpacks of moisture, and wildlife pushed outside their traditional ranges.

Though many of the details are not new, the compendium of scientific evidence, rigorously gathered and compellingly presented, strengthen the narrative of swift change in the natural world that opponents of climate science have tried for years to dismiss. “These indicators show us that climate change is a very real problem with impacts that are already being seen,” said Gina McCarthy, assistant administrator for EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation.

A Sampling of Consequences The 24 climate change indicators and a sampling of the agency’s findings are:

U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions: From 1990 to 2008, U.S. greenhouse gas emissions from human activities increased 14 percent to nearly 7 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent.

Global Greenhouse Gas Emissions: Worldwide emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities rose 26 percent from 1990 to 2005, to 38 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalents. CO2, which accounts for three-quarters of all global greenhouse gas emissions, increased 31 percent.

Atmospheric Concentrations of Greenhouse Gases: Levels of CO2 are higher now than they have been in thousands of years, “even after accounting for natural fluctuations.” Concentrations have risen from 270 ppm to almost 390 ppm.

Climate Forcing: From 1990 to 2008, scientists calculated a 26 percent increase in the absorption of energy in tge atmosphere, or “radiative forcing.”

U.S. and Global Temperature: Seven of the top 10 warmest years on record for the continental U.S. have occurred since 1990, and the last 10 five-year periods have the warmest five-year periods on record. The first decade of the 21^st century was the warmest on record worldwide. Average temperatures in the lower 48 states have risen an average 0.13 degrees Fahrenheit per decade since 1901, and the rate of increase has accelerated over the last 30 years.

Heat Waves: The frequency of heat waves and the percentage of the United States experiencing heat waves has increased since the 1970s. The Dust Bowl decade of the 1930s remains the record-holder for heat waves.

Drought: During the first decade of the 21^st century 30 to 60 percent of the U.S. experienced drought, but the indicator is too new to determine whether droughts are increasing or decreasing.

U.S. and Global Precipitation: Average rain and snowfall has increased in the U.S. and globally. In the continental U.S. precipitation has increased at a rate of 6.4 percent per century since 1901, Globally, precipitation has increased 2 percent per century. Conditions vary within regions. Parts of the Southwest, and Hawaii have seen a decrease in precipitation.

Heavy Precipitation: Intense “single-day events” or very heavy rainfall is increasing. Eight of the 10 worst years for extreme rainfall in the United States have occurred since 1990.

Tropical Cycle Intensity: The intensity of tropical storms in the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico is increasing. Six of the 10 most active hurricane seasons have occurred since the mid-1990s.

Ocean Heat: Since the 1950s the level of heat stored in the world’s oceans has risen. EPA notes that the data interpretations vary as scientists are working with different measuring techniques.

Sea Surface Temperature: Temperatures rose an average of 0.12 degrees per decade from 1901 through 2009, with the fastest rise over the past 30 years.

Sea Level: Oceans have risen an average of six-tenths of an inch per decade since the 1870s.

Ocean Acidity: Ocean acidity has increased.

Arctic Sea Ice: The Arctic is melting. The expanse of Arctic ice in 2009 was 24 percent less than the area covered on average from 1979 to 2000.

Glaciers: Glaciers globally are receding at a quickening pace and have lost more than 2,000 cubic miles of water since 1960, contributing to the rise in sea level.

Lake Ice: Lakes in the northern U.S. are staying ice-free about one to two days longer each decade since the late 1800s.

Snow Cover: North American snow cover has decreased steadily, from 3.4 million square miles in the 1970s to 3.18 million in the first decade of this century.

Snowpack: The depth of snow in early spring has, on average, decreased in the western U.S., with some areas seeing a decline of more than 75 percent between 1950 and 2000.

Heat-Related Deaths: Heat-related illnesses caused over 6,000 deaths in the U.S. since 1980. But the data classifying deaths as heat-related is new, and the EPA acknowledges there is considerable year-to-year variability and it is difficult to discern long-term trends.

