Government Executive - Authors - Coral Davenport

Obama Stocks Administration With Crusaders Against Climate Change

Coral Davenport, National Journal — Tue, 03 Sep 2013 16:24:40 -0400

As President Obama tries to fight global warming without any backing from a gridlocked Congress, he's using every weapon in his executive arsenal.

His Environmental Protection Agency will soon roll out controversial regulations on carbon pollution from coal-fired power plants. He's told every Cabinet agency to look into ways it can use its authority to act on climate change. And now the administration is stocking the executive branch with an army of new appointees who have a history of working aggressively on climate issues and clean energy, often from leadership jobs at environmental advocacy groups.

It's not surprising to see a president name a top nominee -- for Cabinet secretary, say -- who has led the way on an issue the White House cares about. In his first term, for example, Obama named as his Energy secretary Steven Chu, a Nobel physicist who had devoted his career to fighting climate change. With the executive branch the only avenue for the president to make an impact on climate policy, the Obama administration is filling out the second and third tiers of agencies -- influential workhorse positions such as chiefs of staff, assistant secretaries, and heads of regulatory commissions -- with appointees just as devoted to the cause, with the expectation that they'll muscle through a climate and clean-energy agenda wherever they can.

The strategy is drawing cheers from environmentalists and fire from conservatives, who both agree that these behind-the-scenes positions have a sizable impact on shaping policy. "The president has made it … clear that he wants further action on climate to be a big part of his legacy," said Frank O'Donnell, president of Clean Air Watch. "He's not going to get cooperation from Congress, so the only way to carve out a legacy on climate is to have folks at federal agencies that can make things happen. Some of these jobs which no one's ever heard of are being filled by people who can make things happen."

Scott Segal, who lobbies for coal companies with the law firm Bracewell & Giuliani, wrote in an e-mail to National Journal, "Energy- and environmental-policy development has always been more about workhorses than show horses. The subject matter is arcane, and therefore the role of the less visible executive appointment in executive agencies looms large as complicated issues like carbon policy loom on the near-term event horizon." Segal added, "For certain of these roles, the administration has shown a troubling predisposition to nominate individuals from the activist community.... What is needed are realistic and dispassionate professionals that can balance economic and environmental objectives with respect for the rule of law."

Segal and others in industry are particularly incensed at Obama's nomination of Ron Binz to chair the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, a relatively obscure panel that nonetheless wields significant regulatory muscle in implementing energy policy. Binz, a former chairman of the Colorado Public Utilities Commission, drew outrage from the coal industry for helping to write a state law aimed at shutting down coal-fired power plants. In statements and speeches, he's been up front about his philosophy of energy: He backs renewables over fossil fuels. His personal website has a "Philosophy" listing a series of talks and statements championing renewable energy. In an editorial slamming Binz as "radical," The Wall Street Journal called him "the most important nominee you've never heard of." As the drumbeat of opposition to Binz has increased, a group of environmental activists hired a Washington PR firm, VennSquared Communications, to campaign for him as he heads into what looks like a tough and testy Senate confirmation process. (Binz declined a request for an interview withNational Journal, saying he intends to refrain from speaking to the press until after his Senate confirmation.)

Also raising eyebrows among conservatives is Obama's July appointment of Kevin Knobloch, former president of the Union of Concerned Scientists and a longtime player in the world of climate policy and advocacy, as the Energy Department's new chief of staff. "I cannot imagine a moment in history when we have had a window where the Department of Energy's mission has been more important," Knobloch said of the department's plans to toughen energy-efficiency standards and innovate ways to burn fossil fuels more cleanly.

"Someone like Kevin Knobloch—an appointment like that would have been less likely in the first term," said Paul Bledsoe, a senior climate-policy adviser in the Clinton White House. "The chief of staff to the Energy Department, Interior, EPA -- those are important jobs. Those are people with a great deal of influence." O'Donnell, president of Clean Air Watch, said, "I can't imagine why Kevin would take that job unless he had a chance to do something big -- something historic."

Meanwhile, earlier this month, the Senate confirmed Dennis McGinn as assistant Navy secretary for energy installations and the environment. Although the position is little known, the appointment of McGinn, a retired Navy vice admiral who headed the American Council on Renewable Energy, signals Obama's intent to keep using the Pentagon to drive renewable-energy technology. McGinn has served as cochairman of the CNA Military Advisory Board, which authored a prominent paper urging the defense community to prioritize climate change as a national security issue. He also has served as a fellow at the Rocky Mountain Institute, a think tank that publishes papers advocating policies to fight climate change and promote renewable energy.

"The appointment of Denny means this is not just a one-and-done issue," said Douglas Wilson, a former assistant secretary of public affairs for the Pentagon. "What we're seeing in these appointments is an effort not to have placeholders but people who have history in clean energy."

Amy Harder contributed to this report.

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Obama to Name Top Climate Change Regulator

Coral Davenport, National Journal — Wed, 28 Aug 2013 09:32:50 -0400

President Obama is expected to nominate Janet McCabe, a deputy administrator at the Environmental Protection Agency's clean air office, as head of that office, according to sources familiar with his thinking. The position would put her at the heart of the president's historic and controversial globalwarming agenda. She would be charged with crafting massive new pollution regulations on the nation's coal-fired power plants – rules that could eventually freeze the nation's coal industry, but also position the U.S. as a global leader on climate change.

An EPA spokesman would not confirm that Obama intends to nominate McCabe.

In a series of impassioned speeches this year, Obama has made clear that he wants to make fighting climate change a cornerstone of his legacy. Just as clear is the certainty that the divided, gridlocked Congress will not pass the sweeping legislation necessary to do that. Instead, Obama will flex his executive muscles, using the authority of the EPA to roll out a series of regulations to slash the nation's carbon pollution and fundamentally reshape the nation's energy sector. The rules are already being met with a swarm of political and legal pushback, Republicans charge that with the climate rules, Obama is waging "War on Coal." Meanwhile, the coal industry is prepared to meet the rules with an onslaught of legal attacks.

That means McCabe, as the expected chief author of the new climate rules, has a heavy and historic lift in front of her. She will step into the shoes of her boss, Gina McCarthy, who last month was confirmed as chief of the EPA. While McCarthy will be the public face of the new climate change regulations, McCabe will act as her right-hand woman, taking on the burden of drafting and legally bulletproofing the rules, as well as working with all the stakeholders they'll affect – states, electric utilities, consumers and environmental advocate.

During Obama's first term, McCarthy held that role, as head of the Office of Air and Radiation, with McCabe as her deputy. Last month, the White House named McCabe as Acting Director of that office. During her tenure, McCarthy won praise from both environmental groups and polluting industries as a straight-talking honest broker who included industry officials in the regulatory process – even if industries didn't always like the outcome.

By all accounts, McCabe is positioned to continue her boss's legacy. Like McCarthy, who served in the environment departments of Connecticut and Massachusetts, McCabe has a background as a state environmental regulator – experience that officials say will be crucial in crafting the new rules, since ultimately the implementation of them will be done by state agencies.

According to her official EPA bio, McCabe, prior to joining EPA in November 2009, was Executive Director of Improving Kids' Environment, Inc., a children's environmental health advocacy organization based in Indianapolis and was an adjunct faculty member at the Indiana University School of Medicine, Department of Public Health. From 1993 to 2005, she held several leadership positions in the Indiana Department of Environmental Management's Office of Air Quality. She was the office's Assistant Commissioner from 1998 to 2005. Before coming to Indiana in 1993, Ms. McCabe served as the Massachusetts Assistant Attorney General for environmental protection and Assistant Secretary for Environmental Impact Review. McCabe graduated from Harvard College in 1980 and Harvard Law School in 1983.

Her experience as a regulator in Indiana will likely serve in her favor. As a state that generates about 90 percent of its electricity from coal, Indiana is expected to be one of the states hardest hit by the climate regulations. Both environmentalists and industry officials say that background has given her a clear understanding of both the economic and regulatory challenges that lie ahead as she writes rules that will crack down on coal – the nation's biggest contributor to global warming pollution.

"She's basically been Gina's right hand and left hand for the last four years," said Frank O'Donnell, president of the group Clean Air Watch. "She's well-positioned to work with Gina on the climate rules. She's got a classically good background on it, having worked in state government both in Indiana and Massachusetts … Indiana may not be ground zero for the coal industry but it's pretty darn close."

Officials at American Electric Power, an Ohio-based electric utility that owns one of the nation's largest fleet of coal-fired power plants, including plants in Indiana, say they are optimistic that McCabe's Midwestern background means that she'll take their industry's concerns under consideration.

John McManus, vice president of Environmental Services for American Electric Power, wrote in an email to National Journal, "We have operations in Indiana so we worked with Janet McCabe when she was with the Indiana Department of Environmental Management. She was willing to listen to industry views at that time, and we would hope that if she is named Assistant Administrator for EPA's Office of Air and Radiation, she will continue to be receptive to hearing our opinions about issues and regulations that affect our business."

Experts in environmental regulation said that McCabe will face a huge legal challenge in crafting the climate change regulations, which are in many ways unprecedented in the history of environmental law. But they said McCabe is up to the challenge.

"Janet's wonderful," said Adam Kushner, a partner at the environmental law firm Hogan Lovells, and former director of EPA's Office of Civil Enforcement. "She has a very strong working relationship with Gina. She's very stong on the legal side. Very strong on the public health side. And she knows where all the bodies are buried."

It's likely that McCabe could face a tough Senate confirmation process. Senate Republicans, held up McCarthy's confirmation for over 100 days, and barraged her with over 1,000 questions, as coal and oil state lawmakers attacked the EPA for preparing to issue rules that could kill jobs in their home states. However, even if she fails to win Senate confirmation, it's expected that McCabe could carry out the job with the title of "acting" head of the clean air office.

(Image via Gunnar Pippel/Shutterstock.com)

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Senate Confirms Gina McCarthy to Head EPA

Coral Davenport, National Journal — Thu, 18 Jul 2013 16:39:39 -0400

The Senate voted Thursday to confirm Gina McCarthy as head of the Environmental Protection Agency, a job that will make her a central figure in President Obama's historic but controversial plan to fight global warming.

Senators voted 59-40 to confirm the new EPA chief.

McCarthy has spent the past four years as EPA's assistant administrator of air and radiation, writing and implementing a slew of major clean-air and climate-change rules requiring that coal-fired power plants—the nation's largest contributor of greenhouse gases that cause climate change—slash their carbon pollution.

As she steps up to lead the environmental agency, she has her work cut out for her. Obama has declared that he intends to make climate change a signature issue in his second term. In a passionate June address described by environmental groups as the most important speech given by a president in history on the environment, Obama said that in the absence of action by Congress on climate change, he will use the executive authority of EPA to roll out aggressive new climate-change regulations.

At the heart of Obama's plan is for the EPA to propose a rule regulating carbon pollution from new coal plants by Sept. 30 of this year, and to propose a rule regulating carbon from existing coal plants by June 1 of 2014, finalizing that rule by June 2015. The plan ensures that EPA will remain a top political target for Republicans--after Obama's speech Republicans and the coal industry re-ignited the 2012 campaign charge that the President and EPA are waging "War on Coal" – a theme that's likely to reverberate throughout the 2014 midterm elections and possibly into the 2016 presidential campaign.

