Government Executive - Authors - Amy Harder

With Staff Changes, EPA Sharpens Climate Focus

Amy Harder, National Journal — Fri, 13 Dec 2013 09:55:33 -0500

The head of the Environmental Protection Agency is shuffling the agency's staff to put greater focus on President Obama's climate agenda.

In an announcement issued last week and obtained Thursday by National Journal Daily, EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy named Joel Beauvais to be associate administrator for EPA's policy office, a spot left vacant when Michael Goo left the post earlier this fall for the Energy Department.

Beauvais has a background in global warming. He worked on House cap-and-trade legislation from 2007 to 2010 while counsel to the now-defunct Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming and then as counsel to the Energy and Commerce Committee.

Prior to this post, Beauvais was associate assistant administrator in EPA's air and radiation office, which McCarthy led prior to her appointment as administrator earlier this year.

McCarthy also promoted Alisha Johnson, previously press secretary, to be deputy associate administrator for EPA's office for external affairs and environmental education.

"I am confident that in these new roles, Joel and Alisha will continue to be instrumental as we implement the President's Climate Action Plan and continue our work to protect human health and the environment," McCarthy said in the Dec. 3 memo making the announcements.

These promotions come on the heels of additional changes McCarthy made to her personal office this summer in a way that, according to a memo McCarthy sent to staff in July, will "emphasize working with the White House and key stakeholders to create opportunities to highlight the benefits of our work."

The memo highlights several changes in staff working closest with McCarthy.

Lisa Feldt, formerly deputy assistant administrator for EPA's solid waste and emergency response office, is now associate deputy administrator of EPA. Arvin Ganesan, formerly associate administrator for EPA's congressional affairs and intergovernmental relations office, is now deputy chief of staff for policy.

Feldt and Ganesan will focus on a range of issues across the agency "in an effort to streamline our processes, maximize efficiency and identify opportunities to highlight activities that provide the greatest on the ground environmental benefit," McCarthy said in the memo.

Feldt has been focusing heavily on policies related to methane emissions, according to sources familiar with her portfolio. The administration's handling of methane, a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent harmful than carbon dioxide, has faced more scrutiny as the country becomes more dependent on natural gas, a fossil fuel that is composed primarily of methane but burns with half the carbon emissions of coal. It's for that reason the conventional wisdom indicates natural gas is better for global warming than coal. But peer-reviewed studies are raising questions about how much methane is inadvertently leaked during production and transmission of natural gas, triggering calls from environmentalists for increased regulations. EPA has argued that rules issued in 2012 to limit traditional pollutants like sulfur dioxide also have the effect of reducing methane emissions.

Taking Ganesan's spot in the congressional affairs and intergovernmental relations office is Laura Vaught, who was previously Ganesan's deputy. According to her LinkedIn profile, Vaught has worked on Capitol Hill for more than a decade, including as chief of staff to former Rep. Rick Boucher, D-Va., who was instrumental in crafting the House cap-and-trade bill.

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Bill Could Stifle EPA Power-Plant Regulations

Amy Harder, National Journal — Mon, 28 Oct 2013 16:32:11 -0400

A coal-state duo floated legislation Monday that would require congressional approval of President Obama's rules aimed at slashing carbon emissions from the nation's existing fleet of coal-fired power plants, according to a draft of the bill obtained by National Journal.

The pair of lawmakers—House Energy and Power Subcommittee Chairman Ed Whitfield, R-Ky., and Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va.—come from two of the most coal-dependent states in the country, and they worry that the Environmental Protection Agency's suite of regulations aimed at addressing climate change will cripple their states' economies and the nation's electricity supply, which is 40 to 45 percent coal-based.

The bill would make EPA's forthcoming rules for existing power plants as well as for modified and reconstructed plants contingent upon Congress passing a law "specifying the effective date," according to a one-page summary of the bill and a section-by-section summary. This would not bode well for EPA given the gridlock on Capitol Hill and could essentially stop the administration from finalizing the rules, which are a cornerstone of Obama's agenda for addressing climate change without new legislation being approved by Congress.

The bill also addresses EPA's rules for new power plants, proposed in September. It would block the proposal and require EPA to set a standard for coal-fired power plants that has "been achieved over a one-year period by at least six units located at different commercial power plants in the United states."

Coal-state lawmakers are concerned that EPA's proposed rules for new plants will require technology for carbon capture and sequestration that is not yet commercially available.

(Image via Frank Wasserfuehrer/Shutterstock.com)

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Why and How Obama Will (Probably) Approve Keystone XL

Amy Harder, National Journal — Tue, 02 Jul 2013 11:19:30 -0400

Gazing into my columnist's crystal ball on a steamy summer day when many in the Obama administration have climate change on their minds, I see a decision coming on the Keystone XL pipeline on a cold December day when most people have holiday shopping on their minds.

Based on conversations with administration insiders, here's how I envision the final act of the long-running Keystone drama playing out:

Secretary of State John Kerry, who counts combatting climate change as one of his lifelong passions, will recommend to President Obama that he should not approve the pipeline, which would send 35 million gallons of oil every day over 1,700 miles from Alberta's carbon-heavy oil sands to Gulf Coast refineries. Obama will decide to approve the project, in large part because he will have secured commitments from Canada to do more to reduce its carbon emissions.

Obama will publicly repudiate Kerry, akin to how Obama publicly repudiated Lisa Jackson, his first Environmental Protection Agency administrator, two years ago when she asked the White House to let her move forward on a stronger smog standard. On the Friday before Labor Day 2011, Obama announced that he was delaying the standard because of economic concerns.

At that point in time, Jackson endured as the champion for disenchanted environmentalists.

Sometime this winter -- I predict in December -- Kerry will play that same role when Obama decides to approve the pipeline.

The response from pipeline proponents, especially Republicans in Congress, will be jubilation. More importantly, approval of the project can only help, not hurt, Democrats up for reelection in 2014, including Sens. Mary Landrieu in Louisiana, Mark Pryor in Arkansas, and Mark Begich in Alaska, who all support the pipeline and have more-conservative energy positions than Obama. But because the decision comes nearly a year before Election Day 2014, it will likely be old political news by the time campaigns kick into high gear.

The reaction from the environmental community, especially the grassroots opposition led by the Sierra Club and 350.org, will be loud and fevered. They will probably have lawsuits waiting in the pipeline (pun intended). But many environmentalists realize it's not the only climate game in town now that Obama has committed to clamping down on carbon emissions from coal-fired power plants, which account for nearly 40 percent of U.S. greenhouse gases.

"For us, the primary thing is to get the largest single sources, which is power plants, and control their carbon emissions," Frances Beinecke, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council, told me last week at Georgetown University while waiting to hear Obama give what was his most substantive speech on climate change as president. "That's the center of the plan. Now the next thing is to get it done."

To the surprise of everyone outside the White House, Obama mentioned the pipeline in his speech. It was a politically savvy move for three reasons: 1) He called out the elephant in the room and thus avoided both criticism from groups like the Sierra Club and the subsequent media coverage of his omission; 2) He took ownership of the issue, showing everyone on every side of the fight he is personally involved; and 3) He shifted the debate over the pipeline from one of economics to one about the effects on climate change.

"Our national interest will only be served if this project does not significantly exacerbate the problem of carbon pollution," Obama said forcefully, prompting loud cheers from the audience of several hundred climate-minded people. "The net effects of the pipeline's impact on our climate will be absolutely critical to determining whether this project is allowed to go forward."

Environmentalists cheered Obama's new "test" for the pipeline. They maintain that there isn't a way Obama could approve the project since its impact will surely "significantly exacerbate" climate change. People close to the White House read it differently.

"I think it was a clear signal to the Canadians to come to the table and put a good-faith program out there that could provide the kind of net reductions beyond anyone's doubt that would allow Obama to proceed," said a source close to the Obama administration who would speak on the condition of anonymity only.

The basis for Obama to couple his decision to approve the pipeline with additional significant climate commitments from our northern neighbor will not come from nowhere. When the EPA sent a letter in April to the State Department, the federal agency tasked with reviewing the pipeline, and criticized the department's environmental assessment, Cynthia Giles, EPA's assistant administrator for enforcement, also wrote this:

"EPA recommends that the final EIS [environmental impact statement] complement this discussion with an exploration of specific ways that the U.S. might work with Canada to promote further efforts to reduce GHG emissions associated with the production of oil sands crude, including a joint focus on carbon capture and storage projects and research, as well as ways to improve energy efficiency associated with extraction technologies," Giles writes in the seven-page letter.

While approving the Keystone XL pipeline, Obama will say he is leveraging his power over the project to drive an international effort to combat climate change, which is what the debate about the pipeline is all about.

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Analysis: Can We Regulate Our Way Out of Climate Change?

Amy Harder, National Journal — Mon, 01 Jul 2013 09:27:38 -0400

Bypassing Capitol Hill, President Obama is throwing his political power behind his administration’s actions to combat global warming.

“For the sake of our children, and the health and safety of all Americans, I’m directing the Environmental Protection Agency to put an end to the limitless dumping of carbon pollution from our power plants, and complete new pollution standards for both new and existing power plants,” Obama said last week in a speech at Georgetown University on a 90-degree, humid day.

Throughout his first term in the White House, Obama used EPA regulations as a stick to prod Congress to pass comprehensive legislation that put a price on the greenhouse-gas emissions that scientists say cause global warming. Obama said several times that EPA wasn’t his first option to tackle climate change. Now that he has failed to get such a bill through Congress, the president is prepared to fight the problem through his EPA. He did, however, leave the possibility of compromise on the table.

