Even before tonight’s jobs speech, conservation groups in Colorado and across the Rocky Mountain West say it’s clear President Barack Obama has chosen polluting industry jobs over other employment sectors, demoralizing the environmental base ahead of the 2012 campaign.

Last week’s decision by the Obama administration to shelve tougher EPA smog standards, coming hard on the heels of the State Department’s nod to the Keystone XL pipeline, has many mainstream environmentalists wondering if young, green voters will turn out for Obama next year the way they did in 2008.

“[The smog decision’s] a huge mistake politically, and I don’t understand it at all,” Dr. Brian Moench, president of the Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment, told the Colorado Independent. “Unless they’re calculating that by doing this they will capture campaign funds from the polluting industry that would have gone to the Republicans, and I don’t even see that as a possibility.”

Texas Gov. Rick Perry (Mary Tuma)

As Republican in Congress, including members of Colorado’s delegation, call for even more regulatory rollbacks for the oil and gas industry to create jobs, polls on the ground in Colorado show voters don’t want to improve the economy at the expense of the environment.

And a new report from Headwaters Economics analyzing federal labor statistics (pdf) finds that the oil and gas industry is doing just fine in the current regulatory environment.

“During this year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the energy industry has boomed, adding roughly 10,000 jobs a month, and drilling activity is approaching a 30-year high,” according to the report. “This activity already has increased so quickly this year that the sector is starting to fear shortages of skilled labor and machinery.”

In Colorado, where former Gov. Bill Ritter’s “New Energy Economy” focused on conservation and renewables has in some ways been the sole economic bright spot, observers say that the White House has shown some environmental leadership, but ultimately not nearly enough.

Starting with the climate bill …

Colorado Conservation Voters Executive Director Pete Maysmith cited as a positive Obama’s much tougher CAFE (gas mileage) standards for automakers. Others point to a long list of disappointments dating back to the failure in 2009 of a comprehensive climate bill, saying the administration has basically given back any gains from increased vehicle mileage.

“Since the climate bill in particular or moving forward from there, there has been this clear indication that all too often actions to better protect our air and water and address climate change are not the top priority of this administration and are at risk of being jettisoned away,” Maysmith said.

In an interview with the Colorado Independent on energy topics last spring, Democratic House leader Nancy Pelosi placed blame on both the Senate and environmentalists for the failure of the Waxman-Markey climate bill that narrowly cleared the House.

“The House passes a bill; the Senate passes a bill. That’s the way it works,” Pelosi said. “They can do something different. It wasn’t theology for us. We always thought there’d be something less coming in from the Senate; we didn’t think there’d be nothing.”

And she added environmentalists should have lobbied the Senate harder. Now those groups are dejected by the missed opportunity that may have set the tone for future setbacks.

“I’ve been very clear to the [conservation] community,” Pelosi said, “They really had to work the Senate a lot harder than they did.”

‘The alternative is much worse’

But while environmentalists may be disaffected by the latest Obama administration actions, front-running Republican presidential candidate Gov. Rick Perry of Texas said during Wednesday night’s GOP primary debate that “the science is not settled on [human-caused climate change]. The idea that we would put Americans’ economy at jeopardy based on scientific theory that’s not settled yet, to me, is just nonsense.”

Former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman was the only GOP candidate Wednesday night who said Republicans can’t win in 2012 by denying the body of scientific evidence.

“[Perry’s] an environmental clown, so the alternative [to Obama] is much worse,” Utah physician Moench said of the president’s recent decisions. “But it’s going to affect people’s willingness to try and work at the grassroots level, to donate. It will affect turnout to a certain degree and it’s certainly going to have an effect on turnout for younger voters who traditionally are more in tune with environmental concerns.”

Maysmith said the smog ruling in particular appeared to be more of a political decision than an economic one.

“I’d call it a political decision that indicated some lack of willingness to stand by one’s principles in the face of shout radio and the right-wing tea partiers in Congress, and that is a bit mystifying and certainly frustrating,” Maysmith said.

He added it’s ironic that at a time when the Republican Party is regrettably swinging more and more to the right, denying science and becoming increasingly shrill, the White House isn’t standing up for common-sense environmental policy.

“For people who care about our air and our water, many of them are going to look at someone like candidate Perry and think, ‘No way, that’s not an option,’” Maysmith said. “At that exact moment they’re going to look at some of these decisions coming out of the White House and they’re going to inevitably be deeply disappointed in them. And it will have the effect in some instances of depressing energy and enthusiasm for the 2012 campaign.”

