With all eco-eyes focused on the action (or, more properly, inaction) on a climate bill, other critical components of a clean energy economy can be overlooked. That was the case on Monday as the dominant news story concerned speculation about whether Republican members of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works would show up for Tuesday's climate bill markup session (they didn't).

While that tragicomedy played out, a forum at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building adjacent to the White House went largely unnoticed. The "Clean Energy Economy Forum" was hosted by the Department of the Interior, which manages one-fifth of all land in the nation (and 1.7 billion acres on the outer continental shelf). Given the sheer immensity of these lands, DOI policies play an enormous role in greenhouse-gas emissions and in shaping what our nation's energy future will look like. The forum was only the latest of Interior Secretary Ken Salazar's efforts to make DOI policies conform to the realities of climate change and the parallel need to develop renewable sources of energy.

In his second month in office (March), Salazar issued an order making renewable energy development a top DOI priority.

More recently, in mid-September, Salazar signed a secretarial order establishing a framework to coordinate climate change efforts throughout the vast DOI bureaucracy. Policy, data gathering, and public education will all be coordinated by the newly formed Climate Change Response Council.

Moral of the Story

Not to put too fine a point on it, but ... the DOI’s actions are a reminder that the legislative branch is only one of three on our governmental tree. The executive can flex its muscles in other ways if Congress isn’t up to the task. The EPA—another part of the executive branch—has already signaled its willingness to regulate CO2 under provisions of the Clean Air Act. Perhaps EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson will step up to the plate with a regulatory solution to climate change if a legislative one fails.

In the end, we do need a comprehensive climate change bill from Congress. But Republican obstructionism, combined with the Democratic failure to govern as a majority party on the most important issue of the day, may force President Obama to bravely go where no Congress has gone before—or appears to be going anytime soon, for that matter.

That would require bold action, measures carrying significant political risks. But isn’t that the platform on which Obama was elected in the first place?

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With so many qualified candidates for the directorship of the important Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement, why is the Obama administration nominating a controversial advocate for coal ash dumping, who also admits he still needs to learn more about the even more controversial and huge issue of mountaintop removal?

After eight years of rogue mining operators and Bush-era administrators, and reckless mining regulatory oversights, and with the shipwrecked OSM agency in desperate need of a makeover, the OSM nomination of Joseph G. Pizarchik, the seemingly good-natured and well-meaning Pennsylvania Director of the Bureau of Mining and Reclamation, is a colossal error.

While invoking his hardworking southwestern PA family farm credentials in a touching manner at the US Senate nomination hearing today, Pizarchik made two extraordinary admissions:

As one fellow southwestern PA coal miner's granddaughter wrote to the local Washington, PA newspaper recently: "Citizens in the coalfields need to be heard regarding his qualifications. If Pizarchik leads the OSM, it will be a continuation of "the fox watching the hen house," where money rules and health in not an issue." You can watch Pizarchik's hearing here.

As always, Charleston Gazette coalfield journalist Ken Ward has filed several in-depth stories on his Coal Tattoo blog. On the issue of coal ash dumping, Pizarchik has been in the forefront of coal ash pollution deniers, even after a 2007 study released by Clean Air Task Force (CATF) and Earthjustice found that "Disposing of coal ash in mines is contaminating water supplies throughout Pennsylvania...In 10 of 15 mines examined across the state, groundwater and streams near areas where coal ash, or coal combustion waste, was placed had levels of arsenic, lead, cadmium and selenium and other pollutants above safe standards."

An analysis of the report concluded:

"Disposing of coal combustion waste in these mines is threatening water supplies all over the state," said Jeff Stant, director of the Pennsylvania Minefill Research Project at the Clean Air Task Force. "If the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection won't act now to stop these dangers, the US EPA should step in to protect the residents of Pennsylvania who live near coal ash mine fills."

And now the head of this PA disaster will be in charge of monitoring strip mining operations?

In a disturbing letter to the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, which is overseeing the nomination of Pizarchik, Pennsylvania coalfield residents excoriated the nominee for his past work in the PA mining agency. They found:

On the coalfield residents' final point, given the importance Pizarchik gave to his farm family past, it is a shame that he has been criticized for his disregard of the impact of longwall mining on his fellow southwestern PA farmers, many of whom have seen their fields and wells and farms destroyed by this destructive mining practice:

Bottom line: Pizarchik's nomination for the directorship of OSMRE should be withdrawn immediately.

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Copenhagen, U.S.A. December 7

Toward a medically defensible energy policy

Prepared remarks submitted in advance to the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works

Statement of Steven Chu, Secretary of Energy, July 7, 2009

Chairman Boxer, Ranking Member Inhofe, and Members of the Committee, thank you for the opportunity to testify on moving America toward a clean energy economy.

We face many serious and immediate challenges. American families and businesses are struggling in a recession and an increasingly competitive global economy. We have become deeply dependent on a single energy source to power our cars, trucks and airplanes, and spend hundreds of billions of dollars a year to import nearly 60 percent of the oil we use.

We face an unprecedented threat to our very way of life from climate change.

To solve these challenges, the Administration and Congress need to work together to spur a revolution in clean energy technologies. The President and I applauded the historic action by the House to pass a clean energy bill, and we look forward to working with the Senate to pass comprehensive energy legislation.