“I am open to all sorts of new ideas, maybe better ideas to make sure that we deal with climate change in a way that promotes jobs and growth,” Obama said later in his speech.

Is EPA the best way to attack climate change? If not, what other ideas would be better? Do these ideas have the ability to gain bipartisan support on Capitol Hill?

With EPA now actively working on regulations to control greenhouse-gas emissions from existing power plants, will this be enough of a threat to force Congress to come up with another, potentially better solution?

See the discussion at NationalJournal.com.

(Image via Vladimir Melnik/Shutterstock.com)

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Obama's Last Hope for Climate Change: EPA

Amy Harder, National Journal — Tue, 25 Jun 2013 09:30:00 -0400

President Obama is ready to take one more shot at combating global warming with the last, least-popular, and messiest tool he's got left: regulations administered by the politically besieged Environmental Protection Agency.

It won't be popular, it might not work, and it could cost him his pick to head EPA.

But the hard reality is this: Three years after Congress killed a cap-and-trade bill, Obama is running out of time.

If Obama doesn't finalize EPA rules controlling greenhouse-gas emissions from the nation's carbon-emitting power plants before he leaves the White House, a Republican president or Senate could undo the rules—and his legacy.

"He is serious about making it a second-term priority," Heather Zichal, Obama's top energy and climate adviser, said at an event last week. "He knows this is a legacy issue."

In a speech at Georgetown University on Tuesday, Obama will outline a timeline for EPA to move forward regulating carbon emissions from new and existing power plants, which account for almost 40 percent of the country's heat-trapping emissions. EPA proposed rules for new plants last spring but missed its April deadline to finalize them.

But Obama will immediately faces hurdles in Congress, even as he seeks to unilaterally impose regulations through the executive branch. The Senate has not yet confirmed Gina McCarthy, Obama's nominee to head the agency who is currently EPA's assistant administrator for air. Obama's announcement Tuesday will further inflame McCarthy's already incendiary confirmation process.

"The Obama administration may conclude that the policy priority of moving forward on GHG emissions reductions outweighs the political gain of confirming McCarthy in a timely manner," according to analysis published Monday by ClearView Energy Partners, a Washington-based nonpartisan consulting firm. McCarthy could execute Obama's directive from her current post as EPA's top air chief. Acting Administrator Bob Perciasepe could remain in his post indefinitely, which is allowed under EPA's organizational plan.

As a result of the administration's environmental activism, Obama's party may also face newfound trouble in the 2014 midterms. The National Republican Senatorial Committee is already targeting vulnerable red-state Democrats up for reelection, including Sens. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, Mark Begich of Alaska, and Mark Pryor of Arkansas. "Landrieu Ushers in Obama's Climate Change Agenda," says one NRSC statement released Monday. "Jobs & Economy Fall Victim to Liberal Wishlist." GOP strategists believe that voters in Republican-leaning, energy-producing states could punish Democratic incumbents who support additional regulations.

"In what amounts to a national energy tax, the president will pivot away from jobs—the No. 1 issue for constituents," said Don Stewart, spokesman for Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky. McConnell will be criticizing the president's plan in a floor speech Tuesday morning.

If Republicans win back the Senate next year, they will have the tools to undo any new regulations. Using the Congressional Review Act, senators would be able to bypass the majority leader and force a vote requiring only 51 votes to pass a resolution nullifying regulations finalized within 60 days. The White House is reportedly worried such an effort could succeed against EPA's climate rules.

"He [Obama] is concerned about whether or not he has enough support in the Senate to defend vetoes of environmental regulations," said Michael Kieschnick, CEO and cofounder of CREDO, a cell-phone company heavily involved in advocating for action on climate change. Kieschnick has attended private fundraisers with Obama in recent months where the president addressed climate change.

Amid these political obstacles, Obama must navigate the significant legal and policy hurdles, which will inevitably come along with a regulation whose wide-reaching scope surpasses any other EPA rule, according to experts.

"Two years is about the minimal time it would take to go from soup to nuts on a rule like this," said Roger Martella, who was EPA general counsel under President George W. Bush. "These rules don't come out of the clear blue sky and involve lengthy internal deliberations before the public even gets a first peak at them."

Once EPA is done writing the rules, a flood of lawsuits will pour in from both sides of the issue. Litigation also takes time, during which it would be ideal if Obama was still in the White House. "We reason the Obama administration wants to defend its power plant GHG … rule(s) against legal challenges rather than leaving it to another, potentially less simpatico administration," states the analysis by ClearView Energy Partners.

Time might be the biggest hurdle of all.

"Part of the challenge is, how much can they do in a limited amount of time," said Jody Freeman, who worked on energy and climate issues in the White House during Obama's first term. "This plan is a race against time. We're already six months into a second term."

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Energy Department Weighs Permits for Exporting Natural Gas

Amy Harder, National Journal — Tue, 21 May 2013 09:17:47 -0400

Christopher Smith, the Energy Department official in charge of shaping the Obama administration’s policy on exporting natural gas, recalls working for Chevron on an import facility during the first part of the last decade. At the time, U.S. reserves were thought to be scarce and fuel prices were accordingly high.

“That business model completely turned around,” Smith said in a recent interview with National Journal Daily. “It’s given me an understanding of how quickly markets can evolve.” In a 127-page decision published Friday, Smith announced that the administration had approved the second of more than 20 applications pending at the Energy Department to export natural gas.

Smith is expected to face a barrage of questioning on this decision when he testifies during a forum Tuesday before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. Nine others will testify, but he will be the star witness as lawmakers, energy producers, manufacturers, and environmentalists scramble to find out what factors are driving administration policy and how many more export permits Smith might approve.

“We have what I think is a great dilemma, which is: How do we best and most prudently take advantage of what is a tremendous and important resource?” said Smith, 45, who was born in California and grew up in Fort Worth, Texas.

This “great dilemma” Smith speaks of demands the attention of almost every corner of the energy sector and environmentalists, too. Companies producing natural gas, like Chesapeake Energy and ExxonMobil, and those involved in building export terminals, like Dominion, are urging the administration to approve more permits. Manufacturers such as Dow Chemical, meanwhile, are benefiting from the near-record-low natural-gas prices of the last few years, and they worry that exporting too much of it could force a spike in prices akin to what the United States saw in the last decade. Some environmental groups, led by the Sierra Club, are opposed to all exports of the fuel because they oppose hydraulic fracturing, which is controversial for its environmental impact but key to extracting the gas from shale.

Smith leads the small team within the Energy Department’s Office of Fossil Energy that’s tasked with finding the right balance among all of these competing concerns. A spokesperson didn’t say how many people are working on this, but people outside the administration involved in the regulatory-review process say it’s a small number, possibly in the single-digits.

“There’s a small group at DOE who suddenly find themselves in the middle of all this,” said Bruce McKay, managing director of federal affairs at Dominion.

Despite the number of applications pending before the office, the Obama administration’s budget for fiscal 2014 proposed a decrease of 1.5 percent for the import/export authorization program within the Fossil Energy office, from the current $2.12 million funding level to $2.08 million.

Smith says his priority is to work toward the goals laid out by the president, including reducing oil imports by a third over the next 10 years, and doing it in a way that doesn’t jeopardize safety or the environment where the energy is produced.

“Our job is to make sure the people who live and work in the communities where these wells are being drilled have the confidence that we take their concerns seriously,” Smith said.

President Obama might call out big oil from time to time, but that’s exactly where Smith was plucked from in 2009 to work under the newly inaugurated president. Smith worked for two major oil companies, Texaco and Chevron, during a span of 11 years starting in 1998. While at these companies, he focused much of his time on natural-gas trading and also spent three years negotiating production and transportation agreements in Bogota, Colombia.

“I did a lot of risk and commercial work around figuring out the best way to optimize producing energy overseas and bringing it to the United States,” Smith said.

Now, with the United States awash in shale natural gas, he finds himself not only in an opposite energy landscape but also on the opposite side of the issue: inside the government trying to find the sweet spot instead of inside a major oil company seeking to maximize profits.

Mark Brownstein, associate vice president and chief counsel of the Environmental Defense Fund’s climate and energy program, isn’t concerned about Smith’s oil-industry background.

“In the work I’ve done with him, I’ve always known him to be very open-minded on the question of environmental challenges associated with gas production,” said Brownstein, who has worked with Smith on a couple of federal advisory boards related to natural gas. “In some ways, he’s more knowledgeable about some of these challenges specifically because he’s worked in the industry and has seen some of the challenges firsthand.”

This article appears in the May 21, 2013, edition of National Journal Daily as Meet the Man Behind Natural-Gas Export Decisions.

(Image via huyangshu/Shutterstock.com)

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GOP Forces Gridlock Over Obama’s Nominees for EPA, Labor

Amy Harder, National Journal — Thu, 09 May 2013 16:21:09 -0400

Senate Republicans are forcing partisan debates about the role of the executive branch and its commitment to transparency by blocking the confirmation of two of President Obama’s nominees to top positions within his administration.

There doesn’t yet seem to be any clear resolution to the stalemate, which is holding up the confirmations of Gina McCarthy as Environmental Protection Agency administrator and Thomas Perez as Labor secretary.

The Senate ritual of confirming the president’s Cabinet nominees every four years provides the minority party in the Senate a rare chance to influence how the upper chamber and the administration operate. The Republicans, led by Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., are seizing that opportunity.

Republicans on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee boycotted their panel’s confirmation vote Thursday that Chairwoman Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., had scheduled despite objections from ranking member David Vitter, R-La.