Follow David O. Williams on Twitter. ]]> http://coloradoindependent.com/98813/green-voter-anger-at-obama-could-open-door-for-environmental-clown-perry-observers-say/feed 6 http://coloradoindependent.com/63230/new-yorker-story-details-senate-breakdown-on-climate-bill http://coloradoindependent.com/63230/new-yorker-story-details-senate-breakdown-on-climate-bill#comments Mon, 04 Oct 2010 14:03:07 +0000 Andrew Restuccia http://coloradoindependent.com/?p=63230 The New Yorker published a blockbuster story this weekend detailing the many failures of the White House and the Senate to pass climate change legislation.

The story, by Ryan Lizza, is nearly 10,000 words, but it’s definitely worth a read.…

Sen. Mark Udall (DenverJeffrey)

Sen. Mark Udall, D-Colo., for instance, is more of a natural gas guy. He views an ongoing push by Republicans and coal-state Democrats to block EPA regulation of big, stationary polluters like coal-fired power plants with some degree of suspicion, although he agrees it’s a matter for Congress to deal with in a comprehensive climate change bill.

“The Supreme Court has ruled that regulating greenhouse gas pollution is a responsibility of the EPA,” Udall told the Colorado Independent in a prepared statement Thursday. “And I think that the ongoing efforts to get around the decision illustrate the real need for legislation that limits carbon pollution, which is contributing to climate change.

“The best solution is to pass legislation that would provide certainty to the energy industry – and I’m working as part of a bipartisan group to do that.”

The U.S. House passed climate change legislation last summer, but the bill has been stalled in the Senate. In December, EPA administrator Lisa Jackson announced plans to regulate large, stationary polluters, a policy many observers view as an Obama administration insurance policy if the climate bill and its cap and trade provisions die in the Senate.

Sen. John D. Rockefeller, D-W. Va., Thursday introduced a bill that would block the EPA from regulating big polluters for two years while Congress works on climate change legislation. This despite a 2007 U.S. Supreme Court decision that gave the EPA the power to regulate greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act – something the agency will do by the end of the month as it relates to the auto industry.

“The Supreme Court ruling gives the EPA the authority to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act,” Rockefeller said in a press release Thursday. “If Congress wants to change or alter that authority – or suspend it long enough to pass comprehensive legislation – Congress must be able to pass a bill that addresses the real life economic impacts that EPA is not equipped to consider.”

Former Democratic Colorado Sen. Tim Wirth, president of the U.N. Foundation, told the Washington Post that the House bill already gives plenty of concessions to the coal industry and that Obama should torpedo the Rockefeller bill.

“The president ought to veto it, period,” Wirth told the Post. “This is a huge affront to his authority, and it’s exactly what the coal industry wants. The coal industry has everything it wants in legislation, and now it wants more.”

Udall, a big proponent of Colorado’s burgeoning renewable industry sector, as well as its established cleaner-burning natural gas industry as a bridge fuel, said it’s far too soon to give up on the Senate climate bill just yet.

“Climate change legislation, combined with the energy policy bill we already passed in the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, would spur growth in the clean energy sector – including natural gas – and clean up the air for our children and grandchildren,” Udall told the Independent.

Rockefeller, meanwhile, whose state has far more coal reserves than Colorado, is banking on still-unproven clean-coal technology.

“Today, we took important action to safeguard jobs, the coal industry, and the entire economy as we move toward clean coal technology,” Rockefeller said in his statement Thursday. “This legislation will issue a two year suspension on EPA regulation of greenhouse gases from stationary sources – giving Congress the time it needs to address an issue as complicated and expansive as our energy future. Congress, not the EPA, must be the ideal decision-maker on such a challenging issue.”

Numerous Colorado clean-energy businesses, outdoor recreation and tourism officials and health-care professionals mounted a campaign last month to take on Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, who in January introduced a resolution to force Senate debate on the EPA’s authority to regulate greenhouse gases.

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Sen. John D. Rockefeller, D-W. Va., today was set to introduce legislation to impose a two-year moratorium on the EPA effort, which was first unveiled by EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson in December. Some accused Jackson at that time of gunning for big polluters like stationary coal-fired power plants to give the Obama administration more ammo headed into United Nations climate change talks in Copenhagen.

The U.S. House passed a climate change bill last summer, but the Senate version has been stalled. In January, Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, floated a disapproval resolution aimed at forcing Senate debate on whether the EPA should be able to impose penalties on big polluters.

Just this week Murkowski, the ranking member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, pressed Jackson during a hearing of the Senate Interior and Environment Appropriations Subcommittee, demanding to know whether she preferred a regulatory path or a cap-and-trade solution approved by Congress.

“The Clean Air Act was written by Congress to regulate criteria pollutants, not greenhouse gases, and its implementation remains subject to oversight and guidance from elected representatives,” Murkowski said in a release. “We should continue our work to pass meaningful energy and climate legislation, but in the meantime, we cannot turn a blind eye to the EPA’s efforts to impose back-door climate regulations with no input from Congress.”