I want to focus today on the threat of climate change. Overwhelming scientific evidence shows that carbon dioxide from human activity has increased the atmospheric level of CO2 by roughly 40 percent, a level one- third higher than any time in the last 800,000 years. There is also a consensus that CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions have caused our planet to change. Already, we have seen the loss of about half of the summer arctic polar ice cap since the 1950s, a dramatically accelerating rise in sea level, and the loss of over two thousand cubic miles of glacial ice, not on geological time scales but over a mere hundred years.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) projected in 2007 that, if we continued on this course, there was a 50 percent chance of global average air temperature increasing by more than 7 degrees Fahrenheit in this century. A 2009 MIT study found a fifty percent chance of a 9 degree rise in this century and a 17 percent chance of a nearly 11 degree increase. 11 degrees may not sound like much, but, during the last ice age, when Canada and much of the United States were covered all year in a glacier, the world was only about 11 degrees colder. A world 11 degrees warmer will be very different as well. Is this the legacy we want to leave our children and grandchildren?

Denial of the climate change problem will not change our destiny; a comprehensive energy and climate bill that caps and then reduces carbon emissions will.

America has the opportunity to lead a new industrial revolution of creating sustainable, clean energy. We can sit on the sidelines and deny the scientific facts, or we can get in the game and play to win.

Statement of Lisa P. Jackson, Administrator, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Hearing on Energy and Climate Legislation, Committee on Environment and Public Works, U.S. Senate, July 7, 2009

Chairman Boxer, Ranking Minority Member Inhofe, and members of the Committee, thank you for inviting me to testify about new legislation to get America running on clean energy. Let me begin by commending you for starting Senate hearings on this, the second legislative day after the House of Representatives passed the American Clean Energy and Security Act. Immediately after that historic vote on June 26, President Obama called upon the Senate to demonstrate the same commitment we saw in the House to building a clean-energy foundation for a strong American economy. I am grateful that this Committee has wasted no time in answering that call.

The House bill reflects the principles the President believes are essential for our nation’s energy future: decreasing our dependency on foreign oil, creating millions of new jobs in emerging clean-energy technologies, and reducing the pollution that is a danger to our children. I know there are a variety of proposals pending in the Senate that have the same goals, and I am looking forward to working with all the Committee members as you move forward on this effort.

Clean energy is to this decade and the next what the Space Race was to the 1950s and ‘60s, and America is behind. Governments in Asia and Europe are ahead of the United States in making aggressive investments in clean-energy technology. American businesses need strong incentives and investments now in order for this nation to lead the 21st Century global economy. We are also coming late to the task of leading the world’s major greenhouse-gas emitters to reverse our collective emissions’ growth in time to avert catastrophic climactic changes that would severely harm America’s economy and national security within our children’s lifetimes. The necessary shared effort will not begin in earnest unless and until the United States leads the charge.

The advantage of the kind of legislation the President has called for is that it ramps up investment in developing new clean-energy technologies while giving companies an effective incentive to use those technologies to reduce greenhouse-gas pollution. It does so without raising taxes or increasing the deficit.

I do not mean to say that we can get something for nothing. But according to the Congressional Budget Office’s analysis of the American Clean Energy and Security Act, the net cost to the average American household in 2020 would be less than 50 cents a day. For the wealthiest fifth of American households, the net cost would be less than 70 cents a day. The poorest fifth would actually see a net gain of more than ten cents a day. That is what your economists have reported to you.

People have pointed out that the per-household impact would not be uniform across the country – that the costs would be higher in a few states where people drive very long distances and rely almost exclusively on coal for electricity. Yet even if the cost borne by the average family in such a state were double the national average, it still would be just a dollar a day.

That figure does not account for the economic benefits of saving our children from living with increased drought, fire, pests, flooding, and disease. It does not account for the benefit of decreasing our dependency on foreign oil. Can anyone honestly say that the head of an American household would not spend a dollar a day to safeguard the wellbeing of his or her children, to reduce the amount of money that we send overseas for oil, to place American entrepreneurs back in the lead of the global marketplace, and to create new American jobs that pay well and cannot be outsourced?

Labor unions support this kind of legislation because they know it will indeed create millions of high-paying American jobs that cannot be exported. Manufacturing companies support it because they know it will provide needed investment in research and development while creating markets for the American clean-energy technologies born from that investment.

Electric utilities support it because they know it will expand our use of reliable, domestic sources of energy like wind, solar, geothermal – and, yes, safer nuclear power – and, yes, cleaner coal.

Consumer advocates support it because they know it will strengthen the long-term economic foundation for all Americans without imposing short-term economic hardship on any Americans.

And environmental groups support it because they know it is our best chance of preventing catastrophic harm to public health and our natural environment.

Of course, there are still interest groups out there opposing this effort. But I think the tide is turning against the defenders of the status quo, who want more of the same policies that made us dependent on foreign oil and that caused America to forfeit the lead in the burgeoning global competition to sell clean-energy technology. I think Americans want reform that harnesses the country’s can-do spirit. I think they want to fuel long-term economic recovery with a wise investment that sparks a clean-energy transformation in our economy and that protects our children and grandchildren.

That is what the President wants. That is what I want. I believe many Senators want the same thing. Please consider the Environmental Protection Agency a partner in this effort to get America running on clean energy. And, please, keep up the momentum.

Thank you. I look forward to answering your questions.

