Hill Heat

From the Wonk Room.

On Earth Day, President Obama is visiting a “wind turbine manufacturer in Iowa” to “champion his push to cap greenhouse gas emissions and boost renewable alternatives to fossil fuels,” as top officials testify before Congress on behalf of action on green jobs for a green future.

Oil-patch and Blue Dog Democrats like Gene Green (D-TX) and Jim Matheson (D-UT) yesterday called for subsidies for the oil and nuclear industries to be added to the Waxman-Markey clean energy bill, while criticizing federal renewable energy and energy efficiency standards.

Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE) criticized the Environmental Protection Agency for taking initial steps to obey a Supreme Court mandate to regulate global warming pollution, saying, “if alphabet agencies can do what they want without regard to what Congress believes, there’s something wrong with the system.”

From the Wonk Room.

A new report from the Center for American Progress points out that the United States is slipping behind other nations in the development and deployment of clean energy and efficient infrastructure even as China spends $12.6 million every hour greening their economy.

Read the full study here.

China, as part of their two-year stimulus plan, is poised to spend 3% of their GDP a year on public investments in renewable energy, low-carbon vehicles, high-speed rail, an advanced electric grid, efficiency improvements, and other water-treatment and pollution controls. This is about $12.6 million every hour. In the United States, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act invests about half as much as China on comparable priorities. This represents less than half of one percent of our 2008 gross domestic product.

The paper also shows that, when it comes to preparing our country to compete in the new energy economy of the future and create millions of new jobs, the United States lags behind most of our competitors in the rest of the world in a four key ways.

• We have no national energy portfolio standard that encourages clean, renewable power and shifts away from dirty and dangerous energy.
• We have an outdated electrical grid unsuited for the task of carrying energy from regions rich in wind, solar, and geothermal potential to the people who need the energy.
• We don’t make dirty energy companies pay for the pollution they pump into the air; in fact, we give them billions every year in tax breaks.
• And we don’t invest enough in research, development, and deployment to inspire our entrepreneurs and leverage their discoveries by helping bring their bold new technologies to market.

As venture capitalist John Doerr recently pointed out in his testimony before the Senate Committee on the Environment and Public Works, “What is at stake is whether America will be the worldwide winner in the next great global industry, green technologies.”

On April 21, the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) will release the results of a two-year study that found that the United States can significantly reduce carbon emissions and lower energy bills by implementing an emissions cap in conjunction with a suite of energy and transportation policies. UCS’s recommended approach is similar to the one proposed recently by Reps. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Edward Markey (D-Mass.) in a draft discussion climate bill.

The UCS analysis, “Climate 2030: A National Blueprint for a Clean Energy Economy,” uses a modified version of the Department of Energy’s National Energy Modeling System (NEMS) and projects how UCS recommendations would reduce emissions and lower energy costs over the next 20 years. The analysis also provides projections of net business savings on energy and net consumer savings by household and region.

• Kevin Knobloch, UCS president
• Rachel Cleetus, UCS climate economist
• Steve Clemmer, UCS Clean Energy Program research director
• David Friedman, UCS Clean Vehicles Program research director

For the visual portion of UCS’s “webinar,” go to: cc.readytalk.com/r/i6a7q64a5vtw (please log in early to avoid any bottlenecks)

For the audio portion, call: 866-740-1260, access code: 3018025

From the Wonk Room.

Electric utility executives in coal-heavy Indiana and North Dakota attacked cap-and-trade legislation as a “tax” on electricity, calling energy policy reform “too complicated to do swiftly.”

“If Greenland melts,” Secretary of Energy Chu told reporters at the fifth Summit of the Americas in Trinidad and Tobago, “we are looking at a 7-meter sea level rise around the world. Some island states will disappear.”

Appearing on This Week with George Stephanopoulos, House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) confusedly attacked the science of climate change: “George, the idea that carbon dioxide is a carcinogen that is harmful to our environment is almost comical. Every time we exhale, we exhale carbon dioxide. Every cow in the world, you know, when they do what they do, you’ve got more carbon dioxide.”

From the Wonk Room.

Yesterday, the Energy Department proposed lighting standards for fluorescent and incandescent lamps that could “save consumers and businesses almost $40 billion between 2012 and 2042 and eliminate the need for as much as 3,850 megawatts of power generating capacity by that date.”

Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA), speaking at an MIT conference on a clean-energy economy yesterday: “We have to set aside a certain amount of carbon credits to ensure that the steel and the paper and other trade-sensitive, energy-intensive industries are not exploited in the near term by the Chinese and others.”

The National Marine Fisheries Service announced it “will protect habitat for belugas in Alaska’s Cook Inlet, despite a lawsuit from Gov. Sarah Palin (R) seeking to wrest the whales from federal management.”

