Hill Heat

From the Wonk Room.

As Congressional hearings on draft green economy legislation begin, the Environmental Protection Agency has found that the bill will “play a critical role in the American economic recovery and job growth.” The initial EPA analysis, based on the draft of the American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES) released by Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) and Rep. Edward Markey (D-MA), looks only at the effects of the cap-and-trade “market-based emissions program,” without modeling the effects of the complementary renewable energy and energy efficiency standards in this comprehensive legislation. Despite the limited review, the EPA has found that Waxman-Markey would “enable American workers to serve in a central role in our clean energy transformation”:

The draft bill would establish a wide range of policies to promote the development and deployment of new clean energy technologies that would fundamentally change the way we produce, deliver, and use energy. The bill would: (1) advance energy efficiency and reduce reliance on oil; (2) stimulate innovation in clean coal technology to ensure that coal remains an important part of the U.S. energy portfolio by capturing harmful greenhouse gas emissions before they enter the atmosphere; (3) accelerate the use of renewable sources of energy, including biomass, wind, solar, and geothermal; (4) create strong demand for a domestic manufacturing market for these next generation technologies that will enable American workers to serve in a central role in our clean energy transformation; and (5) play a critical role in the American economic recovery and job growth – from retooling shuttered manufacturing plants to make wind turbines, to using equipment and expertise in drilling for oil to develop clean energy from underground geothermal sources, to tapping into American ingenuity to engineer coal-fired power plants that do not contribute to climate change.

The ACES Act does not address the question of how allocate the revenues of a carbon market auction. Industry executives and conservative allies like Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) are calling for free giveaways to polluters. However, the EPA analysis finds that polluter giveaways are “highly regressive.” A full auction of permits and equitable returns, however, allows for working families to come out ahead:

Assuming that the bulk of the revenues from the program are returned to households, the cap-and-trade policy has a relatively modest impact on U.S. consumers. . . . Returning the revenues in this fashion could make the median household, and those living at lower ends of the income distribution, better off than they would be without the program.

From the Wonk Room.

A new report from the Center for American Progress points out that the United States is slipping behind other nations in the development and deployment of clean energy and efficient infrastructure even as China spends $12.6 million every hour greening their economy.

Read the full study here.

China, as part of their two-year stimulus plan, is poised to spend 3% of their GDP a year on public investments in renewable energy, low-carbon vehicles, high-speed rail, an advanced electric grid, efficiency improvements, and other water-treatment and pollution controls. This is about $12.6 million every hour. In the United States, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act invests about half as much as China on comparable priorities. This represents less than half of one percent of our 2008 gross domestic product.

The paper also shows that, when it comes to preparing our country to compete in the new energy economy of the future and create millions of new jobs, the United States lags behind most of our competitors in the rest of the world in a four key ways.

• We have no national energy portfolio standard that encourages clean, renewable power and shifts away from dirty and dangerous energy.
• We have an outdated electrical grid unsuited for the task of carrying energy from regions rich in wind, solar, and geothermal potential to the people who need the energy.
• We don’t make dirty energy companies pay for the pollution they pump into the air; in fact, we give them billions every year in tax breaks.
• And we don’t invest enough in research, development, and deployment to inspire our entrepreneurs and leverage their discoveries by helping bring their bold new technologies to market.

As venture capitalist John Doerr recently pointed out in his testimony before the Senate Committee on the Environment and Public Works, “What is at stake is whether America will be the worldwide winner in the next great global industry, green technologies.”

From the Wonk Room.

“Several hundred people marched on Duke Energy headquarters this morning” – and forty-four were arrested – “to decry the expansion of Duke’s Cliffside coal-fired power plant in Rutherford County.”

Oxfam report: “Emergency organizations could be overwhelmed within seven years” as the “victims of climate change-related disasters” “increase by “54% to more than 375 million people a year on average by 2015.”

Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH): ” What many people” – see Roy Blunt (R-MO), Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY), Rep. Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV), Rep. Fred Upton (R-OH) – “don’t understand is that climate change legislation can make our region and our country stronger.”

From the Wonk Room.

