OurFuture.org Blogs: Frank ODonnell

Chamber of Commerce continues its clean-air SCARE campaign

Frank ODonnell — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 11:48:06 -0400

As you may be aware, Senator Boxer’s Committee on Environment and Public Works plans a hearing tomorrow on the topic of “regulation of greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act.”

http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Hearings.Hearing&Heari...

As you know, both the majority Democrats and minority Republicans get to call witnesses. We want to focus on the organization represented by one of the minority witnesses, the United States Chamber of Commerce. (Less needs to be said about another minority witness, Marlo Lewis of the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Marlo’s a nice fellow and not that many years ago – after we finished debating on CNN – he was privately bemoaning the lack of a threat of government regulation on global warming. After all, what good is an anti-government rabble-rousing organization without the looming presence of the federal bogey-man?)

Now, on to the Chamber of Commerce. You may have heard of its most recent scare campaign about greenhouse gases. In an effort to frighten Congress into taking away Environmental Protection Agency authority over greenhouse gases (in other words, to reverse the big Supreme Court decision) the Chamber has been running about contending the EPA could soon be cracking down on churches, donut shops and melon farms!

How credible are these dire predictions? Is the donut really about to become an endangered species? Perhaps here is where history should be our guide.

For the Chamber has a proud legacy of hyperbole, hysteria – and downright inaccuracy – when it comes to clean air requirements. In fact, the Chamber has been waging rhetorical war against the Clean Air Act for almost four decades. A couple of examples perhaps should suffice to enable us to evaluate the current scare campaign.

In 1971, a year after passage of the landmark Clean Air Act, the Chamber predicted the law would lead to “collapse of entire industries” – including oil and automotive. http://www.earthportal.org/?p=80#1970AD

This was later seen as a classic example of industry hyperbole – especially because the Clean Air Act has actually led to the creation of scores of thousands of highly skilled jobs. (See, for example, at http://www.meca.org/galleries/default-file/motorvehicleindustryfact%2001... )

But the Chamber was only warming up. In the mid-1970s, it opposed the entire concept of limiting air pollution in already-clean areas.

Yes, under the Chamber’s approach, areas such as the Grand Canyon would have been left completely unprotected from air pollution.

As Time Magazine noted, the Chamber claimed that clean-air restrictions would "mandate undeveloped areas into eternal poverty." (Time Magazine, Monday, Jul. 11, 1977 )http://64.233.169.104/search?q=cache:nuE_g7RmCKcJ:www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,919086,00.html+%22chamber+of+commerce%22+clean+air+and+muskie&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=18&gl=us

Boy, doesn’t this silly rhetoric sound familiar? Once again, the Chamber was left with egg on its face.

Let’s jump ahead to 1997, when the Clinton EPA under Carol Browner was seeking to update and strengthen clean air standards for smog and soot. The Chamber was a leading voice in opposition, asserting that tougher clean air standards amounted to a “travesty” and were “about selling a political agenda in an empty green bag.'' http://pubs.bna.com/NWSSTND/IP/BNA/den.nsf/SearchAllView/A74305CF0D2F714... (As the late comedian Anna Russell used to tell her audiences while describing the plot of a Wagnerian opera , “I’m not making this up you know.” )

Ah, but the Chamber wasn’t done with that issue. You may recall that in the litigation over those clean air standards, the Chamber asserted the Clean Air Act was unconstitutional! Justice Scalia, never to be confused with some left-leading judge, wrote a unanimous opinion slapping down the Chamber’s whacko assertions. http://www.blm.gov/nstc/air/pdf/010227A.PDF

Yes, unfortunately the Chamber has assailed other clean-air controls in the most recent decade. It opposed limits on toxic mercury from power plants, claiming that was simply an “attempt by extreme environmental groups to hinder economic growth and force jobs overseas.” www.progressiveregulation.org/articles/ELR_Mercury.pdf

Even more recently, the Chamber has opposed new smog and soot standards. You may recall that Chamber Vice President Bill Kovacs vowed a “royal fight” against tougher smog standards. http://blogforcleanair.blogspot.com/2007_01_01_archive.html

You may note that the Chamber did win at least a partial victory in that “royal fight” because the Bush administration ignored science and covertly considered costs when setting those standards. And so now the Chamber would have us believe the EPA would run wild, putting limits on donuts?! Please.

