Hill Heat

From the Wonk Room.

Even as the appointment of Dr. John Holdren as director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) is held up by Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ), new hires at the OSTP have been made. The Wonk Room has learned that two veterans of the Clinton White House have taken top positions at the office, which “serves as a source of scientific and technological analysis and judgment” for the President.

Thomas Kalil, who was responsible for technology policy at the National Economic Council in the Clinton White House, is the new OSTP associate director for policy. Before joining the Obama White House, Kalil ran the Big Ideas @ Berkeley program at UC Berkeley. Kalil was also a member of California’s Blue Ribbon Nanotechnology Task Force, the scientific advisory board of Nanomix, and Q Network Inc. He has served on several committees of the National Academy of Sciences, including the Committee to Facilitate Interdisciplinary Research. As a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, Kalil developed a “National Innovation Agenda” and was on the advisory board of Science Progress.
Jim Kohlenberger, who was Vice President Al Gore’s senior policy adviser, is the new OSTP chief of staff. As one of Gore’s chief technology policy advisers, Kohlenberger “worked to help pass the Telecommunications Act of 1996, help shape the administration’s hands-off approach to the Internet and e-commerce, and help spearhead administration efforts to bridge the digital divide and connect every classroom to the Internet.” Before joining the OSTP, Kohlenberger was the executive director of the Voice on the Net (VON) Coalition, and a senior fellow at the Benton Foundation, where he supported universal broadband service. From 2006 until March of 2008, Kohlenberger lobbied Congress on behalf of the VON Coalition.

From the Wonk Room.

Obama’s climate scientists are collateral damage in an unrelated fight over Cuba policy with Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ). Menendez is responsible for an anonymous hold on the nominations of Dr. John Holdren and Dr. Jane Lubchenco, both world-renowned experts on climate change and the physical sciences. Holdren and Lubchenco “sailed through” their confirmation hearing on February 12. But as the Washington Post’s Juliet Eilperin reports, Menendez has anonymously blocked their full Senate confirmation “as leverage to get Senate leaders’ attention for a matter related to Cuba rather than questioning the nominees’ credentials.” Menendez, a Cuban American, took to the Senate floor last night “to deliver a withering denunciation” of proposed changes to U.S.-Cuban relations included in the budget omnibus:

We should evaluate how to encourage the regime to allow a legitimate opening – not in terms of cell phones and hotel rooms that Cubans can’t afford, but in terms of the right to organize, the right to think and speak what they believe. However, what we are doing with this Omnibus bill, Mr. President, is far from evaluation, and the process by which these changes have been forced upon this body is so deeply offensive to me, and so deeply undemocratic, that it puts the Omnibus appropriations package in jeopardy, in spite of all the other tremendously important funding that this bill would provide.

Menendez points to a memo prepared by the staff of Sen. Richard Lugar (R-IN) as recommending a policy change that Menendez worries could “rescue the regime by improving its economic fortunes,” namely giving Cuba “financial credit to purchase agricultural products from the U.S.”

These picks have in fact languished for months, having been put forward by President Obama on December 20. Lubchenco’s nomination to be administrator of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) has been stalled in part by the turmoil over finding a Secretary of Commerce, whose department includes NOAA. NOAA career staff are gamely working to draft a spending plan for the $830 million in the recently passed recovery act, and energy adviser Carol Browner is managing climate policy from the White House with a skeleton staff. But the Office of Science and Technology Policy is a key White House office, and its director Holdren is meant to be the top science adviser to the president. The “wise counsel” of Holdren and Lubchenco is irreplaceable, especially given the scope of the challenges our nation faces.

Menendez spokesman Afshin Mohamadi declined to comment on the putatively anonymous hold. “He takes a back seat to no one on the environment,” Mohamadi discussed by telephone, saying the senator’s “record best reflects his feelings on the urgency of combatting climate change.” When asked if Sen. Menendez hopes to have climate legislation on President Obama’s desk before the end of 2009, Mohamadi explained that Sen. Menendez believes it “would be helpful to have it in place going into the December international climate change conference in Copenhagen.”

From the Wonk Room.

On March 2, thousands of youth activists participating in Power Shift ‘09 descended on the U.S. Capitol to demand Congress take action to fight climate change. While students from South Dakota to North Carolina lobby their elected officials, others will be engaging in mass civil disobedience to protest the United States’ continued use of coal.

They were in the halls of Congress and surrounded the coal-fired Capitol Power Plant despite a wicked snowstorm that was ensnarling the East Coast – or, in many ways, because of it.