McCarthy will have to craft and roll out rules that will be immediately subject to a barrage of legal and political pushback – and which will also pave the way for the U.S. to become a global leader on fighting climate change, while fundamentally shifting the U.S. energy industry.

In her April confirmation hearing before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, McCarthy said, "As the President made clear, we must take steps to combat climate change. This is one of the greatest challenges of our generation and our great obligation to future generations. I am convinced that those steps can and must be pursued with common sense."

Republicans have delayed McCarthy's confirmation for more than 130 days, leaving the EPA without an administrator for the longest period in the agency's history. During that time, they also submitted more than 1,000 questions for her to answer, a number Democrats decried as unprecedented.

Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer of California, who chairs the Senate Environment Committee, said of the delay over McCarthy's confirmation, "It isn't about her, it's about the fact that they don't like the Environmental Protection Agency even though it was created by a Republican president named Richard Nixon. And then there's the issue of climate change; … the administrator for the EPA will be carrying out the President's vision of taking that carbon pollution out of the air, and she'll be good at it."

Sen. David Vitter of Louisiana, the ranking Republican on the Senate Environment panel, said, "It's a very important nomination to a very important agency that's been taking dramatic action in the last four years. Gina has been at the center of that dramatic and draconian action. In a methodical march against affordable and reliable energy, EPA has drafted rules that raise energy prices and create energy scarity; ... this agency overreach has been historic, and she's been at the very heart of many of these matters as head of the clean-air program."

But despite their objections to the climate change rules and the EPA, many Republicans and industry groups have warmed to McCarthy herself. Lisa Jackson, Obama's first-term EPA leader, was known as a strident environmentalist who sought the strongest possible clean-air regulations on industry. McCarthy, who in the first term was Jackson's top deputy on clean-air and climate issues, developed a reputation as a pragmatic, personable figure who, while committed to enacting the president's climate-change agenda, is also willing to listen to industry views--and, in some cases, to ease the conditions of regulations in order to lighten the economic burden on regulated industries.

Before coming to Obama's EPA in 2009, McCarthy spent nearly 30 years working as a health and environmental-protection official in Connecticut and Massachusetts, during which she worked for five governors from both parties—including 2012 Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, who, as governor of Massachusetts, tasked her with authoring a state climate-change plan.

Republican Sen. Susan Collins said before the vote that she planned to vote for McCarthy's confirmation. "I had an excellent discussion with her back a month or so ago. I have worked with her previously on [earlier clean-air regulations]. Those experiences made me very favorably inclined towards her. I recognized that she would listen to opposing views. I did not find that to be the case with Lisa Jackson."

In a phone call with reporters earlier this week, Republican Christine Todd Whitman, who headed the EPA during the George W. Bush administration and is the former governor of New Jersey, said, "The thing about Gina that has always impressed me is her work in the office on air; she's been able to bridge those gaps. She's been able to work at the local level, at the state level, and clearly, at the federal level to get some meaningful reform through. I think Gina is uniquely qualified for the job of EPA administrator."

But McCarthy's work on climate change will keep her in the crosshairs of powerful lawmakers from coal-producing states, including Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and Sen. John Barasso of Wyoming.

"As for Gina McCarthy, I have no doubt she's a well-meaning public servant," McConnell said in a statement. "We had some good conversations when she came to visit my office earlier this year." But he added, "But as the head of the EPA's air division, she's overseen the implementation of numerous job-killing regulations. These regulations, along with others promulgated by the EPA, have had devastating consequences in states like mine. They've helped bring about a depression--depression with a D--in parts of Eastern Kentucky. …. As someone sent here to stand up for the people who elected me, I cannot in good conscience support a nominee who would advance more of the same. Someone who is not willing to stand up to this administration's war on coal."

In a Senate floor speech Thursday morning, Barasso said, "This administration has actively sought to eliminate the coal industry from the American economy. ... Ms. McCarthy has been Obama's field general in implementing the President's anti-coal policies."

While the EPA can issue climate-change regulations without Congress, Congress can still play a role in the fate of the President's climate policy--Barrasso is spearheading a legislative effort to repeal or slow the climate regulations--a push that will keep the EPA in the political spotlight, and likely gain momentum if Republicans gain control of the Senate in 2014.

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How EPA Fights Climate Change Even When Congress Doesn’t Want It To

Coral Davenport, National Journal — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 09:26:47 -0400

Environmental groups have a tough time getting Congress to do what they want. Case in point: In the early months of 2010, the Sierra Club, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the Environmental Defense Fund waged an all-out campaign urging the Senate to pass a sweeping climate-change bill backed by President Obama and leaders in the Democratic-controlled Senate. The measure crashed and burned that summer.

But the green groups—and Obama’s top environmental officials—knew they could resort to a different tactic: lawsuits to compel executive action. Toward the end of George W. Bush’s administration, the three big environmental organizations and 11 states sued to force the Environmental Protection Agency to issue new regulations reining in carbon pollution from coal-fired power plants and oil refineries. The Bush EPA fought the suit, but the Obama EPA, full of top officials who had worked in these very nonprofits, took a different tack. By December 2010, after the failure of the climate-change legislation, Obama’s first-term EPA administrator, Lisa Jackson, settled the lawsuit—on the advocates’ terms. The settlement obliged the agency to begin regulating carbon pollution from coal plants and oil refineries, an outcome with profound environmental and economic implications. And in April 2012, EPA proposed a historic new rule to regulate global-warming pollution from coal plants. As Obama’s second term unfolds, the agency is expected to finalize more rules that, thanks to lawsuits, will give the green groups what they want.

The climate-change settlement is just one in a series of recent so-called sue-and-settle agreements since Obama took office. Between 2009 and 2012, EPA has settled at least 60 lawsuits from outside groups, leading to dozens of new environmental regulations. A 2010 deal in another Sierra Club lawsuit led to a 2012 regulation on mercury emissions from coal plants. A 2009 settlement with environmentalists led to a 2012 regulation governing pollution from cement manufacturers. While EPA could fight the suits, they often line up with the administration’s agenda—to fight climate change and promote clean-air laws—so why bother? In many cases, the federal government, as the loser in the legal settlements, has then paid the green groups’ legal fees.

Sue-and-settle lawsuits with like-minded groups as a way to advance common goals aren’t new. The practice dates back to the Carter administration. But EPA’s recent spate of agreements that have major environmental and economic consequences have come as part of a broader flexing of executive authority, particularly on the issue of climate change. Although Congress remains unlikely to act on the issue, the president vows to use what power he has to address a problem he sees as urgent.

The EPA cases are spurring a big backlash from industry and from Republicans on Capitol Hill. In May, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce released a report (“Sue and Settle: Regulating Behind Closed Doors”) slamming the practice. Last week, the GOP-controlled House Judiciary Committee held an investigative hearing, calling the report’s author, William Kovacs, the U.S. chamber’s senior vice president of environmental regulation, as a star witness. Kovacs told Congress the sue-and-settle process gives outside groups an outsized, backdoor role in driving the government regulatory agenda. They turn an independent agency into “an actor subservient to the binding terms of settlement agreements,” Kovacs said. House Republicans have introduced legislation to curb the practice.

Environmental groups contend they are merely forcing the administration to follow the letter of the law when it’s politically inconvenient to do so. Outside groups can’t sue EPA to create or issue new regulations; most of the sue-and-settle cases compel the agency to issue regulations for which it has already missed a statutory deadline. But in the settlement of the climate-change suit, advocates forced EPA to regulate greenhouse gases from oil refineries, which it might not have done on its own, according to both industry and green groups. “There were just as many sue-and-settlements in other administrations. What has increased is the significance,” says Roger Martella, EPA’s general counsel during the George W. Bush administration. “These are economywide mega-rule-makings ... as opposed to small settlements impacting only a limited issue.”

These cases are “very powerful, because early Congresses saw the wisdom of giving ordinary citizens the ability to enforce the law, even if administrations were unwilling to,” says John Walke, a lawyer with the Natural Resources Defense Council who has worked on many of the recent sue-and-settle agreements. “They’re occupying a political vacuum … a space created by an utterly dysfunctional Congress.” Walke says that when an agency agrees to settle a lawsuit with an outside group rather than fighting it, “there’s a meeting of the minds as to what the law requires.”

EPA contends that by quickly settling the lawsuits instead of fighting them, it saves money. According to data the agency provided to National Journal, in instances where EPA paid legal costs between June 1, 2010, and Sept. 29, 2012, the average fees in cases it settled came to $42,000. The average fees in cases where the agency litigated and lost, or partially lost, came to $176,000. “If there’s a deadline required by the Clean Air Act and a lawsuit that poses a litigation risk, there’s value to the public and the government in settling out of court,” says an EPA official who spoke on condition of anonymity. “A settlement can save taxpayers a lot of money.”

Ironically, the one point on which all sides—environmentalists, business interests, and EPA—agree is that they’d prefer to see environmental policy move through Congress rather than through court filings or the backrooms of an executive agency. But as long as Capitol Hill remains gridlocked, expect recourse to come from the legal system.

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Panel Approves EPA Nominee Along Party Lines

Coral Davenport, National Journal — Thu, 16 May 2013 13:59:07 -0400

Senate Republicans on Thursday eased their opposition to the nomination of Gina McCarthy, President Obama’s pick to lead the Environmental Protection Agency—but her confirmation by the full Senate is not yet assured.

The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee approved McCarthy’s nomination on a party-line vote, after committee Republicans last week boycotted appearing at the same vote. They were protesting that McCarthy had not provided satisfactory answers to the more than 1,000 questions submitted to her, and that she failed to satisfactorily answer a series of “transparency requests” about the workings of the environmental agency. Democrats have called the number of questions submitted to the nominee “unprecedented.”

But on Thursday morning, Sen. David Vitter of Louisiana, the ranking Republican on the Environment Committee, sent a letter to McCarthy and EPA Acting Administrator Bob Perciasepe, signaling that both sides may be backing down, as the president’s nominee continues to respond to questions and Republicans conclude their boycott.

“Thank you for the letter of yesterday committing to significant steps forward with regard to all five of the transparency requests of the Senate EPW Committee Republicans,” Vitter wrote to EPA.

“Because these steps forward are significant, we want to thank you and acknowledge progress, including by moving forward with the committee markup of Gina’s nomination,” Vitter wrote.

“Because these steps forward are limited and do not include everything required under the law, we want to request additional progress as outlined below. Should major additional progress be made in all of the five categories over the next two weeks, I will strongly support handling the McCarthy nomination on the Senate floor without a cloture vote or any 60-vote threshold. Should all of our requests in the five categories be granted, I will support the McCarthy nomination.”

But Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., the committee’s chairwoman, slammed Vitter for the delay. “I’ve never seen a nomination handled like this. I’m stunned at this. It’s holding a nominee hostage.… I just can’t celebrate a partisan vote.”

McCarthy, who is currently the top EPA official charged with writing clean-air and climate-change regulations, is the latest in a string of Obama Cabinet nominees to face Republican pushback. EPA in particular has come under intense GOP attack—Obama has indicated that in his second term, the agency will be at the forefront of his controversial climate-change agenda, charged with rolling out major new regulations on the nation’s coal-fired power plants.

Even if McCarthy’s nomination makes it to the Senate floor, Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., has placed a procedural hold on McCarthy’s nomination, saying he’ll block her confirmation until he receives an update on a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers project to repair a levee on the Mississippi River system.