STATEMENT OF THOMAS VILSACK, SECRETARY OF AGRICULTURE, BEFORE THE SENATE ENVIORNMENT AND PUBLIC WORKS COMMITTEE, JULY 7, 2009

Madam Chairman and members of the Committee thank you for the opportunity to discuss the role of agriculture and forestry in addressing climate change and in building our Nation’s renewable energy capabilities. I am pleased to be joined today by Secretaries Chu and Salazar and Administrator Jackson. USDA, the Department of Energy, and the Environmental Protection Agency maintain a close partnership in our work on climate change and renewable energy.

Climate change is one of the great challenges facing the United States and the world. The science is clear that the planet is already warming. While climate change will affect us all, there are particular vulnerabilities and challenges for farmers, ranchers, and those who make a living off the land. I would like to commend the House for its extraordinary efforts in developing historic, comprehensive energy and climate legislation that creates the framework for U.S. leadership on climate change.

I, along with Secretary Chu, Administrator Jackson, and the Administration look forward to working with the Senate as you begin your deliberations. Our hope is that Congress enacts a bill that meets the President’s objectives of creating an efficient, cost-effective, and comprehensive approach that leverages the Nation’s capacity for innovation, creates jobs, reduces dependence on foreign oil, and protects our children from ills associated with pollution.

I believe it is crucial that we engage the participation of farmers, ranchers, and forest landowners. This issue is too important for agriculture and forestry to sit on the sidelines. A viable carbon offsets market – one that rewards farmers, ranchers, and forest landowners for stewardship activities – has the potential to play a very important role in helping America wean itself from foreign oil. It also represents a significant building block to revitalizing rural America. Landowners can also play an important role in providing low-carbon renewable energy.

The potential of our working lands to generate greenhouse gas reductions is significant. In fact today, our lands are a net sink of greenhouse gases. Based on the latest statistics from EPA’s Inventory of U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Sinks, forest and agricultural lands in the U.S. take up more greenhouse gases in the form of carbon dioxide than is released from all of our agricultural operations1. The situation is different in developing countries, where agriculture and deforestation play a much greaterole in emissions. In aggregate, land uses are responsible for over one-third of ggreenhouse gas emissions. It is difficult to see how greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere can be stabilized without policies that target emissions and carbon sequestration on agricultural and forestlands. As a result, it is vital that America demonstrate how the inclusion of agriculture and forests in our domestic approach to climate change can produce real and lasting benefits to both landowners and the climate.

Under climate change legislation the farm sector will experience both costs and benefits. Energy price increases can impact row crop production and other agricultural activities. For example, fertilizer and fuel costs account for 50 to 60 percent of variable costs of production for corn. Because of higher personal transportation expenditures, rural households are more likely than urban households to feel the pinch of increased gas prices.

But, I believe that there are significant opportunities for rural landowners in a cap and trade program that recognizes the contribution that farms, ranches, and forests can make in addressing climate change. Rural landowners can benefit from incentives in climate and energy legislation that reward production of renewable energy such as wind and bioenergy. A number of renewable energy technologies such as anaerobic digesters, geothermal, and wind power can reduce farmers’ reliance on fossil fuels. In cooperation with the Department of Energy, USDA will contribute to promoting these technologies and our outreach and extension networks will need to help make them available to farmers, ranchers, and land managers.

These technologies and promotion of a clean energy economy will also stimulate the creation of new jobs. As farmers, ranchers, and land managers look to install an anaerobic digester or build a wind farm – people will be needed to build the machines and install the systems. And, because many of these technologies will be utilized in rural areas – many of these jobs could be created in rural America. These farmers, ranchers, and forest owners can also benefit from legislation that creates markets for greenhouse gas offset credits.

To be effective in addressing climate change, the offsets market will need to accomplish two goals. First, the market will need to recognize the scale of the changes needed and the infrastructure that will be required to deliver information, manage data and resources, and maintain records and registries. Second, ensuring the environmental integrity of agricultural and forest offsets is critical to addressing climate change and maintaining public confidence in the carbon offset program.

To produce meaningful emissions reductions, an offsets program will likely require the participation of thousands of landowners. I believe USDA, working with EPA, the Department of Energy, the Department of Interior, and other relevant agencies can play a very important role in getting offsets to scale while ensuring the integrity of the offsets program. We look forward to partnering with our fellow agencies to work with the Senate in designing a credible offsets program.

Let me give you a few examples of the scale of activities that USDA provides nation-wide. Under the Conservation Reserve Program, USDA manages over 750,000 contracts with landowners who have taken environmentally sensitive land out of production for at least 10 years. USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) manages a network of over 1,300 registered technical service providers nationwide.

It is important that agriculture and forestry offsets have high standards of environmental integrity. Quantification and reporting systems need to be rigorous, verifiable, and transparent – and review and auditing systems will need to be in place. Uncertainties must be accounted for and reduced. Greenhouse gas benefits accrued through carbon sequestration will need to be monitored over time to ensure that the benefits are maintained and that reversals are accounted for if they occur. If these principles are followed, the resulting offsets should be real, additional, verifiable, and lasting.

USDA can support this effort through its scientific expertise, and technical capabilities, specific to greenhouse gases, carbon sequestration, and offsets. For example, in 2006, USDA released guidance to farm and forest landowners to allow them to estimate their greenhouse gas footprints. We are developing user-friendly tools that can help farmers and landowners make these calculations.

I would like to close by again thanking the Committee for taking up this important issue for agriculture, rural lands, and the environment. I believe that agriculture and forestry can play a vital role in addressing climate change and that, if done properly, there are significant opportunities for landowners to profit from doing right by the environment. USDA is ready to help make this happen.