Length of Growing Season: Earlier spring warming and later fall frosts have increased the average length of the growing season in the lower 48 states by about two weeks since the start of the 20th century. The trend is most apparent in the West.

Plant Hardiness Zones: Higher winter temperatures since 1990 in most parts of the country have shifted northward the region where species of plants are able to thrive.

Leaf and Bloom Dates: Leaves are emerging, and lilacs and honeysuckle are blooming slightly earlier than a century ago. EPA notes that it’s difficult to determine if the observations are statistically meaningful.

Bird Wintering Ranges: Studies have found birds in North America have shifted their wintering grounds an average of 35 miles northward over the past half century, and a few species are moving hundreds of miles farther north and further inland.

“I have seen most of these data before, but it’s extremely useful to have it all in one place and presented in a visually appealing—and appalling—fashion,” wrote Dan Lashof, the director of the Natural Resources Defense Council’s Climate Center in Washington.  “Over the last two decades scientists have patiently assembled the pieces of a giant jigsaw puzzle into a crystal clear picture of how our planet is changing. Professional climate science deniers will continue to focus on the handful of pieces that have been misplaced or lost under the sofa. But for everyone else there is no denying that this picture spells trouble.”

Keith Schneider, a journalist and communications strategist, is director of media and communications at the US Climate Action Network. Reach him at kschneider@climatenetwork.org.

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Meanwhile, Senators John Kerry (D-MA), Joseph Lieberman (I-CT) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) announced they are working on a “dual track” to assemble a new proposal they hope will gain Senate approval. Kerry and Graham said their approach would combine “aggressive reductions” in greenhouse gas emissions while spurring construction of nuclear power plants and allowing for more oil and gas exploration.

“We’re trying to find that sweet spot of a bill that will be good for the environment, good for business and make us energy independent,” Graham said Wednesday.

As climate legislation progresses in the U.S. Senate, President Obama told reporters on Tuesday that he and newly-reelected German Chancellor Angela Merkel had agreed to “redouble our efforts … to ensure that we create a framework for progress in Copenhagen.”

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Rep. Tom Perriello was targeted by ACEEE with forged letters

WASHINGTON, Oct. 7 — As Capitol Hill scandals go, Brian McNeill’s story last summer in the Charlottesville (VA) Daily Progress generated none of the lasting scrutiny that followed, for instance, Wilbur Mills’ 1974 Tidal Basin romp with Argentine stripper Fanne Fox. But for advocates of federal action on climate change and clean energy, the events described in McNeill’s piece revealed a new measure of aggression and desperation in the American fossil fuel industry’s campaign to gain command of the fast-changing policy landscape that confronts them.

McNeill’s article on July 31 reported that in mid-June, as the House of Representatives debated a bill intended to chart a new course for national climate and energy policy, freshman Democratic Representative Tom Perriello, who represents Charlottesville and supports clean energy and climate action, received five letters of opposition that were written on the letterheads of local progressive organizations, including the NAACP.  All were forgeries, said the leaders of those groups.

The authors of the letters turned out to be a Washington-based consulting firm, Bonner and Associates, that was working on behalf of the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity. ACCCE is a lobbying association with a $45 million budget, according to the Center for Public Integrity, and represents the $25 billion-a-year American industry dedicated to rebranding its carbon-saturated, mercury-laden, mountaintop-removing, air- and water-polluting, climate-altering product as “clean coal.”

Making the Case in New York and Pittsburgh
There is good reason for the titans of the American energy industry to be this concerned. In the political war to clear the air of climate changing emissions and pursue clean energy development, environmental and public interest organizations are more than holding their own in and outside of Washington.

Last month in New York and in Pittsburgh the full measure of that public support was on display. On September 22 at the United Nations, President Obama delivered a strong message of allegiance to world leaders about the urgency of taking action on climate change and in investing in clean energy development. Secretary General Ban-ki Moon invited over 100 world leaders to hear the president and to discuss action to cool the warming climate.

