In the decisive defeat of California’s Proposition 23 and the re-election of Senator Barbara Boxer, voters showed that climate action and clean energy have salience in the nation’s largest state. Nevada Senator Harry Reid was re-elected and Democrats held the Senate by a narrow margin with three races still undecided.

In deciding to outspend the oil industry by a three-to-one margin, investors and executives in California’s clean energy and clean-tech companies succeeded in defeating Prop 23, which would have suspended California’s four-year-old climate action law, and hurt the state’s expanding market for clean energy and energy efficiency tools and practices. Now that the battle is won, California will continue to attract billions of dollars in research and start-up funding and retain its stature as one of the world’s principle centers of clean energy innovation.

Moreover, along with Democratic Senator Boxer’s victory, which appears to ensure she retains the chairmanship of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, another climate advocate, Democratic Attorney General Jerry Brown, was elected governor.

Big Message: Dissatisfaction

The unmistakable outcome of the mid-term election, though, was frustration about the economy. What’s not as clear, said many climate and environmental advocates, was how much of a dark shadow that cast on climate action politics and clean energy development. “There was no mandate on turning back the clock on environmental protection. Polls galore show continued and strong public support for making continued progress to protect our health and boost our economy,” said Heather Taylor-Miesle, director of the Natural Resources Defense Council Action Fund. “Americans want us to unleash our ingenuity to develop clean-energy alternatives while combating climate change.”

There is no doubt, though, that achieving those goals got harder. Republicans, too many of them campaigning on messages that denied the scientific authenticity of climate change, and raising doubts about the cost of moving away from fossil fuels, swept House races, gaining 60 seats. Republican in the next Congress will have a 239-196 majority.

Politico reported this morning that at least 30 Democratic House members who voted for the 2009 House cap and trade bill were defeated. The White House, though, asserted that many of those races involved freshman Democratic lawmakers who’d won in 2008 in traditionally Republican districts.

The NRDC looked at the results from a different perspective and concluded that of the Democrats who voted for the House energy and climate bill who were up for re-election, 162 out of 195, or 83 percent won or are winning. Of the Democrats who voted against the bill and were up for re-election, 21 out of 36, or 58 percent lost.

Republican candidates in every region also criticized the $100 billion in clean energy, efficiency, and rail investments in the 2009 stimulus as an ill-advised government gambit to “pick winners and losers.” Voter tallies in every region except California clearly indicated that message also resonated. Virginia Democratic Representative Rick Boucher, a ranking member running for his 15th term, lost to Republican Morgan Griffith, who persistently raised  the stimulus and Rep Boucher’s cap and trade vote as a threat to the state’s coal mining industry.

Florida Republican Charlie Crist, who as governor encouraged solar and the alternative energy development as a safeguard to climate change, was soundly beaten in the Senate race by Tea Party candidate Marco Rubio, a clean energy opponent who denies industrialization is warming the planet. Minnesota Democratic Representative James Oberstar, an 18-term lawmaker, a premier public transit and rail advocate, and chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee was beaten by a Tea Party candidate, Chip Cravaack.

And in Ohio, Democratic Governor Ted Strickland, who led his state through a grueling effort to approve one of the nation’s best renewable energy standards and prompted billions in new manufacturing sector development in wind and solar markets, was defeated by former Republican Representative John Kasich. Kasich vowed during the campaign to roll back the renewable standard.

As we’ve noted, next year will be tough for climate action in Congress and the states. There may be some relief in knowing that a few House climate bill supporters won close races, including Democrats Brad Miller of North Carolina and and John Yarmuth of Kentucky.

“Speaking of the lion’s den – he did this in the heart of Kentucky, a leading coal producer,” said Jeremy Symons, senior vice president for conservation and education at the National Wildlife Federation.

Keith Schneider, a journalist and producer, is senior writer for the U.S. Climate Action Network. Reach him at kschneider@climatenetwork.org

Related posts:

1. Some Big Successes As U.S. Election Casts Long Shadow On Climate, Climate Action Hotline 11.3.10
2. Ahead of the Election, Signs of Hope and Caution For Climate Activists, Climate Action Hotline 10.26.10
3. Ahead of the Election, Signs of Hope and Caution For Climate Activists

More than 1 billion tons of coal are mined and burned in the United States each year, almost all of it to generate electricity in the nation’s more than 600 coal-fired utilities. Those utilities pour 2.67 billion tons of climate changing carbon emissions into the atmosphere every year, according to the Energy Information Administration, or 41 percent of the total 6.4 billion tons of carbon emissions released by all sectors of the American economy.

