Modeshift

There have been 50 Interior secretaries since the department was established in 1849 and President Zachary Taylor named Thomas Ewing its first secretary. On Tuesday, September 21, 2010, in a Washington dedication ceremony that brought Republicans and Democrats together for an all too rare moment of inspiring reflection, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar formally declared that his predecessor, Stewart Lee Udall, was the “greatest secretary of the Interior in United States history.”

Salazar  — in pix below with Senators Tom Udall (right) and Mark Udall (left) — delivered this insight a few moments before dropping a blue drape and unveiling the bronze plaque that will soon be affixed to the agency’s headquarters in Washington. In May, Congress passed, and on June 8 President Obama signed a bill that names the headquarters the Stewart Lee Udall Department of Interior Building. Joining Salazar on the Interior Department auditorium stage were a good number of Stewart’s large family including two sisters –Elma and Eloise; the two senators from New Mexico and Colorado; three more children – Lynn, Lori, and Denis; and a number of grandchildren plus wives and husbands.

In sports, the ultimate honor is to retire a star player’s number. In government, it’s naming the agency headquarters after its most distinguished leader. It’s a rare event. The FBI and Labor Department headquarters are named for leaders. The Senate and House office buildings also are named for honorable lawmakers.

Stewart Udall served as the 37^th Secretary of the Interior from 1961 to 1969 under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, and at a time when bipartisan values enabled Washington’s elected leaders to govern in the public interest. Stewart’s mission to more sensitively manage the nation’s resources even as he alerted the country to what he called the “quiet crisis” of pollution and degradation yielded a legacy of land preservation and environmental safeguards that changed the nation for the better. Stewart died on March 20, 2010 at the age of 90.

Each of the seventeen men and women who delivered remarks, song, and poetry at the dedication described in often funny, and always telling detail how Stewart’s life, and his work in and outside government, delivered to every corner of the nation parks, wild lands, natural rivers, refuges, clean water, clean air, arts, cultural institutions and justice. They also recounted how he did so with humility, reverence for beauty and prose, and a stubborn optimism about the promise of America.

Robert Stanton, the National Park Service director from 1997 to 2001 and the agency’s first African American leader, recalled how in 1961 Stewart purposefully recruited students from historically black colleges to work summer jobs at the Interior Department. Stanton heeded the call from “my secretary” and ended up as a seasonal ranger in Grand Teton National Park.

Lynda Johnson Robb, the daughter of Lady Bird and Lyndon Johnson, revealed to the more than 200 people that attended the ceremony, that “Mother and Stewart, you know, had an affair” and that “Daddy was so jealous because Mother was spending so much time with Stewart.” Her cheeky observation, of course, reflected the close relationship Stewart had with Lady Bird, who shared with the young Interior Secretary the same goals of conservation and stewardship. The two traveled together to parks in the west, said Robb, and down rivers on rafting trips.

Douglas Brinkley, the Rice University historian, noted that President Johnson, who Stewart served as Interior secretary for more than five years, deserved more respect and recognition for how his Great Society programs laid the foundation for the era of environmental policy making that occurred in the 1970s. And he noted that President Johnson, who was raised in the beautiful Texas Hill Country near Austin, also heard nature’s call of distress. “One day President Johnson called Stewart in his office,” Brinkley said. “Stewart, he said, I hear that Lake Erie is getting dirty. It’s dying. Is that true?”

Brinkley said that Stewart confirmed the lake’s diminished condition and explained that the Interior Department has wild lakes in its jurisdiction but doesn’t oversee water quality. “Stewart,” said Johnson, “do something about it. When I think about dirty water I think of  you!”

Patty Limerick, a historian at the Center of the American West at the University of Colorado, who was a friend of Stewart’s, described the breadth of his interests – the law, the arts, writing, the environment, government, politics, the West, commitment to justice — and his capacity to weave them into visible gains for the country. She asserted that of all the people who have served the United States in an executive capacity only Thomas Jefferson exceeded Stewart in so successfully applying all of his varied interests and skills in service to America.

I met Stewart in 1988 when I was a national correspondent for the New York Times and he was a private attorney working on behalf of uranium miners and residents of the West downwind of the Nevada Test Site who’d been injured or killed by exposure to radiation from the government’s atomic weapons production and testing industry. In many ways, Stewart’s 12-year battle for justice for American victims of the atomic bomb, which culminated in a 1990 law signed by President George H.W. Bush, the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, was the most heroic work of his life.

That’s saying something since Stewart was a machine gunner on board U.S. bombers during World War Two, one of the most dangerous assignments. He took up the cause of justice on behalf of Americans who’d been put in harm’s way by a government operating a dangerous radioactive enterprise in suspicion and secrecy.

Rebecca Adamson of the First Peoples Worldwide spoke to Stewart’s fealty to Native Americans, including the Navajo miners injured and killed by exposure to low-level radiation from the mines. His official portrait, which hangs in the gallery leading to the Interior secretary’s executive office, was painted by Allen Houser, a Chiricahua Apache artist. The portrait of Stewart, with his long hair brushed by a western breeze, and slightly longer lines of the chin and higher cheeks than he had, is meant to wrap him in the ceremonial embrace of the Navajo and Hopi tribes. The portrait, which also includes the transcendent browns, and greys  and reds of the Colorado Plateau, is the dominating visual image that graces the bronze plaque naming the Interior building in his honor. “The First Nation lost a hero when we lost Stewart,” said Adamson. “We mourn his death and what he meant to us.”

Senator Mark Udall, Stewart’s nephew and son of Mo Udall, Stewart’s brother who he adored, provided some of the most fitting comments about his uncle’s stubbornness and stamina. In short, when Stewart set his mind to a goal there was no stopping his progress, whatever it took. If the Supreme Court was arrogant enough to deny downwinders and miners justice, Stewart would take it to Congress and win compensation for the families and a formal statement of apology from the U.S. government. “I never thought Uncle Stew would ever die,” said Senator Udall.