Of course, the Chamber also ran silly knockoff Harry-and-Louise style commercials against the ill-fated Lieberman-Warner climate legislation. http://www.uschamber.com/press/ads/advocate_climatechange.htm

Well, we could probably find other examples, but these should suffice. After all, how many times can you get away with crying wolf? These guys don’t exactly have the Bracewell Giuliani level of sophistication.

When it comes to clean-air controls, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce always seems to favor hysteria over fact. Its current campaign should be dismissed as just one most scare tactic aimed at keeping those membership dues rolling in.

Stonewall Steve's War on the Planet

Frank ODonnell — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 10:50:01 -0400

It's been an item of debate in D.C. circles for some time: who was really the worst head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency?

Was it Anne Gorsuch Burford, who resigned from the EPA in disgrace after being cited for contempt of Congress?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A3418-2004Jul21.html

Or is it EPA’s current head, Stephen Johnson, known as “Stonewall” for his rocklike refusal to answer questions from Congress about White House interference in crucial EPA decisions. http://blogforcleanair.blogspot.com/2008/06/stonewall-steve-johnson.html

Well, the verdict is in. Thanks to his utterly disgraceful behavior last week, the winner – really the biggest loser -- is Stonewall Steve. In an effort to continue currying favor with a dying regime, this disgusting pseudo-religious hypocrite http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2008/01/03/epas_holy_roller.php
has declared war not only on his own agency, but on the planet.

Yes, we’ve all read the stories of how Johnson caved in to White House pressure on such issues as rejecting California’s effort to enforce greenhouse gas standards for motor vehicles and EPA’s national standards for smog. (In both cases, the White House has invoked “Executive Privilege” to hide exactly what happened from Congress. http://oversight.house.gov/story.asp?id=2030 )

But it is worth taking a moment to examine Johnson’s most recent act of sycophantic duplicity, which happened last Friday afternoon, the typical time for newsmakers to dump out “bad news.” Johnson’s bad news – at least for the planet -- was EPA’s formal alleged response to the Supreme Court decision which held that EPA did indeed have legal authority under the Clean Air Act to deal with global warming, unless the agency determined that global warming posed no public health or the environment.

Yes, that decision should have been a no-brainer. And last year, EPA’s professional staff drafted not only the declaration that global warming was a threat (the so-called “endangerment” finding), but tough new greenhouse gas standards for motor vehicles. The White House sent both to the circular file, and Johnson declared last December that EPA would continue to examine the issue.

Once again, EPA’s dedicated professionals went to work – preparing a detailed “advanced notice of proposed rulemaking” which noted that the Clean Air Act could indeed be used to reduce global warming emissions – and that tougher vehicle standards could actually save consumers up to $2 trillion by prompting use of more fuel efficient cars that would waste less gasoline. (By the way, aren’t we supposed to favor ideas that would reduce our dependence on foreign oil? Apparently not, if the car companies go whining to the White House.)

Once again, the White House stepped in – and actually turned the EPA finding upside down. It issued a document http://www.epa.gov/epahome/pdf/anpr20080711.pdf
which showcases attacks on EPA by the White House Office of Management and Budget and other cabinet agencies (Commerce, Transportation, Agriculture, and Energy) oriented towards protecting special interests rather than the environment. They declared -- contrary to EPA's staff views -- that nothing constructive could be done about global warming without action by Congress.

As my friend Vickie Patton of the Environmental Defense Fund points out:

"In a move unprecedented in the history of the Clean Air Act, EPA chief Stephen Johnson published a series of denunciations from current White House officials and adopted them as the basis for his own views. Johnson begins the [advanced notice] by noting that the Clean Air Act is "an outdated law" "ill-suited for the task of regulating global greenhouse gases" repeating comments he made to national press earlier today.