His chief concern is not the agency’s regulations controlling greenhouse-gas emissions that cause climate change or even McCarthy herself. He and other Republicans on the panel say that EPA is not being responsive enough to their questions and concerns about the agency’s commitment to transparency, including using official e-mail accounts and not providing comprehensive data about pending regulations.

“It should come as no surprise that the Obama administration continues to stonewall reasonable information requests from Republicans,” McConnell said in a statement to National Journal Daily.

EPA spokesmen and Democrats on the environment panel defend the agency. “I’m going to put this into the record the answer to the thousands of questions,” Boxer said at McCarthy’s would-be confirmation vote Thursday morning where the Republican side of the dais was left empty. “It’s small print, both sides,” added Boxer, waving the stack of documents in the air.

The White House slammed Republicans’ boycott of McCarthy’s confirmation.

“It is unfortunate that some Republicans have chosen to play politics with this nomination,” a White House official said. “Gina McCarthy has decades of experience implementing sensible and achievable standards which protect the air we breathe and save lives, all while supporting a strong economy.”

Democrats are also rebutting Vitter’s charge that McCarthy hasn’t been responsive enough to his requests. According to numbers compiled by a Democratic official, McCarthy has responded to 1,120 questions for the record, compared to 157 questions Lisa Jackson, Obama’s first EPA administrator answered, and 230 questions that Stephen Johnson, George W. Bush’s administrator nominee, responded to.

Democrats signaled they will go to great lengths, including seeking to change Senate rules, to bypass Republicans’ obstructions.

“We will look at all our parliamentary options, including changing the rules of this committee,” Boxer said. “I don’t know if we can do it just with the majority.”

The committee’s rules state that for the panel to take action at a business meeting, at least a third of the committee must be present, and of that third, at least two members must be from the minority party. As with most rules, there’s an exception: The committee can take action if a majority of the total committee is present, which seems to imply that if every Democratic member shows up, Boxer could bypass Republicans altogether to approve McCarthy’s nomination to EPA.

That task would require the 89-year-old Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey to show up. Lautenberg, who is in a wheelchair, hadn’t cast a vote since Feb. 28, but he made a special trip to the Capitol to vote in support of gun-reform legislation last month, according to a report by NJ.com.

“It depends on the health of Senator Lautenberg,” Boxer said. “So we have some work to do on that.”

A spokesperson for Lautenberg, Caley Gray, said that if Boxer seeks to move McCarthy's confirmation along party lines, Lautenberg would make sure to show up.

If and when McCarthy makes it through the Environment and Public Works Committee, Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., placed a hold on confirmation to the full Senate all the way back in March.

Republicans’ beef with Perez, Obama’s pick for Labor secretary and currently assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, stems from the nominee's “ideological” background, according to McConnell.

“His willingness, time and again, to bend or ignore the law and to misstate the facts in order to advance his far-left ideology lead me and others to conclude that he’d continue to do so if he were confirmed to another, and much more consequential, position of public trust,” McConnell said on the Senate floor Wednesday.

Republicans on the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee delayed a confirmation vote of Perez in that committee Wednesday. It’s now set for May 16, according to the Associated Press.

“Republicans will use any procedural roadblock or stall tactic available to deny the president qualified nominees,” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said on the floor Thursday. “But my Republican colleagues can try every trick in the book. I assure you, Mr. Perez will have his day in the Senate. I assure you, Ms. McCarthy will have her day in the Senate. And I will do all that I can to ensure these highly qualified nominees are confirmed.”

Meanwhile, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., continues his hold of Ernest Moniz to be Obama’s Energy secretary not because of the nominee himself but because of cuts to a nuclear-waste facility in his state. His office confirmed Thursday that nothing has changed on that front.

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What the Senate Energy Panel Would Look Like Under Chairwoman Landrieu

Amy Harder — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 11:33:43 -0400

If Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., takes over the gavel of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee next Congress, she is in a prime spot to lead on an issue that’s critically important to her state—energy—and finally get past the finish line her signature policy issue: energy revenue-sharing for coastal states. But even if Landrieu wins reelection (and that’s a big if), several other dynamics would influence how much she is able to lead on that committee.

Right now, Landrieu is the third-most-senior Democrat on the panel, after Tim Johnson of South Dakota, who has already announced he is retiring, and current Chairman Ron Wyden, D-Ore., who is also the second-most-senior Democrat on the powerful—and coveted—Senate Finance Committee. With the retirement announcement of Finance Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., last week, and the conventional wisdom suggesting Wyden wouldn’t say no to the Finance gavel, Landrieu is poised to be the top Democrat on the committee. If Democrats keep control of the Senate, she would chair what’s arguably the most powerful committee for the state she has represented since 1996.

When it comes to energy issues, Landrieu is one of the most conservative Democrats in the Senate. She, along with Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., vote more reliably with Republicans on most energy and environmental issues than with the Democratic Party led by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. This dynamic has led to rumors that Reid could seek to maneuver around Landrieu to ensure that a more moderate Democrat—such as fourth-in-line Sen. Maria Cantwell of Washington state--gets the Energy gavel in 2015 instead. Several people close to Landrieu who are familiar with the Democratic seniority system in picking chairs dismissed this possibility.

“At a time when the party is trying to establish strong beachheads in the South, as well as places like the Mountain West, that would seem to be headed in the wrong direction,” said Paul Bledsoe, president of consulting firm Bledsoe & Associates, who worked on energy and climate issues for then-President Clinton and for Democratic members in Congress.

“At least to date, Democrats have never violated the seniority rule,” said McKie Campbell, who retired recently from the Senate after serving as staff director for Energy and Natural Resources Committee ranking member Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, for the past several years. “I think it would be one heck of a fight were he to do that.”

In fact, precedent indicates that Reid doesn’t interfere when members with differing political perspectives rise in the ranks to chair key committees, such as Baucus at Finance and now-retired Sen. Joe Lieberman, ID-Conn., at Homeland Security. But that doesn’t mean Reid wouldn’t influence the committee’s business in more implicit ways.

“The bigger question would be how it would affect the ability of bills the Energy Committee passes out to go to the floor,” McKie said. He noted that Reid bypassed the Finance Committee to bring to the floor legislation that would empower states to collect taxes from online sales. Baucus opposes the legislation. Would Reid ensure that bills Landrieu pushes in the Energy Committee don’t make it to the floor if he and other more liberal members of the Democratic caucus oppose the legislation? It’s a question Senate staffers and those close to Landrieu are asking.

Reid's office did not respond to a request for comment.

Wyden has expressed an interest in pursuing Landrieu’s revenue-sharing legislation this Congress, but he hasn’t officially signed on as a cosponsor yet, and it’s unlikely the measure will become law before Election Day 2014. If that’s the case, Landrieu could face another hurdle: Her partner-in-crime on this issue, fellow coastal-state Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaskka, the ranking Republican on the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, will no longer be able to serve as ranking member next Congress because of the GOP’s term limits. Murkowski is in the last third of her six-year term as ranking member. She still has the full six years to serve as chairwoman.

That means if Democrats keep the Senate, Landrieu will likely have Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., as her ranking member. Barrasso is a big supporter of fossil fuels (his state produces 40 percent of all coal mined in the U.S.). But as a senator from a landlocked state that already benefits from a piece of the energy-royalty pie, Barrasso doesn’t view Landrieu’s revenue-sharing quest with the same urgency as Landrieu and Murkowski do. According to a spokeswoman, Barrasso hasn’t taken a position on the Landrieu-Murkowski revenue-sharing legislation. (Ironically, a graphic on Landrieu’s website uses Wyoming to compare what interior states get in energy royalties compared with coastal states.)

Although not the desired outcome for the Democratic Party, Landrieu would probably have the best chance at passing her revenue-sharing legislation next Congress if Republicans take control of the Senate in 2014, which would set up Murkowski as chair and she as the ranking member.

The pair’s good working relationship and both of their reputations for working with members of the opposite party could bode well for broader energy legislation.

“That kind of demonstrated success and building the 60 votes of support necessary to get things over the finish line, that is a match that would be very hard to beat in terms of making meaningful change,” said Tom Michels, who worked on energy issues for Landrieu from 2006 to 2010. “I think there is huge potential there.”

But until Election Day 2014, Landrieu will be trying hard to get work done in the committee under Chairman Wyden—and to make sure voters back in Louisiana know about it.

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Energy Nominee Blocked Over Cuts at S.C. Nuclear-Waste Plant

Amy Harder, National Journal — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 09:36:29 -0400

In his recent confirmation hearing, Ernest Moniz told senators that one of his very first trips as Energy secretary would be to Hanford, the troublesome nuclear-waste site in Washington state. But Moniz might be wise to detour down to South Carolina on his way in light of a move Tuesday by Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., to block his confirmation.

Graham complains that President Obama’s budget proposal for fiscal 2014 would slash funding for a plutonium-reprocessing facility along the Savannah River in South Carolina and redirect the government’s plans for dealing with weapons-grade nuclear waste to other options.

“When it comes to lowering costs, count me in,” Graham said to Anne Harrington, deputy administrator for defense nuclear nonproliferation at the Energy Department’s National Nuclear Security Administration, at a budget hearing Tuesday. “When it comes to studying another way to do it, count me out.”

“We’re halfway through,” Graham said to Harrington. “There is no other way to do it.”

Graham’s office did not respond to a request for comment about what exactly the senator is requesting in order to lift the hold on Moniz, who otherwise should expect a relatively easy confirmation. Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., also expressed concerns about the Savannah River project at Moniz’s confirmation hearing before the Energy and Natural Resources Committee earlier this month. Scott was the only member to vote against Moniz’s confirmation in committee.

According to a recent Government Accountability Office report, the project’s costs have more than quadrupled to $7.7 billion in the past eight years and will take three more years than planned to complete, until 2019.