The last breath left Stewart Udall on the first day of spring this year.  Yet as long as there is a United States of America, everything that Stewart did for the land and its living communities, wild and settled, will pulse with life. Denis Udall composed a song in his father’s honor, performed by a grandson, Jonah Udall, that made the same point:

He hiked canyon trails; ran rivers, too.
Climbed glaciered mountains just for the view.
If when we die, we go somewhere.
I bet you a dollar, he’s walking there.

Has anyone seen my old man?
Has anyone seen my dad?
Look where the mountains meet the sea,
And bring him home to me.

– Keith Schneider

Well, now the Senate is getting into the act, at last. Bolstered by new opinion polls and driven by a monstrous blowout that is closing Gulf Coast beaches at the height of the travel season, Democratic leaders stirred into action this week to develop and pass comprehensive climate and energy legislation.

They’re following, of course, the president’s lead. On Wednesday President Obama concluded an all hands cabinet meeting at the White House by publicly declaring again his resolve to develop a “new energy strategy that the American people desperately want.” The next day Democratic Senators caucused, apparently with considerable enthusiasm, to discuss the outlines of a comprehensive proposal to introduce and pass before the August recess.

According to news accounts, Democrats will prepare a bill that includes limits on carbon emissions, as well as new measures to advance clean energy development and more strictly manage deep water drilling. During a news conference Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid described the meeting’s outcome this way: “A number of senators said this was the best caucus they’ve ever attended. It was really very, very powerful. It was inspirational, quite frankly.”

With the president and Senate Democrats motivated in a way they haven’t been before, could this be the season of energy policy making that has eluded presidents and Congress for 40 years? Maybe. The gears of legislative action have swung into motion and there is the scent of inevitability in the air, which is what big bills need to get approved.

There’s also the Republicans, who were wounded last week by Texas Representative Joe Barton’s apology to the BP chief executive. But they aren’t dead. They’ll revert to form and attack limits on carbon emissions and clean energy development as a government overreach that raises costs.

BP Disaster’s Aftermath
The Democrats and environmentalists should have a ready answer to both. Here’s why.

The April 20 Deepwater Horizon explosion that killed 11 workers and the helplessness of the government and BP in controlling the blowout has reacquainted Americans with the colossal hazards of a nation so devoted to a single fuel. The BP Gulf disaster is more evidence of what candidate Obama described on the day he announced his campaign for president as the “tyranny of oil.” It is the latest body blow – the others include 9/11, Katrina, and the Great Recession – that stem from a common source: the nation’s fruitless 40-year struggle to take efficiency seriously and to develop cleaner domestic sources of energy.

Republicans frame their critique strictly around prices and Government action. But how much higher do the actual costs — erratic fuel prices, climate effects, national security risks, lost jobs, depleted savings, diminished home values, and the sense of a crumbling way of life — need to go before the country responds? Maybe we’ve arrived at that place where costs of doing nothing and the benefits of pursuing a new development strategy around cleaner sources of energy have tipped far enough to merit a big policy response.

Democrats are fortified by the results of public opinion polls that find strong support for a new energy and climate policy. One of the most significant was a survey of 1,000 people released this week by the Wall Street Journal and NBC News. It found that by a margin of 63 percent to 31 percent, Americans favor comprehensive energy and carbon reduction legislation. The survey’s findings were consistent with a burst of other national poll results in recent weeks, which also found that public support for new offshore exploration has steadily declined since the start of the BP disaster 67 days ago.

The Oil Judge
The energy industry and its allies in government will not give up easily, we also saw this week. U.S. District Judge Martin Feldman, who sits on the Louisiana federal bench, this week struck down the six-month ban on deepwater oil drilling that the Obama administration established late last month. Federal disclosure reports showed Judge Feldman invested heavily in oil industry assets, including holding and recently selling stock in Transocean, the company that owned and operated the Deepwater Horizon under contract to BP.

Back in Washington, the outlines of the Senate proposal are taking shape. Senator Reid said this in a statement: “There is clear agreement on the need to move forward this summer on comprehensive clean energy legislation. Whatever form that takes, we agree: it must deal with the catastrophe in the Gulf; it must create millions of jobs; it must cut pollution; and it must strengthen our economic security, our national security and our energy independence.”

On Tuesday, a bipartisan group of senators meet with the president about energy legislation, which could be introduced next month.

– Keith Schneider

Late last year when Senator Lisa Murkowski announced she would vigorously oppose any effort to use the Clean Air Act to regulate carbon emissions, environmental leaders in Washington understood the significance of the Alaska Republican’s challenge. A loyal ally of fossil fuel developers, Senator Murkowski attracts more campaign financing from the oil and utility industries than all but two other Senate lawmakers, according to federal election records.

The months-long skirnishing between Senator Murkowski and environmental advocates is now in its final hours, with both sides asserting they will prevail.

At stake is a vote in the Senate scheduled for Thursday night on a “resolution of disapproval” introduced by Senator Murkowski last January and meant to disrupt the Obama administration’s pioneering work to respond to climate change by limiting emissions of carbon dioxide and five other greenhouse gases in the U.S.

Though the Murkowski resolution faces an arduous route through a Democratic-controlled Congress and White House, the Thursday vote will be the most important Congressional test yet this year on where the United States is going on climate action and clean energy.

The details of what’s been happening look like this: Senator Murkowski’s resolution, which has 41 co-sponsors, would overturn the Environmental Protection Agency’s formal scientific finding on December 7, 2009 that carbon dioxide and five other climate-changing pollutants endanger human health and the environment.

The EPA’s “endangerment finding,” introduced at the start of the United Nations climate summit in Copenhagen last year, was saluted by climate activists and government officials around the world. The finding made it legally possible to use the Clean Air Act, the nation’s primary air pollution statute, to set and enforce new manufacturing practices and emissions limits that tamed the U.S. contribution to global climate change.

