About 30 big businesses, including several big electric utilities, are pushing the Senate for a climate change bill this year. Not the usual thing, but not surprising in this instance. A bill with dozens of provisions that make up for the pain of the mandates would be better for many of the companies than an unadorned set of requirements from the Obama administration.
At the same time, an almost innumerable list of mostly state and local companies and organizations -- but the American Petroleum Institute is in there, too -- are pushing the opposite way. MidAmerican Energy is the only big electric company involved in this group, called Energy Citizens. In DC, at least, the organization is running lots of those little bitty TV commercials urging people to save jobs and lobby their members of Congress against the measure.
The Kerry-Boxer Senate bill, like the House's Waxman-Markey bill, "could mean a huge new energy tax on farmers, truckers, small businesses and American's families and imperil millions of US jobs," the Energy Citizens site says.
At the bottom of the very, very long list of participants is the Wayne-White Counties Electric Cooperative, in Illinois, whose site's front page shows that the climate legislation is seriously atop the co-op's agenda. Co-ops across the country have deluged Congress already with postcards decrying efforts to price carbon and raise the price of carbon-based power.
So senators' offices have got to be feeling pretty besieged. Less than a week ago, things were looking bad for the bill this year; Obama's energy/climate change czar, Carol Browner, was saying a Senate bill this year was pretty much a no-go. Yesterday, she was calling Senate passage this year "an open question." This came after some of the big-business group, being called We Can Lead, and other energy-industry people met with administration officials at the White House.
It would be reasonable to think that the approximately 100 energy executives at the White House may have hoped to inject some zest into the administration's commitment to push the climate bill, but the public statements Wednesday afternoon were from the administration urging the executives to help get the thing going. They had begun to try, even as individual companies among them keep working for whatever bill provisions will provide the various benefits they want: support for nuclear power, perhaps easier carbon-reduction targets, more emission allocations for certain groups maybe offshore drilling, and more. They have bought full-page ads in the major newspapers and are devoting a good deal of resources to the effort.
These are companies like Starbucks, and utilities that have a lot of nuclear capacity, which is seen as doing well in a carbon-costly market. Duke Energy is the exception; it has a lot of coal (as well as nuclear), but it has persisted in promoting carbon legislation. The co-ops, and MidAmerican, have a lot of coal capacity, and they, too, are looking for concessions -- more radical ones than the We Can Lead group wants, including a change in the allocation of carbon allowances.
It may be a stalemate. And there are other issues: trade sanctions, prospects for the December climate talks in Copenhagen. But some in the We Can Lead group think there's a chance.
One appears to be Curt Hebert, who is known to the power and gas industry as a former, though relatively short-time, chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. He works for Entergy now. A big nuclear player, Entergy has joined the We Can Lead group. It is new to that advocacy scene, and it's interesting to see it there, since its Southeast/South Central region's politics don't generally favor environmental legislation and higher energy costs. But Entergy executives are talking to their states' federal lawmakers. "It's a great dialogue," Hebert said Wednesday after the White House meeting. "They are good and reasonable people."
He made a characteristically optimistic, but also well-founded, observation: "The one thing about Washington, DC," he said, "is never try to define what is possible and not possible. You'll be wrong."
Leave a comment