Electric utility executives in coal-heavy Indiana and North Dakota attacked cap-and-trade legislation as a “tax” on electricity, calling energy policy reform “too complicated to do swiftly.”

“If Greenland melts,” Secretary of Energy Chu told reporters at the fifth Summit of the Americas in Trinidad and Tobago, “we are looking at a 7-meter sea level rise around the world. Some island states will disappear.”

Appearing on This Week with George Stephanopoulos, House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) confusedly attacked the science of climate change: “George, the idea that carbon dioxide is a carcinogen that is harmful to our environment is almost comical. Every time we exhale, we exhale carbon dioxide. Every cow in the world, you know, when they do what they do, you’ve got more carbon dioxide.”

From the Wonk Room.

Wildfires fueled by “high winds and bone-dry conditions” raged through Oklahoma and Texas, burning over 200,000 acres of land. In Texas, the fires destroyed two towns and killed three people, while in Oklahoma, “losses from wildfires could reach $20 million dollars.”

Michigan officials “announced investments in four new operations that would employ several thousand workers” in advanced battery production collectively worth about $1.7 billion. The projects “illustrate the state’s burgeoning hold on the vehicle battery production market.”

St. Louis-based Peabody Energy Corp, the world’s largest coal company, announced “first-quarter profit tripled” to $170 million.

From the Wonk Room.

Yesterday, the Energy Department proposed lighting standards for fluorescent and incandescent lamps that could “save consumers and businesses almost $40 billion between 2012 and 2042 and eliminate the need for as much as 3,850 megawatts of power generating capacity by that date.”

Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA), speaking at an MIT conference on a clean-energy economy yesterday: “We have to set aside a certain amount of carbon credits to ensure that the steel and the paper and other trade-sensitive, energy-intensive industries are not exploited in the near term by the Chinese and others.”

The National Marine Fisheries Service announced it “will protect habitat for belugas in Alaska’s Cook Inlet, despite a lawsuit from Gov. Sarah Palin (R) seeking to wrest the whales from federal management.”

From the Wonk Room.

“Wind turbines accounted for 42 percent of all new generating capacity in the U.S.,” growing into “a key part of the energy infrastructure in Minnesota and Iowa,” which can now generate more wind power than California.

On Tuesday, Maine lawmakers “will take up one of the most far-reaching anti-global-warming bills to go before any state Legislature in the country” “to reduce dependence on fossil fuels and cut carbon dioxide emissions” but “Maine’s business community wants the Legislature to kill the proposal.”

U.S. Department of Energy officials and top commercial real estate executives kicked off the Commercial Real Estate Energy Alliance, a public-private partnership aiming to produce widespread net-zero-energy commercial buildings by the year 2025.

From the Wonk Room.

A new report which calculates the global warming pollution footprint of U.S. mutual funds finds that “carbon intensity indicates financial risk.”

White House officials say the administration “will be flexible” on the “complicated subject” of comprehensive energy legislation, including the possibility of backing away from the principle “that carbon permits should be auctioned rather than given away”—a development the electricity lobby finds “encouraging.”

Saudi Arabia’s lead climate negotiator wants “industrialized countries to assist us through direct investment, transfer of technologies,” because their oil economy will be affected by restrictions on global warming pollution.

From the Wonk Room.

“Windmills off the East Coast could generate enough electricity to replace most, if not all, the coal-fired power plants in the United States,” Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said Monday. “It is not technology that is pie-in-the sky; it is here and now.”

In a letter to Science not available to the public, prominent climate scientists argue “it is imperative we improve the exchange of information between scientists and public stakeholders.”

As Antarctic ice shelves crumble at the end of the southern summer, the northern summer begins with the Arctic “on thinner ice than ever before,” with 90 percent of sea ice less than three years old.

The Environmental Protection Agency has announced that it will hold a two-day public hearing next week in Arlington, Va. on its “proposal for the first comprehensive national system for reporting emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases produced by major sources in the United States.”

The hearing will take place Monday and Tuesday, April 6 and 7 from 9:00 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the EPA Potomac Yard South Conference Center, 2777 Crystal Drive, Room S-1204, Arlington, VA 22202. Daily parking is available in the building and photo ID is required.