Moment of Reckoning For Both Sides
The vote couldn’t come at a more opportune moment for climate advocates and the fossil fuel industry and should provide a helpful sorting out of the relative political influence of both sides.

The last six months have been a period of dismay for the American climate action community, challenged by the disappointing results in Copenhagen, and fighting back against the furious attack by pundits and lawmakers on the validity of climate science.

The last six weeks have been equally dismal for the oil industry, which has attracted new public scrutiny because of the horrendous oil spill in the Gulf, and the equally destructive environmental consequences of mining and processing oil from Alberta, Canada’s tar sands.

If the resolution passes, an event seen as unlikely by Democratic Senate staffers, it would almost certainly have the effect of putting an even deeper  trench in the already difficult path that comprehensive climate and energy legislation has in the Senate. Conversely, if the resolution fails by a wide margin, that result would likely build new legislative enthusiasm for a climate and energy bill this year.

Important players from both sides are making their cases. Americans United for Change today began three days of cable TV advertising  in Washington, D.C., that explicitly link the BP Gulf disaster to the Murkowski resolution and the assertion that at Republicans are “working to gut the bipartisan Clean Air Act and give big oil a bailout.”

Senator Murkowski issued a statement this week that accused critics of the resolution of misrepresenting her intentions. “There has been a great deal of misinformation spread about my effort by groups — almost all of which are based outside of Alaska — who want to cut the emissions blamed for climate change no matter what the cost,” Murkowski said.  Her spokesman, Robert Dillon, said the resolution is not about debating the science behind climate change. Rather, he told the Associated Press, it’s about stopping an “out of control” government agency.

Senator Murkowski’s conservative supporters contend that using the Clean Air Act to regulate carbon emissions is a regulatory overreach by big government. “Every sector of our economy — transportation, power generation and manufacturing — would be subjected to EPA’s bureaucratic reach,” said Tom Borelli director of the Free Enterprise Project at the National Center for Public Policy Research.

Endangerment Finding Put to Use
The Obama administration, meanwhile, has moved quickly to put the endangerment finding and its Clean Air Act authority into effect. In April the administration issued trend-setting fuel mileage and emissions standards for light vehicles that the agency said would save 1.8 billion barrels of oil and 900 million tons of carbon emissions from 2012 to 2016.

Last month, President Obama ordered similar mileage and emissions reduction rules for heavy trucks. The administration has also made plain its intention to use the Clean Air Act to regulate carbon emissions from some 7,000 industrial installations – refineries, utilities, manufacturers, and mining sites – but leave small businesses alone.

U.S. climate and clean energy organizations anticipated Senator Murkowski’s challenge and began building support in January to defeat the resolution, which they called the “Dirty Air Act.” Among the allies in the campaign were dozens of environmental organizations, labor unions, governors, President Obama, Democratic senators, and EPA Administrator Lisa P. Jackson.

Newspaper editorialists also weighed in, noting that the BP Gulf Spill has made it more urgent than ever to curtail the myriad hazards of America’s addiction to oil. “Murkowski plans to offer a resolution,” said the Washington Post on June 7, “making it less likely we move away from fossil fuels, making it less likely we act to prevent a foreseeable catastrophe (in this case, global warming) from occurring, blocking regulators from doing their jobs, and disrupting one of our best opportunities to prevent climate change rather than scramble to respond after its incalculable effects rip through our atmosphere.”

In an article on Monday for the Huffington Post, EPA Administrator Jackson said the Murkowski resolution “abdicates the responsibility we have to move the country forward in a way that creates jobs, increases our security by breaking our dependence on foreign oil, and protects the air and water we rely on.”

– Keith Schneider

Obama Visits the Gulf Coast | Gulf Oil Spill

Day 40. Great gouts of oil still rush from the ruptured BP well at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. A frustrated president visits the scene of the disaster to literally dab his finger at a tar ball washed up on the Louisiana beach. Television news, enlivened by easy-to-get pictures, sets its stand-ups in strategic positions, broadcasting the drama of competition between spreading pollution and technological limits to a nation that clucks about the damage and still races down the highway in 18 mpg SUVs.

It’s convenient to compare Obama’s Gulf crisis to Bush’s Katrina crisis. Same region. Same antecedent: a nation devoted to oil and so ‘shocked’ when the consequences of its use produce a calamity.

Arguably, though, a more apt simile is Carter’s hostage crisis. The day-after-day countdown of quavering orders and quashed expectations. The grim Democratic president schooled by surprises and anxious to project managerial competence over details he has surprisingly little capacity to manage. And everybody involved — the company, the administration, the region, the nation — acknowledging the magnitude of the event but exhibiting no appetite for changing the rules of the game that would steadily reduce the need for dangerous deep-sea oil exploration and development.

How did the nation react after the hostage crisis? Americans turned right, discovered Ronald Reagan’s “morning in America,” built bigger homes on more cul-de-sacs, and bought Chevy Tahoes and Ford Explorers.

How will America react after BP’s undersea oil geyser is stopped? Maybe they’ll make a change in the White House. But they also have exhibited fierce resolve to secure what they have – cars, homes, choices, and mobility.

That means exploring for more oil or penetrating even deeper into the cultures and economies of other nations to acquire it. In 2009, according to the most recent figures from the Energy Information Administration, the U.S. consumed 18.7 million barrels a day, and imported over 13 million barrels.

Public opinion polls consistently show that a healthy majority of Americans support more offshore exploration. Those same polls find a decline in the sense of American urgency about climate change. Only a third of those polled in a Pew survey released on May 19 said it was very important for Congress to address climate change.

And with gasoline selling at under $3 a gallon for most of the last two years — it was $2.60/gallon in Muskegon, Michigan on Friday — Americans aren’t stressing nearly as much about prices.

President Obama is smart enough to know that the Gulf catastrophe is momentous. He’s apparently unsure about what precisely the moment demands. That’s why although last week he took the first step to explicitly link the need to pass a comprehensive climate and energy bill to the largest oil spill in American history, he wasn’t that enthusiastic.