The NNSA’s budget states about the project: “In an environment where the Budget Control Act and sequestration severely curtail our resources, we need to step back and review all available options.”

According to the agency’s budget proposal, funding for the Savannah River project’s construction would be slashed by about 25 percent in the next fiscal year—from $435,172 last year to a proposed $320,000 in 2014. (Cleanup work at the Hanford site actually saw a funding increase in this year’s budget.)

The Energy Department directed inquiries on the matter to a White House spokesman, who did not have a comment.

Obama’s first Energy secretary, Steven Chu, left the post Tuesday and Acting Secretary Daniel Poneman has taken over while Moniz awaits confirmation.

This article appeared in the Wednesday, April 24, 2013 edition of National Journal Daily.

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Besieged Regulator Appointed to Nuclear-Weapons Panel

Amy Harder, National Journal — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 17:10:11 -0400

Late in the evening on Wednesday, one of the busiest and most unnerving times Washington has seen in a long while, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid quietly appointed a controversial former nuclear-energy regulator to a key but obscure panel.

Reid appointed Gregory Jaczko, the beleaguered former chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, to a newly created congressional advisory panel that oversees the Energy Department’s National Nuclear Security Administration, which manages the nation’s nuclear-weapons stockpile and nuclear nonproliferation with about $8 billion taxpayer dollars.

Jaczko, who used to work for the Nevada Democrat, resigned last spring from the NRC, the agency tasked with regulating the country’s nuclear power plants, after a government watchdog revealed allegations from within the agency that Jaczko was a bullying and intimidating leader. Despite those allegations, Reid stood by his former aide and continues to today.

“Greg Jaczko is an experienced leader on science and nuclear-security issues, and his expertise will be invaluable to the [oversight panel’s] work,” Reid said in a statement to National Journal Daily. “As Chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Jaczko helped push for increased safety and security measures to protect our nation’s nuclear plants and provided leadership during the Fukushima nuclear crisis. Jaczko’s experience will serve the [panel] well as it develops recommendations on the management of our nation’s nuclear arsenal.”

Jaczko’s spring resignation from the NRC was the culmination of an almost year-long drama at the normally nondescript agency, which is traditionally known for being one of the best places to work in the federal government. The soap-opera saga displayed itself through inspector-general reports and emotional congressional testimony by fellow agency commissioners, including Republican Commissioner Kristine Svinicki, who criticized Jaczko for verbally abusing women at the agency. The drama also exposed leadership battles between Reid and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., a strong supporter of Svinicki and a critic of Jaczko.

The timing and manner in which Reid went about appointing Jaczko could suggest the majority leader was trying not to bring attention to the matter. The appointment was the very last item of business of the Senate’s busy Wednesday schedule, which included a controversial vote on legislation requiring background checks for gun-show and online gun purchases. Reid didn’t even utter Jaczko’s name, instead delegating the presiding officer at that time, Sen. Martin Heinrich, D-N.M., to put the appointment in the record on his behalf.

“I ask consent that the appointment at the desk appears separately from the record, as if made by the chair,” Reid said at about 6:45 p.m. Wednesday, after an unsettling afternoon that saw partial evacuations of two Capitol buildings, news that a letter addressed to President Obama was laced with ricin, and ongoing rumors about the perpetrator of Monday's bombing of the Boston Marathon.

Heinrich, also without saying what the appointment was, replied in the custom Senate fashion: “Without objection.” Only once published did the congressional record show that Reid appointed Jaczko to the oversight panel.

The oversight committee, which was created as part of the Defense Reauthorization bill Obama signed into law in January, will include 12 congressionally appointed members, each of whom would serve for one year. These people are appointed by the congressional leaders from both parties and from both chambers and also the leaders on the key congressional committees overseeing the Armed Services. In February, House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, nominated his choice, Heather Wilson, who lost out to Heinrich in New Mexico's open Senate race in 2012. The oversight panel must issue to the administration an interim report six months after the bill was enacted, which would mean this summer.

Jaczko’s appointment to this panel comes a week after Obama’s Energy Secretary nominee, Ernest Moniz, shot down rumors that he might hire Jaczko as a senior aide. “Nothing whatsoever,” Moniz said in response to a question from Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., about those rumors. “No communication whatsoever.”

A request for comment to the Energy Department’s NNSA was not immediately returned. It’s unclear if other members have been appointed yet.

Jaczko also made waves recently in the wake of multiple interviews, including with the trade publication Nuclear Intelligence Weekly and the New York Times, where he called to phase out all nuclear power plants. “What is needed is a phaseout of all nuclear plants in this country,” Jaczko said, according to a March 29 issue of the Nuclear Intelligence Weekly. “They’re not safe.”

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Senator to Grill Obama's Energy Nominee on Nuclear-Waste Site

Amy Harder — Mon, 08 Apr 2013 09:55:49 -0400

On Tuesday, Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee Chairman Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and Ernest Moniz, President Obama’s nominee for Energy secretary, are going to square off like it’s 1998.

Wyden convenes Moniz’s confirmation hearing Tuesday morning, but the history between the two men goes back to the 1990s when Moniz was undersecretary for Energy in the Clinton administration and Wyden was Oregon’s freshman senator. The two men were on opposite sides of the fight over the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, which more than a half-century ago produced plutonium for nuclear weapons during the Cold War and World War II, including the bomb detonated over Nagasaki, Japan.

Today, Hanford holds millions of gallons of radioactive waste from those weapons in underground tanks fraught with problems. Hanford is considered the most contaminated radioactive site in North America and sits on the banks of the Columbia River, which provides the water supply for key parts of Oregon’s economy, including hydropower production and commercial fishing, and the livelihood of endangered species like salmon.

“We have some history with Dr. Moniz, particularly with respect to Hanford,” Wyden said in a recent interview on CSPAN’s Newsmakers. “We had some spirited discussions, let’s put it that way,” added Wyden, who declined to comment further on those discussions.

Back then, Moniz and Wyden were debating the department’s handling of cleanup at the site. The DOE acknowledged in the late 1990s that it knew less about how much the radioactive waste was leaking into soil above the water table, a dry area known as the “vadose zone.”

“It was Moniz who had the unenviable task of coming out to the Hanford site and eating crow for DOE and admitting the waste had migrated, that the science was good, that they were wrong,” said Tom Carpenter, executive director of the Hanford Challenge, a Seattle-based watchdog group. According to press reports at the time, Moniz did concede the department had not done enough.

"There has not been enough science for vadose-zone assessment," Moniz said in an interview with The New York Times in March 1998 when he was undersecretary of Energy and leading the cleanup efforts.

"The Department of Energy has been sticking its head in the contaminated sand, for years, years," Wyden said, according to the Times. The article cited a General Accounting Office (now the Government Accountability Office) report, requested by Wyden, that said the Energy Department needed to pay more attention to this issue.

Fast forward some 15 years, and Wyden and Moniz find themselves in an eerily similar predicament. In recent months, tanks at Hanford have been found to be leaking, and just last week Wyden received a letter from the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, an independent government organization, warning that a treatment plant being built there to better store the waste could lead to chemical explosions. In February, Wyden asked the GAO to investigate the Energy Department’s management of Hanford. That’s the same group Wyden asked 15 years ago to look into a similar set of problems.

“The next Secretary of Energy—Dr. Moniz—needs to understand that a major part of his job is going to be to get the Hanford cleanup back on track,” Wyden said in a statement regarding the letter last week. “I plan to stress that at his confirmation hearing.”

One big thing that has changed since the 1990s is the power Wyden and Moniz hold. Ever since his days in the House representing a district bordering the Columbia River, Wyden has been one of the most outspoken watchdogs on Hanford. From his perch atop the Senate Energy panel, Wyden is one of the few people in Washington who can push legislation and conduct close oversight of the administration’s management of the cleanup process at Hanford, which costs the government about $2 billion a year.

“Now that he is chairman he will have greater ability to make sure that these serious problems get attended to,” said Dan Reicher, who served alongside Moniz in the Clinton administration as assistant secretary of Energy for energy efficiency and renewable energy. Also, as chief of staff to Clinton’s first Energy secretary, Hazel O’Leary, Reicher worked closely on Hanford issues. Reicher is now executive director of the Steyer-Taylor Center for Energy Policy and Finance at Stanford University, which announced last week it has hired former Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee Chairman Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., to lead its initiative on renewable energy standards. Bingaman will introduce Moniz at Tuesday’s confirmation hearing.

Pending his confirmation by the full Senate, Moniz would bring to the job not just deep technical expertise—he is a physics and engineering professor at MIT—but also the power as secretary to order significant changes at the site.

“He comes to this with an understanding of the technical, policy, and political issues surrounding the cleanup of the DOE nuclear-weapons plants, including Hanford,” Reicher said of Moniz. “And now he may have to bring some of his own technical smarts to the Hanford challenges.”

This article appeared in the Monday, April 8, 2013 edition of National Journal Daily.

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Democrats Oppose Flexibility in Sequester Cuts

Shane Goldmacher, Amy Harder, and Stacy Kaper, National Journal — Wed, 27 Feb 2013 09:22:55 -0500

Top lawmakers spent Tuesday searching for leverage points in the coming public-relations war over the automatic spending cuts that almost everyone agrees will now occur even though they were never designed to go into effect.

For Senate Republicans, one such potential spot is in crafting an alternative to the so-called sequester that would lessen the blow of the cuts by giving the White House more flexibility as to where to reduce spending.

But after Senate Republicans met for more than an hour at their weekly luncheon on Tuesday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said his conference remained divided into two factions: those who support giving the White House more flexibility to ease the coming cuts and those who fear giving away any power to the Obama administration.