But there is no basis for this bald and radical assertion in the document put forward by EPA's own staff. So, to prop up this outlandish claim, Johnson turned to the White House. Indeed, he promulgated the views of White House officials as a preface to disparage the work of EPA's own staff.

Here's the kicker: The senior EPA staff long involved in the development of the ANPR never saw the White House denunciations that Johnson put forward to justify his own utter failure to address the global warming crisis. Indeed, they are all dated within the last 2 days."

So for Johnson, it doesn’t matter if the planet keeps heating up or if he flips the bird to his own agency workers. What matters is sucking up to the little man in the White House.

As Margie Kriz reported earlier this year in the National Journal “Johnson enjoys telling his staff and visitors about his travels on Air Force One, his invitations to Camp David, and his wife's friendship with Laura Bush.”

Stonewall, my boy, you’d better enjoy the perks before you and your boss are both run out of town.

For these heinous misdeeds, the poet Dante would likely send Johnson to the eight rung of his Inferno – a place reserved for charlatans and corrupt politicians. By contrast, Burford, who died four years ago this week, rueful of her days of fronting for another vile, environment-hating White House, would probably only have made it to the third rung, reserved for gluttons.

Climate Kidnappers

Frank ODonnell — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 09:59:31 -0400

In case there was any doubt about it, the White House has officially said President Bush would veto the so-called Lieberman-Warner climate bill, which the Senate took up yesterday.

Here is a link to the White House "Statement of Administration Principles." (In this case, it might be more aptly named "statement of lack of principles.")

If you parse this diatribe, you will note that it cites the worst-case projections about the potential cost impacts of prior versions of this legislation, without acknowledging that the bill has been tuned up to keep the costs under control—and that most studies have shown the costs would probably be relatively modest anyway. It also employs an old Republican trick: Just brand this a "tax and spend" bill. I thought we were beyond that type of demagoguery, but I guess not.

It is interesting to note that the White House is actually slamming not only Republican John Warner, but turncoat former Democrat Joe Lieberman, who, as the wonderful Kevin Spacey HBO movie "Recount" vividly reminds us, helped get Bush into office in the first place. So much for loyalty. And the White House is blasting Scott McClellan because...?

In all the moaning and groaning about potential costs, the White House never talks about the costs of doing nothing. But, as reporter Chris Holly astutely notes in today's The Energy Daily:

"Ironically [he could have said pathetically], the White House last week issued a congressionally mandated report—four years late and under a court order—that concludes global warming will exacerbate water shortages for agriculture and urban use across the United States; sharply increase heat-related deaths in metro areas; cause billions of dollars in damages from hurricanes, storms and wildfires; and increase the spread of disease from insect infestations and food- and waterborne microbes."

One real irony here is that the bill isn't going anywhere, in large part due to the demagoguery of some big corporate polluters, such as Duke Energy CEO Jim Rogers, who recently branded the bill a "Mafia" creation. (Sons of Italy, where are you?) Rogers did this because the bill would steer some (though not enough) of the proceeds derived from carbon permits to socially beneficial purposes.

What Rogers wants is that ALL of the carbon permits should be given, free of charge, to polluters such as his company. In effect he is like a kidnapper demanding ransom. In this case, he's demanding that we pay his company to ransom our air!

Even though Bush will be gone soon, Rogers and his ilk will remain to taint future debates on global warming.

No lung left behind

Frank ODonnell — Thu, 01 May 2008 08:15:43 -0400

What we can learn from the American Lung Association’s “State of the Air” report

It has become part of the rites of Spring, along with television’s May “sweeps,” the Kentucky Derby, and Cinco de Mayo.

But unlike these vernal pleasures, the American Lung Association’s annual “State of the Air” report, released May 1 at the start of the traditional “smog” season, teaches some important lessons about the quality of the air we breathe. http://www.stateoftheair.org/

Lesson number one: We can make progress. This report card on the state of our nation’s air does show that we have made progress in dealing with the most common air pollutants, ozone (or smog) and fine particle soot. This is perhaps a counter-intuitive finding given seven years of reactionary Bush policies.

Progress has been especially evident in states such as California that have taken aggressive action – through cleaner cars, tougher smokestack requirements, etc. – that have reduced the number of dirty-air days compared to prior eras.