Despite opposition by Republicans—and some Democrats—to the prospect of EPA climate-change regulations, many Republicans, and even top officials in coal and polluting industries, say they like McCarthy personally and have praised her for a pragmatic approach to crafting environmental regulations.

McCarthy has a bipartisan background, having served as a top environmental aide to Mitt Romney when he was governor of Massachusetts and played a key role in helping him develop a state climate-change plan. She also served as head of Connecticut’s environment department under Republican Gov. Jodi Rell.

Vitter and other Republicans signaled that their opposition has not been to McCarthy personally, or even about the expected climate-change regulations. Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., said, “It seems that we ought to be all smiles on the committee today. A path forward has been agreed to to move the nomination to the next step, and we should be celebrating that.” He added, “Our questions have focused on transparency only.”

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The Coming GOP Civil War Over Climate Change

Coral Davenport, National Journal — Fri, 10 May 2013 09:28:15 -0400

Kerry Emanuel registered as a Republican as soon he turned 18, in 1973. The aspiring scientist was turned off by what he saw as the Left’s blind ideology. “I had friends who denied Pol Pot was killing people in Cambodia,” he says. “I reacted very badly to the triumph of ideology over reason.”

Back then, Emanuel saw the Republican Party as the political fit for a data-driven scientist. Today, the professor of atmospheric science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is considered one of the United States’ foremost authorities on climate change—particularly on how rising carbon pollution will increase the intensity of hurricanes.

In January 2012, just before South Carolina’s Republican presidential primary, the Charleston-based Christian Coalition of America, one of the most influential advocacy groups in conservative politics, flew Emanuel down to meet with the GOP presidential candidates. Perhaps an unlikely prophet of doom where global warming is concerned, the coalition has begun to push Republicans to take action on climate change, out of worry that coming catastrophes could hit the next generation hard, especially the world’s poor.

The meetings didn’t take. “[Newt] Gingrich and [Mitt] Romney understood, … and I think they even believed the evidence and understood the risk,” Emanuel says. “But they were so terrified by the extremists in their party that in the primaries they felt compelled to deny it. Which is not good leadership, good integrity. I got a low impression of them as leaders.” Throughout the Republican presidential primaries, every candidate but one—former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman, who was knocked out of the race at the start—questioned, denied, or outright mocked the science of climate change.

Soon after his experience in South Carolina, Emanuel changed his lifelong Republican Party registration to independent. “The idea that you could look a huge amount of evidence straight in the face and, for purely ideological reasons, deny it, is anathema to me,” he says.

Emanuel predicts that many more voters like him, people who think of themselves as conservative or independent but are turned off by what they see as a willful denial of science and facts, will also abandon the GOP, unless the party comes to an honest reckoning about global warming.

And a quiet, but growing, number of other Republicans fear the same thing. Already, deep fissures are emerging between, on one side, a base of ideological voters and lawmakers with strong ties to powerful tea-party groups and super PACs funded by the fossil-fuel industry who see climate change as a false threat concocted by liberals to justify greater government control; and on the other side, a quiet group of moderates, younger voters, and leading conservative intellectuals who fear that if Republicans continue to dismiss or deny climate change, the party will become irrelevant.

“There is a divide within the party,” says Samuel Thernstrom, who served on President George W. Bush’s Council on Environmental Quality and is now a scholar of environmental policy at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. “The position that climate change is a hoax is untenable.”

A concerted push has begun within the party—in conservative think tanks and grassroots groups, and even in backroom, off-the-record conversations on Capitol Hill—to persuade Republicans to acknowledge and address climate change in their own terms. The effort will surely add heat to the deep internal conflict in the years ahead.

Republicans have been struggling with an identity crisis since the 2012 presidential election. In particular, the nation’s rapid demographic changes are forcing the GOP to come to terms with the newly powerful influence of Hispanic voters and to confront the issue of immigration. For now, climate change isn’t getting anywhere close to that kind of urgent scrutiny from Republicans, at least not in public. GOP strategists say that Republican candidates hoping to win primary races, where the electorate tends to be older and more ideologically driven, are still best served to deny, ignore, or dismiss climate change.

Today, a Republican candidate “wouldn’t be able to win a primary with a Jon Huntsman position on this,” says strategist Glen Bolger.

The problem is, as polling data and the changing demographics of the American electorate show, it’s likely that the position that can win voters in a primary will lose voters in a general election. Some day, though, the facts—both scientific and demographic—will force GOP candidates to confront climate change whether they want to or not. And that day will come sooner than they think.

Already, the numbers tell the story. Polls show that a majority of Americans, and a plurality of Republicans, believe global warming is a problem. Concern about the issue is higher among younger voters and independents, who Republicans will need to attract if they want to win elections.

Read the rest at NationalJournal.com.

(Image via Vladimir Melnik/Shutterstock.com)

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Why Obama's Environmental Pick Drives Republicans Crazy

Coral Davenport, National Journal — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 10:16:33 -0400

Thursday's confirmation hearing for President Obama’s nominee to lead the Environmental Protection Agency became the latest forum for an ongoing argument over global warming, jobs, the future of the U.S. coal industry, and the role of the federal government.

This will continue over the course of Obama’s second term, as the EPA looks set to become the president’s biggest weapon in his efforts to take on climate change.

In his February State of the Union speech, Obama said that if Congress won’t pass climate-change legislation -- a virtual certainty given partisan gridlock on Capitol Hill -- then his administration will do as much as it can using its existing authority. One likely course of action will be to have EPA mandate cuts in air pollution from coal-fired power plants and oil refineries.

That will put Gina McCarthy, the woman he’s tapped to run the agency, at the heart of a fight over a priority that Obama views as a cornerstone of his legacy -- and that the fossil-fuel industry views as a threat to its very existence.

Appearing Thursday before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, McCarthy said, “As the president made clear, we must take steps to combat climate change. This is one of the greatest challenges of our generation and our great obligation to future generations. I am convinced that those steps can and must be pursued with common sense.”

McCarthy, who has worked as an environmental regulator at the state and federal level for over 20 years, is currently the EPA’s top clean air official. Over the course of Obama’s first term, she was the chief architect of a series of controversial regulations restricting toxic air pollution from coal-fired power plants -- rules which were attacked in Obama’s re-election campaign as a “war on coal.” During Obama’s second term, it’s expected that she will oversee far more sweeping climate change regulations, which would restrict greenhouse gas emissions from new and existing coal-fired power plants -- the nation’s top contributor to global warming pollution. Depending on how they’re structured, the rules could effectively freeze construction of new coal plants and lead to closures of existing coal plants.

That’s made McCarthy a top target for Senate Environment and Public Works Committee member John Barrasso of Wyoming – the nation’s biggest producer of coal.

“I’m not sure the nominee is aware of how many people have lost their jobs due to the EPA,” Barrasso said to McCarthy. He cited stories of Wyoming miners who have struggled and lost their jobs as a direct result of EPA coal regulations.

“The EPA is making it impossible for coal miners to feed their families.”

Alabama Republican Jeff Sessions cited concerns about the scope of the environmental agency’s reach, tapping into conservative ire about the size and scope of government.“I don’t think there’s any agency in government today that has such reach, touching all the way down to people’s lives,” he said. “EPA has extraordinary powers. It’s a massive reach in the pure sense of federal power, in areas never before contemplated and never legislated by the U.S. Congress.”

As Republicans piled up attacks, Sen. Bernard Sanders, I-Vt., shot back, “This is not a debate about Gina McCarthy…it is a debate about global warming and whether we are going to listen to the leading scientists of this country who are telling us that global warming is the most serious planetary crisis we face.”

McCarthy, who’s known for her pragmatic, no-nonsense style and her ability to work well even with the heads of polluting industries she regulates, defused some of the heat from her attackers.

To Barrasso and Sessions she responded, “The Clean Air act requires us to regulate and it is appropriate to regulate given the law and the science,” but she added, “I believe coal has been and will continue to play a role in the U.S. energy mix…we’re going to have to be sensitive of the impact of every rule. We don’t want to have unintended consequences on small businesses.”

While Republicans continued a steady barrage of attacks, none threatened to block her confirmation. Even Sen. Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma, who describes global warming as a “hoax,” told McCarthy, “If you are confirmed I want to develop same relationship with you I had with (previous administrator) Lisa Jackson. While I didn’t agree with her on policy, we got along well.”

The top Republican on the Environment Committee, David Vitter of Lousiana, also launched a barrage of criticism at the EPA – but he barely mentioned the issue of climate change.

Vitter’s home state is one of the biggest oil producers in the U.S. – although it’s also one of the states most vulnerable to economic destruction from rising sea levels and extreme hurricanes, which climate scientists link to global warming.

Vitter focused his questioning on the issue of transparency, accusing the EPA of concealing information as it prepares controversial regulations that could have profound impacts on the economy.

“I am concerned that the central functions of the agency have been obfuscated by ideology, frustrated by a severe lack of transparency, undermined by science the agency keeps hidden, and implemented without regard for economic consequences,” Vitter said. “The EPA eschews at all costs economic modeling that would verify the true impacts of the regulatory agenda that now provides this country with the lowest workforce participation rate since the Carter Administration. Cost/benefit analyses as required under various executive orders and as required by the Clean Air Act…yet EPA remains intransigent in its opposition to having a transparent economic analysis process.”

Vitter has sent letters to the EPA asking for details about emails sent by the EPA’s previous administrator, Lisa Jackson, from a private account with the name “Richard Windsor.”

“There’s been a pattern of abuse of using personal emails at EPA,” he said. “it’s clear that this practice was used to hide information from the public,”

Senate Environment Chairwoman Barbara Boxer told Vitter that due to the high volume of emails received by the EPA administrator, it has become common practice for the agency head to create private email accounts – the practice was also followed by George W. Bush EPA chiefs Christine Todd Whitman and her deputies. Previous EPA chief email usernames have included “Tofu” and “ToWhit,” she said.

Of usernames most appropriate for an EPA chief, Vitter said, “Richard Windsor sounds pretty monarchist. I thinks that’s appropriate. But my vote is for Tofu.”

McCarthy told Vitter, “I share your concern for transparency and accountability – I do not conduct business with personal email. There are times when I’ve gone home to Boston and I’ve used my personal email to send documents from EPA home for printing – but those have never left the government email systems. Those would comply with [Freedom of Information Act] requests.”

Vitter also pressed McCarthy on the use of instant messaging, as another way agency officials could communicate without leaving a traceable record.

McCarthy responded, “One good thing about being 58 is that I don’t know how to use that. I’ve never used that and I don’t know how.”

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EPA Nominee’s Hearing Is Just the Opening Act for GOP

Coral Davenport, National Journal — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 10:32:34 -0400

The Obama administration and Senate Republicans face off in a high-drama clash over global warming on Thursday, as the president’s choice to lead the Environmental Protection Agency undergoes questioning by the committee considering her nomination.

Gina McCarthy, a tough-talking environmental regulator from South Boston who is currently EPA’s top clean-air official, expects a grilling from Republicans on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, including a trio of conservatives from oil and coal states who have made no secret of their animosity toward President Obama’s environmental agenda.

McCarthy’s confirmation hearing sets the stage for a drama that will play out over the course of Obama’s second term. The president has made clear he wants action on global warming to be a cornerstone of his legacy, but it is a goal the fossil-fuel industry views as a threat to its very existence.