On Tuesday, Obama met with Senate Republicans and, according to a White House statement, told them “that the gulf oil disaster should heighten our sense of urgency to hasten the development of new, clean energy sources that will promote energy independence and good-paying American jobs. And he asked that they work with him on the promising proposals currently before Congress. “

The next day Obama toured Solyndra’s solar thin-film manufacturing plant in Fremont, California and noted that even as “we are dealing with this immediate crisis, we’ve got to remember that the risks our current dependence on oil holds for our environment and our coastal communities is not the only cost involved in our dependence on these fossil fuels.  Around the world, from China to Germany, our competitors are waging a historic effort to lead in developing new energy technologies.”

The climate action and clean energy communities have been pushing the White House for weeks to leverage the oil spill as an event that could remind Americans of the serious consequences of an economy powered by fossil fuels, and galvanize political support for comprehensive legislation. Of all the options available to the president, really pushing for legislation that pushes the nation’s energy industry to address the markets and threats of the 21st century makes the most sense. It’s just the sort of big step out of the mainstream of conventional Washington thinking at a time of crisis that could help Obama really close the deal on his campaign promise of doing just that.

The American Power Act, introduced in the Senate earlier this month takes into account public support for offshore drilling — as well as the political influence of the oil industry — and provides developers access to new areas for offshore exploration. The proposal, though, also includes a range of other measures to spur clean energy development and restrict carbon emissions that are meant to diminish market demand for polluting and dangerous fossil fuels.

As a candidate in 2008 and as president Obama has made it a point of loudly and consistently promoting clean energy development, while also instituting the energy efficiency and emissions reduction regulations to respond to climate change and support new markets. The dual initiatives – public investment in clean energy tools and federal regulatory action — form the administration’s primary industrial development and climate action strategy. Just how powerful that combination is in generating jobs and new industrialization is now emerging in Michigan, where roughly $6 billion has been invested over the last year in new battery manufacturing plants for the next generation of clean cars.

With so many Americans calling on the president to do something about the Gulf mess, just not something that causes too much change, Obama’s next big move seems obvious. Press the Senate hard to pass climate and energy legislation. The bill is another factor in pushing the country in the right direction.

– Keith Schneider

Over 70 years ago, in the General Motors-sponsored Futurama exhibit at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, an estimated 10 percent of all Americans were transported across a landscape of innovation, creativity, and optimism that became the economic and cultural foundation of the great American century. The Futurama exhibit was a huge diorama of a highway-heavy, congestion-free, car-dependent, time-efficient, leafy green urban and suburban all American pattern of civilization that no one had ever seen before.

What astute observers recognized — among them Lewis Mumford and Walter Lippman — was that GM’s new American geography needed enormous public investments in the roads, sewers, education, research, planning, and industrial infrastructure to make it reality. The vision, though, of an airy, prosperous, shining, and mobile American way of life was powerful and eminently achievable. Over the next two decades voters elected to Congress and the White House lawmakers of both parties who cooperated in steadily enacting big and expensive bills — the GI bill to educate veterans, the 1956 Highway Act to start the Interstate System, water and sewer spending bills, research grants for engineering, just to name a few — to change the way America looked and functioned.

American Power Act Tactics
Last week, Senators John Kerry of Massachusetts and Joe Lieberman of Connecticut introduced The American Power Act, a big and expensive spending bill that is in every way a response to that incredibly accurate 70-year-old GM vision. Its central goal is to preserve American choice and mobility — the two central features of our way of life — in the face of an oncoming train wreck of accumulating economic and environmental consequences.

Kerry and Lieberman propose to execute this impossible task by laying out two paths for legislative action that need to be achieved simultaneously. The first is to generate more supplies of conventional energy sources — oil, coal, and nuclear — in order to stave off the slow demise or even the collapse of America’s convenient, have it your way, drive through economy.

The proposal provides incentives to coastal states to pursue more offshore oil and gas development, while also giving neighboring states the power to block development within 75 miles of their shoreline. It includes $2 billion-a-year in research grants to coal-burning utilities to test carbon capture and sequestration. It proposes to invest tens of billions in loan guarantees and other support to encourage the construction of 12 new nuclear plants.

The second tactical step in the legislation is to push America as insistently as politically practical toward more energy-efficient transportation, and home-grown, renewable, and much cleaner sources of energy. The idea is to spur innovation, new patterns of compact development, and new industrialization that also generates much less carbon pollution.

Kerry and Lieberman proposed spending $70 billion over 10 years on transit, clean vehicles, energy efficiency and other Smart Growth innovations. They lay out a plan for farmers to gain income by siting renewable projects on their land and to grow biofuels. There is money for solar and wind development. And the bill contains provisions to reduce carbon emissions 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020, and over 80 percent by 2050.

Carbon Pricing and Pragmatism
The bill envisions putting a price on carbon, and providing for trading carbon allowances that applies to large polluters and could generate billions of dollars annually, a portion of which would be rebated to citizens.

As a study in pragmatism, the American Power Act does pretty well. The legislation addresses most of what’s possible and practical in the place where energy, economy, the environment, and politics now meet. It’s as big and bold as it dares in an era when the boom-boom-boom of dire risks to our way of life — climate change, declining competitiveness, rising energy costs — is greeted in political circles with the squeak of small ideas and the clanging of ideological idiocy and anger from every side.

In almost every instance, environmental organizations and business groups commended Kerry and Lieberman for such a solid first draft. And in almost every instance — the exception was the Smart Growth community’s enthusiasm for the $7 billion-a-year investment in transit, clean car, and other transportation and efficiency measures — groups said the intricacies of the bill needed serious reworking.

Environmental groups are not thrilled with the oil, coal, and nuclear provisions. They aren’t thrilled with a section that would withdraw some authority of the EPA to regulate carbon emissions from certain sources. And climate groups are concerned that the bill’s proposal to start in 2019 to dedicate some of the revenue from carbon allowance trading to helping developing nations make the transition to a low-carbon economy is too little and too late.