Take, for example, Riverside, California, one of the smoggiest parts of the nation. In 1998, it had 57 days of dirty air for smog, with levels above the national health standard. By 2006, the number of dirty-air days had been cut almost in half – to 30.

Lesson number two: We still have major problems. Despite the progress, the Lung Association report documents the continuing threat that air pollution poses to the health of Americans. Indeed, two of every five people in the nation live in counties that have unhealthful levels of either smog or fine particle soot.

The poster child for this year’s report is Pittsburgh – admitted cleaner than in days gone by, when the odiferous city was described as “hell with the lid lifted off” – but a somewhat surprising first place as the dirtiest city in American for short-term exposure to deadly particle soot. (It’s the first time in the nine-year history of this annual report that California was bumped from the top spot for one of the major pollutants under scrutiny.)

Lesson number three: Progress appears stalled. And this is where the Bush policies come in. One of things you have to know when it comes to air pollution control is that it takes a fairly long time between adoption of a policy choice and real-world results. For example, in 1997, the Clinton EPA demanded that states in the eastern half of the country reduce summer-time smog-forming emissions from electric power plants.

But the Clinton team gave the states about seven years to put the new plans in place (in order to permit an orderly transition which involved the manufacturer and installation of appropriate pollution control equipment). And so the air in 2004 started to be noticeably better than before – a fact which the Bush administration has milked as if it had something to do with the improvement. Unfortunately, the Bush policies appear to have shown up in what the lung association found was a general stall towards progress in the past few years. Some of that stall, no doubt, has been the general failure of the Bush administration to enforce clean air requirements for electric power plants and to suggest – through various attempts to create new loopholes – that coal burning power producers could continue skirting the law.

Lesson number four: we need new legal cleanup protections. Ironically, one of the few Bush positive steps towards cleaner air – a rule EPA issued in 2005 designed to require further electric power cleanup http://www.epa.gov/cair/ -- appears to be in legal jeopardy.

Despite the relatively leisurely projected pace (in this case, industry had a full decade or more to comply), corporate miscreants led by coal-happy Duke Energy have sued and may win in court on a legal technicality. If that happens (we should know within the next three months) we may need Congress to step in and write these new cleanup requirements into law. Senator Tom Carper, D-DE, has drafted legislation that would do the trick.

At least one other new protection is crucial: accelerated cleanup of existing diesel engines which generally have been grandfathered from control requirements that apply to new engines. My friends at the Clean Air Task Force http://www.catf.us/projects/diesel/background.php
report that as many as 13 million of these engines are still in service, spewing soot that cause both lung cancer and global warming. As the Task Force notes, it’s entirely possible to clean up these engines today with modern technology.

Congress needs to appropriate more money to help clean up school buses and other diesel engines. And the EPA (probably after Bush leaves town) should consider requiring that all these engines clean up.

Turn out the lights!

Frank ODonnell — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 10:23:44 -0400

It didn’t make headlines here, but maybe it should have: last week France and the United Kingdom signed a joint declaration pledging cooperation in the fight against global warming.

Their legendary enmity – which sparked the 100 Years War, inspired one of Shakespeare’s greatest speeches http://shakespeare.mit.edu/henryv/henryv.3.1.html , and was re-opened somewhat by the Iraq war – was set aside as the two nations agreed to promote a low-carbon European economy and support cuts in global warming pollution across the European Union. http://www.number-10.gov.uk/files/pdf/UK-FR%20Communique%20270308.pdf.

By contrast, literally the same day (March 27), the Bush administration officially declared it planned to do nothing about global warming except to take comments on what it ought to do.

It is perhaps a sign of the times that the Bush declaration – coming only days before tomorrow’s anniversary of the Bush administration’s historic Supreme Court loss on global warming – didn’t even rate a mention in the news sections of the Washington Post or New York Times. (The Times’ eloquent editorial writer, Bob Semple, did produce another wonderful piece of prose, inveighing against Bush “Flimflam.” http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/29/opinion/29sat2.html?scp=13&sq=global+w... )

Under obvious orders from the White House, EPA chief “Spineless” Steve Johnson announced that the agency would issue an “Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking,” bureaucratic jargon that roughly translates into “lots of process – but no action anytime soon.”