In his February State of the Union speech, Obama said that if Congress won’t pass climate-change legislation—a virtual certainty given the partisan gridlock on Capitol Hill—then his administration will do as much as it can using its existing authority. One likely course of action will be to have EPA mandate cuts in air pollution from coal-fired power plants and oil refineries.

That would make McCarthy the regulator most responsible for developing and implementing new climate-change rules—and put her in the crosshairs of the industries that would have to comply.

McCarthy’s hearing will also represent a return to the spotlight for Sen. David Vitter, R-La., the Environment and Public Works Committee’s new ranking member. Vitter has kept a relatively low profile since 2007, when it was revealed that his phone number had appeared on the call list of “D.C. Madam” Deborah Jeane Palfrey. But in his new position on the panel, Vitter will be the tip of the Republican spear trying to puncture one of the president’s top priorities.

Since the beginning of the year, Vitter has signaled his intent to come out against McCarthy with guns blazing. He has sent out a slew of letters and press releases slamming her and EPA, including a release Friday describing the agency’s “regulatory onslaught” and “garbage can of regulations and failures.”

Backing up Vitter will be the panel’s second-ranking Republican, Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma, who has famously called global warming a “hoax.”

Also pressing McCarthy will be GOP Sen. John Barrasso, who represents Wyoming, the top coal-producing state.

“I think ... the EPA during the Obama administration has been failing ... American taxpayers and American workers,” Barrasso told National Journal Daily. He added, “The president is going to use presidential powers when he can’t get his radical environmental agenda passed legislatively, [and I’m going] to use every effort to block ... administrative efforts to go around the legislative process.”

People close to McCarthy, who is experienced at appearing before Congress, say they expect her to hold her ground in the face of the onslaught.

“She is very grounded and seasoned; she knows what’s coming,” said Carol Browner, the EPA administrator during the Clinton administration who also was Obama’s senior adviser on energy and climate during his first term.

But even with a contentious hearing, senior Republican aides say McCarthy will probably win a narrow Senate confirmation. The meatier action will play out in the coming years, if her agency does roll out climate regulations. It’s expected that Senate Republicans will then use the Congressional Review Act – a law which allows Congress to block Cabinet regulations – to fight the rules.

“The real bite at the apple will be the [Congressional Review Act],” said Browner. “All of this is a preview. This is just the opening act.”

This article appeared in the Thursday, April 11, 2013 edition of National Journal Daily.

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New Era for Energy Department Expected Under a Secretary Moniz

Coral Davenport, National Journal — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 09:15:16 -0400

With stimulus funding for clean energy at an end, climate-change policy dead in Congress, and harsh budget cuts looming over all agencies thanks to the sequestration, the days of President Obama’s vision of the Energy Department as a green juggernaut have probably come to an end.

But Ernest Moniz, who faces a Senate confirmation hearing Tuesday morning as Obama’s choice to become the next Energy secretary, would be likely to steer the department into a new era, one in which climate change still plays a key role in guiding its mission but so, too, do policies connected to the nation’s recent boom in oil and natural-gas development.

The MIT professor and former Energy undersecretary in the Clinton administration is also likely to renew the agency’s traditional focus on nuclear energy, nuclear waste, and nonproliferation of nuclear weapons.

Before Obama took office, the Energy Department had been widely viewed as a backwater agency. But people close to Moniz say they expect him to revitalize the department’s original mission while also taking on new issues involving global trade and commerce.

Like the man he would succeed, Nobel laureate Steven Chu, Moniz is a renowned physicist with serious research chops: He is director of the Energy Initiative at MIT, where he has been on the faculty since 1973. Unlike Chu, however, Moniz has a long record of supporting a broad portfolio of energy sources, including natural gas. He also has a strong background in nuclear issues, making him a better fit considering the agency’s historic nuclear portfolio.

Also unlike Chu, Moniz is viewed as a pragmatic and politically savvy operator who knows his way around Washington.

“I think it will be a very different agency than it was in the first term,” said Charles Ebinger, director of the Energy Security Initiative at the Brookings Institution, who has worked with Moniz on energy policy for many years.

“Ernie knows climate change, but also unconventional oil and gas and coal and nuclear. He will push the president towards a more balanced policy. I think you’ll see a focus on unconventional oil and gas and not as much on renewables.”

Frank Verrastro, director of the energy program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said, “He’ll be a more complete secretary of Energy. He brings different skills. He’s focused on climate and clean energy, but he’s aware of what’s going on in the oil and gas space. It’s an opportunity for the administration to gain back some energy-policy stake.”

The nation’s energy picture has changed profoundly since 2008, when Obama appointed Chu to lead the DOE. Since then, a boom in unconventional oil and gas development, thanks to breakthroughs in hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” technology has led to a dramatic increase in domestic oil and gas supply. Obama has been particularly bullish on natural gas as a one-two punch for his climate-change and economic goals: The fuel has half the carbon emissions of coal, and the new glut of it has lowered U.S. manufacturing costs.

The fossil-fuel industry, which regularly railed against Chu, has already indicated its openness to Moniz.

“Moniz seems to be a pragmatist on the important energy issues facing our nation including natural-gas development,” said John Krohn, a spokesman for Energy In Depth, which represents the gas-fracking industry in Washington. “When he arrives at DOE, he will join many senior-level Obama officials who have publicly stated that natural gas is an important fuel for our nation’s environment and economic future.”

Among the biggest policy decisions facing the Energy Department in the coming years will be the question of whether or not to grant permits for U.S. companies to begin exporting natural gas. Manufacturers fear that exporting the fuel will increase their prices, but foreign policy thinkers believe it could help increase U.S. muscle in Asia. Moniz is expected to be a key player in these decisions.

Nuclear-energy issues are also likely to get more attention under Moniz. While some environmentalists remain wary of nuclear energy, Moniz is among a group of thinkers who see nuclear power—which produces no carbon emissions—as a key piece of a future climate policy. While nuclear-waste issues were not a forte of Chu’s, Moniz was part of the blue-ribbon commission on nuclear waste that last year recommended building medium-term nuclear-waste storage facilities that could hold waste for up to a century.

“There will be more attention paid to nuclear waste and the nuclear stockpile,” said John Deutch, a professor at MIT and former head of the CIA who held senior positions in the Energy and Defense departments during the Carter and Clinton administrations, and who has worked with Moniz on energy issues for more than 30 years.

“He will have a much broader agenda, and he will be asked to have a broader agenda by President Obama,” Deutch said.

This article appeared in the Tuesday, April 9, 2013 edition of National Journal Daily.

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Republicans Take Aim at Obama’s EPA Nominee

Coral Davenport, National Journal — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 10:09:45 -0500

President Obama’s nomination Monday of Gina McCarthy to lead the Environmental Protection Agency sets up the next high-profile clash between the White House and congressional Republicans over the incendiary issue of climate change.

Obama has tapped McCarthy, currently the assistant administrator for the Office of Air and Radiation at EPA, as administrator at a time when he looks to expand the agency’s reach. During the president’s second term, EPA is expected to focus more on regulating fossil-fuel industries that are the biggest contributors to climate change but are also among the mainstays of the nation’s economy.

Most energy analysts and Senate-watchers expect McCarthy to be confirmed, but her nomination does set the stage for high drama over one of the most pressing environmental problems on the planet.

In his State of the Union address, Obama made clear that as he pursues his climate-change agenda, he is prepared to bypass Congress and use EPA’s authorities to move ahead with aggressive regulations on producers of greenhouse gases. The president called on Congress to act on climate change, and Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Chairwoman Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., has introduced legislation, but the bill has almost no chance of success in the gridlocked Congress. As a result, Obama plans to hand the ball for his climate-change agenda to EPA.

Her confirmation hearing before the Environment and Public Works panel, which has yet to be scheduled, will pit McCarthy—an environmental regulator of nearly 30 years with a tough-talking style, a thick Boston accent, and a steely blue gaze—against a trio of conservative energy-state Republicans who question the science of climate change and have launched a public crusade against EPA broadly and McCarthy specifically.

An expected grilling of McCarthy by ranking member David Vitter, R-La.—a conservative Southern firebrand from a major oil-drilling state—will be like “a showdown between Hillary [Rodham] Clinton and Rand Paul,” said one former EPA official.

Vitter has already launched a public campaign of sorts against the nominee. In 2011, he wrote a letter to EPA requesting the scientific methods used in the agency’s regulatory agenda. Over the past six weeks, as rumors swirled that McCarthy was the likely EPA nominee, Vitter has sent out a steady barrage of letters and press releases demanding answers from McCarthy.

“The EPA is in desperate need of a leader who will stop ignoring congressional information requests, hiding e-mails and more from the public, and relying on flawed science,” Vitter said on Monday. “McCarthy has been directly involved in much of that, but I hope she can reverse those practices with [outgoing EPA Administrator] Lisa Jackson’s departure. I look forward to hearing answers from her on a number of key issues.”

The panel’s second-ranking Republican, Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma, has long been known as Washington’s most prominent climate-science skeptic. Last year, Inhofe wrote a book called The Greatest Hoax, reiterating his long-standing claim that the theory of human-caused climate change is a falsehood cooked up by scientists. Inhofe has clashed with the Obama administration on climate change since Day One, and there’s little doubt he’ll seize the opportunity to push back hard at McCarthy.

Another top Republican on the panel, Sen. John Barrasso of Wyoming, comes from a coal state whose economy would likely be hit hard by new climate regulations. He already has a history of conflict with McCarthy.

In 2009, Barrasso initially blocked McCarthy’s nomination to her current post, in part because of concerns about her approach to regulating greenhouse gases. He eventually lifted his hold. But he said on Monday, “I have serious concerns about how the current EPA operates. We can’t afford another administrator who bypasses Congress and rolls out more red tape that discourages job creation. I’m going to take a very close look at Ms. McCarthy’s experience at the EPA and her vision for the agency.”

So far, no Republicans have threatened to block McCarthy’s nomination outright. And she will have an opportunity to make her case with them in one-on-one meetings ahead of the confirmation hearing. Those meetings may give McCarthy a chance to deploy her well-known sense of humor to help smooth the way ahead of the vote on her nomination.

Meanwhile, environmental groups have launched a website, standwithgina.com, to build support for the nominee ahead of the hearing.

Boxer said on Monday she intends to move forward with the nomination “as quickly as possible.”

This article appeared in the Tuesday, March 5, 2013 edition of National Journal Daily.

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EPA Funding Reductions Kneecap Environmental Enforcement

Coral Davenport, National Journal — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 09:33:30 -0500

Republicans have spent the past two years on the warpath against the Obama administration’s Environmental Protection Agency. As the EPA rolled out an ambitious slate of rules aimed at stopping climate change and curbing power-plant pollution, Republicans on the campaign trail and Capitol Hill slammed the agency as the embodiment of government overreach and so-called “job-killing regulations.”

Despite the outrage, the GOP’s efforts to stop the agency’s agenda haven’t succeeded—all of the many bills to block or delay EPA’s new regulations have failed in Congress.

But lawmakers have found another way to strike out at the agency they love to hate—by slashing its budget. Over the past two years, Congress has cut EPA’s budget by a whopping 18 percent, from $10.3 billion to $8.5 billion. And that’s not counting the effects of the across-the-board spending cuts that took effect with sequestration Friday.

