Notably absent from the bill’s introduction was Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who withdrew his support when comprehensive immigration reform jumped to the front of the legislative line. His backing was seen as key to wooing other Republicans in order to get 60 votes and avoid a filibuster.

Sportsmen’s groups and Colorado environmental advocates simultaneously lauded the legislation and began to pick it apart, especially where it deals with domestic energy production and the impacts to public lands.

“While sportsmen appreciate congressional efforts to better manage public lands and waters during energy development, we still are waiting for action by the administration regarding promises that were made earlier this year,” said Tom Franklin, Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership director of policy and government relations.

Environment Colorado questioned the expansion of offshore drilling in the bill, especially in the wake of the devastating Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and provisions to spark a “nuclear power renaissance” that the group sees as unnecessary and perhaps counterproductive to combating global warming.

“We also are disappointed that the draft would block states from enacting their own cap-and-trade programs and curtails EPA authority to deal with new coal plants, especially if the federal program is found to be ineffective in future years,” said Pam Kiely, Environment Colorado program director. She cited an Environment America study concluding “that state-led action on energy and global warming will cut pollution by more than 535 million metric tons by 2020.”

Colorado Sen. Mark Udall issued a statement saying he was pleased to see provisions for nuclear power in the bill, including a proposal he put forth last year to explore small modular nuclear reactors.

“The bill isn’t perfect – ultimately, our ability to address our triple challenges of economic and national security and our planet’s health will hinge on the expansion of renewable energy and energy efficiency. That’s the best way to achieve energy independence, and I will continue to fight for investments that will help us reach that goal,” Udall said.

The goal of the American Power Act is to curtail greenhouse gas emissions 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020 and 83 percent by 2050. To see the entire bill, click here (pdf). For a summary, click here (pdf).

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Leslie Glustrom, now with Boulder-based Clean Energy Action, says federal government estimates of a 200-year coal supply are way off base because most of that coal will not be economically accessible over the course of the next century.

IREA Voices was formed after the Intermountain Rural Electric Association, with nearly 138,000 members in the suburbs between Denver and Colorado Springs, invested $366 million in Xcel Energy’s new Comanche 3 coal-fired power plant near Pueblo.

Last spring the group unsuccessfully backed three green candidates in the IREA’s board election. Comanche 3, which has yet to come online, is already being sued by environmental groups for its mercury emissions plan.

A former head of the Colorado Public Utilities Commission who now works in the renewable energy sector has said utilities may be legally liable if they invest too heavily in fossil fuels and then see those power sources spike prohibitively in cost due to shortages or pending federal climate change legislation.

Glustrom, in a recent interview posted on YouTube, says 50 percent of the nation’s electrical supply comes from carbon-belching coal, and that 40 percent of that comes from Wyoming’s Powder River Basin. The majority of the 13 mines in the Powder River Basin have a life expectancy of only 10 to 20 years, Glustrom warns. Her report is posted on the Clean Energy Action website.

State’s like Colorado with a voter-mandated renewable energy standard are ahead of the game, Glustrom said, but many states in the Mid-West that get a higher percentage of their electrical power from coal-fired plants (Colorado is at 70 percent) and don’t have the same wind and solar resources will be in real trouble in the coming years, she warns.

“What we’ve done in Wyoming is kind of the equivalent of eating two dozen doughnuts for breakfast,” Glustrom says. “It powers you up really fast, but when those doughnuts are gone, thunk, you’re done.”

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U.S. Chamber of Commerce headquarters in Washington, D.C. (Creative Commons photo by Mr T in DC via Flickr)

Earlier this month, heavy hitters like Apple, Exelon, Levi Strauss and Pacific Gas and Electric Co. outright quit the nation’s leading business organization. Nike resigned from the Chamber’s board but maintained its membership, and companies like Duke Energy, General Electric, Alcoa and Johnson & Johnson have disavowed the chamber’s positions on global warming.

“It’s our professional opinion that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is out of step with the leading edge of economic recovery,” said Paul Sheldon, senior consultant with Longmont-based Natural Capitalism Solutions, which has provided corporate sustainability consulting to companies representing 3 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product, including Goldman Sachs.

“We have tracked 13 different studies which document that those companies that come into clean sources of energy, sustainability and responsible corporate behavior are outperforming their competitors before, during and after an economic downturn,” he added.

A Scopes monkey trial

In addition to opposing the Waxman-Markey climate change bill that narrowly passed the House in June, the Chamber took heat in August for statements by Vice President William Kovacs that the organization wanted to see a “Scopes monkey trial” on the effects of global warming on public health, referring to the famous creationism versus evolution case in 1925.