How much delay? Consider that EPA issued a similar “advanced notice” in 2004 regarding the need to clean up high-polluting diesel train and ship engines. It took the agency nearly four years to come out with actual standards, which, by the way, were hailed by the very industries being regulated. That issue was far less complex and contentious than global warming.

The EPA declaration was badly timed: it came the same week as news of a huge fracture in an Antarctic ice shelf – more tangible evidence that global warming is a real and growing threat. But the Bush team has punted the issue to the next administration, leaving those who want action to issue subpoenas (Congressman Ed Markey’s Select Committee on Global Warming aims to do that this week to try to find out what the EPA was planning before the White House put down its big foot) and to return to court in some attempt to cudgel the Bush administration to take action. (Expect states and environmentalists to do this tomorrow.)

Meanwhile, on Capitol Hill, members are still celebrating the recent energy bill, despite new revelations that corn-based ethanol quietly received a huge exemption from global warming requirements. Time Magazine has reported that “biofuels aren't part of the solution at all [to global warming]. They're part of the problem.” http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1725975,00.html

If that weren’t bad enough, those seeking to move forward with the so-called Lieberman-Warner climate bill are reported to be trying to figure out just how many more special deals have to be cut to permit even debate on the legislation.

“This is absolutely headed for a disaster,” reports a friend of mine, who works for a prominent member of the so-called Green Group of major environmental organizations.

So while the French and British move forward, we seem to be spinning in circles, hoping that the “next administration” will set things right.

While awaiting that development, EPA’s Atlanta regional office decided to take matters into its own hands, turning out the lights for an hour as part of last Saturday’s “Earth Hour” demonstration of the need to do something about global warming. http://yosemite.epa.gov/opa/admpress.nsf/d0cf6618525a9efb85257359003fb69d/3cf9d9ffa029de288525741a00656ac8!OpenDocument

What we really need is for someone to turn out the lights on the Bush administration, and do it quickly.

March madness: How Bush and other bad guys juke the pollution stats

Frank ODonnell — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 14:40:59 -0400

Perhaps this is a good time to remind one and all of little-told stories that can have a big impact on the air we breathe -- and even see.

We offer three for your consideration – all of them involve what cops on HBO’s “The Wire” call “juking the stats” – that is, playing little accounting tricks to alter the outcome of various analysis. And all of them could lead to more pollution than if things were reckoned honestly.

Cost-benefit baloney: As I noted last week, EPA chief Stephen Johnson has renewed an often-repeated industry pitch to require that national clean air standards be based in part on an assessment of the projected costs and benefits. There are a lot of reasons why this is a pretty dumb idea, but let’s consider just one: that the bean counters at the White House Office of Management and Budget can juke the stats.

And, in fact, they’ve done exactly that. During the past several years behind the scenes they have ordered the EPA to radically revise – and lower – the projected benefits of cleaning up the air. Some of this stuff is really dense, but the bottom line is that OMB ordered EPA to change a whole series of assumptions used to calculate benefits, with the result that projected benefits are relatively much lower than they would have been under the method EPA used in prior years.

Want to see an example? Take the pollution standards for diesel trains and ships announced last week. Two years ago, our friends with the state and local clean-air regulators performed an analysis of the benefits that would be achieved by applying pollution standards comparable to that required for diesel trucks or off-road engines.

They used the exact same methodology that EPA had used in its 2004 off-road rule.
http://www.4cleanair.org/Loco-Marine/Loco-MarineAnalysis.pdf

And they found that setting tougher standards for trains and ships would prevent nearly 4,000 premature deaths a year by 2030.

But the official EPA cost-benefit analysis for this rule now projects that it would prevent only 1,400 premature deaths a year by 2030. Still attention-getting, but much lower benefits from cleanup.

http://yosemite.epa.gov/opa/admpress.nsf/7ebdf4d0b217978b852573590040443a/2f8d4b77c0bbad3f8525740c0057376e!OpenDocument

Where did all the other bodies go? I guess into the delete file of some OMB computer.