Cutting the agency’s budget doesn’t take away its obligation to enforce environmental laws and implement new regulations, but it has dramatically weakened and slowed EPA’s ability to fulfill its mandate. And the cuts have come just as President Obama is preparing to ramp up efforts to tackle climate change. That will be a huge struggle—EPA’s budget cuts have already sapped the agency of money for the staff, training, travel, and technology needed to enforce existing environmental-protection rules.

“Enforcement has really taken it on the chin,” said Adam Kushner, a former director of EPA’s Office of Civil Enforcement who now practices at the law firm Hogan Lovells.

Kushner and others point out that in order to enforce environmental regulations, staffers must be able to travel to sites such as coal plants or water bodies; to use high-tech tools to determine pollution levels; to review complex technical documents; and more. At least some of that work requires in-house training. And money to do all of it is declining.

“It means laws about environmental enforcement are just paper,” Kushner said.

Budget-cutting is an age-old means for lawmakers to influence the executive branch. “One of the ways you can affect policy is by denying money,” said Steve Ellis, vice president of the watchdog group Taxpayers for Common Sense. “They couldn’t undo the regulations. So they bled the funding. It’s not a new tactic. It’s been done at other agencies in other times.”

Republicans have made clear this is exactly their strategy. Here’s what Rep. Mike Simpson, R-Idaho, chairman of the House Appropriations subcommittee that funds EPA, said about last year’s spending bill: “Wherever I go, the biggest complaint I hear about the federal government is how the EPA is creating economic uncertainty and killing jobs. This bill includes provisions to address some of these issues.”

While the Democratic majority in the Senate has restored some of the EPA funding cut by the Republican-controlled House, the agency has still taken a bigger hit than many others. For example, over the past two years funding for EPA’s climate-change and clean-air programs dropped 9 percent, from $1.1 billion to $1 billion, while funding for water quality fell 29 percent, from $5.6 billion to $4 billion.

Those cuts appear to have had a measurable impact on levels of environmental cleanup. According to agency data, EPA programs stripped 410 million pounds of pollutants from the air in 2010; the amount dropped to 250 million pounds in 2012. In the same two-year period, the volume of contaminants removed from U.S. waters was cut in half, from 1 billion pounds to 500 million pounds. Hazardous wastes eliminated from the environment fell from 11.8 billion pounds in 2010 to 4.4 billion pounds in 2012.

Reduced environmental enforcement has real consequences, said Frank O’Donnell, president of the group Clean Air Watch. “It’s a fundamental problem,” he said. “EPA has been given more and more responsibility, but not the adequate resources."

“In theory, it’s been given all this power,” O’Donnell said. “In reality, it’s a paper tiger.”

This article appeared in the Monday, March 4, 2013 edition of National Journal Daily.

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Why John Kerry should treat climate change as a national security issue

Coral Davenport, National Journal — Fri, 01 Feb 2013 08:38:43 -0500

For centuries, the glaciers of the Western Himalayas have fed the Indus River, which flows down the mountains through India and into Pakistan, where it runs the length of the country to the Arabian Sea. In both countries, the river is a crucial source of water for livestock, irrigation, drinking—essential to life and livelihood for millions of people.

But as climate change causes global temperatures to rise, the glaciers that feed the Indus are receding. A series of scientific reports indicates that in the coming decades, the river’s water levels could drop by as much as 40 percent. Already, some Indian policymakers are raising the idea of damming that water off for their own country. That could save the lives of millions of Indians, while threatening millions of Pakistanis. Pakistan lacks the economic, political, or conventional military leverage to retaliate against India if that happens; it matches its neighbor only in nuclear weapons.

National security agencies around the world, including the Pentagon and the CIA, are watching the situation closely, nervous that climate change could one day ignite a nuclear face-off between these two volatile neighbors.

That’s exactly the type of event John Kerry, approved earlier this week as secretary of State, was referring to during his Senate confirmation hearing, when he called climate change a “life-threatening issue” of national security. Kerry, a Vietnam veteran, has long been a so-called climate hawk, framing his drive to stop global warming in terms of curbing a force that inflames conflicts around the world to the detriment of U.S. safety.

In an impassioned Senate floor speech in August, Kerry compared the potential peril from climate change to the threat of war. “I believe that the situation we face [with climate change] is as dangerous as any of the sort of real crises that we talk about” in Iran, Syria, and other trouble spots, he said.

He has taken plenty of heat for that view from Republicans, many of whom question the science of human-caused climate change, scoff at any link to national security, and say that solving global warming is the wrong priority for the nation’s chief diplomat. But defense and intelligence officials say the link between climate change and national security is clear, dangerous, and urgent—and a raft of national security experts say it’s high time the nation’s top foreign policy official treated it as such.

In its 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review, the Pentagon identified climate change as a major “threat multiplier.” While climate change itself doesn’t cause wars, it can, like a spark on dry tinder, exacerbate already volatile circumstances.

Around the globe, climate change contributes to rising sea levels, more-intense drought, and food and water scarcity. Already, swaths of land in Africa and the Middle East have become too barren to support crops, and scientists warn far worse is to come as the globe continues to heat up in the coming century.

Security experts say the slow but steady spread of the Sahara through Mali, killing crops and leaving farmers starving, may have been a contributing force in the jihadist uprising in that African country last year—an uprising that has taken many lives and led to a deadly hostage-taking at a gas plant in neighboring Algeria in January.

“If you look at the Sahel band in Africa—Mali, Niger, Somalia, Egypt—you’re finding more and more jihadists there, in an area which is already unstable. And climate change compounds that instability,” said Drew Sloan, a veteran of combat in Iraq and Afghanistan, who works closely with the Truman National Security Project and has briefed President Obama on climate issues. “As climate change makes those dry areas get drier, as crops are threatened, you take away people’s ability to farm, take away their food, and then you present an alternative to that,” he said. “It presents a recruitment opportunity for jihadists, who can also blame the problem on the gluttony of America.”

Climate change has also set off what’s predicted to become a towering wave of “climate migrants” in vulnerable and volatile parts of the world. Rising sea levels are expected to displace an estimated 20 million people in Bangladesh; the first waves of migrants are already fleeing flooding and destruction in the low-lying nation. Andrew Guzman, an economist and international legal expert at the University of California (Berkeley), says this torrent of “climate migrants” will heighten border tensions, create vast new refugee camps, and send displaced people streaming into cities in need of shelter and basic human services—in numbers that could create a humanitarian crisis for which nobody is prepared.

The question, however, is what the chief U.S. diplomat can actually do about climate change. Although no single official, or nation, can solve the problem alone, Kerry will be uniquely positioned to broker action through diplomacy. In France in 2015, the world’s nations are set to sign a global treaty that would legally bind them to cut their global-warming pollution. Much of the world views the success of the treaty as largely resting in American hands. If the United States acts to cut its carbon emissions—either through legislation or, as seems far more likely, through Obama’s use of executive authority and regulations issued by the Environmental Protection Agency—the country will be well positioned to broker a global climate deal.

While the secretary of State can’t control EPA, he can, as first among equals in the Cabinet, quietly counsel the president to act on emissions regulations. To the rest of the world, says Charlie Ebinger, an energy and foreign policy expert at the Brookings Institution, Kerry “can sound the clarion call. He can convey that the U.S. will take moral leadership on this.”

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The education of Energy Secretary Steven Chu

Coral Davenport, National Journal — Fri, 18 Jan 2013 09:27:02 -0500

The imminent departure of Energy Secretary Steven Chu highlights the political struggle President Obama has faced in trying to enact even a portion of the sweeping clean-energy and climate change agenda he envisioned when he ran for the White House in 2008.

Obama tapped the Nobel physicist to lead his fight to stop global warming and transform the nation’s energy economy but the broad climate bill the president hoped would become part of his legacy never made it through Congress and Chu later found himself embroiled in the political controversy over the bankrupt solar company Solyndra.

Several people close to the administration have said Chu was not planning to stay on in a second Obama administration. Bloomberg reported on Thursday that the secretary's departure could be announced as early as next week.

At the time Chu took the helm at the Energy Department, it actually played very small role in shaping energy policy. Its chief purview was to oversee the nation’s nuclear weapons arsenal. Obama's plan was to push a comprehensive energy and climate change bill through Congress, raising $150 billion for clean energy research over a decade. Chu was to oversee a transformation of the department into an international driver of clean energy development. And he did oversee the federal government’s single biggest investment in clean energy in history – a one-time shot of $35 billion from the 2009 stimulus law.

In 2010, the climate change bill died in Congress. And the following year, Chu’s star fell and he and the Energy Department became a political target when the solar company Solyndra, which received $535 million in stimulus funding, went bankrupt and became the subject of an FBI probe. But Chu also won high praise from all quarters for his central role in stopping the disastrous 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill. And while the ambitious plan to expand and transform the Energy Department into a juggernaut of clean energy research wasn’t realized, Chu brought in some of the greatest scientific minds of the country to help launch small but cutting-edge new clean energy research and development agencies, which have been hailed as some of the most innovative and important in the nation.

Chu was the first Nobel prize winner to be appointed to a U.S. Cabinet post. When he took office, he was already a star in the scientific community. He came to Washington from University of California, Berkeley, where he was a professor of physics and molecular biology and director of the Energy Department’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. When the new president declared that tackling global warming was a top priority, and that Chu was the man to take it on, the self-styled nerd was catapulted into a spotlight, and his stardom transcended the worlds of Washington and academia. In June 2009, Rolling Stone published a profile of him entitled “Secretary of Saving the Planet.”

Chu had almost no political experience when he came to Washington – a qualification that, at the beginning, often endeared him to lawmakers. He testified regularly before congressional committees and his warm but wonky style won plaudits even from Republicans, when he launched into enthusiastic explanations about energy and climate science.

When pressed on political questions by the press, Chu would sometimes quip, “I’m a scientist, not a politician!”

Susan Tierney, an assistant energy secretary in the Clinton administration, who worked with the Obama 2008 transition team to help prepare Chu for his new job, recalled the excitement over the new secretary.

“It’s not an accident that a Nobel prize winning scientist was chosen…the president had had a plank of wanting to be very much more scientifically based. Decarbonizing the energy supply was a big scientific goal. That was part of the excitement of bringing someone like him in,” she said.

Later, that lack of political experience would prove a challenge.

Clean-Energy Projects

Obama’s first signature piece of clean energy legislation was his 2009 economic stimulus law, which injected $800 billion into the ailing economy – including $35 billion to the Energy Department for a massive jump-start in clean energy projects, such as wind, solar, geothermal and energy efficiency installations. The stimulus was both the biggest federal investment in clean energy in U.S. history, and an unprecedented sum for the agency, which typically has an annual budget of only about $28 billion -– of which only about $2 billion per year had previously gone to clean-energy funding.

The Obama administration saw the sum as a down payment on future clean-energy funding that would flow more freely once Congress passed a cap-and-trade law.

The money came with a deadline – it had to be spent in two years. In theory, the cash should have been a dream come true – but in practice, it created a logistical nightmare as the agency struggled to ramp up staff and resources in an area in which it had little expertise.

“It was an immense challenge to get that amount of money out the door in a Department that had never done it,” said Paul Bledsoe, an energy policy consultant and a senior energy official in the Clinton administration. “The agency just was not equipped to do what they were being asked to do.”