Last December EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson, acting on a two-year-old Supreme Court decision, formally declared that carbon dioxide and five other climate changing-gases endangered public health and welfare. She announced the Obama administration’s intent under the Clean Air Act to regulate greenhouse gas pollution from vehicles, heavy industry, and the coal-fired utility sector.

Jackson’s announcement, which was anticipated by environmentalists and business executives alike, prompted a number of legislative responses from Republicans and Democrats to block the EPA. Last June one of those proposals, a resolution introduced by Alaska Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski formally disapproving the agency’s work on carbon emissions, was defeated in the Senate 53-47. Six Democrats voted with the Republicans.

One Down, More to Go
A second measure, S. 3072, introduced in March 2010 by Senator Jay Rockefeller, a Democrat from West Virginia, the nation’s second largest coal-producing state, is likely to come before the Senate later this year or next.  Seven similar proposals to pre-empt or delay federal authority to reduce global warming pollution have been introduced in the House.

Senator Rockefeller’s bill (S.3072), which calls for staying the administration’s regulation of greenhouse pollution for two years, represents the next big showdown in Congress over climate change. The Rockefeller bill is designed to give polluters free rein to dump carbon pollution into the atmosphere. The bill releases polluters from their responsibility to keep communities and people safe from harmful emissions. And it displays the arrogance of the energy industry to push Congress into doing its bidding, regardless of the consequences.

President Obama vowed to veto Sen. Murkowski’s resolution of disapproval and the White House said the president would do the same if Sen. Rockefeller’s pre-emption bill passed.

Popular Support For Reducing Pollution
Public opinion polls consistently show that Americans support confronting polluters. One commissioned late in August by the Natural Resources Defense Council found that 60 percent of respondents favored EPA action to control greenhouse pollution, and 34 percent opposed. Some 54 percent of those polled said they felt confident in the EPA’s ability to effectively regulate greenhouse gas pollution; 51 percent said they support the agency issuing the regulations while 40 percent were opposed. A clear majority of respondents, 68 percent, said the government must “do more to hold corporations accountable for their pollution.”

“Essentially, what Rockefeller is proposing would tell the EPA – at least for two years, although we know that justice delayed is often justice denied! – that it has to be asleep at the switch, that it must not hold polluters accountable, that it must look the other way whole Big Oil and Big Coal trash the environment,” wrote the author of NRDC’s MarkUp blog. “Is that the lesson the Senate learned from the Gulf of Mexico disaster?”

Push From Energy Industry To Pollute
Energy industry executives, meanwhile, are investing heavily in candidates sympathetic to their view that climate change has no basis in scientific fact, and that new regulations are an economic burden at the moment when the nation can least afford them. The first assertion is disputed by scientists and the harrowing record heat, flooding, glacial melting, and violent storms experienced by most of the planet this summer. The second assertion is the standard response from industry when confronted by pollution that requires government action.

Sen. Rockefeller’s opposition to controlling carbon emissions, he said in a floor speech in June, is rooted in economics and the law. West Virginia’s coal industry produced 144 million tons last year, employed 22,000 people, and made its presence felt in Washington, Charleston, and every one of the state’s 55 counties. He says that the regulation of carbon emissions is a change in policy so substantial that Congress, and not the executive branch, should direct government action.

“We must send a strong and urgent message that the fate of our economy and our workers, including our coal workers, should never be placed solely in the hands of the Environmental Protection Agency,” said Sen. Rockefeller. “The elected people and not the unelected EPA have constitutional responsibility here.”

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said earlier this year that he plans to allow a vote this year on Sen. Rockefeller’s proposal. It would be a close vote in the Senate. The Rockefeller measure has six Democratic co-sponsors, all from coal-producing states, and all of whom voted against the earlier Murkowski resolution. The companion House measure has 14 Democratic co-sponsors.

Environmental leaders are looking to the White House for help. “It is up to the Obama administration to promptly comply with the Supreme Court by using EPA’s authority to reduce global warming pollution,” Daniel Weiss, director of climate strategy at the Center for American Progress Action Fund, told reporters in July. “The White House must also launch a vigorous defense of that authority in the face of attacks from big oil, big coal and their congressional allies.”

David Moulton, director of climate policy at the Wilderness Society, said his group “will be focused very heavily on defending EPA” against efforts to block climate rules. “EPA is the backstop and the president is the backstop for EPA,” Moulton said.