Many business executives, meanwhile, are nervous about the carbon emissions limits. Democratic lawmakers from the Midwest want more investment in clean tech manufacturing. And the bill’s former sponsor, South Carolina Republican Lindsey Graham who dropped out following an ideological fit, said the proposal would not survive the — so far — uniform Republican opposition.

Transition and Trouble
America, of course, has not always had such trouble responding to change and transition. The America that resulted from executing the Futurama vision was industrious, optimistic, and capable of reacting to favorable market trends. The suburbs and highways, cul-de-sacs and three-car garages, homes with more bathrooms than TVs were made possible by cheap energy (most of which we generated ourselves), cheap land, core competitiveness in major industries, reasoned population increases, growing personal income, wealthy governments, and a willingness of taxpayers to invest in the nation’s future.

We’re not dealing well with the new market trends of the 21st century. Energy prices are steadily rising. Land is expensive. Whole industries have moved beyond our borders. The U.S. is the third fastest growing industrialized nation in the world. Incomes are declining. Governments operate with enormous deficits. Taxpayers are unwilling to invest in a collaborative future.

The result is a nation that is uncharacteristically hesitant and operating in fear. And while ideologues on all sides shout past each other, and make holding office at any level a thankless and grueling experience, the real danger in our governing circles is the entrenchment of the politics of stasis. Doing nothing. Holding the line. Not deciding. Not acting.

The American Power Act contains a suite of reasoned ideas that make sense. Hopefully it not only survives the blizzard of amendments but is strengthened. The sole provision that could be considered a breakthrough, and needs to survive intact, is the bid to put a price on carbon and then to generate revenue by trading allowances. By itself that provision sets the basic foundation to reduce emissions, spur clean energy investment, and prove to the world that the United States is serious about being a leader in the global work to solve climate change. Taking into account the political and economic context, the bill’s passage would be a step, arguably a big step, for America’s future.

– Keith Schneider

The foreboding of the monstrous Gulf oil spill was accompanied this week by the opportune deeds of Washington lawmakers, policy makers, and activists hard at work to fashion a political response, including the Senate introduction of a comprehensive climate and energy bill. The new proposal was generally applauded for its expansive scope by business groups, labor, and environmental organizations, which also agreed that it needed some work.

But first came the White House, which started the week with a plan to break up the Minerals Management Service, a unit of the Interior Department charged with 1) holding federal bottomland lease auctions that have the effect of promoting the development of offshore drilling, 2) collecting roughly $13 billion annually in federal oil and gas royalties, and 3) regulating offshore oil and natural gas production practices.

Then came a series of investigative hearings on Capitol Hill, during which members of Congress and the public learned from senior executives of the three companies involved in the accident – BP, Transocean, and Haliburton – that technical breakdowns involving tools most Americans never heard of caused an environmental disaster that gets worse by the day. Those included such things as drilling mud applied at the wrong time, dead batteries, and disruption in the functioning of the blowout preventer. It also involved flaws in the sequencing of events to simultaneously manage the extreme pressure of the sea 5,000 feet deep, and oil bursting out of its geological reservoir at the rate of 14,000 pounds per square inch, which is roughly the same power as a big artillery shell fired down the barrel of a cannon.

A Big, Complex, Auspicious Bill
Against this backdrop, and with all of the political and media bunting that they could muster, New England Senators John Kerry and Joe Lieberman introduced the American Power Act. The big bill, 987 pages in its draft form, is intended to change the direction of some of the nation’s toughest systemic problems – economic competitiveness, energy security, job loss, and environmental safety. The proposal encompasses development of the full menu of conventional and alternative energy sources, calls for limits on carbon emissions, and the development of a carbon market to buy and sell allowances.

The bill also calls for contributing to a global climate action fund, starting in 2019, to help developing nations respond to climate change. That provision was viewed as too little and too late by Oxfam America and other climate action organizations. Indeed, many features of the bill – federal incentives to build 12 nuclear plants, support to the coal and electrical utility industry for carbon capture and sequestration projects, plans to withdraw some authority from the EPA to regulate carbon emissions under the Clean Air Act, steps to allow more offshore drilling – attracted similarly skeptical critiques that environmental organizations said they would work to fix.

Oil Ban, Clean Air Carbon Emissions Limits
As the week drew to a close, a flurry of other spill- and climate-related actions stirred Washington. West Coast Democratic Senators Maria Cantwell, Barbara Boxer, Dianne Feinstein, Jeff Merkley, Patty Murray, and Ron Wyden introduced legislation to permanently ban offshore drilling in all federal waters off the coasts of Washington, Oregon and California.

EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson issued new rules under the Clean Air Act that specified which big air polluters – power plants, refineries, large industrial plants – would be required to obtain operating permits based on their emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.

And environmental organizations stepped up their organizing to convince the Senate not to act on a resolution introduced in January by Alaska Republican Senator Linda Murkowski that would prevent the EPA from using the Clean Air Act to regulate carbon emissions.

While all of this occurred, one million more gallons of oil poured into the Gulf, according to federal estimates. The slick, which has already closed fishing grounds and begun to wash up on shorelines, expanded by thousands of square miles. Senator Murkowski, by the way, also blocked  a Democratic initiative on Thursday — The Big Oil Bailout Prevention Act — which proposed to raise the liability limits for oil companies from $75 million to $10 billion. The increase was designed to ensure that oil companies pay for the economic and environmental damage caused by big spills.
– Keith Schneider

In a long-awaited proposal designed to secure existing domestic energy sources and develop new ones that begin to reverse the damaging effects of global climate change, New England Senators John Kerry and Joe Lieberman today introduced comprehensive clean energy and climate legislation.

The co-authors of the bill, one a Democrat from Massachusetts and the other an Independent from Connecticut, insisted that its vision is to change the direction of some of the nation’s toughest systemic problems — economic competitiveness, energy security, job loss, and environmental safety. Indeed, the 900-plus page bill’s expanse, encompassing development of the full menu of conventional and alternative energy sources, as well as international finance to help developing nations respond to climate change was widely commended by environmental and business organizations.