McConnell said that, personally, “I would be happy to give the president more flexibility.” But some of his colleagues, he said, are “suspicious” of ceding congressional power to the White House. Those Republicans fear the administration would use added flexibility “to punish their political enemies,” McConnell said.

The White House and leading Senate Democrats have lined up against any flexibility proposal, arguing agencies need more funds, not more flexibility. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., dismissed backing such a plan. “No, why would I?” he said.

Several Democrats toed the party line by arguing that authorizing such discretion would be akin to rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. They included Sens. Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin, Barbara Boxer of California, Carl Levin of Michigan, Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, and Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island.

But some sources close to the administration have quietly expressed concern that when push comes to shove -- after the sequester cuts have taken hold and appear to be sticking -- some Democrats might eventually embrace the idea of giving more flexibility to agencies as a least-worst option to manage the pain.

There are signs that the concept has some appeal.

If the Democrats fail to stop sequestration as expected -- Reid filed Tuesday for cloture on a bill to halt the cuts, but it would take 60 votes to end debate and move to vote on the bill -- Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., said lawmakers need to face “reality” and should consider other ways to proceed.

“If there is flexibility built into it, if that’s the only alternative we have, then it’s something that has to be considered,” he said. “It’s a smarter way of doing it than just the draconian cuts across the board.”

Sen. Thomas Carper, D-Del., said that as a former governor, he would welcome the ability to have more discretion to implement the cuts if he were the president and suggested that perhaps a modest degree of discretion for the executive branch might bridge problems temporarily.

But some Senate Democrats -- and one independent who caucuses with the Democrats -- are hesitant to support the GOP’s idea of giving the White House flexibility because the blame for fallout from the cuts would ultimately fall at President Obama’s feet.

“It would enable the folks who are sponsoring [flexibility legislation] to then blame the president for the cuts,” said Sen. Angus King, I-Maine. “They’re saying: ‘We don’t want these cuts, you decide.’ And then, sure enough, two weeks later they’ll say: ‘Why did you close that base in my state?’ ”

Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., said he supports providing flexibility, but admits the politics are awkward for Obama. “Because then he’s the one having to make the cuts,” Flake said. “He’d rather blame Congress.”

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After the Sequester, Government Shutdown Looms

Amy Harder and Stacy Kaper, National Journal — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 09:52:26 -0500

Congressional leaders are already shifting their focus to the next spending battle after the automatic budget sequester takes effect on Friday -- how to keep the government running -- but the Democratic strategy on this fight is far from set.

House Republicans are gearing up for a bill spearheaded by Appropriations Committee Chairman Harold Rogers, R-Ky., which would keep the government funded for the rest of the fiscal year at the post-sequester spending levels of $974 billion. That bill is expected to be brought to the House floor as soon as next week.

Meanwhile, Senate Democratic leaders are waiting to see what the House can pass and how the votes break down before devising their plans. Although Senate Democratic leaders are engaged in conversations with their House Republican counterparts about the expiring continuing resolution to fund the government, they have not communicated a strategy for handling the CR to the Democratic caucus.

“The discussion has definitely started to shift towards how the CR is going to be dealt with, and if the House sends something over, what can we expect it might look like and what we want to do about it,” said a Democratic Senate aide, who was not authorized to discuss the dynamics on the record. “I don’t think Democrats know what we are going to do with that. Are we just going to raise the levels and put in more details on the discretionary side or what?”

“We have not heard much of a coherent strategy from our leadership,” the aide said.

Democrats are still focused on trying to gain leverage through the sequester, in hopes that those cuts are perceived to be so damaging that voters react, triggering needle-pushing opposition to them. Such momentum would be necessary to bolster Democrats’ hand for returning spending levels to pre-sequester levels, said Hill aides and budget wonks following the issue.

“We feel pretty confident about our messaging looking past the sequester and towards the CR -- that if Republicans are coming in at this lower number, that we will have some kind of a better story to tell about how we are still working to replace sequestration and we will be able to fund defense and nondefense at higher levels,” said another Democratic Senate aide.

But Republicans see the sequence of these spending battles in their favor. With sequestration hitting first, a new, lower fiscal baseline is set that will help the GOP resist any spending increases that the other side might propose. “Republicans don’t get to run everything, but what they can do is stop increases,” said Grover Norquist, president of the influential Americans for Tax Reform.

The current CR expires on March 27. If Congress does not act before then, the federal government faces the threat of a shutdown that could be politically devastating for whichever political party is held to blame.

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Senate Democrats Prepare to Defend Obama's Climate-Change Rules

Amy Harder, National Journal — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 09:15:58 -0500

When offense fails, try harder on defense.

That’s the mindset of Senate Democratic leaders, led by Environment and Public Works Committee Chairwoman Barbara Boxer of California, as they prepare for an intensifying battle with Republicans over President Obama’s climate-change rules.

“My No. 1 job is to make sure that nobody does any harm to the existing Clean Air Act,” Boxer told National Journal Daily on Wednesday in a phone interview from Los Angeles. “No. 2, I have to make sure we have a strong person at the EPA.”

Obama is expected to nominate Gina McCarthy, the Environmental Protection Agency’s assistant administrator for air and radiation, as EPA administrator. “She’s a wonderful person,” said Boxer, whose committee will conduct the confirmation hearing for Obama’s nominee. “She’s really good.”

Boxer has spent the better part of the six years she has chaired Environment and Public Works trying to play offense in the climate debate. Despite her influential perch, Boxer has not come close to passing a big climate bill.

She was pushed aside in 2010 when former Sens. John Kerry, D-Mass., and Joe Lieberman, ID-Conn., and current Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., tried to muster enough support for a cap-and-trade bill. They ultimately failed too, but they came closer to the legislative finish line than Boxer. In his State of the Union address last week, Obama praised the bipartisan climate bill sponsored by Lieberman and Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., in 2003. He didn’t mention Boxer.

The Senate landscape has since shifted. Kerry is secretary of State, Lieberman has retired. And Graham and McCain won’t touch climate-change legislation with a 10-foot pole.

That puts Boxer in the driver’s seat of the Democrats’ messaging on climate policy just as Obama, in his speech last week, enunciated more clearly than ever that he intends to move forward with his executive powers to combat global warming unless Congress acts, which is unlikely. He didn’t mention EPA by name, but it’s no secret that’s what he means.

To complement her defense of EPA rules, Boxer is also pushing cap-and-trade legislation with Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. She declines to admit the obvious: That the measure is dead on arrival in the GOP-controlled House and even faces grim prospects of seeing the light of day on the Democratic-controlled Senate floor. She insists the legislation serves a purpose nonetheless.

“You want to have a bill out there that people can rally around, and eventually to put a huge amount of pressure on people in the Congress,” Boxer said.

Boxer, who has won handily all four times she has run for the Senate, is filling a role many others in her party would find politically precarious. Republicans and even some Democrats find Boxer a polarizing figure on climate change and thus an ineffective legislator on the issue. It’s that very quality that makes her an effective political messenger defending the administration’s actions. Moderate Democrats and those hailing from energy-intensive states up for reelection in 2014 can stay on the sidelines and out of the fight while Boxer plays defense for them.

To be sure, other Democrats will help defend EPA behind the scenes.

The new chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, Barbara Mikulski, D-Md., will be an important ally as Republicans seek to attach legislative “riders” to spending bills that would restrict funding for climate-change programs. “She’s very dedicated to this issue,” Boxer said of Mikulski.

Mikulski’s voting record over the last few years reflects a reliable vote in support of EPA’s authority over climate change. But when asked about the new chairwoman’s plans to defend the agency in the appropriations process, spokesman Rob Blumenthal referred National Journal Daily to Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., chairman of the Appropriations subcommittee that oversees the EPA budget. “Right now we’re focused on finding a solution to the sequester and the rest of 2013,” Reed spokesman Chip Unruh said in an e-mail.

In other words, they don’t want to be bothered as they stay in the background of a fight Boxer is more than happy to wage on their behalf.

The past has shown the easiest way to prevent Republicans—along with a few Democrats—from attaching riders defunding EPA’s climate rules: Don’t pass an EPA appropriations bill at all, and instead fund the agency through a string of continuing resolutions. The Senate hasn’t passed a stand-alone appropriations bill funding EPA since September 2009.

“I stopped riders on the last appropriations bill, and we’ve been able to stop every single repeal they have brought over from the House,” Boxer said.

Coordination between Boxer and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid will also be critical if and when Republicans seek to nullify EPA’s climate rules through the Congressional Review Act, which requires a simple majority to pass.

In April 2011, the Senate voted on four measures that each, to varying degrees, restricted EPA’s authority. None of them mustered the necessary 60 votes to end debate, but the GOP-sponsored measure nixing the rules altogether received 50 yea votes.

That’s a cautionary tale for Democratic leadership if the Senate faces another round of similar votes this Congress. Under the arcane rules of the CRA, Republicans are just one vote away from nullifying EPA’s power over global warming, and beating Boxer’s defense.

This article appeared in the Thursday, February 21, 2013 edition of National Journal Daily.

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Super Bowl blackout could add momentum to energy policy, lawmaker says

Amy Harder, National Journal — Mon, 04 Feb 2013 15:36:23 -0500

The Super Bowl blackout could provide the momentum for energy policy like the Hispanic vote has done for immigration reform, according to Senate Energy and Natural Resources Ranking Member Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska.

“This issue of immigration: Why are we all focused on that? Well, it’s because the Republicans lost the election because in part we did not have the Hispanic community behind us,” Murkowski said Monday. “What is it that brings about that motivation? Maybe it could be something like a gap in the Super Bowl causes the focus on energy that we need to have. I can only hope.”