Statement of Kenneth L. Salazar, Secretary, Department of the Interior, Hearing on Energy and Climate Legislation, Committee on Environment and Public Works, U.S. Senate, July 7, 2009

Chairman Boxer, Ranking Senator Inhofe and members of the Committee, thank you for your work on this important challenge facing our Nation.

I am here today to urge this committee to join with the Administration in seeking strong and effective legislation that will steer our nation toward a new energy economy that brings new jobs to our nation and improves our energy security . As the President has said, there is a choice before us: we can remain the world’s leading importer of oil, or we can become the world’s leading exporter of clean energy.

Interior is our nation’s largest landowner with jurisdiction over 20% of the land mass of the United States and 1.75 billion acres of the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS). As America’s largest water provider and land and wildlife manager, Interior is already faced with the impacts of climate change on land, water and wildlife. Interior will thus play a key role in how the U.S. Government addresses and adapt to these climate change issues. Interior’s 6,000 scientists and 14,000 land managers are already documenting these impacts and developing systems to respond to them on and across public lands.

Interior’s land base includes some of the most productive renewable energy resources: solar in the Southwest; wind in the Atlantic, on the Great Plains and in the West; and geothermal in the West. We are working to develop these assets to help power President Obama’s vision for a new energy economy. Interior’s vast land ownership also gives it an important role in siting the new transmission lines needed to bring stranded renewable energy assets to load centers.

As the Secretary of the Interior, I can see the economic opportunity presented by the new energy economy. Since coming into office, we have prioritized the development of renewable energy on our public lands and our offshore waters. American business is responding. Companies are investing in wind farms off the Atlantic seacoast, solar facilities in the Southwest, and geothermal energy projects throughout the west. These new energy sources produce no greenhouse gases and, once installed, they harness abundant, renewable energy that nature itself provides.

The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee recently reported out legislation that will help to promote the development of this renewable energy opportunity. But we will not fully unleash the potential of the clean energy economy unless this committee, and the Senate, put an upper limit on the emissions of heat-trapping gases that are damaging our environment. Doing so will level the playing field and demonstrate that our nation is serious about building a new, clean energy economy. It will trigger even more massive investment in new clean energy projects throughout our nation.

In addition to seeing the potential economic opportunity presented by addressing climate change, the Interior Department is in a unique position to see the negative impacts that climate change is having on our land, water and wildlife resources. Our land managers are confronting longer and hotter fire seasons, new incursions of invasive species, and the early impacts of sea rise; our wildlife managers are dealing with climate change-induced impacts on wildlife mating and migration habits and species interactions; and our water managers are factoring new precipitation patterns into their planning decisions, as snow packs diminish and more extreme wet and dry periods challenge long-standing water management practices.

The Interior Department is participating actively in the interagency process on adaptation policy being led by the White House, and I look forward to working with your committee as well as you consider adaptation strategies that address the impact that climate change is having on our resources. We have been developing a unified approach to adaptation challenges through the Department of the Interior, and we look forward to providing the committee with the benefit of the expertise that our land, wildlife and water managers can provide on this subject. Our Department’s developing experience with adaptive management strategies for resource management can provide a template for future efforts. For example, snowpack declines in the Northwest and Mountain-West have been accompanied by earlier annual peaks in river run-off as documented in stream gage monitoring and analyses across the lower 48 States and throughout Alaska. Land managers facing this reality are analyzing potentially substantial changes in management requirements for fish and wildlife and water resources. Interior managers are also learning to be strategic in rebuilding facilities that are lost to such natural disasters as Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. The Fish and Wildlife Service has repaired or replaced dozens of facilities at refuges along the coast damaged by these storms. In the process of rebuilding facilities for people across the region to enjoy, the Service decided not to replace some facilities judged to be too vulnerable and has relocated others to more secure locations.

In all of these activities, the Department of the Interior is putting a premium on integrating our dual science and land management roles. Scientists in our United States Geological Survey (USGS), the Fish and Wildlife Service, and the National Park Service, for example, are working hand-in-glove with our land, wildlife and water managers who are responsible for the more than 500 million acres of public lands that we oversee. We are focused on ensuring that our USGS and other agency scientists are collecting and analyzing data that are providing relevant scientific information about natural resource conditions, issues, and problems to decision-makers in the Department, at all levels of government, and the general public. This is, and needs to be, an interactive process, as our land, wildlife and water managers work with our scientists and help focus the nature of their research and analysis on the reality of on-the-ground changes. This information – baseline scientific information, trends detection, modeling and forecasting, together with the effective dissemination of information and decision support tools – is key to understanding and addressing climate change and its effects.

Finally, I look forward to working with the committee as you address the opportunities for carbon reduction provided by the “biological sequestration” of carbon in our Federal lands. As you know, pursuant to section 712 of the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 (P.L. 110-140), the USGS has the responsibility, in consultation with the Secretary of Energy and others, to conduct national assessments of biologic carbon sequestration, ecosystem greenhouse gas fluxes, and potential effects of management practices and policies on ecosystem carbon sequestration and greenhouse gas emissions. The USGS is well underway with this work. Combined with the work of other agencies, it will help to enhance the scientific underpinning needed for a domestic offsets program that focuses on carbon reductions from land use practices.