Support and Specific Concerns
But in nearly every statement issued today, by organizations as diverse as Oxfam America, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the League of Conservation Voters, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, executives expressed concern about specific provisions and vowed to work with Senators of both parties to fix them. Environmental organizations principally focused their critiques on provisions to expand offshore drilling, provide federal incentives to build new nuclear power plants, and support the coal and utility industries with grants to prove technology to capture and store carbon.

Environmental organizations also said they would work to improve or change provisions that would limit the reach of the Clean Air Act to reduce carbon emissions in new coal-fired utilities, and eliminate the ability of states to establish carbon-emission reduction programs. Oxfam said it was concerned that the international finance provisions of the proposal would not become effective until 2019, and did not include nearly enough federal investment to meet the commitment the Obama Administration made in Copenhagen in December to help establish a $100 billion-a-year global climate action fund to assist developing nations.

“If the proposal introduced today by Senators Kerry and Lieberman stays true to its goals,” said Michael Brune, the Sierra Club’s executive director, “it can serve as a foundation on which we can build an America free from oil dependence, with millions of new clean energy manufacturing, construction and service jobs here at home, less wasted energy, and less of the carbon pollution that is threatening our economy, our health and our climate. But this proposal will only serve as a solid foundation if the Senate both improves and completes it.”

According to Senator Kerry, who blogged about the bill’s contents on Grist and Huffington Post today, The American Power Act proposes to put a price on carbon emissions from roughly 7,500 power plants and other industrial facilities. The bill proposes to establish a market to trade emissions allowances in order to reduce carbon emissions 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020, and 80 percent below 2005 levels by 2050.

Returns to Citizens
Moreover, a provision that borrows from a separate climate and energy measure proposed by Senators Maria Cantell and Susan Collins, provides proceeds of the sale of allowances as rebates to citizens. “None of it stays with or grows government,” said Kerry. “Those rebates rise over time until it all goes straight back to Americans.”

The American Power Act also takes into account the environmental and political consequences of the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The bill’s co-authors inserted a new provision that gives states the authority to veto drilling less than 75 miles off their border, although it also gives states that decide to drill access to a percentage of the lucrative federal royalties generated by oil and gas production. The proposal introduces new regulatory safeguards that require oil developers to much more thoroughly assess the risks and consequences of drilling offshore, and to more accurately predict the potential of a spill.

A third provision that environmental organizations considered crucial is the bill’s influence on the Clean Air Act, which the Obama administration is applying for the first time since its passage in 1970 to limit carbon emissions. Unfortunately, the legislation limits the Environmental Protection Agencies’s ability to clean up new coal plants. Maintaining the ability to use the Clean Air Act to reduce global warming pollution is critical, especially if the federal program is found to be ineffective in future years. The bill does call on the EPA to continue setting tough emissions standards to reduce global warming pollution from cars and trucks and continues EPA’s ability to set some performance standards for old power plants to make sure they operate more cleanly.

Other provisions of the American Power Act, designed to both gain political allies in the Senate and encourage development of alternative sources of energy and fossil fuels, include:

• Providing incentives for farmers to base wind and other clean energy projects on their land.
• $2 billion in annual investment in carbon capture technology for coal-fired utilities.
• $7 billion in annual investment for public transit, clean car technology, and clean energy research.
• Federal incentives, including loan guarantees, to encourage the construction of 12 new nuclear power plants

White House and Graham Respond
The White House issued this statement today from President Obama: “The challenges we face — underscored by the immense tragedy in the Gulf of Mexico — are reason to redouble our efforts to reform our nation’s energy policies. For too long, Washington has kicked this challenge to the next generation. This time, the status quo is no longer acceptable to Americans. Now is the time for America to take control of our energy future and jumpstart American innovation in clean energy technology that will allow us to create jobs, compete, and win in the global economy.”

The introduction of the American Power Act, initially scheduled for April 26, was delayed until today due to the Republican Senator Lindsey Graham’s decision to withdraw as a member of the three-member Senate team that wrote the bill. Over the last two weeks, as Senators Kerry and Lieberman amended provisions, Senator Graham has consistently expressed his view that the proposal could not pass without his help.

Today Graham issued a statement that described his support for a comprehensive energy bill, but also warned that its Senate approval would be a struggle: “I want America to lead the world in the coming energy revolution, not follow. I look forward to working with my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to improve upon these concepts and find a pathway forward on energy independence, job creation, and a cleaner environment,” but ” the problems created by the historic oil spill in the Gulf, along with the uncertainty of immigration politics, have made it extremely difficult for transformational legislation in the area of energy and climate to garner bipartisan support at this time.”

Visit USCAN’s American Power Act page for more information and the climate community’s reactions. USCAN is following the developments and will be updating this article and posting others in the days ahead.

– Keith Schneider

On May 5, in an unusually aggressive response to what they saw as an academic witch hunt, the University of Virginia Faculty Senate condemned state Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli’s demand to turn over six years of documents related to the work of Michael Mann, a former UVa climate scientist.

Two days later, members of the National Academy of Sciences published a letter in the journal Science that focused on the “political assaults” directed at climate scientists. The letter, signed by 255 of the nation’s leading scientists, called for “an end to McCarthy-like threats of criminal prosecutions against our colleagues based on innuendo and guilt by association, the harassment of scientists by politicians seeking distractions to avoid taking action, and the outright lies being spread about them.”

Both actions are the latest and arguably the most influential steps yet mustered by academia and science to counter the global campaign to discredit climate research, a crusade that drew much of its energy this year by what looks like an unprosecuted crime: the theft and public release last November of thousands of email messages exchanged by scientists at the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in England, a top climate research group.

Change The Conversation
The UVa faculty and the National Academy members spoke out to specifically change the vector in the fierce competition between climate advocates and skeptics about the value of climate science. And though it is early, it looks as though the tactical strategy worked, in large part because the UVa Faculty Senate and NAS scientists struck at the very moment that the skeptics had overreached.