Colorado critics say Murkowski and coal-state Democrats like Rockefeller are pandering to entrenched fossil-fuel-based power sources and mining interests at the expense of a growing clean-energy sector like the one currently booming in Colorado.

“We are very concerned that the dialogue that Murkowski is supporting has the priorities wrong: Investing in climate solutions is profitable and creates jobs,” said Paul Sheldon of Natural Capitalism Incorporated, a Longmont-based consulting business. “Investing in energy efficiency and renewable energy could generate $440 million in economic development in Colorado and as many as 20,000 new jobs.”

Others say climate change legislation or at least letting the EPA enforce the Clean Air Act as ordered by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2007 goes far beyond mere economics and verges into public health.

“Coal is a particularly dirty and harmful fuel source, both because of its disproportionate contribution of greenhouse gases to the problem of global warming, and because of its production of numerous other air pollutants and environmental toxins,” said Dr. Roberta M. Richardson, president of Colorado-based Physicians for Social Responsibility.

Richardson said PSR, along with other public health organizations such as the American Public Health Association and the National Association of County and City Health Officials, oppose Murkowski’s resolution because of science-based findings by the EPA and others that “greenhouse gases are air pollutants that threaten human health.”

The ski and outdoor recreation industries, made up of cross-over Colorado businesses touching on both health and economic vitality, are perhaps the most threatened by climate change, advocates say, making climate change legislation or EPA regulation all the more imperative.

“Colorado is a climate state,” said Auden Shendler, director of sustainability for Aspen Skiing Company. “Colorado’s economy is climate-dependent – whether it’s fishing or hunting, skiing, hiking, ranching or river rafting. At the same time, we’re teed up for solutions, with great sun and wind resources, and a growing green-tech industry.”

And all arguments for stepped-up regulation of coal-fired power plants ultimately seem to circle back to pure economics for many Colorado companies engaged in Gov. Bill Ritter’s “New Energy Economy.”

“There are federal lawmakers who are ignoring the science and health experts for short term political gain,” said George Danellis, Principle of The Vector Group, a Steamboat Springs-based consulting firm. “Investments in clean energy would spur innovation and generate economic growth.”

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According to National Public Radio, ExxonMobil, the largest, most powerful lobby in Washington, is now conflicted on the climate change legislation passed by the U.S. House this summer and now languishing in the Senate.

While the natural gas lobby has been battling hard to get more love from the Senate (in the form of tax incentives and other concessions) for what they point out is the cleanest burning fossil fuel and a bridge to a renewable future, ExxonMobil has spent millions fighting Congress on cap and trade and other aspects of a climate bill. Now ExxonMobil seems to be playing both sides of the fence – an interesting dilemma as pressure mounts on the Obama administration and Congress to produce a meaningful bill.

And Reuters today is reporting ExxonMobil can back out of the XTO deal if hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” is somehow deemed illegal or regulated to the point of being too expensive. The process of injecting gas wells with high-pressure water, sand and chemicals to free up more gas is the subject of U.S. Rep. Diana DeGette’s (D-Colo) FRAC Act, which seeks to remove a Safe Drinking Water Act exemption for the process and put in under EPA oversight.

Most natural gas industry officials and some state regulators say the process is being adequately handled by state regs and presents no real danger to groundwater supplies. But community activists and environmentalists continue to challenge industry claims on fracking.

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The New York Times Monday reported the administration is struggling on whether to come up with a concrete target for reducing greenhouse gas emissions contributing to global climate change before next month’s United Nations climate change summit in Copenhagen, Denmark.

While the House barely passed its version last summer – setting a reduction target of 17 percent below 2005 levels – the Senate version faces a much tougher fight, and right now is stacked up and stuck behind hotly debated health care reform.

The Senate version calls for a 20 percent reduction, and Sen. John Kerry told the Times Obama can safely set a target of between 17 and 20 percent ahead of Copenhagen, where it was originally hoped the administration would have a climate change bill – complete with cap and trade – in hand before attending.

Meanwhile, the Washington Post Tuesday reported fewer Americans – mostly Republicans – believe in global warming. The Post cites a poll conducted with ABC that shows overall belief in global warming dropped from 80 percent to 72 percent – still a pretty overwhelming majority.

But Republicans (76 percent down to 54) and independents (86 to 71) stopped believing by much gaudier margins than Democrats (92 to 86). Amazing what an increasingly charged political climate and a crushing global recession will do for the public’s environmental perceptions.

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Photo: Colorado College

Key Republicans like Arizona’s John McCain, whose state is also a hotbed of uranium mining, and South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham are big backers of a nuclear-energy revival suddenly popular in some circles for its promise of nearly carbon-free power. Their votes may be needed to give Democratic co-sponsors Barbara Boxer of California and John Kerry of Massachusetts 60 filibuster-proof votes.