“In the past, [Chamber officials have] said such things as, ‘Global warming would benefit Americans because the reduction in wintertime deaths because of cold weather would be several times larger than the increase in summertime heat-stressed-related deaths,’” said Micah Parkin, Colorado organizer of the grass-roots climate change activism group 1Sky. Parkin added that 117 Colorado businesses signed a letter supporting the Senate version of Waxman-Markey.

“That brings home the point of just how many Colorado businesses do not concur with the U.S. Chamber’s position on climate denying, and just how many businesses here actually spoke out,” she said. The letter was addressed to U.S. Sens. Mark Udall and Michael Bennet of Colorado. The Senate is currently debating its version, the Boxer-Kerry bill.

Parkin said her group is working to give a voice to businesses and regional Chambers that feel disenfranchised by the position of the U.S. Chamber, which she said spent $26 million lobbying Congress in the first half of 2009 — twice the amount of the next biggest spender, Exxon Mobil.

According to the Los Angeles Times, Chamber President Tom Donohue has backpedaled on Kovacs’ comments, saying the chamber is not interested in arguing the science behind global warming and is essentially being targeted by an “orchestrated pressure campaign” by environmentalists.

On Monday, the chamber was punked by an activist group called the Yes Men, which staged a fake press conference at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., announcing the Chamber was supporting Boxer-Kerry. Some media organizations, including FOX News, ran with the announcement before the real chamber corrected the hoax.

Chamber defections

Notable among the recent Chamber defections was PNM Resources Inc., a New Mexico utility, and Chicago-based Exelon, the nation’s largest power company. Representatives of Colorado renewable energy companies say those forward-looking power companies understand the profits to be realized and the jobs to be created by backing clean energy.

“Those utilities recognize that they are energy companies and not necessarily tied to any specific energy technology, and those companies that embrace renewable energy going forward are going to be the ones that are going to lead the U.S. economy in the future,” said Christopher Koch, owner of Boulder-based Pele Power, which installs geothermal heat pumps.

Among Colorado utilities there are varying levels of support for renewable energy and disbelief in climate-change science. Investor-owned Xcel Energy has been more supportive of funding conservation initiatives and renewable projects than the member-owned utility Tri-State, which supplies power to rural electric co-ops around the state that also diverge widely in terms of backing clean energy.

For instance, the state’s largest co-op, the Intermountain Rural Electric Association, tends to debunk global warming and resist putting too much money into renewable sources. The IREA is heavily invested in a new coal-fired power plant near Pueblo, and defends the expenditure based on the lower price of coal-fired electricity despite the possibility it will increase if climate change legislation is passed.

Increasingly, oil and gas companies are battling with the coal industry over carbon caps and emission permits that may be a part of the final Senate bill, with natural gas proponents in particular touting their product for being 50 percent cleaner burning than coal.

“There was an inherent flaw when Congress set off down the road of favoring one fuel source over another,” American Petroleum Institute chairman J. Larry Nichols recently told the New York Times. “You knew there had to be a feeding frenzy among various competing fuels trying to protect themselves.”

Udall and Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter have both advocated adding more incentives for natural gas — a plentiful resource in the state — as part of any final climate change bill.

“I believe [Waxman-Markey] gives short shrift to natural gas,” Ritter said in July. “There’s one mention of natural gas if my memory serves me, and it is about a research project for conversion to natural gas [transportation] fleets. There should be far more done with natural gas and incentivizing the production of natural gas because it’s such a cleaner burning carbon fuel.”

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Produced by the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy and released earlier this week by Denver-based Environment Colorado and the Southwest Energy Efficiency Project, the report is a bit laboriously entitled “Energy Efficiency in the American Clean Energy Security Act of 2009: Impacts of Current Provisions and Opportunities to Enhance the Legislation.”

It found that in Colorado alone, the American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES) would create 7,100 new jobs by 2020 by improving the energy efficiency of new and existing buildings and spending $90 billion on renewable energy projects nationwide by 2025.

With the Senate back in session and about to take up deliberations on its own version, the report suggests changes to the legislation could increase the number of new jobs created in Colorado to 11,000 by 2020.

Those numbers would seem to run counter to the justifications of Colorado Republican lawmakers and blue-dog Democrat John Salazar, who voted against the narrowly passed (219-212) House bill in June. Although it remains to be seen where the majority of new jobs would be created.