I also would like to point out that the Interior Department has been engaged in a variety of projects that will teach us a great deal about biological sequestration, ranging from wetlands restoration projects in the mid-Atlantic and southeast, to afforestation projects in the lower Mississippi Valley, and habitat restoration projects in the west. The methodologies that USGS is developing at the direction of Congress, and the experience of our land managers in pursuing these projects as part of our broader ecosystem responsibilities, should be useful to the committee as you develop an offsets program that credits verifiable carbon reductions that are associated additional and with environmentally sound land management practices.

Madame Chairman, a problem as complex as climate change takes the coordinated efforts between all the branches of the government and all the governments of the world. The Department of the Interior stands ready with our shoulder to the wheel to contribute to this effort.

Thank you. I look forward to answering your questions.

Opponents of this effort claim the nation cannot afford to act at this time. I disagree, and so do the Environmental Protection Agency and the Congressional Budget Office. These organizations estimate that meeting the greenhouse gas targets in the House bill can be achieved at an annual cost between 22 to 48 cents per day per household in 2020. That’s about the price of a postage stamp per day.

History suggests that the actual costs could be even lower. The costs to save our ozone layer, to reduce smog with catalytic converters, and to scrub the sulfur dioxide from power plants were all far less than estimated. For example, according to the EPA, the SO2 reductions will be achieved for one-quarter of the estimated cost. The right clean energy incentives will start the great American research and innovation machine, and I am confident that American ingenuity will lead to better and cheaper climate solutions.

We can make significant near-term carbon reductions through energy efficiency. We use 40 percent of our energy in buildings. I firmly believe that, with today’s technologies, we can build new homes and buildings that use 40 percent less energy than today’s new buildings and therefore save money on energy bills. By developing a system integration approach, I believe we could eventually build buildings that use 80 percent less energy with investments that pay for themselves in less than 15 years through reduced energy bills. Similarly, we could retrofit existing buildings to achieve 50 percent energy savings with investments that will pay for themselves.

A comprehensive energy and climate bill will drive American innovation in fuel efficient automobiles and the development of advanced batteries for electric vehicles. It will offer incentives to re-start our nuclear power industry and encourage utilities to invest in carbon capture and sequestration. It will drive investments in wind and solar power and next generation biofuels from grasses and agricultural waste.

In addition to deploying the technologies we have today and can see on the horizon, we must pursue truly transformative solutions. Climate experts, such as the IPCC, tell us we must reduce our carbon emissions by 80 percent by mid-century to stabilize atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations at a level that may avoid the worst consequences of climate change. To achieve our long-term goals in a more cost-effective way, we will need a sustained commitment to research and development. Only R&D can deliver a new generation of clean technologies.

Let me close with a quote from Dr. Martin Luther King. His words seem so fitting for today’s climate crisis: “We are now faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there is such a thing as being too late.”

Now is the time to take comprehensive and sustained action. With the leadership of the President, the actions of this Congress, and the support and participation of the American people, I am confident that we will succeed.

Thank you. I would be glad to answer your questions at this time.

Statement of Governor Haley Barbour, State of Mississippi, Before the Committee on Environment and Public Works, United States Senate, July 7, 2009

Madam Chairman, Senator Inhofe and committee members: Thank you for inviting me to testify before you on the critical issues of energy policy and America’s future.

America’s future is so tied to out energy policy that this hearing could be held before the Senate Armed Services, Foreign Relations, Finance, Energy or Budget Committee and be equally important and relevant to their work.

Energy policy significantly impacts every aspect of American foreign and domestic policy. Energy is the lifeblood of our economy; our national security depends on it. When we consider energy policy, it must be in the broadest context.

As we all know, our country is in the worst economic crisis in decades. It is being felt at the kitchen table of every family, as unemployment is at the highest rate since 1983. Our government is vastly increasing our national debt to get our economy “back on track.” Even though everyone knows the national debt is increasing at an unsustainable rate, we are taking the risk because robust economic growth is the only way to solve our economic problems.

Yet, as we strive to get our economy back growing and more Americans back on the job, our government is considering an energy policy, as set up in the Waxman-Markey bill and the President’s budget, that would make it much harder for the economy to grow; a policy that is, in fact, anti-growth because it will necessarily and purposefully raise the costs of energy for families and businesses, especially manufacturing…for our economy as a whole.

The cap and trade tax, the $81 billion of tax increases on the oil and gas industry contained in the President’s budget and the Waxman-Markey renewable energy standard would all drive up costs and drive down economic growth. Don’t take my word for it. President Obama, then a candidate, said to the San Francisco Chronicle in January 2008, “Under my cap and trade plan, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.”

And before becoming Energy Secretary, Steven Chu told the Wall Street Journal in September 2008, “Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.”

President Obama’s OMB Director, Peter Orszag, in April 2008 said, “Under a cap-and-trade program, firms would not ultimately bear most of the costs of the allowances but instead would pass them along to their customers in the form of higher prices. Such price increases would stem from the restriction on emissions and would occur regardless of whether the government sold emission allowances or gave them away. Indeed, the price increases would be essential to the success of a cap-and-trade program because they would be the most important mechanism through which businesses and households would be encouraged to make investment and behavioral changes that reduced CO2 emissions.”

Just last month in an interview with Forbes magazine, the CEO of American Electric Power (AEP), Mike Morris, said the cap and trade tax would cause his electricity rates to go up 30% to 50%.

The gigantic effect of energy policy on American life means Congress should work particularly hard to ensure Americans know the facts about the policies Congress is considering: To the contrary, the House of Representatives added more than 300 pages of its 1200 page energy bill just a few hours before it was brought to the floor and passed. This is just the opposite of what is needed.