Speaker: Steven J. Milloy

Host: Becky Norton Dunlop, Vice President, External Relations, The Heritage Foundation

Behind the smiley-face rhetoric of “sustainability” and “conservation” – that warm and fuzzy public image that the environmental movement has cultivated for itself – resides a dark agenda. In Green Hell, Steve Milloy examines how the Greens aim to regulate your behavior, downsize your lifestyle, and invade the most intimate aspects of your personal life. He reflects on the authoritarian impulse underlying the Green crusade. Whether they’re demanding that you turn down your thermostat, stop driving your car, or engage in some other senseless act of self-denial, he argues that the Greens are envisioning a grim future for you marked by endless privation.

With apocalyptic predictions of environmental doom, the Green movement has gained influence throughout American society – from schools and local planning boards to the biggest corporations in the country. And their plans are much more ambitious than you think, says Milloy. What the Greens really seek, with increasing success, is to dictate the very parameters of your daily life – where you can live, what transportation you can use, what you can eat, and even how many children you can have.

Steven J. Milloy is Founder and Publisher of JunkScience.com, a columnist for FoxNews.com, the Co-Founder of the Free Enterprise Action Fund, an Adjunct Scholar at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and Co-Director of the Free Enterprise Project at the National Center for Public Policy Research. An outspoken defender of the free market against the junk science and false claims disseminated by the Greens, his columns and op-ed pieces have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Financial Times, and Los Angeles Times.

Location: The Heritage Foundation’s Lehrman Auditorium

Chairman Edward J. Markey will host President Obama’s top climate, energy and science advisers along with other energy experts at a forum at MIT on Monday, April 13 to discuss the future of clean energy in national policy and in the Massachusetts economy. They will discuss clean energy solutions for creating jobs, improving our national security and protecting our planet from global warming. Last week, Rep. Markey released draft legislation that will be the main congressional vehicle to push clean energy technologies and create millions of new jobs.

• Chairman Edward J. Markey (D-Malden), Chairman of the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming and Energy and Environment Subcommittee
• Carol Browner, Assistant to the President for Energy and Climate Change
• John Holdren, Assistant to the President for Science and Technology
• Ernest J. Moniz, Professor of Physics and Cecil and Ida Green Distinguished Professor, MIT
• Dr. Susan Hockfield, President, MIT
• Daniel Yergin, Pulitzer Prize-winning author and Chairman of Cambridge Energy Research Associates
• Massachusetts clean energy CEOs and others

Wong Auditorium, Tang Center, Building E51, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts

Live webcast.

From the Wonk Room.

“Wind turbines accounted for 42 percent of all new generating capacity in the U.S.,” growing into “a key part of the energy infrastructure in Minnesota and Iowa,” which can now generate more wind power than California.

On Tuesday, Maine lawmakers “will take up one of the most far-reaching anti-global-warming bills to go before any state Legislature in the country” “to reduce dependence on fossil fuels and cut carbon dioxide emissions” but “Maine’s business community wants the Legislature to kill the proposal.”

U.S. Department of Energy officials and top commercial real estate executives kicked off the Commercial Real Estate Energy Alliance, a public-private partnership aiming to produce widespread net-zero-energy commercial buildings by the year 2025.

More than two dozen organizations, including well-respected groups from the research, advocacy, faith-based, labor and civil rights communities, have come together to ensure that emerging climate legislation protects and provides opportunity for society’s most vulnerable individuals and families. The Climate Equity Alliance unites around shared concerns about the effects of climate change and climate change legislation on low- and moderate-income households. Alliance members believe climate legislation should both help to build an inclusive green economy — providing pathways to prosperity and expanding opportunity for America’s workers and communities — and ensure that low- and moderate-income people receive relief from the higher energy costs that will result, so that they are not pushed into poverty or made poorer.

This conference call for reporters will unveil the Climate Equity Alliance and present the principles drawing these groups together, with particular attention to how policymakers should move forward following the draft legislation introduced by Representatives Henry Waxman (D-CA) and Edward Markey (D-MA).

• Robert Greenstein, Executive Director, Center on Budget and Policy Priorities
• Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins, CEO, Green For All
• Gerry Hudson, Executive Vice President, SEIU
• Other speakers TBA

Click here to register for this conference call.

• Green for All
• Center on Budget and Policy Priorities
• Center for American Progress
• Service Employees International Union
• NAACP
• National Hispanic Environmental Council
• Oxfam America
• First Focus
• Economic Policy Institute
• Redefining Progress
• US Action
• Coalition on Human Needs
• The Workforce Alliance
• Center for Law and Social Policy
• The Washington Office of Public Policy, Women’s Division, United Methodist Church
• Union for Reform Judaism
• National Low Income Housing Coalition
• ACORN
• Policy Link
• Citizens for Tax Justice
• Enterprise Community Partners

The 2009 EIA conference is being held April 7-8 at the Washington Convention Center.

Please register onsite at the Walter E Washington Convention Center starting at 7:30am on Tuesday, April 7th.