Judging by the discourse on Capitol Hill on Monday, it doesn’t appear the blackout is having any substantive impact on momentum for much of anything policy-related—at least not yet.

During Sunday’s Super Bowl game played in New Orleans, the power to the stadium went out for 34 minutes. The outage was reportedly caused by an “abnormality” of the electrical system, operated by Entergy, according to company and stadium officials quoted in articles.

In unveiling her blueprint for energy policy recommendations Monday, Murkowski said the game’s electricity woes helped her put into context her report.

“I really didn’t have an idea when that game first started how 34 minutes was going to help me tell the energy story,” Murkowski said at a press conference. “I know it delayed the game a little bit, but it was sure helpful from the perspective of letting Americans know how important energy is in their daily worlds.”

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Democratic senators pass torch to EPA on climate change

Amy Harder, National Journal — Wed, 23 Jan 2013 09:07:02 -0500

After years of trying—and failing—to get climate-change legislation through Congress, top Senate Democrats are publicly ready to hand over the power to President Obama and the Environmental Protection Agency.

“A lot of people don’t recognize that EPA has huge authority to reduce carbon in the air,” Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Chairwoman Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., said at a briefing Tuesday.

“A lot of you press me … on: ‘Where is the bill on climate change? Where is the bill’? There doesn’t have to be a bill,” Boxer told a group of reporters in her office in the Hart Senate Building. “There will be many approaches, but I’m telling you right now, EPA has the authority in the transportation sector, in the electricity sector, and the industrial sector under the Clean Air Act.”

Boxer’s public comments come a few months after another top Democrat, Senate Democratic Policy and Communications Center Chairman Chuck Schumer of New York, made similar comments to another group of reporters shortly after the election in November. Speaking at a Christian Science Monitor breakfast, Schumer noted the significance of EPA’s authority to regulate greenhouse-gas emissions and said that Congress could instead tackle smaller bits of policy, such as energy-efficiency legislation.

The statements by Boxer and Schumer that they won’t push big climate legislation and will defer to EPA on global warming are two of the clearest signals yet that the Democratic Party will not only defend the agency’s authority to regulate carbon emissions but that it will also follow through on the regulations, despite Republican criticism and industry pleas to slow down the rules. Boxer’s statement also came on the heels of Obama’s Inaugural Address, where he gave a full-throttled call to action on climate change.

After spending the past two years fighting over EPA and casting messaging votes on the agency’s carbon rules, Congress is poised for even more intense partisan clashes. This year’s fights will carry more weight as the agency gets closer to rolling out the regulations that will affect coal-fired power plants across the country. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., ensured during the last congressional session that no GOP-led efforts to pass legislation delaying or eliminating EPA’s climate rules can succeed. Boxer is confident Senate Democrats can beat back expected GOP efforts this Congress, too.

“We will stop it every time, let me just tell you that,” Boxer said.

A 2007 ruling from the Supreme Court is backing Boxer up. Republicans—with potential support from some moderate Democrats up for reelection in 2014—will nonetheless put up a big fight. Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., who has been the ranking member on the Environment and Public Works Committee during Obama’s first term, and GOP leadership in the House have vowed to keep trying to curtail EPA on a whole host of issues, especially climate change. A request for comment to the Environment panel’s new top Republican, Sen. David Vitter of Louisiana, was not returned.

(Image via Epitavi/Shutterstock.com)

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Protesters, security forces clash in Charlotte

Amy Harder — Wed, 05 Sep 2012 07:09:50 -0400

Rowdy protesters and stepped-up security wreaked havoc in uptown Charlotte on the first day of the Democratic National Convention.

For several hours in the afternoon, a standoff between police and protesters identifying themselves with the Occupy movement blocked roads that were originally not expected to be closed. This exacerbated traffic problems, stranding or delaying some delegates and even other demonstrators.

“I’ve been trying to get into this area for 45 minutes,” said Washington Mayor Vincent Gray, one of the delegates. He ran into trouble both driving and walking while trying to get to the convention for another rally for D.C. statehood.

“We could drive up to a certain point, and then we had to walk down a couple blocks, up a couple blocks, down three blocks and, of course, ironically enough, when we got here, it was over,” Gray said in a tired, exasperated tone.

The group of about 50 protesters wanted to march down Stonewall Street, which borders the convention center and is a few blocks from the Time Warner Cable Arena, but police say they stopped the demonstrators because they were blocking traffic. After a standoff that lasted at least two hours, Charlotte-Mecklenberg Police Chief Rodney Monroe summoned a protester to a meeting that took about 10 minutes and ended with an agreement that if protesters confined themselves to the sidewalk they would be allowed to march.

It was then that the clashes between protesters and conventioneers got personal. Police broke up a heated exchange between two Nevada delegates and at least one protester. The confrontation happened as the delegates and a much smaller crowd of activists passed each other on the sidewalk.

“I’m proud to be a Democrat, period,” delegate JoEtta Brown said as police escorted her away from the protesters. It was unclear what the protesters and delegates were arguing about except the general notion that the demonstrators were unhappy with President Obama and the Democratic Party writ large.

Just one more block down Stonewall Street, another shouting match broke out between a protester and convention guests Ronald Mincey and Ruth Richards. “The only time we see you is at stuff like this,” Mincey yelled at the protester, 20-year-old Matthew Malone. Malone and many of the others there were protesting to support Bradley Manning, an Army soldier who was arrested in May 2010 on suspicion of having passed classified material to WikiLeaks, the whistle-blower website.

Despite the disturbances, Charlotte police had arrested only three people as of 5 p.m.—and two of the arrests weren’t related to the standoff. Two men were arrested on charges of disrupting a National Journal event earlier on Tuesday. Another man was taken into custody near the standoff area for breaching a police line and barricade.

Many conventioneers were already grappling with logistical difficulties.

“They wouldn’t let us walk on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard,” said Pam Douglas, who was attending the convention as part of the California Correctional Peace Officers Association. But the problems she faced were not a result of the protests. They were “just because of the way they did the strategic planning,” Douglas said bitterly while waiting for the police to allow her to pass the protesters to get to her hotel, the Hampton Inn, on the other side of the standoff.

People’s experiences getting around Charlotte varied, depending on how and when they reached the security-laden uptown area. Convention-goers who took public transportation, such as the rail system Lynx, said the trip didn’t take long at all. But those trying to get from one point to another within the uptown area said it took hours to go just a few miles.

“We’re dealing with a smaller geographical area than in years past, and that has its benefits and burdens,” said Manny Ortiz, who was at the convention with consulting and lobbying firm Brownstein Hyatt. “Benefits are, your distances are closer, but you’re all stacked together, and there’s a lot of foot traffic.”

Ortiz, who was trying to get out of the uptown area, added, “Something like this—a protest—that blocks the only access road you have to your bus makes it even worse.”

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Isaac prompts loan from petroleum reserve

Amy Harder — Fri, 31 Aug 2012 15:31:54 -0400

The Obama administration is loaning 1 million barrels of oil to Marathon Petroleum in the wake of Hurricane Isaac, the Energy Department announced on Friday.

The oil loan, which will come out of the nation’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve, is not the same thing as an official release of oil from the 727 million-barrel SPR, an action that would have political, economic, and foreign-policy implications.

“Today’s announcement is part of the broader federal effort to respond to those impacted by Hurricane Isaac,” Energy Secretary Steven Chu said in a statement. “This emergency loan from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve will help ensure Marathon’s refining operations have the crude oil they need to continue operating.” Marathon will return the same quantity of oil to the reserve in the next three months.

The Energy Department has loaned oil in similar, emergency-type situations eight previous times, most recently following Hurricane Gustav in 2008, the department said.

The Interior Department said on Thursday that because of Hurricane Isaac, almost 95 percent of all the daily oil production in the Gulf of Mexico—which accounts for about a quarter of all U.S. oil production—was halted. Almost three-quarters of all natural-gas production was stopped as well.

Oil prices have not gone up much as a result of Isaac yet. In fact, a highly anticipated speech by Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke on Friday morning about the economy has affected oil prices just as much, if not more, than Isaac. Analysts predict that there won’t be any long-term price impact because of the storm.

This is due in part to the fact that most oil companies had evacuated and stopped production well before the storm entered the Gulf of Mexico, so it eased traders’ concerns that there would be long-term infrastructure damage and lengthy production delays, problems that caused then-President George W. Bush to tap the SPR following the historic 2005 hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

Rumors about whether the Obama administration will work with other countries and the International Energy Agency to conduct a coordinated release from the SPR continue. But White House spokesman Jay Carney continues to offer no insight except for the notion that all options are on the table.

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Science, politics collide over extreme weather, climate change

Amy Harder, National Journal — Tue, 03 Jul 2012 08:58:18 -0400

According to some environmentalists and scientists, climate change was knocking down Washington’s door—and its power lines—this past weekend.

About 4.3 million people throughout the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic lost power over the weekend in the wake of a series of unusually severe and long-lasting thunderstorms—known as a “super derecho”—that hit the region on Friday night in part because of the region’s record-high temperatures.

“I think climate change is contributing to the severity of these storms because it’s adding energy to the climate system,” said Dan Lashof, director of the Natural Resources Defense Council’s climate and clean air program. “We are clearly seeing a trend toward more extreme precipitation events, more severe storms of this kind.”

The relentless heat wave hitting much of the country, the violent thunderstorms that heat wave in part caused on Friday, and the droughts and raging wildfires in Colorado and elsewhere have thrust to the forefront a cyclical debate about cause and effect: Is a warming Earth, caused by human activity, causing these extreme-weather events?