Last month the Southern Growth Policies Board, a forty-year old regional economic development group for thirteen states, held its annual conference. The more than four hundred attendees were most concerned about the costs associated with the cap and trade tax, the renewable energy mandate and the $81 billion in tax increases on the oil and gas industry. They were concerned about the costs to families as well as the costs to the economy.

At this conference there was a great deal of support for conservation and energy efficiency-both indispensable measures in our energy future-and a lot of hope and confidence was expressed for renewables like wind, biofuels, solar and even some more exotic sources in the future.

Nevertheless, it was agreed that for a long time there will be a need for traditional fuels like oil, gas, coal and nuclear, which generates no greenhouse gas emissions. Clean coal technologies and projects were presented and praised. But the biggest and most discussed issue at this conference was the cost of energy policy proposals like the cap and trade tax, the renewable electricity standard and the tax increases proposed for the oil and gas industry.

There was no question about who would bear these costs: the consumer. The one who turns on the light switch, starts the washing machine, fuels up the car with gas or drives the truck delivering goods across town for across the country; that is who will pay.

Moreover, these increased energy costs will hit small businesses hard and will particularly hurt energy-intensive industries like manufacturing or computer processing. Some manufacturers even predicted these energy policies would cause electricity rate increases that would make their U.S. manufacturing facilities uncompetitive compared to facilities in China, India, Brazil or Russia.

Dan DiMicco, the CEO of Nucor Steel, America’s largest steel manufacturer, said the cap and trade tax would mean his company would close U.S. plants, shifting production to China. Making a ton of steel in China results in five-times grater emissions of greenhouse gases than to produce that same ton of steel in the U.S.

It is hard to believe that at a time when growing our economy is our number one priority, Congress is considering a bill that would reduce economic growth. When families are suffering because of a serious recession, Congress is considering a bill to drive up the cost of electricity that cools those families’ homes and the gasoline that runs their cars. As U.S. manufacturing faces stiff foreign competition, Congress is considering a bill that would make our manufacturers less competitive.

The concerns I’ve cited are serious, even if the cap and trade tax works as planned. But many Americans worry it will be an Enron-style financial scheme where Wall Street manipulators make giant profits while ratepayers, motorists and Main Street businesses pay greatly increased costs.

Environmentalists rightly worry about the assumed large scale use of international offsets, saying they are not verifiable. Others say the foreign offsets are claimed by CBO to reduce the price of allowances by 70%, but that’s highly questionable.

A particularly scary feature of the cap and trade tax regime is that anyone can purchase emissions permits. There is nothing to stop a large government like China from investing heavily in CO2 emission permits instead of U.S. Treasuries. The effect, of course, would be that U.S.-located industries could not buy those permits or that they would have to pay much higher prices for the permits, thereby making our businesses even more uncompetitive with foreign (read: Chinese) manufacturers. Market manipulation by speculators is bad enough; driving up demand and prices by foreign competitors is anathema.

The right energy policy for our country is more American energy, using all sources of American energy…all of the above. We have abundant, affordable, reliable American energy. Let’s use it rather than having a policy that makes energy more expensive.

I’d be glad to discuss more American energy during questions or to try to answer any other questions.

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UPDATED: 16 Sep 2009

President Barack Obama's key advisers on energy and climate issues include a former top aide to Al Gore, a Nobel Prize winner, a governor, and a gaggle of former members of Congress. Here's a rundown:

Carol Browner
Assistant to the President for Energy and Climate Change

Browner serves as a special adviser to the White House on climate and energy, a new role Obama created to work on an issue he has defined as one of his top concerns. Browner has been keeping a low profile in Washington, offering very few on-the-record interviews and not receiving as much of the limelight as other administration players, though it's clear her role in coordinating policy within the administration is major. She's at the table during economic discussions, and was the key negotiator hashing out a new deal on automobile emissions.

Browner served as Florida's secretary of the environment from 1991 to 1993, and was a top aide to Al Gore when he was in the Senate. She served as EPA administrator during the entire Clinton administration, and later served as a principal in The Albright Group LLC, a global strategy firm lead by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, as well as Albright Capital Management.

Photo: epa.govLisa Jackson
Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency | epa.gov

During her first months on the job, Lisa Jackson has made significant headway on several climate issues that the Bush administration EPA refused to take up. Within days of taking office, Jackson announced that the agency was beginning the process of reevaluating whether California and other states should be able to set their own higher standards for automobile emissions; the administration has now adopted those standards nationwide. She also moved the agency forward on regulating planet-warming emissions by declaring that they do, in fact, pose a threat to public health and welfare.

Jackson has been adamant that the EPA will move forward on regulating emissions under the Clean Air Act if Congress doesn't pass a climate bill this year, telling reporters, "The race is clearly on." But she has also maintained that the administration would prefer new legislation, and has encouraged Congress to deliver it.

Jackson came to the Obama administration from the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, which she lead from February 2006 to November 2008. Enviros in the state gave her mixed reviews, though national green leaders cheered her appointment to the post.

Watch a video interview with Jackson by Grist's Amanda Little.

Steven Chu
Secretary of Energy | energy.gov

Steven Chu, a Nobel laureate physicist who came to the administration from a post at the head of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, has made some ambitious moves in his first months in office. Greens swooned when he called coal his "worst nightmare," but he hasn't been quite as much of a rabble-rouser in office.

Among his biggest accomplishments so far have been streamlining the loan guarantee process at DOE and initiating new partnerships with other departments to improve energy efficiency. He also scored a win in securing funding for the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E).