**
Polluted parks: Another story I haven’t seen enough of is the effort by the Bush administration to juke the stats to permit more air pollution in national parks.

Here’s the story in a nutshell: one of the key principles of the Clean Air Act is that relatively pristine areas – such as national parks and wilderness areas – should remain relatively unsullied by air pollution. To achieve this, big new potential sources of pollution (such as a coal-fired power plant) must project the impact of their emissions on any possibly affected national park or wilderness area, and make sure any impact is minimal.

To permit more coal plants to be built, the Bush EPA has proposed accounting changes that would permit more pollution in these pristine areas.

Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) has called EPA on this http://oversight.house.gov/story.asp?id=1731 , but I haven’t seen anywhere near the media coverage that this outrage deserves.

Malarkey made in the USA: Finally, let us consider the latest effort by the National Association of Manufacturers to scare policy makers in the name of protecting industry from cleaning up its emissions.

Partially thwarted in its effort to block any changes in EPA’s national smog standards, NAM has turned its attention to Congress – and global warming. Always ready to twist the truth, NAM is touting what it calls an “independent” study (that NAM partly paid for along with the American Council for Capital Formation, or ACCF) by the Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC). It should not come as a shock that this “analysis” predicts that global warming legislation would cost more than official government assessments predict.

Because NAM juked the stats.

Indeed, in a footnote to the report, the authors concede that

SAIC executed the NEMS model in this project using input assumptions provided by
ACCF and NAM. Analysis provided in this report is based on the output from the NEMS model as a result of the ACCF/NAM input assumptions. The input assumptions, opinions and recommendations in this report are those of ACCF and NAM, and do not necessarily represent the views of SAIC.

In other words, don’t blame us for this fiction. We just took the money and ran their bogus assumptions through our computers.

EPA chief floats radical plan to weaken Clean Air Act

Frank ODonnell — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 18:53:06 -0400

Well, it was bad enough that the Bush administration chose to disregard the advice of EPA's own independent science advisers in setting a weak new national health standard for ozone.

But Bush appointee Steve Johnson didn't stop with one favor to polluting industry: he announced March 12 that he was backing a long-sought polluter plan to weaken the Clean Air Act. Johnson said the Bush administration wants to change the law to permit costs to be considered when national clean air standards are set.

You may recall that the Supreme Court ruled against industry in 2001, and said costs could not be considered. That's because the national clean air standards are supposed to be based exclusively on science. They are supposed to let the public know, based on science alone, when the air is safe to breathe.

Adding cost considerations leaves the process open to manipulation. (Note, for example, that the Bush administration has significantly reduced the projected benefits of environmental standards simply by changing a few assumptions that go into the calculations.)

The smog decision went against the unanimous recommendation of EPA’s own independent science advisers, who said science demanded a tougher standard to protect kids with asthma and other vulnerable breathers. Two years ago, the Bush administration also rejected the advisers’ advice in 2006 regarding national standards for particle soot.

In both cases, real science was tainted by political science. The Bush administration decided to compromise public health to save industry money. Because of these decisions, more people will get sick, and more people will die. And now the Bush crowd wants to re-write the law to give industry even more leverage.

It's not the first time the head of EPA has floated such a notion; the last time it was Reagan EPA chief Anne Burford, before she left the agency amid scandals.

And the idea also was floated in the 90s by Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, who was dubbed "Smokey Joe Barton" by the Dallas Morning News.

Even the Newt Gingrich Congress thought that was a bad idea.

But as Congress starts getting serious about global warming, the Bush crowd appears to be floating an offer: give us this (a weaker Clean Air Act) and we might take that (limits on global warming pollutants).

Let's hope our law makers realize this should not be a tradeoff.

There will be blood – and global warming

Frank ODonnell — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 15:25:40 -0500

A year after Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth won an Oscar -- amid expectations that the champagne toasts and trendy carbon-neutral academy ceremony might shame our lawmakers to move quickly on global warming -- Congress still appears to be waiting for someone to yell “action!”

