Thursday, 02 Oct 2003

Lights Out

Bush Lets Successful Energy-Efficiency Program Lapse

A win-win U.S. government program that allows private companies to invest in energy-efficiency measures in federal buildings has come out a loser in political wrangling over a national energy bill. Just about everyone supports the highly successful Energy Savings Performance Contracting program, which is cutting federal energy bills by about $300 million a year, but the Bush administration didn't push to renew the program before it expired yesterday. Meanwhile, the Bushies are aggressively forging ahead with another energy measure of the sort they love -- opening up vast tracts of Alaska's Beaufort Sea to oil and gas drilling at bargain-basement royalty rates. Get the inside scoop on all this and more -- only in the Muckraker column on the Grist Magazine website.

Soft Sell

McCain and Lieberman Soften Climate-Change Legislation

The sponsors of a groundbreaking climate-change bill in the Senate are softening their legislation in an attempt to attract more support. Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.) announced yesterday that a revised version of their Climate Stewardship Act would not contain a requirement that carbon dioxide emissions in the U.S. be brought down to 1990 levels by 2016, though it would still call for CO2 emissions to decline to 2000 levels by 2010. The cornerstone of the bill is a system that would allow companies to buy and sell rights to emit CO2, similar to a highly successful trading program launched in 1990 to tackle the problem of acid rain. Both the original bill and the new version are much less stringent than the Kyoto Protocol on climate change that President Bush rejected last year, but the U.S. environmental community is still largely united in favor of the legislation.

Wolf at the Door

Enviros Sue Feds for Loosening Wolf Protections

In an effort to make the western U.S. safe for gray wolves, 17 conservation groups teamed up yesterday to sue the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for downgrading the species' status from endangered to threatened in April. The coalition argued that the Bush administration was wrong to remove federal protections from the wolves because the animals still have not returned to much of their historic range and their populations remain small and isolated. The down-listing would give states more say in how wolf populations are managed; a number of states have plans to allow sport hunting, trapping, and other lethal control measures. The conservationists chose to file their suit in a federal court in Oregon because wolves are believed to be migrating to that state from Idaho, which could make Oregon a new battleground in the fight over wolf protections.

Oil Be Seeing You

Oil and Gas Supplies Will Peak in a Decade, Swedish Scientists Assert

World oil and gas supplies will peak soon after 2010 and be in short supply thereafter, causing worldwide economic havoc unless societies have adopted alternatives to fossil fuels, Swedish scientists predict in a controversial article published today in New Scientist magazine. Other scientists have estimated that supplies might top out in 2050, but geologists at the University of Uppsala in Sweden say that forecast is off base because oil and gas supplies are 80 percent smaller than widely believed. If the Swedes are correct, one possible side effect would be a forestalling of dire climate change predictions, because with less fuel to burn there would be lower emissions of carbon dioxide. But environmentalists might want to be wary of buying into predictions of oil and gas shortages -- they've gotten burned before by asserting that supplies were running low.

New Kid on the Block

Democrats Block Vote on Leavitt's Nomination to EPA

As expected, Senate Democrats blocked a committee vote yesterday on President Bush's nominee to head the U.S. EPA, Utah Gov. Mike Leavitt (R). Though they insisted it was "nothing personal" against Leavitt, Democrats on the Senate Environment Committee, joined by independent Sen. James Jeffords (Vt.), boycotted a committee meeting and thereby denied the quorum needed for a vote to send Leavitt's nomination to the Senate floor. Jeffords said he and his Democratic cohorts want responses from Leavitt and the Bush team to numerous questions about the administration's environmental policies. "The American public needs answers," Jeffords said. "The Bush administration is weakening the Clean Air Act, it is weakening the Clean Water Act, and it is not cleaning up Superfund sites. We have a right to know why. These are life-and-death issues." The committee vote has been rescheduled for Oct. 15.