On September 25, the president and 19 other world leaders gathered in Pittsburgh at the G-20 Summit where their finance ministers, for the first time, began talking about how to fund the work to limit the emissions that are warming the planet and to heat up global economies. The meetings were intended to set the stage for a new global climate treaty to be negotiated in Copenhagen in December.

In both cities climate action activists staged high profile public events to make the case that the world supports global leaders who are charting a new course to a clean, green, energy efficient era of new prosperity.

Americans Support Action
Clearly that is where most Americans want to go, according to public opinion polls. Since May 13, 2008, when the U.S. Senate soundly rejected a proposal that would have opened the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas development, environmental and public interest organizations have won many of the important battles in Washington and the states that pitted clean energy and climate action against fossil fuel development. That includes the November election of Barack Obama to the presidency. Obama campaigned on a promise to act on the climate and spur a clean energy transition.

The fossil fuel industry is not happy. With each setback, the energy industry has dug into its considerable financial reserves to launch new attacks.  Of late, the industry has directed its financial might to win in the councils where it still has influence: Washington, right-wing activist organizations, and Fox News and its AM talk radio allies.

The energy industry organized town-hall style events around the country attended by its own employees and designed to generate the sort of raw emotion and agitation that attracts attention on television, especially from Fox News, which it supports with considerable advertising.

Tea Party Backlash
The industry spent $151.9 million to lobby Congress in the first half of 2009, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, more than all but two other industrial sectors. One of the industry-supported activist organization is Americans for Prosperity, an anti-tax group which helped organize the Tea Party movement and has close ties to Koch Industries, a Wichita-based private energy conglomerate. Americans for Prosperity took credit in September for providing much of the background information that Fox News host Glenn Beck used to go after Van Jones, the White House green jobs leader. Beck accused Jones of being a “self-proclaimed communist,” a “full-fledged radical” connected to “study groups in the Marxist and Lenin teachings.”

And energy companies are advertising in other venues, including their own gas stations. In September, Valero Energy Corp., the largest gasoline refiner in the country, posted ads in opposition to the climate and energy bill its 1,000 company-owned filling stations, and the 4,800 independent stations that carry its brand, that urge consumers to stop Congress from passing the climate bill. Posters featuring an Uncle Sam illustration warn that the bill could cause gasoline prices to increase by 77 cents a gallon, a figure disputed by environmental economists who assert that the bill would encourage alternative fuel sources and clean transportation technology, reducing demand for gasoline, thus helping to keep gas prices in control.

The power of the energy industry alliances in Washington was on full display in August when Senate Democrats announced they were postponing the introduction of their version of the climate and energy bill.  The Kerry-Boxer climate and energy bill was introduced in late September.

Over the Labor Day weekend Jones resigned his White House post. And online organizing by Tea Party groups convinced thousands of conservatives to attend a Capitol Hill demonstration on September 12 in opposition to the health care and climate and energy bills. “The Van Jones affair is, as President Obama likes to say, a ‘teachable moment,’” wrote Phil Kerpen, the policy director of Americans for Prosperity in an article on FoxNews.com. “We need to put not just him but the whole corrupt “green jobs” concept outside the bounds of the political mainstream.”

Climate Activists Respond
Leaders of environmental and public interest organizations say they are determined to prevent that from occurring, and they have considerable momentum working in their favor.

“Our opponents certainly are trying to reinforce fears that some members have already about jobs, energy bills, gas electricity rates,” said Alden Meyer, director of strategy and policy at the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington, D.C. “It’s not clear how effective they are with different members. I have a sense, for example, that where steel companies and steel workers stand is more important to members in Ohio and Pennsylvania than where the right wingers are. “

“Our challenge is to really ramp up the case for a new kind of economic growth agenda that is based on clean energy, and energy efficiency,” added Kate Gordon, vice president of energy policy at the Center for American Progress in Washington. “The case we make that investments in clean energy and efficiency will actually  lower consumer costs hits people where they live, and is not abstract.”.