Climate and weather scientists are cautious about drawing a direct line from A to B, but most agree that a warmer planet will cause a higher frequency of extreme-weather events—even if you can’t scientifically prove that one single extreme-weather event is caused by climate change. It’s a subtle distinction and one that’s lost in Washington politics, where the debate boils down to black and white.

“It’s a treacherous issue,” said Kerry Emanuel, a climate-change scientist and an atmospheric science professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “When considering extreme weather and climate, you have to be mindful. It’s easy to step on a political or scientific mine and have it go off in your face.”

Greg Carbin, warning-coordination meteorologist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Storm Prediction Center, said he didn’t “want to be specific about any one event.” But, referring to the wildfires, heatwaves, and thunderstorms, he added: “The science seems to suggest that in a warmer world, we will see more of these events.”

Politicians, meanwhile, jump into the minefields of climate change and extreme weather. Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass., who chaired the House Select Committee on Global Warming in the last Congress, blasted Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney for his recent equivocation on climate-change science.

“Hundreds of millions of American citizens have been afflicted by extreme weather events in the last two years, from wildfires to heatwaves to floods,” Markey said in a statement on Monday. “Mitt Romney is attempting to become the president for all of America’s citizens, yet he has no interest in protecting them from these events that have been supercharged by climate change.”

A spokesman for Senate Environment and Public Works ranking member James Inhofe, R-Okla., who does not think anthropogenic climate change is occurring, blasted Markey for his comments.

“It was only a matter of time before someone came out and wanted, for political gain, to link global warming to recent events,” said Inhofe spokesman Matt Dempsey. “These scare tactics have always backfired, and they will this time.”

MIT's Emanuel says that the most undeniable evidence that climate change is occurring—and that human activity is a big factor—is the unequivocal rise in global temperature in recent years. But that’s not what grabs people’s attention.

"Climate change will affect human beings principally through its effect on weather extremes. We are more affected by increasing incidence of floods, droughts, and heatwaves than we are by small changes in the average temperature," Emanuel said. "It's an important topic, but you have to be very careful when looking for signatures of it."

Washington should brace for more extremes—the temperature is forecast to near the century mark almost every day this week.

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Sierra Club hires EPA official felled by 'crucify' comments

Amy Harder, National Journal — Fri, 29 Jun 2012 17:11:00 -0400

The Environmental Protection Agency official who recently resigned for saying the government should “crucify” bad actors in the energy industry will go to work for the Sierra Club to help its campaign against coal.

The Sierra Club announced on Friday that it was hiring Al Armendariz, who resigned on April 30 as EPA regional administrator for Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, and New Mexico after an uproar over his comment that the “general philosophy” of EPA's enforcement policy should be to “crucify” oil and natural-gas companies.

"This is an exciting day for clean-energy and public-health supporters in Texas,” said Bruce Nilles, senior campaign director for the Sierra Club's "Beyond Coal" campaign, in a statement on Friday. “Al has worked closely with the Sierra Club for many years, as an environmental scientist and professor. He understands the critical importance of developing clean energy to create jobs, protect people, and protect air and water."

The hire will likely inflame an already heated debate among congressional Republicans, the Obama administration, and influential environmental groups like the Sierra Club. House Energy and Commerce Committee Republicans have recently lashed out at the Sierra Club—the country’s largest environmental group—for its intensified campaign seeking to wean the country off not only coal and oil, but natural gas, too.

National Journal reported earlier this month that on the same day that Armendariz initially agreed to testify before a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee regarding his comments, he was later at the Sierra Club’s Washington offices.Even though he was in town and met with the environmental group that day, Armendariz abruptly canceled his plans to testify less than 24 hours before the hearing and did not provide the committee with a reason.

Senate Environment and Public Works Committee ranking member James Inhofe, R-Okla., whose staff uncovered the 2010 video where Armendariz made the “crucify” comments, speculated at that time that Armendariz’s visit to the Sierra Club was for a job interview.

"Rather than testifying in the House and being accountable for carrying out the Obama EPA's 'crucify them' agenda, it appears Mr. Armendariz may have had a job interview with the Sierra Club,” Inhofe said at the time. “With such an impressive job-killing resume, it would be no surprise if the Sierra Club is recruiting him for their 'Beyond Gas' campaign designed to 'prevent any new gas plants from being built' and to end natural-gas production in this country.”

It appears as though Inhofe was right. Armendariz's lawyer, Danny Onorato, did not respond to requests for comment at the time about why Armendariz was at the Sierra Club.

Inhofe issued a statement on Friday congratulating Armendariz on his new job. “Dr. Armendariz follows numerous Obama administration officials who have come from or moved to radical Left and green groups—it’s as if there is a revolving door between the White House and organizations such as the Sierra Club and the Center for American Progress,” he said.

Armendariz will be helping the organization with its "Beyond Coal" campaign, which it launched in 2002 in reaction to trends in the power market to build more than 150 new coal-fired power plants. The campaign’s goal is to retire one-third of the nation’s 500-plus coal plants by 2020. National Journal reported in May that the Sierra Club was doubling down on its efforts to combat new natural-gas production with a “Beyond Gas” campaign modeled after the "Beyond Coal" campaign.

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Utility executive blasts EPA

Amy Harder, National Journal — Fri, 01 Jun 2012 11:52:00 -0400

Republicans in Congress complain that President Obama is trying to ban coal -- the nation’s most prevalent source of electricity -- through a flurry of rules issued by the Environmental Protection Agency. Nick Akins, the new CEO of American Electric Power, one of the country’s biggest coal utilities, paints a more complicated picture. Edited excerpts of his interview with National Journal follow.

NJ Congressional Republicans say that EPA is waging a war on America’s energy resources—specifically,
coal. The agency says it is just following the market as it moves to natural gas. What’s your take?

AKINS The actual issue is the timing. If EPA was not so aggressive on shutting down coal-fired generation, that would be one thing. You’d be demonstrating it’s a market condition. By truncating 20 to 25 percent of the coal-fired fleet in this country by the end of 2014—perhaps by the end of 2015, if you get the year extension—it just says you’re going to be shutting down generation. And, oh, by the way, we just passed greenhouse-gas rules that really impair the next generation of coal-fired [power]. So, in effect, you’re shutting coal down.

NJ What is the primary cause for coal’s relative decline?

AKINS EPA, with its aggressive treatment of coal-fired generation, has shown you’re really in a struggle to get a new coal mine permitted, to get a new coal-fired capacity-generator permitted. The other issue is market conditions themselves. As coal prices increase, certainly the advent of shale gas, fracking, and directional drilling brings in the notion that natural gas is competing on marginal cost basis with coal. If you’re making capital decisions on new investment in generation, it’s going to be natural gas.

NJ Talk about the dynamic—some people describe it as a war—between natural gas and coal.

AKINS I’m disappointed in it. To have one fuel supply competing with another fuel supply, particularly when you look at the demands in this country and the future, the pie keeps getting bigger, and we actually need everything.

NJ How important is “clean-coal” technology to the future of coal power?

AKINS It’s extremely important, because if you’re trying to scope out a new plant, you really have to consider the greenhouse-gas emissions. To keep coal as part of the portfolio of the future during the time we’re using natural gas as an intermediate fuel, there ought to be continued progress associated with the development of the uses of carbon capture and storage.

NJ Is federal funding necessary?

AKINS It’s absolutely necessary. Private and public funding need to come together to make sure science is advanced at the commercial scale.

NJ Should the government provide money for renewable energy?

AKINS I think the government should incentivize everything that balances an energy portfolio of the future. Don’t disincentivize anything else.

NJ AEP supported the cap-and-trade legislation that the House passed in 2009. That bill would have replaced the rules on carbon emissions that EPA is promulgating now. Do you still prefer a market-based, cap-and-trade approach to reducing greenhouse-gas emissions?

AKINS I think one of the main issues why we supported [the 2009 bill] was that the economy was in very good shape at that point. It also provided allowances for customers, to make sure we were able to make that transition. The third thing is, it was really focused on development of [clean-coal technology] funding. If you had those basic tenets in place, we probably would continue to support it.

NJ Do you think the Earth is warming and that human activity is a primary cause?

AKINS When you’re planning investment for a plant that’s going to last for 40, 50, or 60 years, you have to think about what issues you’re dealing with today before you can get approval to build. Regardless of whether we believe in climate change or not, I think, clearly, AEP has shown we’re very focused and have been focused on the issues associated with carbon. And we’ll continue to move to decarbonize the fleet.

NJ As governor of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney hired Gina McCarthy, who is now chiefly responsible for the EPA air-pollution rules that your company is grappling with. Does that concern you?

AKINS Governor Romney also stood in front of a coal plant to shut it down. Let’s hope, with the passage of time, that people have learned. In the last election, President Obama started saying we could do it all with renewables. And Senator [John] McCain said all nuclear. By end of the election, they were gravitating around more reasonable, available options. I’m hoping that Governor Romney clearly does want to have an all-of-the-above strategy.

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EPA proposes first-ever climate rules

Amy Harder, National Journal — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 12:57:35 -0400

The Environmental Protection Agency proposed limits on greenhouse-gas emissions from new power plants on Tuesday, taking the first major regulatory action to address climate change as promised by President Obama's administration soon after he took office in 2009.

“We’re taking a common-sense step to reduce pollution in our air, protect the planet for our children, and move us into a new era of American energy,” EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson said in a statement released with the regulations.