As the Senate this week commences three critical committee hearings on the Boxer-Kerry bill, Colorado’s Mark Udall has repeatedly made it clear nuclear needs to be a bigger part of the nation’s electrical-power mix, although he acknowledges uranium mining needs to be done much more safely than it was in the state’s not-too-distant past.

“You can’t consider expanding nuclear power without uranium mining, but that does not mean supporting irresponsible mining,” Udall told The Colorado Independent in an earlier statement. “It’s important that the state — which is the delegated agency for permitting authority for uranium mining — ensures that uranium mining is done safely, responsibly and with the full input of the affected communities.”

The Montrose County commissioners late last month approved a controversial uranium mill proposal for the far western end of the county, and the state will now take up to a year to issue its own permits. Some residents of the area that produced yellowcake for the first atomic bombs view a nuclear energy revival as the likely salvation of the local economy; others see it as another looming environmental disaster. Yellowcake is used to produce nuclear fuel rods.

Frank Filas, environmental manager for a U.S. subsidiary of Ontario-based Energy Fuels Inc., which proposed the Montrose County mill, said he understands the public trepidation given the industry’s checkered past.

“If you go back to the ’40s and ’50s and you look at our industry, well, we were doing a lot of things that weren’t necessarily best for our people, but we didn’t know any better — very similar to all the other industries at that time,” Filas said. “And when you had scares like Three Mile Island, and obviously Chernobyl was a horrible disaster, people see that and basically they wanted a safe supply.”

Those nuclear reactor meltdowns and explosions in the 1970s and 1980s put a halt to the expansion of the industry in the United States, basically leveling off nuclear power’s share of the nation’s electricity base load at about 20 percent.

According to The Associated Press, 104 reactors in 31 states currently provide that 20 percent of the nation’s electricity — amounting to about 70 percent of the nearly carbon-free power that doesn’t contribute to global warming. The goal of climate change legislation is to cut greenhouse gas emissions 80 percent by the year 2050, which would require, according to an EPA report, 180 new reactors.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is reviewing applications for only 30 new reactors, but 85 percent of the uranium used for nuclear power production in the United States is currently imported from abroad, according to the Department of Energy’s Energy Information Administration.

That agency recently reported that so far in 2009 coal-fired plants contributed 44.7 percent of the nation’s electrical power; natural gas-fired power plants 22.3 percent; nuclear 20.6 percent; hydroelectric 7.4 percent; other renewables combined (biomass, wind, solar, geothermal) 3.7 percent; and petroleum-fired power plants 1.1 percent.

Coal belches by far the most carbon of all of those sources, and some say the duration of the nation’s coal supply is rapidly waning. Udall is also big backer of upping incentives for the natural gas industry in the Boxer-Kerry bill given Colorado’s abundance of gas, and that’s a sentiment Gov. Bill Ritter shares.

But Ritter also told The Denver Post he backs nuclear power and expanding uranium mining and milling, as long as modern technology ensures safe production: “Today’s standards for a new mill … are far, far more protective of health and the environment. We believe it is possible to construct a mill today that fully protects workers as well as the air and water.”

Energy Fuels’ Filas said nuclear wouldn’t even be on the radar right now if not for the global climate change debate.

“Let’s face it, if we weren’t worried about carbon dioxide right now and the burning of fossil fuels [nuclear wouldn’t be expanding],” he said. “Fossil fuels, whether it’s coal or natural gas or oil, are all very inexpensive forms of power. They’re a little less expensive than nuclear and obviously less expensive than renewables, so from a supply and demand point of view, those types of power sources made more sense over the last 30 years.”

But the potential public health risks of uranium mining are still far too high for some critics of the industry, including Keith Hay, energy advocate for Denver-based Environment Colorado. Hay disputes the notion that nuclear should be grouped in with other forms of clean energy: “Anyone who has seen the front end of uranium mining for nuclear knows that it is in no way clean.”

Travis Stills, managing attorney for the Durango-based Energy Minerals Law Center, says the environmental legacy at Uravan — a toxic ghost town cleaned up at taxpayer’s expense — mandates any new milling operation in the area must be required to post an enormous bond in the event the company goes out of business but leaves behind a radioactive mess.

“The starting point for any launch should be the amount of cleanup that was actually spent at Uravan. That should be the absolute floor [for a bond], and then we should start talking about what to do from there,” Stills said, adding the county commissioners seemed to have their minds made up long before the approval process began.

“[County commission chairman] David White attempted to run the best process that he could, but they fell way short of providing anything fair and balanced – maybe they did provide fair and balanced the way that means now – but they certainly didn’t provide anyone with the hours of PowerPoint presentation opportunity that they provided to Energy Fuels. [The mill] was a done deal when they met privately March 25, 2008, and it sort of remained that way all the way through.”

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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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