“While I strongly agree the issue of climate change must be addressed, this specific bill would have placed a disproportionate financial impact on individual households in Colorado’s Third Congressional District and, for that reason, I could not support it,” Salazar told the Colorado Independent last week. Salazar’s 3rd Congressional District is largely rural, with heavy oil and gas production in the northwest and parts of the southwest. The San Luis Valley has seen considerable renewable energy development.

Salazar was responding to a League of Conservation Voters television ad campaign blasting him for his no vote.

The report also looks at potential consumer savings, concluding the House version would save Colorado households an average of $158 per household in 2020, with that number jumping to $218 per year by 2020 if the Senate version strengthens energy efficiency provisions.

“Energy savings is a key component of our New Energy Economy,” Tom Plant, director of the Governor’s Energy Office, said in a release accompanying the report. “Efforts to make our buildings and homes more energy efficient are creating green jobs in Colorado. Increased investment in efficiency would put more Coloradans to work building an energy smart state while saving them money on energy costs.”

The report suggests Congress strengthen the Energy Efficiency Resource Standard (EERS) in the bill to a 10-percent requirement from the current House version of 5 percent with an option 3-percent increase. EERS provides incentives and financial assistance to utility customers to make homes and businesses more energy efficient.

The report also recommends modeling electric utility allocation on the natural gas utility allocation in the House bill, which requires one-third be used for energy efficiency improvements, and extending the allocation of carbon allowance revenue to the State Energy and Environmental Development provision.

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Only two of those cities – Grand Junction and Pueblo – are actually in Salazar’s 3rd Congressional District, but the message of the campaign may resonate better with Front Range city dwellers than in blue-collar Pueblo or the Western Slope gas patches around Grand Junction.

The ad features a ranching neighbor of the blue-dog Democrat, Colin Henderson of La Jara: “You can grow just about anything in Colorado sunshine, and these days all our sun and wind are growing something pretty special.”

Then a voice over: “Clean energy jobs, all across the state, but when John Salazar voted no on the American Clean Energy and Security Act [aka, Waxman-Markey], he voted no on wind, on solar, and on more clean-energy jobs.”

Back to Henderson: “Congressman Salazar, let’s work together to give clean-energy jobs a bright future in Colorado.”

In an LCV release put out late Wednesday, Henderson is quoted on the ag issues that prompted Salazar to vote no a bill the Senate will take up after the August recess:

“As my congressman, I know representative Salazar believes in defending rural values, but he missed an opportunity to use our state’s natural resources to create clean energy jobs.”

Salazar’s office did not provide an immediate response Thursday.

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“I’m not critical of cap-and-trade,” Wirth told Bloomberg. “But it has to be used in a targeted and disciplined way, and what has happened is it’s gotten out of control.”

Wirth, a six-term congressman and one-term senator who now heads up Ted Turner’s U.N. Foundation, got cap-and-trade provisions for emissions passed as part of the Clean Air Act in 1990. He also served in the Clinton State Department as Undersecretary for Global Affairs focusing on climate change and population growth.

He told Bloomberg the climate-change bill needs to scrap the idea of auctioning permits to raise revenues for the federal government and “just focus on the utilities.” To get out of the Senate, he said, the bill needs include more agriculture provisions, a better nuclear power package, a carbon-emissions standard for new utilities and a stronger “natural gas piece.”

More goodies for the cleaner-burning (by about 50 percent versus coal) natural gas industry and a higher renewable electricity standard are two of the things Colorado Democratic Sen. Mark Udall recently told reporters he wants to see in any climate-change bill. Natural gas is also something Gov. Bill Ritter would like to see strengthened in the bill.

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Gov. Bill Ritter

Gov. Bill Ritter is calling out Republican members of the U.S. Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee for what he called a very partisan approach to the debate on climate change legislation and new energy versus traditional energy jobs.

After testifying along with three other governors during a hearing titled “Clean Energy Jobs, Climate-Related Policies and Economic Growth: State and Local Views,” Ritter said in a conference call with reporters on Tuesday that the tone of the conversation on Capitol Hill caught him off-guard.

“The Senate committee hearing, and it’s probably something Sen. [Mark] Udall is more used to than I am, but it was a very partisan deal,” Ritter said, referring to the Colorado Democrat who joined him on the conference call. “When the western governors meet to talk about climate and energy, there’s very strong bipartisan support for addressing these two issues together.”

Udall took the opportunity to back up Ritter’s comments and take a dig at his fellow senators on the other side of the aisle. “I take my cues from the western governors and will continue to find bipartisan solutions here, and there are plenty of them frankly,” he said.

