Hill Heat

The Field Briefing will take place Thursday, January 10 at 10:00am PST in the City Council Chamber at the Los Angeles City Hall, 200 North Spring St. in Los Angeles.

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Stephen Johnson has been invited to appear at the field briefing to answer Senators’ questions about the EPA’s denial of California’s request for a waiver to regulate greenhouse gas pollution from motor vehicles.

Witnesses

• Edmund G. Brown Jr., Attorney General of California
• Mary Nichols, Chairman of the California Air Resources Board
• Fran Pavley, Senior Advisor, Natural Resources Defense Council
• Carl Pope, Executive Director, Sierra Club

Chairman Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) of the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming will hold a hearing next week on the international climate negotiations now wrapping up in Bali, Indonesia.

Chairman Markey and other members of the Select Committee will host climate experts returning from Bali to discuss the climate conference and suggest an effective path forward on global warming for the United States and the international community.

Witnesses

• Philip Clapp, President, National Environmental Trust
• Myron Ebell, Director, Energy and Global Warming Policy, Competitive Enterprise Institute
• Alden Meyer, Director of Strategy and Policy, Union of Concerned Scientists
• Ned Helme, President, Center for Clean Air Policy
• Christiana Figueres, Former Official Negotiator, U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Kyoto Protocol, Costa Rica

Featured Speaker:

• Senator John Kerry (D – MA)

Introduction by:

• Melody Barnes, Executive Vice President for Policy, Center for American Progress Action Fund

After years of denial, delay, distraction and distortion, climate change is changing the political climate. Australia’s John Howard recently became the first national leader voted out of office in large measure because of his failure to respond to citizens’ concerns about global warming. Newly elected Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has made global warming his first priority in office. Australia’s awakening is not an isolated example. Eighty-three percent of Chinese support action on climate change. Between 2006 and 2010 China plans to improve energy efficiency by 20 percent. The dialogue in the United States is also shifting, albeit too slowly. Fifty-nine percent of Americans now endorse taking major steps soon to combat global warming, and 33 percent more think we need modest steps. Unfortunately this 92 percent of the American public is still looking to President Bush for action on this key issue.

Just last week representatives of more than 180 nations met in Bali to chart a course toward a new global agreement to control climate change that will succeed the Kyoto Protocol. Together – in spite of American obstruction – they produced a roadmap for the new climate negotiations that set a target date of 2009 for the next treaty. How do we avoid the missteps that plagued the Kyoto Treaty? How do we create a framework that includes industrialized nations as well as the developing world? Sen. Kerry – who attended the Bali conference and led the U.S. Senate delegation – will lay out a strategy to follow the Bali roadmap and expand the existing emissions trading market, promote an efficient and effective technology development and implementation program, launch an aggressive effort to protect the world’s remaining forests, and embrace technology transfer. This will require innovative financing and investment – and, if properly implemented, will create major new opportunities for American industry to create the jobs of the future.

Center for American Progress Action Fund
1333 H St. NW, 10th Floor
Washington, DC 20005

RSVP

“Does the current framing and scaling of the climate/energy issue adequately capture the challenge posed? If not, what might be a more appropriate frame and scale?”

Speakers

• Dr. James G. Anderson, Philip S. Weld Professor, Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology and Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University
• Dr. Daniel Schrag, Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences and the Director of the Harvard University Center for the Environment, Harvard University

The issues of global energy demand and climate response are, at one level, complex and contentious. However, they are joined by simple but important considerations. While the flow of energy is important to the global economic infrastructure, the flow of energy within the Earth’s climate system reveals simple but compelling conclusions. These will be explored in this briefing.

On December 18, the Brookings Institution will host Senator Richard G. Lugar, the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, for a conversation on the lack of action on U.S. energy security and the challenges the next president will face on this issue. Indiana’s longest-serving senator, Lugar was first elected in 1976, and is recognized as one of the nation’s leading voices on foreign relations and national security.

U.S. dependence on increasingly scarce fossil fuels threatens U.S. security while also undermining international stability. Absent revolutionary changes in energy policy, U.S. foreign policy goals may be undermined, living standards may erode, and the U.S. may become highly vulnerable to the machinations of rogue states. These are the urgent security questions facing the next U.S. president.