Among the most high-profile recipients of the new Energy Department funding was the California solar company Solyndra, which received a $535 million loan guarantee from the stimulus. In August 2011, Solyndra went bankrupt, and the FBI soon opened up an investigation against the company. House Republicans launched a high-profile probe of the Solyndra loan, and White House emails revealed that the administration had asked the Energy Department to hurry the process for approving the Solyndra funds, in order to make the company a poster child for the stimulus. Later, when it became clear that the company was struggling, the Energy Department restructured the loan rather than allowing the company to fail. And Republicans also took aim at the fact that Obama donor George Kaiser is the billionaire behind the George Kaiser Family Foundation, which has a subsidiary that was a major investor in Solyndra. House Republicans hauled Chu on the carpet to question and slam him over the deal, and Americans for Prosperity, the superPAC linked to the oil conglomerate Koch Industries, ran an ad charging, “Wealthy donors with ties to Solyndra give Obama hundreds of thousands of dollars. What does Obama give them in return? Half a billion in taxpayer money to help his friends at Solyndra, a business the White House knew was on the path to bankruptcy.”

To date, investigations of the Solyndra loan have not found evidence that the Energy Department was pressured to approve the loan to benefit political contributors. And the vast majority of the companies that received stimulus funding remained solvent. But the controversy tarnished Chu and the Energy Department –- and also froze future prospects for more federal clean energy funding.

Alternative Energy Lab

Despite the dust-up over Solyndra, Chu’s scientific chops shone at Energy - he won praise for the work he did to begin to transform the Energy Department into a leading clean-energy research and development facility in its own right. Chu used the stimulus money to start a cutting-edge alternative energy lab known as ARPA-E, or Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy. The lab was modeled after the famous Pentagon DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) lab, a high-risk, high-rewards research program that helped birth technology like the Internet, the microwave, and stealth fighter planes. Today, ARPA-E is leading the way in funding energy research in fields from electrofuels (in which microbes harvested from the ocean absorb hydrogen and carbon dioxide to produce clean-burning oils) to batteries that could allow cars to travel 300 miles on one charge.

The lab has won almost universal praise from the scientific, commercial and even political communities. During the 2012 Presidential campaign, even Republican nominee Mitt Romney praised ARPA-E, and promised to continue funding for the program.

“There are some Secretaries of Energy that don’t leave a market – ARPA-E will leave a significant mark on the country,” said retired Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., who chaired the Senate panel that funded the Energy Department and now heads up the Bipartisan Policy Center’s energy program. If you fast forward 10 years from now, ARPA-E will be a permanent part of the landscape. It’s a very significant legacy.”

Point Man on Fukushima, BP

While Chu’s star fell during the Solyndra episode, he had also built up tremendous capital in the White House. He was Obama’s point man during the 2011 meltdown of Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant, which triggered new oversight of the U.S. nuclear power fleet, and during the catastrophic 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill. Obama has credited Chu himself with designing the cap that ultimately plugged the gushing oil well (although other reports have said Chu chose the designs from thousands of submissions).

“He’s a brilliant scientist. But he is also real-world smart,” said former Congressman Bart Gordon, who was Chairman of the House Science Committee. “During the Gulf incident, the president called on Chu to do something. And he and [ARPA-E chief scientist] Arun Majumder put together a strike team and they went down there – and they were the ones who figured out how to cap that well.”

Republicans also praise his role in stopping the disaster. “His high point was his direct role in handling the Macondo problem,” said Bob McNally, a senior energy official in the George W. Bush White House, who now runs an energy consulting firm, The Rapidan Group. “His skill were applicable to the highest degree.”

A Less Muscular Role For Energy Department

It’s unlikely, in a second term, that the Energy Department will take on the muscular clean-energy engine role that Obama had once envisioned. But the small clean-energy research programs that Chu launched, particularly ARPA-E, do appear likely to keep going strong.

Among the top contenders to succeed Chu are Dorgan, and former Colorado governor Bill Ritter. Both are skilled politicians who have championed both clean energy and the boom in oil and gas extraction. The controversial extraction method known as “fracking” has benefitted both of their home states. Christine Gregoire, who this week wrapped up her tenure as governor of Washington state, has also been mentioned for the job. Gregoire is also being considered for secretary of the interior or head of the Environment Protection Agency.

Also on the list are Dan Reicher, who served as Clinton’s assistant secretary of energy efficiency and renewable energy, and from 2007 to 2011 was Google’s director of climate-change and energy initiatives. He currently heads the Center for Energy Policy and Finance at Stanford University, where Chu was once a professor of physics. Another possibility is John Podesta, chairman of the liberal think tank Center for American Progress, who was Clinton’s chief of staff. Their progressive pedigrees could be stumbling blocks to Senate confirmation but if either ended up in the job, they would continue the clean-tech work started by Chu.

“There is a real focus on energy R and D that had never been seen before,” said Josh Freed, director of energy policy at the Democratic think tank Third Way. “That evidence will endure beyond Steven Chu."

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Why the former Washington governor is likely to join Obama's Cabinet

Coral Davenport and Caren Bohan, National Journal — Thu, 17 Jan 2013 16:05:47 -0500

President Obama hinted at his news conference this week that he would soon name some high-profile women to top jobs in his administration. Christine Gregoire, the former governor of Washington state, will almost certainly be one of them.

Gregoire, who has made energy issues a cornerstone of her gubernatorial tenure, is likely headed for one of three Cabinet-level jobs that are vacant now or will soon become vacant: Energy secretary, Interior secretary, or head of the Environmental Protection Agency. As a former head of Washington state's Department of Ecology, Gregoire is steeped in experience in energy and environmental issues. Her enthusiastic support for renewable energy has won plaudits from environmentalists, but she’s also known for her ability to speak effectively about the realities of the fossil-fuel economy.

After Obama nominated John Kerry as secretary of State, Chuck Hagel as Defense secretary, and Jacob Lew as Treasury secretary, he was hit with a barrage of criticism about the lack of diversity in his selections for plum jobs. In a column in The Washington Post, Ruth Marcus suggested that Obama ask to borrow Mitt Romney’s “binders full of women” to balance out a Cabinet that includes so many white men.

Gregoire would check that box but would also fill other crucial needs. Obama lacks an effective spokesperson within his administration for energy and environmental issues. Gregoire would fit that bill, bringing a comfort level on the national stage and an ability to tailor her message to a broad audience.

Energy Secretary Steven Chu has often quipped that he is a scientist and not a politician. He’s right. The Nobel Prize-winning physicist, who never relished the limelight, is expected to move on from his job early this year, though his departure has not yet been announced. EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson, who has already announced she is leaving, was considered a political lightning rod, limiting her ability to serve as a national spokesperson for Obama’s environmental agenda. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, a former U.S. senator from Colorado who is leaving his post in March, does have an ease on the public stage, but he provoked controversy in 2010 with his vow to keep the administration’s “boot on the neck” of British Petroleum in the aftermath of the catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. More recently, Salazar was forced to apologize for another verbal gaffe when he was heard on tape threatening to punch out a reporter.

If Obama chooses Gregoire for Interior, it would be in keeping with a tradition of naming Western governors or politicians to the job, though she has an equal shot at the Energy or EPA positions. People close to the administration say she has been on the White House's radar for one of the senior energy and environment slots since before the election.

The timing could work out well for Gregoire, too. She finished her tenure as governor this week and there is buzz that she is interested in heading to the nation’s capital.

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Obama could look west to fill Interior job

Coral Davenport, National Journal — Wed, 16 Jan 2013 12:25:53 -0500

President Obama could look west to fill the job of Interior secretary that will become vacant by the end of March with the departure of Ken Salazar. Washington Gov. Christine Gregoire, who supports the president’s progressive clean-energy and climate-change agenda, is one possible candidate. Gregoire, who has also been mentioned as a potential successor to Lisa Jackson at the Environmental Protection Agency, has pushed policies to move her state away from coal-fired electricity.

Another candidate for Interior is John Berry, director of the White House Office of Personnel Management. Berry is a previous director of the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation and the National Zoo. He has held posts at the Interior Department as well as the Treasury Department and the Smithsonian Institution. If selected, Berry would be the first openly gay Cabinet member.

The Interior Department oversees oil and gas drilling and also conservation on the nation’s 700 million acres of public lands. Traditionally, it has been run by governors or senators from Western states. Salazar had represented his home state of Colorado as a senator and also served as Colorado's attorney general before Obama appointed him to Interior.

Salazar oversaw the department’s first forays into developing renewable energy on public lands. While Interior has always overseen oil and gas drilling on public lands, it has made an aggressive push to begin developing large-scale solar power on federal lands in the deserts of the Southwest, and the nation’s first offshore wind farms in the federal waters off the East Coast.

Salazar plans to return to Colorado, according to a statement from the Interior Department.

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A Secretary John Kerry would elevate climate issues

Coral Davenport, National Journal — Tue, 11 Dec 2012 14:39:40 -0500

Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has long been viewed as a likely candidate to replace Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. While United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice more recently had been viewed as the top contender for the post, fierce Republican resistance to her candidacy now appears to be making Kerry, who would probably face a relatively easy Senate confirmation, the more likely candidate.

A Vietnam veteran who has served on the Senate Armed Services Committee, Kerry is also seen as a possible choice for the next Defense secretary. He would bring his passion for the issue of climate change to either position.

“No senator since Al Gore knows as much about the science and diplomacy of climate change as Kerry,” said David Goldwyn, an international energy consultant who served as Clinton’s special envoy and coordinator for international energy affairs. “He would not only put climate change in the top five issues he raises with every country, but he would probably rethink our entire diplomatic approach to the issue.”

Kerry could also have a strong impact on climate policy as Defense secretary given the Pentagon’s emergence as a leading force in the Obama administration on energy and climate issues.

“He has a lot of gravitas on national security. He’s made that a touchstone of his career,” said Paul Clarke, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel who served on the National Security Council staff in both the George H.W. Bush and Clinton administrations, and is now a senior adviser at the Truman National Security Project. “If he talks about the issue of climate change as a national-security issue, he will be taken seriously.”

Kerry has been engaged with climate policy since he attended the first major U.N. climate summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. He was coauthor, along with Sens. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and Joe Lieberman, ID-Conn., of sweeping legislation that would have capped U.S. emissions of greenhouse gases, although the bill fell apart before making it to the Senate floor. In 2007 he and his wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, coauthored a book, This Moment on Earth: Today’s New Environmentalists and Their Vision for the Future.

And in an impassioned Senate floor speech in August, Kerry compared the threat of climate change to the threat of war. “I believe that the situation we face [with climate change] is as dangerous as any of the sort of real crises that we talk about” in Iran, Syria, and other world trouble spots, he said.

While many lawmakers speak passionately about climate change, Kerry has also logged years doing the thankless behind-the-scenes work of climate diplomacy and in the process has earned the respect of the rest of the world on the issue.

He was the only U.S. senator to attend key U.N. climate-change negotiations in Bali, Indonesia, in 2007, and Poznan, Poland, in 2008. At a major climate summit in Copenhagen, Denmark, in 2009, Kerry arrived before President Obama and Secretary Clinton and spent time in back-room meetings with ministers from China, India, and several European countries to help pave the way for final negotiations.

More recently, in his position as Foreign Relations chairman, Kerry has prioritized action on a Law of the Sea treaty that addresses melting polar ice caps.

“Kerry’s been one of the most active champions on the Arctic. He’s out there saying, ‘The Arctic ice is melting, we’ve got to do something,’ ” said Charles Ebinger, director of the Foreign Policy and Energy Security Initiative at the Brookings Institution.