Specifically, Ritter responded to U.S. Sen. James Inhofe, an Oklahoma Republican who questioned the governor’s very presence at the hearing but didn’t give him the chance to answer.

“One of the things [Inhofe] said was, ‘How can you be here when you have such significant oil shale deposits?’” Ritter said. “We very much support the [research and development] projects in the northwest part of the state where there’s vast deposits of oil shale.

“But until somebody can tell me that there’s a technology that protects our groundwater and air… and we know what level of energy is necessary just to produce a material that can be extracted in a conventional fashion, I don’t believe we should be writing the rules for commercial leasing.”

Ritter was referring to Bush administration midnight rulemaking to set royalty rates and oversight regulations for an industry that is very much in its nascent stages of development and could be decades from producing commercially viable amounts of oil. Udall concurred with Ritter on the oil shale issue, adding all forms of energy must be pursued.

“The governor and I both believe that you’ve got to do it all and there’s no silver bullet,” Udall said. “There may well be silver buckshot, but to make a bet, as Sen. Inhofe suggests, just on oil shale is one that right now’s unlikely to pay off in the ways that we need for it to pay off.”

Asked about the American Clean Energy and Security Act, or so-called Waxman-Markey bill named for its key House sponsors, Ritter said it needs to acknowledge the cleaner-burning potential of natural gas. Udall agreed, and added that he’ll work on that aspect of the Senate version of the bill, as well as push for a higher renewable electricity standard than what the House passed.

“I believe [Waxman-Markey] gives short shrift to natural gas,” Ritter said. “There’s one mention of natural gas if my memory serves me, and it is about a research project for conversion to natural gas [transportation] fleets. There should be far more done with natural gas and incentivizing the production of natural gas because it’s such a cleaner burning carbon fuel.”

Ritter has taken some heat lately for going to bat for the state’s natural gas industry, especially on the topic of legislation being pushed by U.S. Rep. Diana DeGette that seeks to remove an exemption under the Safe Drinking Water Act for the gas drilling process called hydraulic fracturing.

Ritter supports more research on the issue before turning it over to federal oversight.

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The brother of Interior Secretary Ken Salazar has been drawing environmentalist ire of late and raising raising questions likely to frame the 2010 campaign by voting no on the American Clean Energy and Security Act and by not backing fellow Colorado Rep. Diana DeGette’s hydraulic fracturing bill aimed at the natural gas industry.

Salazar is now taking comments on his proposal to designate 63,475 acres of federal land in San Miguel, Ouray and San Juan counties as wilderness, meaning the area would be protected from off-road vehicles, road building of any kind and any sort of development, including energy production and logging.

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There’s also a generic Web ad — Markey doesn’t merit the television ad campaign the NRCC is unleashing on Virginia’s Tom Perriello — featuring a clip from President Barack Obama, who said during the 2008 campaign that under his cap-and-trade plan, “electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.”

TPMDC’s Eric Kleefeld notes this is the first time this election cycle Republicans have used the wildly popular Obama “in a negative manner” in an attack ad.

While Politico reported Tuesday the NRCC was “planning to air TV and radio commercials and unleash robocalls” in its campaign against “vulnerable” House Democrats, there won’t be any TV or radio commercials airing in Colorado, just the robocalls.

NRCC spokeswoman Joanna Burgos told The Colorado Independent the robocalls will reach “thousands” of households in Markey’s district but wouldn’t be more specific. They’ll start running Wednesday and continue into the Fourth of July weekend. Burgos declined to say how much the NRCC was spending on the campaign.

Here’s the script for the robocall targeting Markey. Listen to it here.

This call is from the National Republican Congressional Committee, 202-479-7000.

Your Congresswoman, Betsy Markey voted this past Friday for a huge national energy tax – a tax on natural gas and electricity that will hit every American family and small business. The Wall Street Journal said this tax “will likely be the largest tax in American history.” A tax that will move more American jobs overseas while unemployment continues to rise. Even Democratic Congressman John Dingell called this bill “a tax and a great big one.” A tax Warren Buffett calls “huge – regressive” forcing “many poor people to pay a lot more for electricity.”

Call Betsy Markey now at 970-221-7110. Let her know that her vote on the Nancy Pelosi National Energy Tax is a vote against American families.

PAID FOR BY THE NATIONAL REPUBLICAN CONGRESSIONAL COMMITTEE. NOT AUTHORIZED BY ANY CANDIDATE OR CANDIDATE’S COMMITTEE. THE NATIONAL REPUBLICAN CONGRESSIONAL COMMITTEE IS REPSONIBLE FOR THE CONTENT OF THIS ADVERTISING. WWW.NRCC.ORG

If Markey were on the receiving end of the NRCC’s radio ad blitz, it might sound like this one, aimed at Arkansas Democrat Vic Snyder. But she isn’t.

And here’s the Web ad — watch for a title card urging viewers to “turn off the lights on Betsy Markey” at the end.

Markey’s office didn’t reply to an e-mail seeking comment on the latest NRCC attacks. She released this statement after Friday’s vote:

After much consideration and input from businesses, families and farmers across Northern and Eastern Colorado, I supported the American Clean Energy and Security Act. As with any critical piece of legislation, I took my time to hear from constituents, study the bill and work to make key changes. After critical adjustments were made to protect the agriculture industry and an amendment that I offered to help connect Colorado wind farms to America’s wider energy markets was accepted into the bill, I made the decision to lend my support.

It’s time we get serious about reducing our country’s energy costs and saving American families money. We simply cannot afford to continue to send billions of dollars overseas to unstable governments, while we have our own vast energy resources right here in America. It is critical to our long-term economic health.

I was also compelled by the unique benefits this bill brings to Northern and Eastern Colorado. The renewable energy industry is a reality in the 4th Congressional District and this bill brings jobs directly to our community. Quite frankly, Colorado and the Fourth Congressional District in particular, stand to see greater benefits from this legislation than other areas of the country. Latest estimates project that 41,000 households in the 4th Congressional District would see a net income increase as a result of this bill. This was a reality I could not ignore.

I worked hard with my colleagues on the Agriculture committee to ensure that Colorado’s farmers and ranchers reaped the benefits of this bill. I felt that the cost of regulating emissions from farms across Colorado would be far too expensive for agriculture and would result in relatively limited reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. I was pleased to see the agriculture industry has been exempted from the emissions provisions in the final version of the bill—this was a critical compromise and without it I would not have supported the legislation. I believe it is vital to Colorado agriculture that ethanol producers, beef farmers and rural electric associations alike are protected from rate increases.

The landmark climate change bill, which seeks to reduce carbon emissions in the United States 80 percent by 2050, passed out of the House by a scant seven-vote margin late Friday (219-212), with Colorado Democrats Diana DeGette, Betsy Markey, Ed Perlmutter and Jared Polis voting for the bill.

“We applaud the Colorado representatives who voted for this critical legislation, yet we are disappointed with Reps. Salazar, [Mike] Coffman, and [Doug] Lamborn for opposing this critical legislation,” Pam Kiely, legislative director for Denver-based Environment Colorado, said in a release.

Salazar, brother of Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, told the Denver Post he couldn’t justify raising utility rates in his largely rural 3rd Congressional District at a time when the economy is just now starting to stabilize.

Markey also represents a mostly rural and more conservative district but voted in favor of the bill because of last-minute pro-agriculture changes to it. DeGette, vice chair of the Energy and Commerce Committee that painstakingly negotiated the framework of the bill over the last several weeks, said the costs to the average American will be negligible.

Independent analysis by the Congressional Budget Office and the EPA puts the costs at less than $200 a year for the average American, instead of the thousands predicted by Salazar.

The Colorado delegation’s mostly partisan divide on the bill mirrored the final vote. After an intense day of arm-twisting, 44 House Democrats voted against it and eight Republicans — providing the margin for the bill to pass — bucked strong GOP opposition and voted in favor.

Now the bill moves to the Senate, where the Energy and Natural Resources Committee passed a version last week that was criticized by environmentalists for not going far enough in establishing a national renewable electricity standard.

Colorado Sen. Mark Udall, instrumental in establishing this state’s standard (which now stands at 20 percent renewable sources by 2020), first proposed then pulled an amendment that would have increased the national RES in the Senate version from its current level of 15 percent by 2021. Udall didn’t have the votes but hopes to get the job done on the full Senate floor.

In a statement Friday, Udall said it will take bipartisan cooperation to get a Senate version of the House bill passed.

“When Republicans and Democrats work together we can do great things. I’ve spent many years reaching across the aisle on the state and national level to pass an RES. It’s become a reality in Colorado and I believe it’s time to bring that same spirit of ingenuity to the national level. If we all work together, our country could follow Colorado’s lead on passing an RES. But more importantly, we could finally take one of the biggest steps in implementing new and meaningful energy policy.”