Hill Heat

The House Natural Resources Committee, Subcommittee on Fisheries, Wildlife and Oceans, led by Del. Madeleine Z. Bordallo (D-GU), will hold a legislative hearing on the following bills:

• H.R. 3223 (Allen): To amend the Coastal Zone Management Act of 1972 to establish a grant program to ensure coastal access for commercial and recreational fishermen and other water-dependent coastal-related businesses, and for other purposes. (Keep Our Waterfronts Working Act of 2007)
• H.R. 5451 (Bordallo): To reauthorize the Coastal Zone Management Act of 1972, and for other purposes. (Coastal Zone Reauthorization Act of 2008)
• H.R. 5452 (Capps): To amend the Coastal Zone Management Act of 1972 to authorize grants to coastal States to support State efforts to initiate and complete surveys of coastal State waters and Federal waters adjacent to a State’s coastal zone to identify potential areas suitable or unsuitable for the exploration, development, and production of renewable energy, and for other purposes. (Coastal State Renewable Energy Promotion Act of 2008)
• H.R. 5453 (Capps): To amend the Coastal Zone Management Act of 1972 to authorize assistance to coastal states to develop coastal climate change adaptation plans pursuant to approved management programs approved under section 306, to minimize contributions to climate change, and for other purposes. (Coastal State Climate Change Planning Act of 2008)

28/02/2008 at 10:00AM

From E&E News:

Overall, the fiscal 2009 USDA budget would cut discretionary spending by 4.8 percent. The major increases in the budget would go to food assistance programs to cover the growing number of people who qualify for food stamps and other aid programs. Two of the hardest hit areas of the budget would be research and conservation, which would each see budget cuts of almost 15 percent.

The administration’s proposal would cut more than 10 percent from USDA’s research budget, which includes a wide range of programs, from livestock safety to farm-based energy, biotechnology and food safety. USDA Deputy Secretary Chuck Conner said last week that the cuts came from wiping out congressional earmarks for different research projects.

The White House also made what has become an annual effort to zero out funding for a number of discretionary programs it says are redundant, including local watershed surveys and flood prevention programs. The Bush administration has tried to eliminate the programs in previous years, but congressional appropriators have restored them each year. DeLauro noted she plans to restore the funds again this year.

This year the administration also targeted a popular renewable energy program in its spending cuts for the first time. The budget includes no funding for grants or loans for the “Section 9006” renewable energy program, which gives money to help farmers improve energy efficiency on their farms and develop small on-farm business ventures in wind, solar, biomass or geothermal energy.

The House and Senate both proposed large increases for the renewable energy program in last year’s farm bill and appropriations measures, and the administration had proposed expanding it in the farm bill. USDA included it this year in a list of programs that “serve limited purposes for which financing and other assistance is available.”

Witness

• Edward Schafer, Secretary of Agriculture

13/02/2008 at 10:00AM

Sen. Reid, Senate Majority Leader from Nevada, detailed his position on America’s energy and global warming policy. He called for a moratorium on coal-fired plants and a restructuring of tax policy away from gas and oil and toward renewable energy.

At a community meeting he said:

Let us spend a few billion developing what we have a lot of. We have a lot of sun, we have a lot of wind and we are the Saudi Arabia of geothermal energy. The sooner we move toward the sun, the wind, geothermal, biomass, the better off we’ll be, and we will never do it until we have a tax policy that gives people an incentive to invest in these industries because the big oil companies have controlled America.

More at Grist, It’s Getting Hot in Here, and I Think Mining.