Photo: BikePortland.orgRay LaHood
Secretary of Transportation | dot.gov

Ray LaHood was a Republican congressman from Illinois up until his retirement in 2008, making his pick a surprising one. He has not been a particularly visible member of the administration in its first months, though his department has made some major headway on key environmental issues.

The Department of Transportation scored $8 billion in funding for Amtrak in the stimulus package, as well as $15 billion in the budget to create a "world-class passenger rail system" across the country. Everyone's favorite climate curmudgeon, George Will, has basically written LaHood off as a communist for supporting mass transit.

DOT also played a central role in reaching a new deal on automobile emissions, one of the first major actions the administration has taken to curb global warming. And LaHood appeared before the House Energy and Commerce Committee in support of the Waxman-Markey climate and energy bill in April.

Photo: Mike DisharoonKen Salazar
Secretary of Interior | interior.gov

The former Colorado senator got mixed reviews from enviros when he was nominated, and he's still getting them. He got cheers for withdrawing oil-shale leases on tens of thousands of acres in Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming. He also got a gold star for scrapping the Bush administration's offshore leasing plan. But he has not written off offshore drilling entirely and is reportedly at work on a new offshore-drilling plan.

Salazar got a thumbs-down from enviros for upholding the Bush administration's policy on polar bears. The bears will continue to be considered a threatened species, since climate change is melting their Arctic habitat, but they won't get the protections from oil and gas exploration that a declaration as "endangered" would give them.

Photo: change.govNancy Sutley
Chair of the White House Council on Environmental Quality | CEQ site

Nancy Sutley came to the Obama administration from the Los Angeles mayor's office. She has promised to be the "voice for the environment" within the White House, and said she "will play an important role in coordinating the efforts of the federal government" on environmental policy, but her work is largely behind the scenes.

She has pledged that Obama and his administration are willing to stake their political capital on passing a climate bill.

Watch a video interview with Sutley by Grist's Amanda Little.

Tom Vilsack
Secretary of Agriculture | usda.gov

Obama's decision to appoint the former Iowa governor to head the Agriculture Department was blasted by some in the green movement who believe Vilsack is beholden to the industrial agriculture interests that are deeply rooted in his home state. So far, however, the ag secretary has avoided significant controversy, though USDA is working to influence how climate legislation governs farmers and the ethanol industry.

Vilsack has said he believes farm and forestry operations should earn carbon credits under a national climate program (a view in synch with Big Ag), with his department providing the necessary oversight. Then there's the question of how EPA will measure biofuels' impact on offsetting carbon dioxide emissions -- a complicated issue that promises to leave either farmers or EPA scientists angry in the end.

Photo: dol.govHilda Solis
Secretary of Labor | dol.gov

Hilda Solis, Obama's green-jobs-loving labor secretary, has been a low-key figure thus far, though she has spoken publicly about the administration's desire to create millions of jobs in the renewable-energy and energy-efficiency sectors. Before joining the administration, she represented California's 32nd Distract in the House and was a key player in getting the Green Jobs Act passed in 2007.

The Labor Department recently announced that it is partnering with the Department of Housing and Urban Development to spend funds from the economic recovery act to train and employ residents of public housing in green jobs.

Get involved in the fight against climate change via Grist's Climate Citizens project.

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Photo illustration by Tom Twigg / Grist

Next week brings two milestones in wildlife protection that serve as a lesson in contrasts -- examples of what the environmental movement has been and what it's becoming.

On Monday, gray wolves in Montana, Idaho, and parts of other northern states leave the endangered species list, designated as an officially "recovered" species. Once driven nearly to extinction, the wolves will fall under the watch of state management -- which includes hunting -- following the Obama Interior Department's decision in March to sign off on a delisting process put in motion on George W. Bush's watch.

Later in the week, the legal status of polar bears will become clearer when the Obama administration must decide whether to overturn a last-minute Bush move that denied the arctic mammals key protections under the Endangered Species Act. Acknowledging that the polar bear is threatened by a melting habitat, Bush officials still ruled that endangered species protections cannot apply to causes originating outside of their habitat (in other words, the greenhouse gas emissions heating up the polar regions). Obama has until May 9 to overturn the decision; otherwise, it stands.

Two different species located in very different places -- what's the connection?

The wolf story is a chapter in the environmental movement's decades-long efforts to protect specific species and eco-systems -- a campaign descended directly from "save the whales" and "stop the logging." Protecting the polar bear, however, is all about confronting the existential threat of global warming.

Wolf, meet bear. When it comes to saving the planet, you're just a sideshow.

Gray wolves are a classic "old environmentalism" problem. Humans threatened the species in a very localized way: they shot too many wolves and settled in their habitat. Local ecosystems were disrupted, and when the federal government introduced a Rocky Mountain recovery plan in 1995, it tried to balance the interests of local parties, such as cattle and sheep farmers. Environmentalists fought for stronger protections through their long-preferred method -- lawsuits. This continues: a coalition led by Earthjustice will sue to overturn the wolf decision in June, once a 60-days-notice requirement has been met.

For years the Bush administration sought to remove wolves from the endangered species list, and wolf advocates twice blocked the move in court. When Interior Secretary Ken Salazar upheld the Bush policy in March (it had been put on hold by the new administration), it was like, well, upholding a Bush environmental policy -- exactly the opposite of what many in the environmental community expected.

