Narrow Energy Bills Introduced in House and Senate

Goals: Make Deep Ocean Drilling Safer;
Improve Energy Efficiency

House and Senate Democrats on Tuesday introduced separate energy proposals that are principally concerned with limiting the hazards of deep ocean energy exploration and production, and also contain modest additional measures to strengthen energy efficiency programs and expand the use of natural gas as a fuel in heavy [...]

Climate Dropped From Energy Bill

WASHINGTON, JULY 22 – Though he vowed last week to introduce a comprehensive climate and energy bill before the end of the month, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid emerged this afternoon from a meeting with Democratic colleagues and announced that the new bill would not include specific measures to limit emissions that are warming the [...]

Dirty Air Act Vote Tests Senate’s Direction on Climate, Clean Energy

On June 10, the Senate votes on a “resolution of disapproval” to limit federal action on climate change by blocking the EPA’s ability under the Clean Air Act to limit emissions from big polluters.
The resolution, which has 41 co-sponsors, was introduced in January by Alaska Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski, one of the largest Congressional recipients [...]

Gulf Oil Disaster Prompts Calls For Comprehensive Solution: President Obama and advocates press for new national climate and energy bill

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 [...]

All Eyes To The Future: American Power Act’s Imperiled Pragmatism

By Keith Schneider
US Climate Action Network
Over 70 years ago, in the General Motors-sponsored Futurama exhibit at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, an estimated 10 percent of all Americans were transported across a landscape of innovation and optimism that became the economic and cultural foundation of the great American century. The Futurama exhibit was a [...]

The Hour of Choosing Arrives: American Power Act Introduced in Senate

By Keith Schneider
US Climate Action Network

In a long-awaited proposal designed to secure existing domestic energy sources and develop new ones that begin to reverse the damaging effects of global climate change, New England Senators John Kerry and Joe Lieberman today introduced comprehensive clean energy and climate legislation.
The co-authors of the bill, one a Democrat from [...]

Bubbling and Crude: Gulf coast spill reflects devotion to wealth, power, and oil

By Keith Schneider
US Climate Action Network
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 [...]

Clean Action Commitments: World Waits on U.S.

White House, Congress Appear to be Stepping Toward Commitments
By Keith Schneider
U.S. Climate Action Network
Delegates from the United States and 191 other nations gather in Copenhagen next month to draw up a comprehensive, ambitious, and fair international agreement to solve climate change. Hundreds of public interest organizations and tens of thousands of citizens from around the [...]

Senate Committee Passes Climate Bill

The Clean Energy Jobs bill advanced through a key committee this Thursday. The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee successfully passed their version of the bill, despite a boycott of the vote by the panel’s Republicans. The bill will now be merged with legislation being written by five other Senate panels.
Meanwhile, Senators John Kerry (D-MA), [...]

Senate Hearings Kick Off Climate Bill Debate

With Democrats and Republicans deeply divided about the need for and cost of curbing climate changing pollution and pursuing an energy economy that tilted away from dirty and expensive fossil fuels, the United States Senate today launched a potentially far-reaching debate on legislation designed to secure the environment and propel a new industrial chapter for [...]

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