The most prominent Senate actor on this issue, Joe Lieberman, I-CT, teamed up with retiring Senator John Warner, R-VA, to push a bill through a Senate committee last December. But Lieberman appears to have become distracted by his campaigning for John McCain, R-AZ, (who doesn’t seem to understand that his own climate legislation would require mandatory limits on global warming emissions). http://www.commodityonline.com/news/topstory/newsdetails.php?id=5555

In the House of Representatives, Chairman John Dingell, D-MI, of the Energy and Commerce Committee continues at a stately pace to draft “white papers” on the subject. (First alert: one white paper will be aimed at trying to block California and other states from limiting global warming emissions from cars.)

One reason for the apparent congressional inertia may be fundamental disagreements among leaders of the biggest source of global warming pollution – the electric power industry. And those disagreements were on display last week as three top execs spoke to gilt-edged audiences.

In an address to an investor summit at the United Nations, Peter A. Darbee, Chairman, CEO and President of the California-based PG&E Corporation, called on the federal government to “set long-term national targets and timetables” for reducing greenhouse gases.

http://www.pgecorp.com/investors/pdfs/080214UNClimateRemarks.pdf

"In conversations with other business leaders, I've heard more times than I can count that it's impossible or impractical to make much headway on greenhouse gases until we have better technology," Darbee said. "That is not the case. It's a red herring. . . . The biggest obstacle right now is a lack of will - not invention."

PG&E is among the companies that have publicly backed the so-called Lieberman-Warner climate bill as a “solid starting point” for action in Congress, though I strongly suspect the company, which doesn’t use coal as a power source, would prefer a quicker phase out of the bill’s controversial coal subsidies. http://www.pge.com/includes/docs/pdfs/about/environment/pge/climate/comm...

The Senate legislation was praised in a different forum last week by another top power company executive, John Rowe, chairman of Chicago-based Exelon. In a speech to the Brookings Institution, Rowe declared “we need not – and should not – wait for a new President” to deal with the climate issue. (An interesting comment, since Exelon is one of the top campaign contributors to Barack Obama. http://www.opensecrets.org/pres08/contrib.asp?id=N00009638&cycle=2008 )

Rowe was adamant that free carbon pollution permits should not be given away to power companies based on the amount of pollution they produce, noting that this could create “economic windfalls” for some companies.

http://www.exeloncorp.com/NR/rdonlyres/C709E214-C22C-46E2-B92B-50BBBE507...

Interestingly, Friends of the Earth Action has launched a campaign against the Lieberman-Warner bill over this very issue. www.lieberman-warner.org In an attempted overture to coal-burning power companies, the bill would include an estimated trillion dollars in free emission permits to polluters, while gradually transitioning to a fairer system that would make polluters pay.

The apparent failure of that overture was on graphic display last week, as a third influential power executive, Jim Rogers, chairman of Duke Energy, slammed the Lieberman-Warner bill.

Sounding a bit like Shakespearean bad-boy Edmund from King Lear http://www.online-literature.com/shakespeare/kinglear/3/, Rogers charged that “What they have done is they have bastardized cap and trade" by attempting to transition to a polluter-pay approach, under which the federal government would auction carbon permits.

Rogers, who has promoted himself as a leader in the global warming battle, told a Cambridge Energy Research Associates conference in Houston that "an auction is nothing more than a tax" which he claimed would lead to steep price increases. His attack was more than a bit ironic since, not that long ago, North Carolina-based Duke was an outspoken proponent of exactly that – a tax on carbon emissions as a way to limit them. http://www.dukenews.duke.edu/2005/05/carbontax.html (Ironically, the Congressional Budget Office last week basically endorsed the original Duke view -- that a carbon tax would be the most efficient way of reducing carbon emissions.
http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/89xx/doc8934/02-12-Carbon.pdf )

Rogers, who said he hopes to influence the presidential candidates, basically was saying he’d try to kneecap legislation in Congress – unless his company gets an even bigger payoff than that contained in the Lieberman-Warner bill.

Thanks to influential double-talkers like Rogers, Al Gore may have time to do a sequel.