“It’s not clear where the Rockefeller amendment shakes out in all of this,” added Nathan Willcox, Environment America’s federal global warming program director. “But the less Congress does on energy and climate, the more important it will be that the Clean Air Act can be allowed to do its job and cut global warming pollution from the largest polluters.”

Keith Schneider, a journalist and producer, is senior writer for the U.S. Climate Action Network. Reach him at kschneider@climatenetwork.org

Related posts:

1. The Dangers of Delay, Climate Action Hotline, 6.13.11
2. Obama Vows To Go Where No Man Has Gone Before: Goal is to pass and sign comprehensive energy and climate legislation
3. Polluters Sued for Emissions

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 vehicles.

Both proposals were unveiled five days after Senate Democrats pulled provisions to respond to rising carbon emissions out of their comprehensive climate and energy proposal. That decision prompted a chorus of condemnation from many of the nation’s influential editorial pages and leaders of major American environmental organizations.

The criticism continued this week. A group of 350 green organizations, among them the US Climate Action Network, said they would press the fight in the Senate to gain historic provisions to limit carbon emissions.

“There’s no doubt that big oil, big coal, their army of lobbyists and their partners in Congress are cheering the obstruction that blocked Senate action on clean energy and climate legislation,” the groups wrote in a joint statement. “As we look forward, one thing is clear: the Senate’s job is not done. They must use every opportunity available to address clean energy and climate reform by working to limit carbon pollution and invest in new clean energy sources that are made in America.”

We’re Still Here
“It is important to recognize before people say that the message that didn’t work that the majority supports it and the minority is using procedural tactics,” added Peter Lehner, executive director of the Natural Resources Defense Council, in a news conference. “This isn’t a time to think those messages aren’t fundamentally correct. “Those arguments are going to get stronger, and those who are playing politics will have less support and will find it harder to continue.”

Both the House and Senate proposals call for reorganizing the Department of Interior’s division that regulates offshore drilling. The Senate proposes to rename the unit the Department of Ocean Energy; the House would name the regulatory unit the Bureau of Energy and Resource Management. Both proposals also call tougher oversight of offshore operations, more assertive environmental monitoring and new fees on oil companies to help pay for compliance.

The 238-page House bill is a compilation of measures from three separate bills passed since the April 20 blowout and fire on the Deepwater Horizon, The bill includes a provision to bar companies that were exempted from paying federal royalties under leases issued between 1996 and 2000 from bidding on any new leases unless they renegotiated those old leases. Those no-fee and no-royalty leases were meant to encourage expensive deepwater exploration at a time of low oil prices. The House measure also includes a so-called bad actor provision that would deny drilling rights to any company that has had more than 10 deaths offshore or at land-based oil operations over the previous seven years. The only company the rule currently applies to is BP, said federal officials.

Oil Industry Opposes
Jack N. Gerard, the president of the American Petroleum Institute, objected to those ideas and argued that that they would raise the cost of production, fence off large areas of the outer continental shelf to drilling, and drive small and midsize companies out of business. “We remain concerned about what we’re hearing,” Gerard told the New York Times. “I would encourage the House and Senate to protect American jobs as they consider appropriate responses to the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.”

The Senate bill, sponsored by Majority Leader Harry Reid, and titled the Clean Energy Jobs and Oil Spill Accountability Plan, principally advances the clean energy and energy efficiency provisions of the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which contained over $100 billion in clean energy, efficiency, and transit investment. The Senate measure proposes to spend $3.8 billion to promote natural gas as a fuel for light and heavy trucks, grants to developers of natural gas fueling infrastructure, and up to $2 billion in loan guarantees to develop natural gas-fueled vehicles. The proposal calls for new investment for development of electric vehicles. And the proposal calls for investing $5 billion on energy efficiency programs aimed principally at the housing sector.

Obama Supports
The last major provision of the Senate bill authorizes reliable funding to the Land and Water Conservation Fund, the public account that invests in resource and land protection and is funded by revenue from permit fees and royalty income from natural gas and oil development on federal lands.

“Our plan will lower energy costs for homeowners and create at least 150,000 jobs,” said Sen. Reid in a statement. “Our plan will lessen our dependence on oil by promoting the manufacturing and deployment of clean vehicles that use natural gas and electricity.  Our plan will help protect environmentally important and vulnerable areas by fully funding the Land and Water Conservation Fund for the next 5 years for the first time.  And our plan will hold BP and all the oil companies involved in the Gulf Coast oil spill fully accountable for the true costs of the damages they caused.”

President Obama, in a brief appearance on Tuesday, endorsed the Senate and House Democratic packages.

“That legislation is an important step in the right direction,” the president said. “But I want to emphasize it’s only the first step. And I intend to keep pushing for broader reform, including climate legislation because if we’ve learned anything from the tragedy in the gulf, it’s that our current energy policy is unsustainable.”

Keith Schneider, a journalist and multi-media producer, is senior writer at the US Climate Action Network. Reach him at kschneider@climatenetwork.org

Related posts:

1. The Hour of Choosing Arrives: American Power Act Introduced in Senate
2. Boxer, Kerry Restart Climate, Energy Debate With New Senate Bill
3. White House Clean Energy Forum Today

A much less ambitious bill will be introduced, said Sen. Reid, that focuses on a response to the BP Gulf disaster, improvements to energy efficiency, converting vehicle fleets to natural gas, and other narrower energy measures.

The introduction of such a bill would appear to have the effect of squandering the work of the House, which passed a cap-and-trade bill in June 2009 that set a national cap on carbon emissions and required companies to have permits for such emissions.

Weeks Of Work By Climate Activists
The Senate decision to focus the new bill solely on energy came after weeks of intensive work by climate advocates to build a case for emissions limits in and outside Washington, organizing demonstrations at the grassroots, meeting with Senate staff, and raising the issue in the media. Since May, following the explosion and oil blowout in the Gulf, President Barack Obama also had campaigned for climate action in meetings with Senators of both parties, in public appearances outside Washington, and in a televised Oval Office address in June during which he called for a new “national mission” to achieve energy independence and safeguard the environment.

The effort, though, was impeded by opposition messages that asserted, with scant basis in fact, that limiting carbon emissions would severely raise energy prices and living costs, and by the prevailing politics of stasis on climate issues that define the era. Lawmakers in Australia, Japan, and Canada are having similar difficulties getting strong climate bills approved. Last December, more than 100 heads of state gathered at the Copenhagen climate summit were unable to each agreement on comprehensive and binding measures to reduce carbon emissions.

“Many of us want to do a thorough comprehensive bill that creates jobs, breaks our addiction to foreign oil, and curbs pollution,” said Sen. Reid at a hastily called news conference. “Unfortunately at this time we don’t have a single Republican to work with in achieving this goal. For me it’s terribly disappointing and it’s also very dangerous.”

In The Face Of Record Heat, No Action
Indeed, Sen. Reid’s announcement came the same week that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported that 2010 is the hottest year on record, and on the same day that China said it would enact domestic carbon trading programs starting next year to help meet its target of reducing the nation’s carbon pollution.

“It should be a wake-up call that the same day Republican opposition kills a carbon price in the Senate, China announces it will put a price on carbon in 2011,” Joshua Freed, the director of clean energy program at the Third Way, a centrist think tank, told the Washington Post.

Appearing at the news conference with Sen. Reid was Sen. John Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat who is widely regarded as the Senate’s most important advocate for reducing carbon emissions. Sen. Kerry promised to keep trying to find an opening to introduce and pass climate legislation in the Senate. “It’s not dying. It’s not going away,” he said. “We’re going to try our best to find a way to do it in the next few weeks. If we can’t do it in the next weeks, we’ll do something that begins to do something responsibly in the short term. But this will stay out there, and we’ll be working on it. We’ll be asking you to talk to your senators and move them to understand why we have to get this done.”

President Obama dispatched Carol Browner, director of the White House Office of Energy and Climate Change, to join Senators Reid and Kerry in making the announcement. Her assessment of a large portion of the problem was characteristically direct and unvarnished: “”As we stand here today we don’t have one Republican vote,” she said.

Democrats Not United in Support, Republicans United Against
Still, neither Reid nor Kerry were able to marshal consistent support from Democrats either. New West Virginia Democratic Senator Carte Goodwin, who this month replaced the late Sen. Robert C. Byrd, announced even before he arrived in Washington that he would not support measures to limit carbon emissions. Other Democrats, most notably Sen. Ben Nelson of Nebraska, also periodically expressed opposition.

Advocates of climate action expressed equal measures of disappointment, frustration, and resolve to keep trying today. “It’s deeply disappointing that Big Oil, Dirty Coal and their allies in Congress continue to stand in the way of creating a clean energy economy that creates jobs, makes America more energy independent and protects the planet,” said Gene Karpinski, the president of the League of Conservation Voters. “The twin challenges of building a clean energy economy and addressing global warming are too important to fail.  The fight to create new clean energy jobs and solve the climate crisis will continue — in this Congress, in the states and at the EPA.”