Though Brian Gottstein, director of communication for the attorney general’s office, told reporters that Mann’s involvement with East Anglia researchers indicated that “some climate data may have been deliberately manipulated to arrive at pre-set conclusions” and that “the use of manipulated data to apply for taxpayer-funded research grants in Virginia is potentially fraud,” almost every other observer understood that Cuccinelli’s investigative demand was starkly political and not all connected to checking scientific accuracy.

The Washington Post said the investigation involved a “dangerous disregard for scientific method and academic freedom.” The UVa Faculty Senate said the Virgina attorney general’s “action and the potential threat of legal prosecution of scientific endeavor that has … a chilling message to scientists engaged in basic research involving Earth’s climate and indeed to scholars in any discipline. Such actions directly threaten academic freedom and, thus, our ability to generate the knowledge upon which informed public policy relies.”

“Society has two choices,” wrote the National Academy members in their letter. “We can ignore the science and hide our heads in the sand and hope we are lucky, or we can act in the public interest to reduce the threat of global climate change quickly and substantively. The good news is that smart and effective actions are possible. But delay must not be an option.”

An Overreach
For years fossil fuel industry executives and their allies in state Legislatures, Congress, the media, and free market think tanks have waged a persistent campaign to discredit the global scientific consensus that the world was warming, that the causes were largely due to man-made emissions from burning fossil fuels, and that if the trend persisted the consequences to Earth’s environment and economy could be catastrophic. The organized skepticism delivered results. One was to prompt journalists to seek “other side” quotations when reporting on new physical evidence of climate change or new reports from climate scientists.

But last November, the release of the stolen cache of emails from East Anglia University was followed by a carefully and well-orchestrated global message campaign by critics of climate science that focused on the not always graceful way that scientists communicated. Skeptics cherry picked the messages to bolster their argument that neither the scientists nor the science could be trusted. And if that was so, they argued, why should the U.S. or any other nation fashion a new regulatory framework to reduce carbon emissions to solve a problem that might not exist at all?

The email messages also provided justification for climate science reporters from mainstream news organizations to probe and find a few inaccuracies in important climate science studies, among them the exhaustive United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, which shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 with former Vice President Al Gore.

The IPCC acknowledged the errors — the rate of melting of Himalayan glaciers, for example, was overestimated by a decade or two — but argued that the original consensus about the causes and consequences of climate change were scientifically sound. Still, skeptics had drawn blood and pursued their work by targeting specific scientists, among them Michael Mann, a former researcher at the University of Virginia who now works at Penn State University and had been in active contact with colleagues at East Anglia University.

Blizzard of FOIAs
Since the disclosure of the hacked emails Mann and a number of other climate scientists have spent much of their professional time responding to Freedom of Information Act requests for notes, other emails, and research conducted while they were in the employ of state-funded or federally-funded research centers.

Those who filed the FOIA requests asserted that they were intent on discovering the accuracy of climate research findings. Scientists and their supporters fired back that the FOIA process was an attempt by climate skeptics to discover other instances of candid communications between scientists that might prove embarrassing, as well as damaging to scientific credibility.

Meanwhile Pennsylvania State University, the British government, and other groups established independent scientific panels to study the conduct of scientists who wrote some of the email messages, and whether the credibility of climate science was eroded. In every case, including an evaluation by a panel convened by the National Academy of Sciences, the independent groups found that climate scientists conducted themselves and their work with high standards of scientific principals and ethics. Each concluded that the stolen East Anglia emails revealed interesting twists and turns in how scientists communicated, but the emails in no way compromised the validity of scientific research on the hazards of climate change, or its causes.

On February 3, 2010, for instance, a panel established by Penn State to investigate Mann’s conduct and research published its finding that Mann had acted properly in his role as a scientist and researcher. On April 12, an independent British scientific panel investigating research results and conduct at the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia University found that “CRU did a public service of great value by carrying out much time-consuming meticulous work on temperature records at a time when it was unfashionable and attracted the interest of a rather small section of the scientific community. CRU has been among the leaders in international efforts to determining the overall uncertainty in the derived temperature records and where work is best focussed to improve them.”

In addition, studies by the Goddard Institute of Space Studies, the Environmental Protection Agency, and other government groups consistently concluded that global temperatures continue to rise, that the first decade of the 21st century was the warmest on record, and that physical evidence of the warming was appearing almost everywhere.

Virginia AG’s Agenda
Those conclusions, though, did not deter Virginia Attorney General Cuccinelli, who on April 27 filed a “civil investigative demand” under the Virginia Fraud Against Taxpayers Act requiring the University of Virginia to turn over documents related to Dr. Mann and his research from 1999-2005.

Such zealousness often marks the moment when an opposition movement built solely on ideology begins to crumble under the weight of real evidence of hazards and public opinion. An analogy is the property rights movement, which gained influence in state Legislatures and in Congress in the 1990s on the basis that government oversight of the environment was an intrusion in what conservatives asserted was their right to do with their own property what they deemed fit. The movement began to break down in the late 1990s when conservative governors and their anti-regulatory environmental agency chiefs ignored the law and failed to guard against environmental hazards, asserting their action could be seen as a “taking” of private property under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution.

In Michigan, for instance, state oil and gas regulators declined to carefully oversee maintenance work at natural gas wells in populated areas because it would interfere, they said, with the property rights of well owners. The result was that 11 people in Manistee, Michigan were injured in 1996 by a deliberate release of dangerous hydrogen sulfide gas from a well in their neighborhood. The incident was a turning point that significantly diminished the influence of property rights advocates in local and state elections, and in state policy making.

Cuccinelli was elected Virginia’s attorney general on the basis of his ardent support of extreme conservative views. He has filed federal lawsuits over clean energy policies and the Democratic-authored health care reform law. He has written to Virginia’s public college presidents telling them not to enforce policies that protect the rights of gays.