Asked if Kerry would make climate change a top priority in a Cabinet post, Ebinger said, “There’s no doubt -- 100 percent. He is impassioned on the issue and would bring it front and center.”

While Obama has indicated he’d like to tackle climate change in his second term, energy and environment policy experts remain skeptical that the president is willing to put in the passion and commitment necessary for action on the issue.

That could change if his top diplomat or Pentagon chief makes the case that the issue is a driving foreign-policy and national-security concern.

“I think he could be quite powerful with the president,” said Brooks Yeager, who led the State Department’s global environmental negotiations during the Clinton administration and now serves as vice president for policy at the advocacy group Clean Air-Cool Planet.

“The president respects intelligence and competence, and he’s got both on these issues. He’d have to listen to Kerry.”]]>

'We're not fishing,' Issa says of leak investigation

Coral Davenport and Alexandra Jaffe, National Journal — Mon, 25 Jun 2012 09:00:46 -0400

Just days before the House is slated to vote on whether to find Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress, the Republican congressman leading the investigation against Holder defended his pursuit of further information and slammed President Obama for invoking executive privilege to withhold documents.

Last week, the House Oversight Committee, chaired by Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., held a vote finding Holder in contempt, and Issa said on Fox News Sunday that he expects a vote in the full House this week to yield the same result. If so, it would be the first time in history that either chamber has voted to hold a U.S. Attorney General in contempt.

Issa has led the months-long investigation into the gun-running operation known as fast and Furious, in which the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms funneled guns into Mexico in an attempt to track them to drug cartels. Many of the guns ended up being used in violent crimes, however, and at least one U.S. border patrol agent, Brian Terry, was killed by a gun from the program.

Democrats have criticized Issa for his investigation, calling it a “fishing expedition” because it has yet to turn up evidence of a government cover up. But on Sunday, Issa defended the committee's work.

“No, we're not fishing, but you get testimony or whistle blowers and you ask for documents. You read the documents. Sometimes that leads you to more,” he said on ABC’s This Week.

Issa acknowledged that the program originally began under President George H.W. Bush, but he also noted that it had ended and was re-opened by the Obama administration.

“It started under Bush, was closed up under Bush, reopened under President Obama, and, in fact, got to be on steroids,” he said.

Last week, President Obama asserted executive privilege over a number of documents requested by Issa, to prevent him from receiving them, leading critics to wonder whether the move was intended to cover up vital information. However, the White House has said that the move was a matter of “principle” to uphold the separation of powers between Congress and the Executive branch.

Issa said that Obama was wrong to assert executive privilege, and he’ll be sending a letter to Obama this week “that breaks down the points of why the president's executive privilege claim is either overbroad or simply wrong.”

“Even the president -- and certainly all the agencies -- cannot hold back information related to covering up criminal activities or talking about them," he said on ABC. "That's what we're looking for here.”

However Issa conceded on Fox News Sunday that there is no evidence to date that the White House is involved in a cover-up.

Democratic Rep. Elijah Cummings, the ranking Democrat on the Oversight Committee, said he hopes this week’s vote can be averted if House Speaker John Boehner sits down with Holder in the coming days. “I’m calling on speaker Boehner to come forth and show strong leadership and sit down with the attorney general,” Cummings said on Fox News Sunday.

That may be the outcome preferred by some moderate Republicans, who face attacks that the Holder flare-up is a political distraction from the issues most voters care about: jobs and the economy.

“It’s not a fight we want, we want to be on jobs,” Issa conceded on NBC’s Meet the Press. “We have those issues we’re working on. Some fights you pick, some come to you. In this case you’ll have some Republicans saying this is not a fight we want to do but we’re going to do it.”

Some Democrats also contend that the pressure on Holder comes because he has challenged Republican-backed state laws, including the controversial Arizona immigration law.

“This is why Republicans don't like Eric Holder, because he has challenged voter I.D. laws under the civil rights statutes as voter suppression rules that they are, because he has challenged the Arizona, you know, discriminatory immigration law, because he has refused to implement the discriminatory anti-marriage law,” said Democratic strategist Hilary Rosen, speaking on ABC’s This Week.

The Supreme Court is expected to release a decision this week on whether or not to uphold Arizona’s tough immigration law.

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How the Pentagon plans to wean itself off fossil fuels

Coral Davenport, National Journal — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 08:44:11 -0400

The Pentagon plans to roll out a new slate of clean- and renewable-energy initiatives on Wednesday as part of its long-term “Operational Energy Strategy” aimed at reducing the military’s dependence on fossil fuels while increasing its front-line fighting power.

The moves are in keeping with a sustained push by the military in recent years to cut its dependence on oil, which costs the Pentagon up to $20 billion annually and has led to the deaths of thousands of troops and contractors, killed while guarding fuel convoys in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Some renewable-energy projects at the Defense Department are already paying big dividends. Pentagon efforts to research and deploy products like hybrid batteries for tanks have enabled combat vehicles to travel farther without refueling, while advances in portable solar generation have allowed troops on the front lines in Afghanistan to power housing and electronic facilities without requiring fuel convoys to make dangerous drives through hostile territory to deliver the diesel required for traditional generators.

It doesn’t hurt that the initiatives also tie in politically with President Obama’s unwavering support for clean energy on the campaign trail -- even as Republicans continue to attack him almost daily on energy issues.

GOP and conservative “super PACs” have no problem hitting Obama for his support of renewable-energy programs in the wake of the bankruptcy of Solyndra, the solar panel company that cost the federal government $535 million in loan guarantees from the economic stimulus law.

But politically, it’s a lot harder for traditionally hawkish Republicans to criticize the Pentagon’s embrace of renewable power, which Defense officials have repeatedly made clear is not being done in the interest of an environmental agenda, but rather to increase security and fighting capability on the front lines.

Defense officials have also emphasized that much of the funding for the Pentagon’s renewable-energy initiatives won’t come from taxpayer dollars. On Tuesday, a Defense official said that the construction of renewable-electricity plants for Army and Air Force bases -- which the official said could cost up to $7 billion -- will be privately financed.

Projects being announced on Wednesday are:

In Detroit, the Army will open a 30,000-square-foot lab to develop new technologies for fuel-efficient combat vehicles.
The Army and Air Force will announce contracts to purchase one gigawatt each of renewable electricity from wind, solar, and geothermal sources to power domestic bases (one gigawatt is about the equivalent of one nuclear power plant’s worth of energy). That comes on top of a similar announcement last year by the Navy.
The Energy Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy lab will launch a $30 million research competition to build energy-storage devices that can be used in the battlefield, and ultimately should be available for commercial use.

While Pentagon officials haven’t tried to politicize their renewable-energy portfolio, the White House and Democratic candidates aren’t shying away from publicizing Defense Department moves that highlight their broader energy agenda.

On Tuesday evening, White House and Pentagon officials held a telephone press briefing on Wednesday’s clean-energy announcements in an evident effort to raise their profile. In a non-election year, it’s doubtful that announcements about how military bases will generate electricity would merit a White House background call—or whether a slate of such programs would even be rolled out together publicly.

In Michigan, Democratic Sens. Carl Levin and Debbie Stabenow are scheduled to be present at the opening of the advanced combat-vehicle lab. Stabenow could face a tough reelection fight this fall.

As it happens, the conservative super-PAC American Crossroads is also rolling out on Wednesday a $1.7 million television ad campaign attacking Obama’s energy policies in six 2012 battleground states: Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Nevada, Ohio, and Virginia.

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First major climate regs from Obama EPA sure to stir political debate

Coral Davenport, National Journal — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 09:29:10 -0400

The Obama administration is expected to unveil long-awaited global-warming regulations as soon as Tuesday in a move that will make a big splash politically but won’t have real environmental or economic impact until long after the 2012 elections.

The controversial rules -- initially setting limits on greenhouse-gas emissions from new power plants -- have been in the works since 2009, when the Environmental Protection Agency determined within a year of President Obama taking office that it had a legal obligation under the Clean Air Act to rein in carbon pollution that scientists say is one of the chief causes of climate change.

The planned regulations have been a top political target for just as long: Republicans and the fossil-fuel industry have attacked the proposed controls as a poster child for government overreach, saying they will kill jobs and send electricity prices soaring.

Coming in the midst of an election cycle in which energy prices, the EPA, and government regulation are all hot-button issues, the rollout of climate-change rules is likely to ignite a fresh line of political attacks, with GOP campaigns blasting Democrats and the president for hurting the economy and congressional Republicans introducing a slew of bills to block or delay the rules. (House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., long ago put them on a list of “Top 10 job-killing regulations” that the Republican-led chamber would push hard to roll back.)

On the other side, the Obama reelection campaign hopes that issuing the climate-change rules will help ease frustrations among its liberal environmental base; many environmental groups have been less than enthusiastic in their support for Obama since last summer, when he delayed another major EPA clean air rule regulating smog. And while Obama regained their support after rejecting the controversial Keystone XL pipeline, some green groups remained tepid after Obama signaled that he may eventually approve the pipeline in a second term.

“Environmental groups will react very positively to this,” said Frank O’Donnell, president of the advocacy group Clean Air Watch. “Old King Coal may not be dead, but he could be on life support.”

On Monday, several environmental groups met with White House officials to discuss a campaign aimed at supporting the new rules once they’re rolled out.

But while the climate-change rules could fire up both Obama’s red-state foes and his green-group friends, it appears that neither side will have much to point to in terms of substance -- at least for many years.

That’s because the EPA has deftly crafted the rollout to score political points now but delay the environmental and economic impacts until later.

According to sources familiar with the rules, the first proposal will only require new coal- and gas-fired power plants to limit emissions of carbon pollution. Rules to control carbon from existing plants won’t come until later, possibly after the November elections.

As a result, the first power plant forced to comply with the rules probably won’t even be built for years. There are currently about a dozen proposed power plants going through the licensing and permitting process; these will be grandfathered in and not subject to the new rules, either, said sources who asked to remain anonymous because the rules have not been released.

Rolling out the rules this way allows Obama to revitalize his base by standing firm on his commitment to tackle climate change, and it defangs his opposition since the rules will require no existing plants to install expensive new technology or close down.

Going forward, the rules are expected to allow new power plants significant flexibility in how they comply with the rules: for the first 10 years of operation, a new power plant may operate without carbon constraints. But over 30 years, coal and gas plant operators must show that over the three decades, the plant produced no more than an average of 1,000 pounds of carbon dioxide per megawatt-hour: that’s about the same amount of carbon pollution currently produced by natural gas plants, and about half the amount of pollution currently produced by coal plants.

While the rules won’t cut U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions significantly in the next few years, over the course of the next few decades they are likely to drive power companies away from building heavily polluting coal plants and towards building cleaner, lower-polluting natural gas plants. As it happens, many power companies are already making that choice -- thanks to market forces, rather than regulations. A recent glut of domestic natural gas production has sent the price of natural gas plummeting, so power plant operators say that the new climate-change rules happen to conform to many companies’ existing long-term investment plans.

Even one of the nation’s most coal-reliant utilities, Ohio-based American Electric Power -- which has come out in fierce opposition to many other Obama EPA rules -- says climate-change rules for new plants probably won’t hurt the company’s bottom line.