“Due to Republican leaders inaction,” said Daniel J. Weiss, the director of climate strategy at the Center for American Progress, “China will continue to expand its clean energy industry and jobs. We will spend $1 billion each day on foreign oil. And power plants will spew billions of tons of pollution.”

Keith Schneider, a journalist and multi-media producer, is senior writer at the US Climate Action Network. Reach him at kschneider@cliimatenetwork.org.

Related posts:

1. Boxer, Kerry Restart Climate, Energy Debate With New Senate Bill
2. Gulf Oil Disaster Prompts Calls For Comprehensive Solution: President Obama and advocates press for new national climate and energy bill
3. Gulf Disaster Approaches End as Senate Again Delays Energy Bill, Climate Action Hotline 8.6.10

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 of campaign donations from the oil and utility industries, according to federal election records. Senator Murkowski’s resolution – S.J.R. 26 – would overturn the Environmental Protection Agency’s formal scientific finding on December 7, 2009 that carbon dioxide and the other climate-changing pollutants endanger human health and the environment.

The EPA’s “endangerment finding,” introduced at the start of the United Nations climate summit in Copenhagen last year was saluted by climate advocates and government officials around the world. The finding made it legally possible to use the Clean Air Act, the nation’s primary air pollution statute, to set and enforce new manufacturing practices and emissions limits that tamed the U.S. contribution to global climate change.

Test of The Senate
Senator Murkowski says Congress should be the one authorizing carbon reductions, though she has displayed no interest in supporting any of the Congressional proposals to do just that. Moreover, her conservative supporters contend that using the Clean Air Act to regulate carbon emissions is a regulatory overreach by big government. “Every sector of our economy — transportation, power generation and manufacturing — would be subjected to EPA’s bureaucratic reach,” said Tom Borelli director of the Free Enterprise Project at the National Center for Public Policy Research.
The Obama administration, meanwhile, has moved to put the endangerment finding and its Clean Air Act authority into effect. In April the administration issued trend-setting fuel mileage and emissions standards for light vehicles that the agency said would save 1.8 billion barrels of oil and 900 million tons of carbon emissions from 2012 to 2016.  The United Autoworkers and the Alliance of Automobile Manufactures oppose the resolution of disapproval because it would unravel the historic agreement struck between labor, industry and environmentalists on these new fuel efficiency standards.

Last month, President Obama ordered similar mileage and emissions reduction rules for heavy trucks.

Endangerment Finding Put to Use
The administration has also made plain its intention to use the Clean Air Act to regulate carbon emissions from some 7,000 industrial installations – refineries, utilities, manufacturers, mining sites – but leave small businesses alone.

Though the Murkowski resolution would have to pass both houses of Congress and be signed by the president to take effect, events considered unlikely anytime soon, the vote on June 10 is seen as a crucial test of Congressional urgency on energy and climate issues. The vote, scheduled for Thursday night, also comes as President Obama and Senate Majority Leader display new resolve to tackle climate and energy legislation, and as oil from the BP Gulf Catastrophe reaches beaches in four states.

U.S. climate and clean energy organizations anticipated Senator Murkowski’s challenge and began building support in January to defeat the resolution, which they called the “Dirty Air Act.” Among the allies in the campaign were dozens of health groups, environmental organizations, labor unions, governors, state officials, President Obama, and EPA Administrator Lisa P. Jackson.

Newspaper editorialists also weighed in, noting that the BP Gulf Spill has made it more urgent than ever to curtail the myriad hazards of America’s addiction to oil. “Murkowski plans to offer a resolution,” said the Washington Post on June 7, “making it less likely we move away from fossil fuels, making it less likely we act to prevent a foreseeable catastrophe (in this case, global warming) from occurring, blocking regulators from doing their jobs, and disrupting one of our best opportunities to prevent climate change rather than scramble to respond after its incalculable effects rip through our atmosphere.”

In an article on Monday for the Huffington Post, EPA Administrator Jackson said the Murkowski resolution “abdicates the responsibility we have to move the country forward in a way that creates jobs, increases our security by breaking our dependence on foreign oil, and protects the air and water we rely on.”

Related posts:

1. Dirty Decision Makers Ignoring Clean Solutions, Climate Action Hotline 5.9.11
2. In South Carolina, Protests of Dirty Energy and Recognition for Clean Alternatives
3. Before Big China Climate Conference, New Senate Support For Clean Energy

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

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 huge diorama of a highway-heavy, congestion-free, car-dependent, time-efficient, leafy green urban and suburban all-American pattern of civilization that no one had ever seen before.

