How Big Coal Gave Us The Clean Power Plan

As polluters and their political allies decry President Obama's Clean Power Plan, it's understandable they're ignoring the reality that they created it. As Kate Sheppard recounts at Huffington Post, friends of the coal industry, namely the minority of Republican and coal state Democrat senators, filibustered the 2010 clean energy & climate bill, which contained the ungodly sum of $177 billion to subsidize carbon capture & storage at coal-fired power plants.

Despite that massive giveaway offer negotiated by coal ally Rep. Rick Boucher (D-VA), despite President Obama making clear that if the bill died he'd use the Clean Air Act to limit carbon pollution, coal allies blockaded the bill anyway. And then they voted their powerful Democratic ally Boucher out of office, replacing him with an inept, back-bench Tea Party Republican.

Coal and its allies were gambling they could kill the climate bill and block the Clean Power Plan. Here in 2015, it's breathtaking to look at just how spectacularly that plan blew up in Big Coal's face.

Even at the time, it was clear the climate bill's death also killed any hope coal could ever be clean. But just five years later, even the old-fashioned coal-fired power that's allowed to dump carbon pollution into the atmosphere for free is now in a death spiral - well before the Clean Power Plan takes effect.

I talked about the Clean Power Plan with Bruce DePuyt on News Channel 8's Newstalk:

Virginia Attorney General Predicts All Americans to Die

The government will tax every building at $125,000 per year until no one has any money to buy food, at which point everyone will die out and there will be no people left.

I'm pretty sure that's what Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli is saying here, although it's really hard to sort it all out -- and I say that as someone who works on environment & energy issues every day:

I think Cuccinelli starts with new Environmental Protection Agency regulations on mountaintop removal coal mining, confuses that with lies about a clean energy & climate bill that would actually create 1.7 million jobs & smushes it all together with lying about EPA global warming regulations under the Clean Air Act to say they'll apply not to industrial polluters emitting at least 25,000 tons of CO2 a year but instead to any building Ken Cuccinelli points to. I have no idea where he got $125,000 -- I think he made up a big scary number on the spot.

In other words, Ken Cuccinelli lies so much, even Ken Cuccinelli can't keep straight what Ken Cuccinelli is lying about at any given moment.

Cross-posted from BlueVirginia.us

Why Can't Virginia's Attorney General Talk About Global Warming Without Lying?

You really have to wonder -- if Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli's legal case against climate action is really as watertight as he claims, why can't he talk about it without lying repeatedly?

In an interview with the Roanoke Free Press, Cuccinelli repeats an old Republican lie about the results of an MIT study on the costs of clean energy & climate legislation. Strangely, Cuccinelli repeats the lie even though the MIT professor behind the study asked Republicans to stop lying about his research over a year ago.

How much would a bill like the American Clean Energy & Security Act that passed the House last year cost the average family? According to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, about a postage stamp a day -- $175 a year. And low-income families would actually save $40 a year thanks to energy rebates. Pretty cheap for a bill that would create 1.7 million new jobs & curb the worst effects of global warming.

Showing that he must get his climate news from Rush Limbaugh, Cuccinelli also cites illegally hacked climate scientist emails as proof the Environmental Protection Agency should throw out decades of scientific research. Does Cuccinelli know the Associated Press had a team of 5 reporters comb through every word of those emails & found "none of the emails" changed the fact that "global warming is man-made and a threat"? Or is he happy to keep ignoring reality & instead live in a science-denying bubble?

New Poll: Plurality of Perriello Constituents Want Climate Action Now

The Beltway conventional wisdom is wrong. I know, shocking, right?

From Greg Sargent at The Plumline:

I’ve obtained a new poll done for the Environmental Defense Fund which found that in three conserva-Dem districts, backing cap and trade vote may not be a huge risk, after all. [...]

“We went into three districts where conventional wisdom held that Demorats took a tough vote on cap and trade,” Allan Rivlin, a partner with Garin Hart Yang, told me. “The poll shows that it didn’t hurt these members in these districts. It actually helps them. Even in districts that are represented by moderate or conservative Democrats, supporting action on climate change is the popular position to take.”

Environmental Defense Fund specifically polled Rep. Tom Perriello’s 5th Congressional district. Even in that district, seen as center-right, cap and trade is supported by 42% of voters. Only 25% oppose it. You can see the full results at EnviroKnow.

For Senators Mark Warner and Jim Webb, the message is clear. The political risk isn't supporting clean energy & climate action -- it's in continuing our energy status quo.

The Big Lie About Nuclear Power

Just finished my appearance on CleanSkiesTV. (Looking at the screen cap, I'm reminded that my head looks like an orange on a toothpick.) It's funny how their website goes to such great lengths to emphasize their objectivity, then you get on and they're like, "Renewables are teh suck! Long live natural gas!"

I kid. Actually, I thought their reporting on natural gas this morning was pretty objective. It was their coverage of nuclear power that was hard to swallow. According to one reporter, the biggest obstacles to nuclear power are "government bureaucracy and how to deal with the nuclear waste."