As predicted by models of climate change, the South and West is increasingly gripped by extreme storms and extreme drought: California is in its third consecutive year of drought conditions and now in a state of emergency. Drought conditions in Oklahoma are “terrible.” Despite the triple storms of Dolly, Gustav and Ike in 2008, nearly 97 percent of Texas is in drought – already this year, “about 3,400 wildfires have been reported across the state, scorching nearly 105,000 acres.”

The youth activists are trying to keep it snowing in the Northeast, raining in Texas, cold in the Rockies, and sunny in Florida. They’re trying to prevent California from burning up, Iowa from being flooded out, and Alaska from melting away. They’re trying to get our elected leaders to take action to put an end to the destabilization of our climate.

From the Wonk Room.

Responding pre-emptively to plans of a massive act of civil disobedience at the coal-fired U.S. Capitol Power Plant, the leaders of Congress today called for an end to its use of coal. In a letter to the Architect of the Capitol, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) describe the plant as “a shadow that hangs over the success” of the architect’s efforts to green the Capitol:

The Capitol Power Plant (CPP) continues to be the number one source of air pollution and carbon emissions in the District of Columbia and the focal point for criticism from local community and national environmental and public health groups.

Reid and Pelosi note that “there are not projected to be any economical or feasible technologies to reduce coal-burning emissions soon.” (In other words, coal is dirty.) They ask the architect to switch the plant fully to natural gas “by the end of the year”:

Therefore it is our desire that your approach focus on retrofitting at least one of the coal boilers as early as this summer, and the remaining boiler by the end of the year.

The switch will allow the plant “to dramatically reduce carbon and criteria pollutant emissions, eliminating more than 95 percent of sulfur oxides and at least 50 percent of carbon monoxide,” as well as the costs of “cleaning up the fly ash and waste.”

Gristmill’s Kate Sheppard reports “that doesn’t mean the big protest on Monday is off, according to organizers,” because “there are still hundreds of other power plants burning coal around the country.”

From the Wonk Room.

The Center for Public Integrity has found that “more than 770 companies and interest groups hired an estimated 2,340 lobbyists to influence federal policy on climate change in the past year,” estimating total expenditures of $90 million. Their comprehensive investigation of climate lobbying discovered that nearly 2,000 of the lobbyists represent corporate interests.

CPI found that the top climate lobbying shop was the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE), a coal-industry front group that spent $10.5 million lobbying Congress:

No group exemplifies the sophistication of the current debate more than the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity — a new lobbying organization unveiled just weeks before the vote last June on the Warner-Lieberman bill. Representing 48 mining firms, coal-hauling railroads and coal-burning power companies, ACCCE spent $10.5 million lobbying Capitol Hill on climate in 2008 — more than any other organization solely dedicated to the issue. In addition to the group’s president, Steven Miller, a one-time aide to former Democratic Kentucky Gov. Brereton Jones, and vice president Joe Lucas, who was an aide to former Energy Secretary Hazel O’Leary, ACCCE has at least 15 outside lobbyists, including former White House Counsel Quinn. The big effort is not surprising, since electricity is the largest single source of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, and the most carbon-intensive fuel, coal, provides half the nation’s power. But ACCCE’s position is that it supports a mandatory federal program to curb the emissions its own members produce—as long as the policy meets ACCCE’s set of principles for keeping electricity affordable, domestically produced, and reliable. And that means encouraging, in ACCCE’s words, “robust utilization of coal.”

Check out the “The Climate Change Lobby” site, including a searchable database of lobbyists and a sampling of top players.

The kickoff of the Georgetown State-Federal Climate Resource Center at Georgetown Law will take place on Monday, February 23, 2009, from 5:00 – 8:00 p.m. on the 12th Floor of the Gewirz Student Center, located on the Georgetown Law campus at 120 F Street, NW, Washington, D.C.

Gov. Chris Gregoire (D-Wash.) and Gov. Kathleen Sebelius (D-Kan.) will deliver remarks at 5:30 p.m. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson will speak at 6:30 p.m.

From the Wonk Room.

Announcing that “the time for reform has arrived,” Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar set aside the Bush administration’s “midnight timetable” for offshore drilling. “On Friday, January 16, its last business day in office,” Salazar explained in his Feburary 10th press conference, “the Bush Administration proposed a new five year plan for offshore oil and gas leasing.” The Bush plan called for the completion of meetings and hearings by March 23. Salazar decried this “broken process”:

It was a headlong rush of the worst kind. It was a process rigged to force hurried decisions based on bad information. It was a process tilted toward the usual energy players while renewable energy companies and the interests of American consumers and taxpayers were overlooked.

Salazar announced he “will extend the public comment period by 180 days, get a report on offshore energy resources, hold regional conferences and expedite rulemaking for offshore renewable energy resources.”