What astute observers recognized — among them Lewis Mumford and Walter Lippman — was that GM’s new American geography needed enormous public investments in the roads, sewers, education, research, planning, and industrial infrastructure to make it reality. The vision, though, of an airy, shining, and mobile American way of life was powerful and eminently achievable.

Over the next two decades voters elected to Congress and the White House lawmakers of both parties who cooperated in steadily enacting big and expensive bills — the GI bill to educate veterans, the 1956 Highway Act to start the Interstate System, water and sewer spending bills, research grants for engineering, just to name a few — to change the way America looked and functioned.

American Power Act Tactics
Last week, Senators John Kerry of Massachusetts and Joe Lieberman of Connecticut introduced the American Power Act, a big and expensive bill that is in every way a response to that incredibly accurate 80-year-old GM vision. Its central goal is to preserve American choice and mobility — the two central features of our way of life — in the face of an oncoming train wreck of accumulating economic and environmental consequences.

Kerry and Lieberman propose to execute this impossible task by laying out two paths for legislative action that need to be achieved simultaneously. The first is to generate more supplies of conventional energy sources — oil, coal, and nuclear — in order to stave off the slow demise or even the collapse of America’s convenient, have it your way, drive through economy.

The proposal provides incentives to coastal states to pursue more offshore oil and gas development, while also giving neighboring states the power to block development within 75 miles of their shoreline. It includes $2 billion-a-year in research grants to coal-burning utilities to test carbon capture and sequestration. It proposes to invest tens of billions in loan guarantees and other support to encourage the construction of 12 new nuclear plants.

The second tactical step in the legislation is to push America as insistently as politically practical toward more energy-efficient transportation, and home-grown, renewable, and much cleaner sources of energy. The idea is spur innovation, new patterns of compact development, and new industrialization that also generates much less carbon pollution.

Kerry and Lieberman proposed spending $70 billion over 10 years on transit, clean vehicles, energy efficiency and other Smart Growth innovations. They lay out a plan for farmers to gain income by siting renewable projects on their land and to grow biofuels. There is money for solar and wind development.

Carbon Pricing
Most significantly, the bill contains provisions to reduce carbon emissions 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020, and over 80 percent by 2050. It envisions putting a price on carbon and providing for trading carbon allowances that applies to large polluters and could generate billions of dollars annually, a portion of which would be rebated to citizens.

As a study in pragmatism, the American Power Act does pretty well. The legislation addresses most of what’s possible and practical in the place where energy, economy, the environment, and politics now meet. It’s as big and bold as it dares in an era when the boom-boom-boom of dire risks to our way of life — climate change, declining competitiveness, rising energy costs — is greeted in political circles with the squeak of small ideas and the clanging of ideological idiocy and anger from every side.

In many instances, environmental organizations and business groups commended Kerry and Lieberman for such a solid first draft. And in almost every instance — the exception was the Smart Growth community’s enthusiasm for the $7 billion-a-year investment in transit, clean car, and other transportation and efficiency measures — groups said the intricacies of the bill needed serious reworking.

Environmental groups are deeply concerned with the oil, coal, and nuclear provisions. Some National and more local green organizations say they will oppose the measure for those measures alone. Other environmental groups aren’t thrilled with a section that would withdraw some authority of the EPA to regulate carbon emissions from certain sources, and do away with the current state authority to enact stronger cap and trade programs than the federal government. And climate action groups, which don’t like the total lack of funding for tropical forest protection and clean technology transfer, also said the plan to dedicate some of the revenue from carbon allowance trading to help developing nations make the transition to a low-carbon economy is too little and too late.

Business executives, meanwhile, are nervous about the carbon emissions limits. Democratic lawmakers from the Midwest want more investment in clean tech manufacturing. And the bill’s former sponsor, South Carolina Republican Lindsey Graham who dropped out following an ideological fit, said the proposal would not survive the — so far — uniform Republican opposition.

Transition and Trouble
America, of course, has not always had such trouble responding to change and transition. The America that resulted from executing the Futurama vision was industrious, optimistic, and capable of reacting to favorable market trends. The suburbs and highways, cul-de-sacs and three-car garages, homes with more bathrooms than TVs were made possible by cheap energy (most of which we generated ourselves), cheap land, core competitiveness in major industries, reasoned population increases, growing personal income, wealthy governments, and a willingness of taxpayers to invest in the nation’s future.