In his address, Senator Lugar will discuss the need for leadership by the next president in combating energy threats to U.S. national security. Brookings Vice President and Director of Foreign Policy Carlos Pascual will provide introductory remarks and moderate the discussion. After the program, Senator Lugar will take audience questions.

Participants

Introduction and Moderator

• Carlos Pascual, Vice President and Director

Featured Speaker

• Sen. Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.)

Location

Falk Auditorium The Brookings Institution 1775 Massachusetts Ave., NW

Contact: Brookings Office of Communications

E-mail: events@brookings.edu

Phone: 202.797.6105

The full committee will meet to receive testimony on global maritime strategy initiatives. In October the Navy, Coast Guard, and Marine Corps released A Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower.

Witnesses:

• Admiral Gary Roughead, USN, Chief of Naval Operations
• Admiral Thad W. Allen, USCG, Commandant of the Coast Guard
• General James T. Conway, USMC, Commandant of the Marine Corps

EE News:

The hearing comes amidst growing concern over climate change in the Arctic and its effect on national security and international relations, as new shipping routes open and the area becomes more accessible for oil and gas extraction.

The issue has not escaped the notice of the U.S. military. In mid-October, the Coast Guard announced plans for an operational base in Barrow, Alaska, to deal with increased shipping in the North Pole region.

Later that month, the Navy, Coast Guard and Marines released an updated national maritime strategy, which for the first time includes global warming – particularly its effects in the polar region – as a concern for the U.S. fleet.

It is that strategy that is at the center of Thursday’s House hearing.

“As we look at maritime strategy on a global basis, we can’t ignore the future of the Arctic, the implications of access to the Arctic, national security issues, environmental issues, energy issues associated with it,” Coast Guard Commandant Adm. Thad Allen said in September at a Washington, D.C., conference on national security sponsored by the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis. “Where do we invest our money? How do we develop policies?”

Allen, one of three top military officials scheduled to testify at the hearing, also drew a link between climate change in the Arctic and U.S. participation in the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea, a hot-button issue this fall on Capitol Hill.

The United States is the only major industrialized nation that has failed to ratify the 25-year-old agreement, which governs how countries manage their exclusive economic zones and seabed mineral rights, sets rules for navigating international waters, and addresses species protection and other environmental issues.

“The United States must ratify the Law of the Sea treaty,” Allen said. “We must become an international player. We must be at the table.”

The Senate is scheduled to consider the Farm Bill (H.R. 2419 with S.Amdt. 3500) and the energy bill (H.R. 6 with S.Amdt. 3841).

Under a unanimous consent agreement, all amendments to the farm bill were required to get 60 votes to end debate and be accepted.

In roll call vote 424, the Dorgan-Grassley amendment (S.Amdt. 3695) to the Farm Bill was rejected 56-43.

In roll call vote 425, cloture on the latest compromise version of the energy bill was rejected 59-40.

In roll call vote 426, the Klobuchar “means-testing” amendment (S.Amdt. 3810) to the Farm Bill was rejected 48-47.

The amendment, supported by the administration, would have limited subsidies to full-time farmers making less than $750,000 a year, and landowners whose primary income comes from outside the farm making less than $250,000 a year.

In roll call vote 427, the Tester-Grassley Competition Title packer price manipulation amendment (S.Amdt. 3666) to the Farm Bill was rejected 40-55.

The amendment, as explained by Tom Philpott:

Price manipulation is clearly prohibited by the Packers & Stockyards Act (PSA), but some judges have recently ruled that price manipulation is excused if a packer or processor can show “a legitimate business justification” for manipulating prices—such as gaining access to more livestock at the price they want to pay. This defense to price manipulation is not in the PSA and the court rulings, if allowed to stand, weaken the law substantially. The amendment filed by Senators Tester (D-MT), Harkin (D-IA), and Grassley (R-IA) will clarify that the PSA cannot be interpreted to include “a legitimate business justification” for market manipulation.

S.2156, to authorize and facilitate the improvement of water management by the Bureau of Reclamation, to require the Secretary of the Interior and the Secretary of Energy to increase the acquisition and analysis of water resources for irrigation, hydroelectric power, municipal, and environmental uses