In public and private statements, Interior officials have framed wolves' resurgence as a success story -- what the Endangered Species Act intended. They cite the wolf population across the Northern Rockies -- about 1,600, including about 100 breeding pairs -- and evidence that wolf packs in three distinct areas (Yellowstone ecosystem, central Idaho, and northwest Montana) have enough contact to interbreed and ensure genetic diversity.

"The population has really come back from the brink," said Seth Willey, a Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) regional recovery coordinator in Denver. "There's been scientific consensus on this for a long time."

The delisting hinges on management plans submitted by the states. Montana's and Idaho's plans were approved, though the department rejected Wyoming's trigger-happy plan [PDF] as inadequate, so wolves will remain federally protected in that state.

Wildlife groups find the Montana and Idaho plans nearly as troubling; Idaho, in particular, would allow hunters to reduce the current population to 104 animals, down from a current count of 778. Idaho Gov. Butch Otter (R) famously said he would be first line for a wolf hunting license.

"We've made all this progress," said Noah Greenwald, a conservation biologist at the Center for Biological Diversity. "Instead of continuing with that and ensuring the wolves recover to a larger area of their historic range, we're going to shut the door and allow them, particularly Idaho, to reduce their population to the point where it's questionable they're going to be viable."

Suzanne Stone, an Idaho field conservationist for Defenders of Wildlife, a leading wolf advocacy group, questioned whether the Rocky Mountain populations are sufficiently connected, as FWS claims. She said federal recovery goals are based on an outdated 1987 plan [PDF].

"Since that time, wildlife scientists have repeatedly warned that the original wolf recovery goals were set too low and in order to reach a recovered metapopulation, the northern Rockies wolf population needs to be much larger than a few hundred wolves," she wrote in an email. "... Genetic scientists have also confirmed that when our regional wolf population reached 450 wolves region wide (the current requirement for delisting), the wolf population was still disconnected and not functioning as a metapopulation by providing genetic connectivity between all three subpopulations."

The Interior Department maintains its plans are based on the best available science. The government's recovery findings were detailed in the Federal Register [PDF] on April 2, written largely by wolf recovery architect Ed Bangs. Further, said spokesperson Hugh Vickery, the Endangered Species Act compels a species to be delisted when it has recovered, meaning Salazar's decisions was less a judgment call than a requirement.

"How the decision is made is clearly spelled out in the law," Vickery said. "If the best available science says to do it, we have to do it."

The department's handling of the announcement didn't win it any friends. Wildlife groups that had worked on the issue for years resented being caught off guard by the announcement.

"It's too soon to pass judgment on how [Salazar] will ultimately do as secretary, but certainly it was a warning flag that more needs to be done to arrive at these decisions carefully, that more communication needs to occur," said Bob Irvin, the senior vice president for wildlife at Defenders.

Congressional supporters of continued protections also felt left in the dark on announcement. Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) wrote to Salazar asking him to delay the effective date (he did not). She also questioned whether the Endangered Species Act allows the department to single out a particular area -- Wyoming -- for continued protection, a point Defenders of Wildlife also raises.

A staff member for Rep. Norm Dicks (D-Wash.), another longtime wolf advocate, said simply that Dicks found the announcement unexpected, disagreed with it, and had spoken to Salazar about it.

Defenders of Wildlife filed a Freedom of Information Act request for documents showing whether Salazar looked at any new research before making the "scientifically flawed" decision. It's awaiting a response, Irvin said.

"We're very disappointed in the [wolf] decision, but it's way too early to draw any lines between it and future administration actions," said Andrew Wetzler, endangered species project director for the Natural Resources Defense Council. "This is a bad decision among a number of good decisions."

Unlike gray wolves, the threat to polar bears' habitat isn't local. It won't be fixed with a regional management plan, which can't address greenhouse gases from tailpipe emissions in Los Angeles or coal plants in India. It won't be fixed with a typical lawsuit -- wildlife advocates can't litigate a national (or global) climate change plan into existence.

True, polar bears are furry and loveable (from a distance!), and much like wolves inspire awe at nature's untamed predators. Like wolves, they require protection from local habitat destruction. But polar bears have become the poster-species for the issue that defines the new environmental movement -- one that concerns itself less with charismatic species than with the tremendous disruption to human life that climate change will bring.

On its surface, the wolf delisting puts President Obama in an awkward spot -- upsetting a key plank in the Democratic platform -- environmental voters -- and complicating the clean break he's tried to make from Bush's environmental policies. The political sensitivity of the decision was made clear by the fact that Salazar's announcement back in March came on a Friday afternoon, the classic time for downplaying unpopular news, and was issued with no comment from the White House.

But if the White House upholds the Bush decisions on wolves, it may show that Obama is making a political calculation. The president's selection of Salazar, a Colorado senator with a fairly strong environmental record and deep family ties to ranching, can be seen as a signal of the president's belief that it's more important to mediate culturally charged western states issues like wolves and save political ammunition for the bigger challenge -- enacting a comprehensive strategy for combating climate change.

"The science makes it so clear that the polar bear is threatened by greenhouse gas emissions, and it's such a well-known species, that they should be considering rescinding [the Bush-era rule]. I think it's still possible they will," said Greenwald of the Center for Biological Diversity.

Overturning the Bush exception, Greenwald said, could lend additional weight to efforts to strengthen auto-efficiency standards and block offshore drilling and oil shale development.

Interior Department Press Secretary Kendra Barkoff said the department had not yet decided on the polar bear rule. A decision must come by next Saturday.

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