The “new era” for energy will mean less reliance on coal, which currently provides nearly half of U.S. power supplies, and greater use of cleaner-burning natural gas, the EPA said in a release summarizing the rules. The agency is proposing that new fossil-fuel power plants — namely those fired by coal and natural gas — emit no more than 1,000 pounds of carbon per megawatt-hour of energy produced. That’s about the same amount of carbon emissions produced by today’s natural gas-plants and about half the amount of produced by coal plants.

“EPA’s proposed standard reflects the ongoing trend in the power sector to build cleaner plants that take advantage of American-made technologies, including new clean-burning, efficient natural-gas generation, which is already the technology of choice for new and planned power plants,” the EPA release said.

Even before EPA officially announced the rule, environmentalists were cheering and critics of the agency were jeering. The rule is sure to reignite a fight over climate change both in Congress and on the campaign trail.

Senate Environment and Public Works Committee ranking member James Inhofe, R-Okla., immediately vowed to fight the rule by introducing a congressional resolution to nullify it. “This plan is the most devastating installment in the Obama administration’s war on affordable energy: It achieves their cap-and-trade agenda through regulation instead of legislation,” Inhofe said at a hearing on Tuesday.

Environmentalists prodding the agency to act were elated that the administration proposed the rule after delaying it several times since last July.

“EPA deserves a standing ovation for today’s historic action to protect Americans’ health, strengthen our economy, and address the clear and present danger of carbon pollution,” said Fred Krupp, president of the Environmental Defense Fund, one of the environmental groups leading a legal challenge to force EPA action on greenhouse-gas emissions, which most scientists agree are the chief cause of climate change.

Despite industry charges, EPA asserted that the rule will not create undue costs on the electricity sector. “Because this standard is in line with current industry investment patterns, this proposed standard is not expected to have notable costs and is not projected to impact electricity prices or reliability,” the agency said.

The limits will apply to new power plants only and grandfather in the dozen or so plants going through the licensing and permitting process right now, according to sources familiar with the rules. EPA will issue rules that apply to the current fleet of power plants later this year, likely after the November elections.

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Energy secretary backtracks on high gas prices

Amy Harder, National Journal — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 13:37:48 -0400

Energy Secretary Steven Chu on Tuesday retracted his now-infamous quote from 2008: “Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.”

“I no longer share that view,” Chu said in response to questioning from Sen.Mike Lee, R-Utah, at a Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee hearing on another topic related to DOE’s loan-guarantee program.

Chu’s 2008 quote, initially included in a Wall Street Journal article, has formed the foundation for daily Republican attacks on President Obama over high gas prices.

Chu seemed to equivocate, pause, and stumble over his words when responding to Lee’s question about high gas prices. Other comments Chu made at another hearing late last month put him in hot water on gas prices. Politico reported on Feb. 28 that Chu told a House committee that he was not working to lower gasoline prices but to wean the United States off oil. That story has since been corrected to clarify that DOE is working to bothlower gas prices and wean the country off oil. But that was only after the story was picked up by Republicans and used against the administration.

During his testimony before the Senate panel on Tuesday, after stopping and starting with a few thoughts on the economy and the department’s commitment to alternatively fueled vehicles, Chu told Lee: “Of course we don’t want the price of gasoline to go up. We want it to go down.”

New polling out this week found that the president's disapproval rating is going up alongside high gasoline prices, which averaged $3.80 per gallon nationwide on Tuesday.

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EPA faces third straight year of cuts

Amy Harder, National Journal — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 12:41:00 -0500

President Obama’s environmental agenda, under political attack and on the back burner in a sluggish economy, will face budget cuts for the third straight year.

The proposed Environmental Protection Agency budget for fiscal year 2013 is $8.3 billion, down from $9.0 billion last year. This year’s request represents a 1.2 percent decrease, or $105 million, from the 2012 enacted level.

Tellingly, EPA’s budget barely acknowledges the agency’s plans to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from power plants -- a stark reversal from last year’s budget, which said EPA’s “measured, common-sense steps to address greenhouse gas pollution” was one of its “funding points of focus.”

Instead, this year’s budget says the administration “continues to support greenhouse gas emissions reduction in the U.S. in the range of 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020 and 83 percent by 2050.” Those have been the goals for addressing climate change since the beginning of the Obama administration, but no legislation has been enacted requiring the reductions to be achieved.

The only mention EPA's greenhouse gas rules for power plants receives in this year's budget is one sentence that doesn't say anything about when the rules are coming. "EPA will continue to develop regulatory strategies to control GHG emissions from major stationary sources."

The EPA budget does acknowledge one program already on the books that can help reduce greenhouse gases: the increased fuel-economy standards for vehicles that the administration worked out with the auto industry last year. The budget “supports the 2012 implementation of a historic national program to improve fuel economy and reduce greenhouse gases (GHGs) from cars and trucks by about 21 percent by 2030, saving an estimated 1.8 billion barrels of oil,” the proposal from EPA states.

Rules to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from power plants have been pending at the White House’s Office of Management and Budget for regulatory review since early November, longer than the normal review time. EPA had said the rules would come out by the end of January. But election-year politics are quickly taking over, and experts predict the White House will keep the rules in the draft stages for awhile.

Proposed cuts in EPA’s budget include $359 million in State Revolving Funds for water projects, “in part because of the continuing constrained fiscal environment; $33 million to the agency’s hazardous substance Superfund account; and $50 million by eliminating “outdated, underperforming and overlapping programs,” which includes certain grant programs and the Clean Automotive Technologies program.

The areas the budget proposes to increase funding are scarce. EPA asks for $15 million more to help restore the Chesapeake Bay, up from the $67.4 million it requested in its FY2012 budget. EPA requests $1.2 billion in grants to support state and tribal efforts to implement environmental programs, the same as last year’s proposal.

In a sign of shifting priorities, Obama’s $8.3 billion budget request for FY2013 is closer to the last budget proposed under the George W. Bush administration than it is to what Obama proposed his first year in office. In 2009 he proposed a 26 percent increase in EPA’s budget: Up to $10.3 billion from $7.6 billion under Bush.

While it is very unlikely to emerge from Congress unscathed, the administration’s EPA budget proposal is an important blueprint for Obama’s priorities, and the continued cuts EPA is facing shows the president’s priorities have shifted away from the agency.

House Energy and Power Subcommittee Chairman Ed Whitfield, R-Ky., said his panel will likely scrutinize EPA grants. “Seldom do we really look at these grant programs,” Whitfield said late last week at a briefing. “When I go to my district people still primarily talk about the debt we have.… We don’t have any idea how much money is going out to these grants, no idea where these grants are going.”

Last year House Republicans passed numerous bills to delay or nullify many EPA regulations only to see them die in the Democratic-controlled Senate. But EPA’s budget proposal provides an opening for a new round of attacks.

“EPA will come in on its budget, so that’ll give us a chance to address whatever issues we want and look at their budget and see how that is helpful or harmful,” House Environment and Economy Subcommittee Chairman John Shimkus, R-Ill., said recently.

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Obama rejects Keystone pipeline

Amy Harder, National Journal — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0500

In a decision that quickly re-ignited a fierce energy debate, the Obama administration on Wednesday rejected the controversial Keystone XL pipeline because the 60-day deadline imposed by Republicans did not allow adequate time to review an alternate route through an ecologically sensitive area in Nebraska. Deputy Secretary of State William Burns made the announcement on President Obama's behalf on the project that would carry oil from Canada's carbon-heavy tar sands to refineries on the Gulf Coast.

TransCanada, the company seeking to build the $7 billion, 1,700-mile pipeline, will be able to reapply with a new route avoiding an ecologically sensitive area of Nebraska, sources told National Journal. Put more simply, the Obama administration hit back at Republicans by saying no because of their forcing him to decide on the project in just 60 days. Republicans in Congress and on the campaign trail promptly painted the decision as a rejection of thousands of American jobs purely for political reasons.

A spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, decried the news. "President Obama is about to destroy tens of thousands of American jobs and sell American energy security to the Chinese," said Brendan Buck. "The president won't stand up to his political base even to create American jobs. This is not the end of this fight." Texas Gov. Rick Perry also jumped on it. "The president's focused more on the next election than on the next generation." The White House has been trying to thread a needle between two segments of the Democratic base split over the pipeline: labor unions that support the project for the jobs it would bring, and environmentalists who oppose it for the adverse impacts that development of tar-sands oil could have on the environment. The administration's decision was not a big surprise. White House spokesman Jay Carney and other senior officials have repeatedly said that the Republicans' 60-day deadline, which was included in the payroll-tax deal Obama signed into law last month, did not give the administration enough time to appropriately review the project plans.

The State Department announced last fall that it would postpone a decision on the permit while an alternate route was developed to avoid Nebraska's Ogallala Aquifer, which supplies water to millions of people. The timing of the announcement was more surprising, since the administration had until Feb. 21 to decide. But a Wednesday announcement does make some political and economic sense. It allows Obama to go on offense before Thursday's debate between Republican presidential candidates in South Carolina and before his own State of the Union address next Tuesday. It also comes before public anger could grow if gasoline prices continue their upward climb in the weeks ahead.

"This is the last day to own this issue on their terms," said Kevin Book, managing director at ClearView Energy Partners, a Washington-based energy consulting firm. "The administration gets to explain their choice before it gets explained for them."

Now the administration - and Obama's reelection campaign - will seek to do damage control with Republican attacks. It must also submit within 15 days a report to Congress detailing why it rejected the permit. But the issue will not be dropped by congressional Republicans. GOP leaders in both chambers are already mulling other legislation that could take the decision on the pipeline completely out of Obama's hands. They have also said any such maneuver could likely be included in the longer term payroll-tax deal Congress has indicated it will pass by the end of February.

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