We’re not dealing nearly as well with the new market trends of the 21st century. Energy prices are steadily rising. Land is expensive. Whole industries have moved beyond our borders. The U.S. is the third fastest growing industrialized nation in the world. Incomes are declining. Governments operate with enormous deficits. Taxpayers are unwilling to invest in a collaborative future.

The result is a nation that is uncharacteristically hesitant and operating in fear. And while ideologues on all sides shout past each other, and make holding office at any level a thankless and grueling experience, the real danger in our governing circles is the entrenchment of the politics of stasis. Doing nothing. Holding the line. Not deciding. Not acting.

The American Power Act contains a suite of reasoned ideas that make sense. The majority of climate action and environmental organizations are working to ensure that the bill not only survives the legislative process but is strengthened. The sole provision that could be considered a breakthrough, and needs to survive intact, is the bid to put a cap and a price on carbon and then to generate revenue by trading allowances. By itself that provision sets the basic foundation to reduce emissions, spur clean energy investment, and prove to the world that the United States is serious about being a leader in the global work to solve climate change. Taking into account the political and economic context, the bill’s improvement and passage would be a step, arguably a big step, for America’s future.

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

Related posts:

1. The Hour of Choosing Arrives: American Power Act Introduced in Senate
2. All Eyes Are on Japan, Climate Action Hotline 3.14.11

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 Massachusetts and the other an Independent from Connecticut, insisted that its vision is to change the direction of some of the nation’s toughest systemic problems — economic competitiveness, energy security, job loss, and environmental safety. Indeed, the 900-plus page bill’s expanse, encompassing development of the full menu of conventional and alternative energy sources, as well as a cap on carbon, was widely commended by environmental and business organizations.

Support and Specific Concerns
But in nearly every statement issued today, by organizations as diverse as Oxfam America, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the League of Conservation Voters, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, executives expressed concern about specific provisions and vowed to work with Senators of both parties to fix them. Environmental organizations principally focused their critiques on provisions to expand offshore drilling, provide federal incentives to build new nuclear power plants, and support the coal and utility industries with grants to prove technology to capture and store carbon.

Environmental organizations also said they would work to improve or change provisions that would limit the reach of the Clean Air Act to reduce carbon emissions in new coal-fired utilities, and eliminate the ability of states to establish carbon-emission reduction programs. Oxfam said it was concerned that the international finance provisions of the proposal would not become effective until 2019, and did not include nearly enough federal investment to meet the commitment the Obama Administration made in Copenhagen in December to help establish a $100 billion-a-year global climate action fund to assist developing nations.

“If the proposal introduced today by Senators Kerry and Lieberman stays true to its goals,” said Michael Brune, the Sierra Club’s executive director, “it can serve as a foundation on which we can build an America free from oil dependence, with millions of new clean energy manufacturing, construction and service jobs here at home, less wasted energy, and less of the carbon pollution that is threatening our economy, our health and our climate. But this proposal will only serve as a solid foundation if the Senate both improves and completes it.”

According to Senator Kerry, who blogged about the bill’s contents on Grist and Huffington Post today, The American Power Act proposes to put a price on carbon emissions from roughly 7,500 power plants and other industrial facilities. The bill proposes to establish a market to trade emissions allowances in order to reduce carbon emissions 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020, and 80 percent below 2005 levels by 2050.

Returns to Citizens
Moreover, a provision that borrows from a separate climate and energy measure proposed by Senators Maria Cantell and Susan Collins, provides proceeds of the sale of allowances as rebates to citizens.  “None of it stays with or grows government,” said Kerry. “Those rebates rise over time until it all goes straight back to Americans.”

The American Power Act also takes into account the environmental and political consequences of the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The bill’s co-authors inserted a new provision that gives states the authority to veto drilling less than 75 miles off their border, although it also gives states that decide to drill access to a percentage of the lucrative federal royalties generated by oil and gas production. The proposal introduces new regulatory safeguards that require oil developers to much more thoroughly assess the risks and consequences of drilling offshore, and to more accurately predict the potential of a spill.

A third provision that environmental organizations considered crucial is the bill’s influence on the Clean Air Act, which the Obama administration is applying for the first time since its passage in 1970 to limit carbon emissions. Unfortunately, the legislation limits the Environmental Protection Agencies’s ability to clean up new coal plants. Maintaining the ability to use the Clean Air Act to reduce global warming pollution is critical, especially if the federal program is found to be ineffective in future years. The bill does call on the EPA to continue setting tough emissions standards to reduce global warming pollution from cars and trucks and continues EPA’s ability to set some performance standards for old power plants to make sure they operate more cleanly.