Really? I thought the biggest obstacle to building new nuclear power plants was that it's wicked expensive.

Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) this week proposed instructing utilities to build 100 brand-new nuclear power plants. As Grist reports:

A study released last month [PDF] by economist Mark Cooper, senior fellow at the Institute for Energy and the Environment at Vermont Law School, found that building and operating 100 new nuclear reactors would cost $1.9 trillion to $4.1 trillion more over the life of the reactors than would generating the same electricity from renewables and energy efficiency. And taxpayers would have to foot the bill for loan guarantees for the nuclear industry, as the private sector has been unwilling to make big investments in the sector.

Sen. Alexander's nuclear unfunded mandate would force utilities across the country to jack up rates to pay for those plants. As much as Republicans cry socialism at the tiniest increase in tax rates, they seem to have absolutely no problem with skyrocketing electricity rates.

And from a political point of view, why not? People tend to blame high electricity rates on their utilities. But they blame high taxes on politicians. And having to take a leadership role to explain why something unpopular is needed is what spineless elected officials fear most.

So having to explain to voters that while a bill like the American Clean Energy and Security (ACES) Act might cause their rates to go up a bit but their bills to go down thanks to massive efficiency gains ... well, that's a bit much to ask of Sen. Alexander.

Photo courtesy Public Citizen

Rep. Perriello Evokes Dr. King

"Cowardice asks the question, 'Is it safe?' Expediency asks the question, 'Is it politic?' But conscience asks the question, 'Is it right?' And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but one must take it because one's conscience tells one it is right."
-- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

That was today's quote in my Living Green Page-a-Day calendar. Funny coincidence since it reminded me of something I'd just read this morning. It was Rep. Tom Perriello (D-VA) talking about his vote in favor of the Waxman-Markey American Clean Energy and Security (ACES) Act:

“If I have to choose between national security and reelection, for me that’s easy. It’s national security,” he told POLITICO. “I can deal with losing reelection. I can’t deal with being a coward.”

So if Virginia Congressmen like Glenn Nye, Rob Wittman and Frank Wolf weren't voting conscience when they voted against ACES, you have to ask -- were they voting cowardice or expediency?

Protesters Arrested Outside Rep. Boucher's Office

Any minute now, the House Energy & Commerce Committee is expected to pass the American American Clean Energy & Security Act (HR 2454), also known as Waxman-Markey.

Earlier today, 15 protesters were arrested outside the office of Rep. Rick Boucher (D-VA), who's been working to weaken the bill. Grist has more on the protest:

“It’s really a statement about Boucher and the leadership he has assumed in gutting the bill and giving billions of dollars to polluters,” CCAN communications director Anne Havemann told Grist after the protest.

Boucher has been very open throughout the process about his talks with coal companies about the bill. “In the course of conducting other negotiations, I have had continued conversations with coal companies, both locally and nationally, including the chief executive officers of CONSOL ... which operates the largest mine in Southwest Virginia, and Michael Quillen, the chief executive officer of Alpha, which is our region’s largest coal producer,” Boucher said recently. “I have been in discussions with Mike Morris, the chief executive officer of AEP, and Tom Ferrell, who is chief executive officer of Dominion, which is Virginia’s largest electricity supplier.”

But Boucher hasn’t made himself quite so accessible to foes of coal, prompting the sit-in today. “He doesn’t meet with groups like us,” said Havemann. “We’ve tried for months.”

Wouldn't it be nice if Rep. Boucher could join the fight for a clean energy future and green jobs instead of protecting the dirty coal industry and its rapidly dwindling number of mining jobs?

Rep. Boucher Working to Weaken Clean Energy Legislation

From The New Republic on Rep. Henry Waxman's American Clean Energy and Security Act:

In particular, watch the coal-state Democrats, led by Virginia's Rick Boucher, who are pressuring Waxman to weaken the short-term emissions targets, so that coal-heavy utilities will have more time to develop carbon-capture technology and be able to compete with renewable power. It's not that they're necessarily worried the targets for emission cuts by 2020 are unrealistic on some macro level. Rather, they're worried that the coal industry will play only a tiny role in a low-carbon future if it's not given ample time to adjust. The flipside, of course, is that most climate scientists don't think we have time to dally around.

As a ratepayer, I don't think we have time to dally around, either. Dominion Virginia Power raised our rates 18 percent in September, 1.5 percent in January and now wants to raise them another 7 percent, all in large part due to higher coal prices and the huge cost of building new coal-fired power plants.

Who's Rep. Boucher really looking out for -- coal states? Or corporate coal polluters?

Gore Lays the Smackdown on Ignorant Republican

For my day job with the National Wildlife Federation, I live-blogged Friday's House Energy & Commerce Committee hearings on the Waxman-Markey clean energy bill, the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009.

This was the quintessential moment of the hearings -- a Republican ignorantly spouting off about something he or she didn't know about, then getting smacked down by Al Gore: