House lawmakers announced a deal last night on their sweeping proposal to tackle climate change, but not before the bill’s sponsors were forced to bow once more to a polluting industry that would be affected by the proposal.
Colorado’s environmental community wasn’t exactly singing the praises of the Senate version of clean-energy legislation passed by the Energy and Natural Resources Committee Wednesday.
Environment Colorado issued a release saying the American Clean Energy Leadership Act of 2009 “does little or nothing to spur renewable energy in this country. The proposal risks sensitive coastal ecosystems [in Florida] to pollution and spills from off-shore drilling, while worsening global warming by opening the door to high-carbon fuels such as liquid coal, tar sands and oil shale.”
Despite an exemption from a proposed cap on greenhouse gas emissions, Big Agriculture has declared war on clean energy legislation making its way through Congress.
Grist has the details on what it describes as a sop to large agribusinesses to continue its old, polluting ways:
Colorado Sen. Mark Udall Thursday first introduced than pulled back an amendment that would have strengthened a proposed national Renewable Electricity Standard (RES) of 15-percent renewable electricity for all utilities by the year 2021.
Ron Lehr was chairman of the Colorado Public Utilities Commission (PUC) in the early 1990s when the Montrose-based Colorado Ute Electric Association went bankrupt because of what he deemed “a colossal blunder that put them out of business.”
Four years after Vice President Dick Cheney spearheaded a massive energy bill that exempted natural gas drilling from federal clean water laws, Congress is having second thoughts about the environmental dangers posed by the burgeoning industry.
With growing evidence that the drilling can damage water supplies, Democratic leaders in Congress are circulating legislation that would repeal the extraordinary exemption and for the first time require companies to disclose all chemicals used in the key drilling process, called hydraulic fracturing.
Even as some House Democrats moved closer last week to installing first-of-a-kind limits on the carbon emissions blamed for global warming, others are in a full-court press to kill a separate White House effort to curb those same greenhouse gasses.
The push by environmental groups for Colorado Public Utilities Commission (PUC) oversight of rural electric co-ops (REAs) and the utilities that supply them with power is already shaping up as a key campaign issue in the 2010 governor’s race.
Henry Waxman, D-Calif., may not “have the nuts” to pass the American Clean Energy and Security Act (at least according to his GOP counterpart on the House Energy and Commerce Committee), but some Colorado environmentalists say the bill itself doesn’t have the teeth it needs to truly transform America’s energy infrastructure.
The global warming debate is heating up in the House, leading to the kind of quirky moments that are a common feature of life on the Hill.
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