Meyer, Gordon and other public interest leaders made that case earlier this year in Congress and succeeded in convincing lawmakers to approve the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which committed over $100 billion over the next two years to clean energy investments, public transit, energy efficiency, conservation, and new technology.

Four months later, despite the forged letters and in the face of a barrage of phone calls and email messages generated by conservative organizing online, the U.S. House approved the American Clean Energy and Security Act. The proposal would  require large utilities in each state to produce an increasing percentage of their electricity from renewable sources, foster innovation and conservation by cutting climate changing emissions 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020, and invest almost $200 billion over the next 15 years on clean energy technology and energy efficiency measures. Fred Krupp, the president of the Environmental Defense Fund called the proposal, “the most important environmental and energy legislation in the history of our country.”

Obama Administration and State Action
The Obama administration is supporting the values and principles in the bill with aggressive regulatory actions. On September 2, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson announced that the agency was close to a decision to regulate carbon dioxide as a dangerous pollutant. Nine days later, the EPA took action to much more closely scrutinize applications for coal mining permits that involved removing mountaintops.  In mid-September the administration announced its intent to raise fuel mileage standards to 35 miles per gallon. Earlier this month the EPA announced a proposed rule that would require industrial facilities emitting greater than 25,000 tons of carbon dioxide per year to demonstrate the use of best available control technologies and energy efficiency measures to limit the emission of greenhouse gases.

The fossil fuel industry also is taking a similar pounding in the states and cities. In the last three years public opposition, court orders, gubernatorial executive orders, and nervous warnings from Wall Street investment advisers have prompted utilities to cancel 101 proposals to build new coal-fired power plants, according the Sierra Club. Ratepayers, moreover, are protesting proposals to dramatically increase electricity prices in the handful of states where new coal-fired plants have been brought online.

California approved a law to reduce climate change emissions in 2006 and more than 30 states in every region of the nation have taken various other steps to spur clean energy industrial development, improve efficiency, and reduce climate emissions. Almost 1,000 cities have embraced the greenhouse gas limiting measures contained in the Mayors’ Climate Protection Agreement, and many have approved new ordinances to expand public transit, install green roofs, promp energy efficient building and home construction, and reduce commuting in cars.

In just the last eight weeks, the Dakota Minnesota and Eastern Railroad Company announced it was ending legal efforts to condemn 1,200 acres of land for a new rail line in Wyoming. The $6 billion, 278-mile proposal was intended by the company to tie the Wyoming strip mine coalfields to the Mississippi River.

Apple and a host of other major companies ended their membership and rebuked the U.S. Chamber of Commerce for that organization’s fierce opposition to legislation that would cap climate changing emissions and spur clean energy investment.

And as a result of three years of persistent citizen opposition to fossil fuels, Santee Cooper, the state-owned utility in South Carolina, announced in August that it was suspending plans to build a $1.2 billion coal-fired power plant in the state’s Pee Dee region.

“The basic point we made was that there was no demonstrated need for this plant,” said Nancy Cave, the director of the Coastal Conservation Council’s North Coast office, and one of the leaders of the opposition campaign. “The environmental and economic costs of this idea vastly outweighed the advantages. It was dirty, old technology electric power at a time when efficiency and new cleaner technologies were available. We just made that case and stayed on message at every opportunity we had.”

Indeed, earlier this year the World Resources Institute published a study that found every $1 billion invested in clean energy development generates 30,000 jobs and saves $450 million annually in energy costs.

The titans of the American energy industry are driven to halt this momentum. In the collision between the hope for clean energy and environmental safety and the grievance over change sowed by the energy industry, the American president and the environmental community have chances in Congress and in Copenhagen to prove that they will prevail.

Keith Schneider, a journalist and communications strategist, is director of media and communications at the US Climate Action Network. Reach him at kschneider@climatenetwork.org.

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