Salazar made it clear that his definition of “energy independence” does not mean a “drill only” future. He rebuked the “oil and gas or nothing” approach of the Bush administration, who ignored the Energy Policy Act of 2005’s mandate to develop regulations for offshore renewables:

I intend to do what the Bush Administration refused to do: build a framework for offshore renewable energy development, so that we incorporate the great potential for wind, wave, and ocean current energy into our offshore energy strategy. The Bush Administration was so intent on opening new areas for oil and gas offshore that it torpedoed offshore renewable energy efforts.

From the Wonk Room.

In a speech at the Department of Energy today, President Obama announced he was signing a memorandum to direct the department to issue new energy efficiency standards for common household appliances – something Secretary Steven Chu has highlighted in the past as a top priority. He also responded to critics who “ridiculed our notion that we should use part of the money to modernize the entire fleet of federal vehicles,” asking, “Are these folks serious?”

This is what they call “pork.” You know the truth. . . . So when you hear these attacks deriding something of such obvious importance as this, you have to ask yourself, “Are these folks serious?” Is there any wonder we haven’t had a real energy policy in this country?

Watch it:

Conservatives have attacked numerous efficiency initiatives in the recovery plan:

• $600 million to buy hybrid vehicles for federal employees
• $200 million in funding for the lease of alternative energy vehicles for use on military installations
• $5.5 million for “energy efficiency initiatives” at the Department of Veterans Affairs National Cemetery Administration
• $6 billion to turn federal buildings into “green” buildings

As President Obama explained, federal fleet modernization “will not only save the federal government significant money over time, it will not only create manufacturing jobs for folks who are making these cars, it will set a standard for private industry to match.” This is as true for the green building efforts and other efficiency initiatives. Speaking to an audience of Department of Energy scientists, he concluded:

For the last few years, I talked about these issues with Americans from one end of this country to another. Washington may not be ready to get serious about energy independence, but I am and so are you and so are the American people.

Inaction is not an option that’s acceptable to me and it’s certainly not acceptable to the American people, not on energy, not on the economy, not at this critical moment.

In Obama’s words, it’s time for Congress “to rise to this moment.”

From the Wonk Room.

The Washington Post’s Al Kamen reports Center for American Progress senior fellow Robert Sussman “is returning to the Environmental Protection Agency” as “senior policy counsel to EPA Administrator Lisa P. Jackson, advising her on climate and environmental issues across the agency.” An official announcement is expected shortly. Before joining the Center for American Progress, Sussman was the Deputy Administrator during the Clinton administration, serving under Carol Browner, now President Obama’s White House energy and environment adviser.

Sussman was a regular blogger for CAP’s Wonk Room, writing on the Mary Gade scandal, the Bush administration, and climate legislation. Sussman challenged the argument that laws like the Clean Air Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, and the Endangered Species Act are not applicable to the threat of global warming:

The truth is that our environmental laws were not written to be static. They are flexible tools to address unanticipated or emerging problems that science identifies over time.

Sussman’s work for the Center for American Progress highlighted that approach. He crafted recommendations for regulatory and funding mechanisms to spur the development of carbon capture and sequestration technology for coal plants, “to reconcile reliance on coal for electricity with the need to reduce the threat of global warming.”

On Wednesday, February 4 the youth-led Energy Action Coalition is hosting a national teleconference for student reporters about the crucial role of young people in the fight for bold federal energy and climate legislation.

From February 27 to March 2, 2009, 10,000 young leaders from across the country will convene for Power Shift ‘09 in Washington, D.C. to demand that the President and Congress pass bold climate and energy policy that prioritizes renewable energy, green job creation, and an aggressive reduction of carbon emissions.

Call-in number: (866) 501-6174, participant code, 231000#

Participants

• Jessy Tolkan, Executive Director, Energy Action Coalition
• Dominique Hazzard, Power Shift ‘09 organizer and freshman at Wellesley College, Executive Committee Sierra Student Coalition
• Jason Walsh, Policy Director, Green for All
• Dave Hamilton, Director, Global Warming and Energy Program, Sierra Club

The speakers on the call will be able to answer questions about Power Shift ‘09 and the role of young people in shaping federal energy and climate policy.

From February 27 to March 2, 10,000 young leaders from around the world will kick off a historic year for climate action by convening in Washington, D.C. for Power Shift ‘09. Young people will demand that the President and Congress rebuild the economy and reclaim the future by passing bold climate and energy policy. Participants will share ideas and success stories, learn new skills, build connections, hear from leading experts and change-makers and come together to deliver a unified message to the nation’s leaders. On March 2, Power Shift ‘09 will culminate with a massive lobby and rally day on Capitol Hill.