THE NO-ENERGY BILL

HomeStar, Natural Gas Survive in Trimmed Senate Energy Bill; With 60 votes needed, don’t expect a lot of action about carbon yet
Herman K. Trabish, July 22, 2010 (Greentech Media)

“In the world where we live,” President Obama’s press secretary Robert Gibbs told the White House reporters Thursday, “everything takes 60 votes.”

Gibbs was not finished with his press briefing when Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev) emerged from a high level caucus to announce the Senate will move forward with a starkly scaled-back energy bill that emphasizes natural gas, home efficiency retrofits and nothing for New Energy.

“Many of us want to do a thorough, comprehensive bill that creates jobs, breaks our addiction to foreign oil and curbs pollution,” Reid said, describing what is not going to happen. “We don’t have a single Republican to work with,” he said in announcing the legislation he believes he can get the 60 Senate votes necessary to beat a filibuster on.

The “spill bill” he will bring to the Senate floor next week will have four components: (1) Procedures “to hold BP accountable,” (2) support for the transforming of the U.S. heavy transport fleet to compressed natural gas (CNG), (3) funding of the HomeStar proposal to do energy efficiency retrofits for millions of U.S. homes and buildings, and (4) support of the land and water conservation fund.

It is what Senator John Kerry (D-Mass), who worked long and hard for a comprehsive bill that included a limited cap on greenhouse gas emissions (GhGs) and a Renewable Electricity Standard (RES) to buoy renewables over the long term, called “this admittedly narrow, limited bill.”

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“It is beyond comprehension,” Denise Bode, CEO of the American Wind Energy Assocition, said of the Reid legislation’s failure to include a national Renewable Electricity Standard (RES) requiring U.S. utilities to obtain a portion of their power from renewable sources. “A refusal to pass an RES is an attack on every American worker and consumer.”

Offering solace and a promise of comprehensive energy and climate legislation going forward, Kerry described watching the late Senator Ted Kennedy (D-Mass) work on health insurance reform for 40 years and said, “This is not going to take that long. This in not going to take close to that long.”

It was not great solace to environmentalists who have worked a long time for what did not come. “Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid today delivered very bad news to the American people,” wrote David Hawkins, Director of Climate Programs at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), shortly after the announcement.
“Continuing obstructionism by the Senate Republican leadership, joined by a handful of Democratic senators, is still blocking the way forward.”

Hawkins went on to call for action from voters. “It is time for all of us to make our voices heard. Over the recess we must deliver a message to senators: ‘Do your job! We face a triple threat of a stagnant economy, ballooning energy insecurity, and a climate that is coming apart. Don’t fail us. Don’t fail our children. Don’t come home again without having tackled these real and present dangers.’”

“There will be an extra hot place in the hell of global warming,” David Doniger, NRDC’s Climate Center Policy Director added, “for the people responsible for blocking sensible climate and energy legislation.”

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Anticipating criticism of the Obama administration for the failure to move more meaningful legislation, Carol Browner, the Director of the White House Office of Energy & Climate Change Policy, said the administration had already taken “unprecedented steps” to address New Energy and climate change through the Recovery Act’s provisions and through stronger vehicle emissions standards. “We will continue to use our existing tools to address these problems,” she added, a reminder and veiled threat to energy and climate legislation opponents that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) still has the legal authority to attack GhGs if Congress remains gridlocked.

Reid said he is committed to bringing the limited legislation, each provision of which he called “bipartisan” to the floor before the current session ends. “This is what we can do now.”

On the provision to support the shifting of the heavy transport fleet to CNG, he said “the one thing that Gore and Pickens agree is that we need a bridge to move to renewable energy. They agreed on batteries and natural gas.” He said the stimulus bill had provided for battery technology advancement.

“There are six million eighteen-wheelers driving around our country today,” Reid said. “This legislation allows the conversion of those trucks from diesel fuel to natural gas. This will lessen our dependence on foreign oil.”

Defending the home retrofit provision, Reid pointed out the HomeStar program would “increase employment in every state in the Union by a significant amount. With the money we have with HomeStar, we’re talking about as many as 350,000 or 400,000 jobs.”