His pursuit of the climate investigation may delight allies in Virginia’s Tea Party, but the responses by the UVa faculty and the members of the National Academy of Sciences could cause a backlash among less conservative voters who see the probe as an overreach by a powerful government officer. Cuccinelli’s demand for documents is a hunt, but not one that benefits science or that most citizens are likely to support.

– Keith Schneider

On March 17, two weeks to the day before President Barack Obama laid out a new plan to expand offshore oil exploration in the United States, a government auction of federally controlled oil and gas reserves in the Gulf of Mexico was held at the New Orleans Superdome. It took just a few hours for 77 energy companies to pledge $1.3 billion to the U.S. Treasury to look for oil and natural gas across a 2.4 million-acre expanse of bottomlands 200 miles from shore, and in most cases thousands of feet below the surface.

The lease sale, one of the most lucrative on record, bolstered the Gulf’s global reputation as one of the hottest deepwater oil and gas plays on Earth. The Gulf of Mexico is responsible for a quarter of the 5.5 million barrels of oil produced daily in the U.S., according to the Department of Energy. And of the 1.4 million barrels produced daily in the Gulf, 1.1 million barrels comes from over 100 deep sea production platforms. The Interior Department predicts that by the end of the decade, deep sea production in the Gulf could reach nearly 2 million barrels a day.

Though offshore oil production is dangerous – 165 people died when an offshore platform exploded off the coast of Scotland in 1998; 10 more people were killed in a drilling rig explosion off the coast of Brazil in 2001 – a kind of Titanic syndrome had set in with Gulf coast oil explorers. The high-tech, semi-submersible, nearly $1 billion floating drilling platforms that operated in the deep Gulf waters were seen as too big, too modern, too well-equipped to fail.

Moreover there is so much oil (and natural gas) beneath the deep Gulf bottomlands – 85.9 billion barrels of oil, according to several estimates – and so much money to be made at $70 to $100 a barrel, that downplaying the risks made economic and political sense. Federal drilling permits obtained by developers normally did not require extensive and time-consuming analysis of the environmental risks, the government has acknowledged.

On April 20, an explosion and fire aboard Transoceans’ Deepwater Horizon drilling platform, which was operating under contract to BP, killed 11 workers. The accident provided the latest unmistakable evidence of the workplace hazards of deep sea exploration. Then two days later, on Earth Day’s 40^th anniversary, the Deepwater Horizon sank and simultaneously produced an oil slick that the government says is growing by about 5,000 barrels of oil daily.

America Awake?
By any measure, the Gulf spill has reawakened the nation and magnified the human, environmental, and political consequences of oil production, especially from such treacherous places as the deep ocean. But the spill has not yet made clear what, if anything, the nation is prepared to do in response.

Indeed, the Deepwater explosion and the spreading slick are apt metaphors for an era of striking domestic risks related to energy production and consumption and growing uncertainties about how to reduce them.

Not Santa Barbara, Not 1969
There is no longer much reasoned debate that America’s devotion to fossil fuel, and especially to oil, has contributed to dangerous energy insecurity, rising atmospheric concentrations of climate changing gases, increasing costs, decreasing incomes, and a ferocious national recession. Yet the national response is so different than the  January 1969 oil spill in Santa Barbara, California, which soaked the beaches with crude oil. That spill produced a momentous national that helped to launch Earth Day and a decade of policy making that cleared the skies and cleaned the waters.

In contrast the Deepwater spill, so far, has produced modest public concern nationally and little more than that.

President Obama on April 30 announced he would suspend his March 31 decision to open new areas to offshore exploration pending a full investigation of the Deepwater accident. In the Senate, where a climate and energy bill has been delayed because of partisan infighting, lawmakers debated whether the Gulf spill would 1) break or 2) cement the deadlock.

It is clear the United States needs a new energy policy. The devastating spill has heightened awareness on Capitol Hill to the dangers of U.S. dependence on oil. Democratic Senators Robert Menendez and Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey, and Bill Nelson of Florida held a news conference this week to alert their colleagues that including additional offshore oil exploration has no place in a comprehensive climate and energy bill.

Halting the Spill
In the Gulf, BP says it is moving as fast as it can to plug the well and on Wednesday the company announced that it had stemmed one of three leaks in the pipe that once attached the well to the Deepwater drilling platform. Fishing in the coastal waters, some of the most productive fishing grounds on the planet, has been suspended. Meanwhile the governors of Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, and Florida expressed concern about the expanding spill, which was drifting closer to their shores.

Source: Minerals Management Service

– Keith Schneider

Barack Obama addressed 90,000 people Saturday at the Big House, the University of Michigan’s football stadium, where he was greeted warmly by the largest crowd to hear the president since the inauguration. Among the nearly 10,000 graduates was my daughter Kayla.

The university is a place of innovation, stability, and optimism in a state that has endured more negative consequences of the recession, and the underlying transitional factors that caused it, than any other. The evidence list is long and familiar. Detroit is losing 10,000 residents a year, and is home to less than half as many residents as it had in the 1950s. The state is just one of two — Rhode Island is the other — that is losing population. Joblessness is high. Incomes are low. Most of Saturday’s graduates will begin their careers outside Michigan, where we’ve been sending our best   since 1990. For two decades in a row, Michigan has been a national leader in exporting its brightest young minds.

Michigan voted for Obama because he represented hope and because his calm, self-effacing, and candid style is appreciated even though the state is fueled by division. Blacks from whites. Urban from suburban. North from south. Detroit from Grand Rapids. Conservatives from liberals. Front office from shop floor. Michigan from Michigan State. Perhaps that’s why Obama, who’s confronting upheaval and resistance at every turn — war, the economy, jobs, political opposition in both parties, climate change, energy, and an expanding environmental disaster in the Gulf — chose Michigan as the place to address how Americans behave in the public arena. His speech, he said, was prompted by a kindergarten student who sent him a letter that asked, “Are people being nice?”