Environmental deja vu

Frank ODonnell — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 11:18:11 -0500

In 1983, then EPA Administrator Anne Burford was forced to resign after she was cited for contempt of Congress for refusing to turn over Superfund records, arguing that they were protected by executive privilege.

Twenty-five years later, Stephen Johnson, the worst EPA chief since the scandal-ridden Buford, may soon find himself in a similar bind for withholding information from Congress about the Bush administration’s decision to reject California’s attempt to enforce its greenhouse gas standards for motor vehicles.

It’s worth taking a moment to explore these two stonewalling EPA chiefs – to examine the similarities, but also to see how times have changed in the past quarter century.

Burford, known as Anne Gorsuch until her marriage to Robert Burford, an aide to Interior Secretary James Watt, took office in 1981, determined to carry out President Ronald Reagan’s desire to take what he viewed as out-of-control bureaucrats at the environmental agency. (Reagan was known for such comments as “trees cause more pollution than automobiles do,” and “if you’ve seen one redwood, you’ve seen them all.”)

Burford had been a state lawmaker in Colorado – part of a group of anti-big government zealots known as “crazies” – and came in to office with an agenda to purge competent EPA senior managers (the Heritage Foundation had compiled a hit list), cut the agency’s budget, and transfer as much authority as possible to state governments.

During her 22-month tenure at EPA, Burford was often pretty loose in her interpretation of her responsibilities. For instance, she once told a New Mexico-based refiner that it could, with impunity, ignore EPA restrictions on lead in gasoline. https://courses.washington.edu/uconj540/Readings/needleman_2000.pdf

She ultimately took the fall for Reagan, gearing up for re-election and eager to stem the tide of bad publicity for her executions of White House orders. (The administration eventually gave up its claim of executive privilege and handed over the contested documents.)

Current EPA chief Johnson faces an interesting parallel situation now that the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform has issued a subpoena for an uncensored copy of an internal EPA staff presentation about the California vehicle standards. http://oversight.house.gov/story.asp?ID=1735

You may recall that Johnson rejected the California request despite reports that EPA staffers had concluded not only that California had met appropriate legal tests, but that an EPA rejection would probably be ruled illegal by the courts. http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2008/01/03/epas_holy_roller.php

Of course, the Bush EPA is no stranger to making illegal decision that help polluting industries. Just last Friday, a federal appeals court ruled that Johnson had acted illegally in crafting industry-friendly mercury pollution requirements for coal-burning electric power companies. The same court earlier shot down an earlier attempt by the Bush EPA to create loopholes for coal-burning power companies. And, of course, the Supreme Court ruled – contrary to claims by the Bush administration – that the EPA does have authority under current law to limit global warming pollution.

Like Burford, Johnson has quietly acquiesced to EPA budget cuts and has presided over cutbacks in enforcement, particularly against the politically favored electric power industry. Johnson even has his own so-far quiet scandal involving lead pollution. (EPA’s science advisers are recommending that existing lead pollution standards should be made much tougher because lead can poison the brains of children even at the smallest levels of exposure. But EPA has floated the idea of keeping current standards unchanged – or even eliminating them altogether.)

There are, of course, striking differences between Burford, so cold in temperament that she was known as the “Ice Queen,” and the superficially affable Johnson.

Burford was an obvious political hack with no administrative experience or scientific background. Johnson is more a political hack in a scientist’s suit, having worked his way up the ranks of EPA’s notoriously industry-friendly pesticide division. http://www.epa.gov/administrator/biography.htm Like Burford, Johnson appears ready to cave in to White House pro-polluter demands at the drop of a hat, though he does pretend that he’s making the decisions. Buford thoroughly demoralized EPA staff through her draconian budget cuts. Johnson hasn’t plunged morale to the same depths, but his decision on California disgusted agency insiders who know the truth.

One stark difference is the shifting perception of state and federal governments and their attitudes towards environmental protection. While Burford sought to shift as much power as possible to state governments (thought then to be more industry friendly), Johnson has actually done the opposite: tried to block states such as California and the numerous other states that want to deal with global warming.

That’s probably a reflection on just how bad the Bush administration has been when it comes to environmental protection.