Other provisions of the American Power Act, designed to both gain political allies in the Senate and encourage development of alternative sources of energy and fossil fuels, include:

• Providing incentives for farmers to base wind and other clean energy projects on their land.
• $2 billion in annual investment in carbon capture technology for coal-fired utilities.
• $7 billion in annual investment for public transit, clean car technology, and clean energy research.
• Federal incentives, including loan guarantees, to encourage the construction of 12 new nuclear power plants

White House and Graham Respond
The White House issued this statement today from President Obama: “The challenges we face — underscored by the immense tragedy in the Gulf of Mexico — are reason to redouble our efforts to reform our nation’s energy policies. For too long, Washington has kicked this challenge to the next generation. This time, the status quo is no longer acceptable to Americans. Now is the time for America to take control of our energy future and jumpstart American innovation in clean energy technology that will allow us to create jobs, compete, and win in the global economy.”

The introduction of the American Power Act,  initially scheduled for April 26, was delayed until today due to the Republican Senator Lindsey Graham’s decision to withdraw as a member of the three-member Senate team that wrote the bill. Over the last two weeks, as Senators Kerry and Lieberman amended provisions, Senator Graham has consistently expressed his view that the proposal could not pass without his help.

Today Graham issued a statement that described his support for a comprehensive energy bill, but also warned that its Senate approval would be a struggle: ”I want America to lead the world in the coming energy revolution, not follow. I look forward to working with my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to improve upon these concepts and find a pathway forward on energy independence, job creation, and a cleaner environment,” but ” the problems created by the historic oil spill in the Gulf, along with the uncertainty of immigration politics, have made it extremely difficult for transformational legislation in the area of energy and climate to garner bipartisan support at this time.”

Visit USCAN’s American Power Act page for more information and the climate community’s reactions. USCAN is following the developments and will be updating this article and posting others in the days ahead.

Keith Schneider, a journalist and communications strategist, is media and communications director at USCAN. Reach him at kschneider@climatenetwork.org.

Related posts:

1. All Eyes To The Future: American Power Act’s Imperiled Pragmatism
2. Narrow Energy Bills Introduced in House and Senate
3. Dirty Air Act Vote Tests Senate’s Direction on Climate, Clean Energy

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

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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

By Keith Schneider
U.S. Climate Action Network

"To truly transform our economy, to protect our security, and save our planet from the ravages of climate change," President Obama told a joint session of Congress in February, "we need to ultimately make clean, renewable energy the profitable kind of energy."

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 world will join them.

Arguably the biggest unknown still is whether the United States will publicly commit on reductions it is prepared to make in greenhouse gas emissions, and how much it is willing to invest to help developing nations make the transition to a low-carbon economy. Just as in Stockholm in 1972, when global leaders first met to limit the harm caused by industrial pollution, and again in Rio in 1992 and in Kyoto in 1997, the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen is a rare turning point moment for the world to consider the environment and the economy, and the dire consequences of burning fossil fuels.

Last month, during climate negotiations in Barcelona, Jonathan Pershing, the deputy special envoy for climate change and the chief American negotiator, dropped plain hints that the U.S. was prepared in Copenhagen to make such commitments, which the rest of the world views as essential to the success of the Copenhagen conference and the new treaty.

Earlier this week, during the U.S.-China Summit in Beijing, President Obama seemed to draw closer to making commitments when he described his resolve to reach a substantive climate agreement in Copenhagen. “Our aim is not a partial accord or a political declaration,” the president said, “but rather an accord that covers all of the issues in the negotiations, and one that has immediate operational effect. This kind of comprehensive agreement would be an important step forward in the effort to rally the world around a solution to our climate challenge.”

Should the U.S. commit in Copenhagen to emissions limits and financial assistance to developing nations, it would close a circle of global engagement on climate action that began in November 2008 with elections that brought significant changes to the office of the White House and both chambers of Congress.

The first significant legislative action by the White House and Congress in 2009 was enactment of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which committed the U.S. to spend $100 billion over the next two years on energy efficiency, clean energy manufacturing, clean energy research, biofuels production, and other carbon-reducing energy practices.

See the summary of Federal events by my USCAN colleagues Mathew Todaro and Kate Smolski by clicking the White House and Congress tab on the USCAN Copenhagen page. Mat and Kate map how the United States is taking the first crucial steps to develop a low-carbon economy and generate globally significant momentum for an international climate agreement.

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