“We don’t have any plans to build new coal plants. So the rules won’t have much of an impact,” said Melissa McHenry, a spokeswoman for the company. “Any additional generational plants we’d build for the next generation will be natural gas. It will shape sources for new generation. But in the near term, the impact will not be as great. It impacts the ability to expand the use of coal for electricity, but it doesn’t cause immediate concern for us.”

But while environmental groups understand Obama’s political motivation for taking a baby step toward addressing climate change, they will also hold his feet to the fire to do the tougher work of clamping down on existing power plant pollution if he is reelected.

“It’s not acceptable to us that they would put out only a new-source rule,” said Conrad Schneider, advocacy director of the nonprofit group Clean Air Task Force. “We believe that together, new and existing standards are the most important energy and climate decision they will make.”

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Budget reflects scaled-back vision for clean energy

Coral Davenport, National Journal — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 14:00:00 -0500

President Obama’s fiscal 2013 budget proposal asks Congress to increase spending on renewable-energy projects by about $500 million – almost the same amount the Energy Department lost on its loan guarantee for the bankrupt solar-panel manufacturer Solyndra.

The proposed spending increase, which would take the Energy Department’s renewables spending up to $2.3 billion, compared to $1.8 billion in fiscal 2012, is a clear signal that Obama plans to push ahead with full-throated support of clean energy on the campaign trail, despite the Solyndra controversy.

The bump up is part of an overall increase in the Energy Department’s topline request of $27.2 billion, up 3.2 percent from fiscal 2012 levels.

“In light of the tight discretionary spending caps, this increase in funding is significant and a testament to the importance of innovation and clean energy in the country’s economic future,” the agency wrote in its request.

Practically, though, the request for new clean-energy spending is dead on arrival on Capitol Hill, where election-year partisan deadlock has all but assured that Congress won’t even pass a budget this year. And even if it did, the Republican-controlled House would be sure to attack any fresh Energy Department spending on renewable-energy programs.

And while Obama's proposed boost in clean-energy spending may seems bold in the face of the rain of criticism he knows will come from House Republicans, it represents a deeply scaled-down vision of his once-ambitious agenda. Campaigning in 2008, Obama proposed a sweeping clean-energy plan that would have budgeted $150 billion over a decade in federal spending. By comparison, clean-energy advocates say that this year’s relatively paltry proposal won’t come close to scaling up the nation’s clean-energy economy to the size once envisioned by the Obama administration.

The president's budget request proposes once again to slash long-standing tax breaks to coal, oil, and gas companies -- a move that would raise $46 billion over 10 years to help pay for his clean-energy vision. Democrats have tried and failed for years to end these tax breaks, and they’ll likely have just as much success this year as in years past. The White House knows this, of course, but proposing to slash the tax breaks to oil companies gives Democrats an important talking point in an election year likely to see voter ire at high gasoline prices. It also helps set the stage for a debate on broad corporate tax reform in 2013. Although oil companies have fought the rollback of their tax breaks tooth and nail, they’ve said they would be willing to come to the table in 2013.

Most of the rest of the increase in the Energy Department funding request comes in boosts to its chief portfolio, managing the nation’s nuclear-weapons arsenal. The agency requests $7.6 billion for weapons activities, a 5 percent increase above the fiscal 2012 enacted level, for such things as continuing nuclear-weapon life-extension programs and sustaining the existing stockpile.

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White House budget to expand clean energy programs through Pentagon

Coral Davenport, National Journal — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 12:13:00 -0500

The White House believes it’s figured out how to get more money for clean energy programs touted by President Obama without having it become political road kill in the wake of the Solyndra controversy: Put it in the Pentagon.

While details are thin on the ground, lawmakers who work on both energy and defense spending policy believe the 2013 budget request to be delivered to Congress on Monday probably won’t include big increases for wind and solar power through the Energy Department, a major target for Republicans since solar-panel maker Solyndra defaulted last year on a $535 million loan guarantee from the DOE.

But they do expect to see increases in spending on alternative energy in the Defense Department, such as programs to replace traditional jet fuel with biofuels, supply troops on the front lines with solar-powered electronic equipment, build hybrid engine tanks and aircraft carriers, and increase renewable energy use on military bases.

While Republicans will instantly shoot down requests for fresh spending on Energy Department programs that could be likened to Solyndra, many support alternative-energy programs for the military.

“I do expect to see the spending,” said Rep. Jack Kingston, R-Ga., a member of the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, when asked about increased investment in alternative-energy programs at the Pentagon. “I think in the past three to five years this has been going on but that it has grown as a culture and a practice and it’s a good thing."

“If Israel attacks Iran and we have to go to war and the Straits of Hormuz are closed for a week or a month and the price of fuel is going to be high, and the question is, in the military, what do you replace it with? It’s not something you just do for the ozone – it’s strategic.”

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who sits on both the Senate Armed Services Committee and the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, said, “I don’t see what they’re doing in DOD as being Solyndra.”

“We’re not talking about putting $500 million into a goofy idea,” Graham told National Journal. “We’re talking about taking applications of technologies that work and expanding them. I wouldn’t be for DOD having a bunch of money to play around with renewable technologies that have no hope. But from what I understand there are renewables out there that already work.”

A senior House Democrat noted that this wouldn’t be the first time the Pentagon has been deployed as a way to advance policies that wouldn’t otherwise be supported.

“They did it in the ’90s with medical research,” said Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., ranking member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. In 1993, when funding was frozen for breast-cancer research programs in the National Institutes of Health, Congress boosted the Pentagon’s budget for breast-cancer research – to more than double that of the health agency’s funding in that area.

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Will Energy Secretary Steven Chu stay or go?

Amy Harder and Coral Davenport — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0500

Until then, the Energy Department had actually played very little role in energy policy. Despite its name, the agency's chief mandate is to guard the nation's nuclear arsenal, and to clean up Cold War-era defense nuclear waste. In most years, about two-thirds of its budget goes to nuclear weapons and waste cleanup, while roughly 10 percent to 15 percent goes to energy research.

The idea in 2008 was that Obama would push through a sweeping climate-change law, spurring a transformation of the nation's energy economy: Oil and coal companies would pay the federal government for pollution permits and around $150 billion of that money would be invested over the next decade in clean-energy research, a mission that would be led by the Energy Department, with Chu at the helm.

Three years later, that vision appears to be evaporating. The climate-change bill died in Congress. Clean energy got a one-shot cash infusion of about $30 billion in the economic stimulus law, but that money dries up this year, and Republicans on Capitol Hill want to slash what little federal spending remains on clean energy-and some want to ax the Energy Department altogether. The Energy Department has come under increasing criticism for its management of the clean-energy money-culminating in the dust-up over Solyndra, the bankrupt solar company that got $535 million in federal loan guarantees.

Now Chu is at the center of the explosive political controversy, and many people in Washington are asking if he'll resign because of it. Even if he's not forced out, some are questioning whether he'd even want to stay, since it's clear that the ambitious clean-energy agenda that he came on board to drive won't be enacted any time soon. And Chu himself, whose career until he came to Washington had been spent in scientific laboratories, has often pointed out that his forte is science, not politics-a distinction that could hurt him as Obama faces the political realities of the 2012 campaign.

The first cues on Chu's future are likely to come on Thursday, when he will give testimony on the Solyndra affair to the House Energy and Commerce Committee, his first appearance before Congress since the Solyndra controversy broke.

Media speculation about Chu's fate began to build last week, when emails released by the White House showed that Dan Carol, a former Obama campaign adviser, wrote to senior White House officials questioning Chu's aptitude as Energy secretary. In memos sent earlier this year to several senior White House officials, including Obama's then-Chief of Staff Pete Rouse, Carol laid out his vision for revamping the department. That vision included demoting Chu from the department's secretary to its chief scientist.

"Secretary Chu is a wonderful and brilliant man, but he is not perfect for the other critical DOE mission: deploying existing technologies at scale and creating jobs," Carol wrote in a February memo. "Chu should become chief scientist at DOE and re-inspire and re-organize DOE's labs."

In response to a similarly worded memo sent to Rouse in March, Rouse said in an email to Nancy-Ann DeParle, the White House deputy chief of staff for policy, that he wasn't "that interested in Dan's criticism of Secretary Chu, but what do you think of Dan's general assessment of the need for greater focus on our energy policy agenda?"

Energy Department and White House spokespeople brushed aside the significance of the memo and said Carol's recommendations were not taken seriously. But the administration adopted at least one of them in September when the Energy Department hired Richard Kauffman, former CEO of renewable-energy company Good Energies, as a senior adviser to Chu. Carol included Kauffman on his list of suggested new DOE leadership.

"I think Richard Kauffman is an excellent addition to Secretary Chu's staff," Carol told National Journal on Monday. "But larger challenges remain in moving top-down congressional mandates and DOE deployment to more locally led innovation."

Carol in his February memo also predicted-accurately-"the GOP attacks that are surely coming over Solyndra and other inside DOE deals that have gone to Obama donors and have underperformed."

Other people familiar with the White House's thinking on energy policy and politics privately voice similar criticisms.

"The department is at a point where policy and financial leadership is really quite critical more than the science leadership that Secretary Chu has brought," said one clean-energy expert who is close to the Obama administration. "And I think that's going to be a big challenge going forward."

The source, who insisted on anonymity because of the expert's connections with the administration, added that in light of the Solyndra scandal, "there is a serious question of whether or not" Chu has the necessary leadership skills "given what we're seeing now. That's what the president is probably wrestling with as we speak."

But Chu has also built up tremendous capital in the White House. He was Obama's point man during the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan and the catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and Obama has credited Chu with designing the cap that ultimately plugged the BP well (although other reports have said Chu chose the design from thousands of submissions).

"He was the point person for the biggest energy crises the country has faced," said a former Energy official who worked with Chu. "The president turned to him and said: 'Chu: you're our guy on this.' "

"The idea that there is some kind of confidence issue with him is widely off base," the former official added, who would only speak on the condition of anonymity.

There's also a practical matter: If Chu resigns in the coming year, it's unlikely that the Senate would confirm a new Energy secretary before the 2012 election.

Chu could likely resign if Obama wins a second term, which is what most Energy secretaries have done before him. That would satisfy his critics-without tarring him directly with the taint of the Solyndra scandal. And it could well satisfy Chu's own inclinations.

"Even though it's the Department of Energy, today it has very little authority to affect how people use energy. Obviously, Steven Chu is associated with climate and clean energy. He had the expectation that there were going to be boosts in clean energy. But now you're moving to a situation where there's a Congress that doesn't believe you should exist and doesn't believe in clean energy," said Joseph Romm, a former assistant secretary of Energy who now writes the blog Climate Progress.

The wild card remains how big the Solyndra scandal will grow-and whether the Obama campaign will deem it politically necessary to make Chu a scapegoat.

One top Energy official, the agency's loan guarantee office director, Jonathan Silver, already resigned earlier this fall, soon after the Solyndra scandal broke. Chu said Silver had always planned to resign once the stimulus dollars ran out on Sept. 30.

"I don't know that Jonathan Silver is enough to satisfy the shark," said one clean-energy expert who sits on one of DOE's advisory boards.

Ultimately, said Romm, "It's 100 percent up to Barack Obama, and not Steven Chu."

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Interior Department plan will include more Gulf, Alaska leases

Coral Davenport and Olga Belogolova — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0500

By expanding drilling in the Arctic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico, where drilling is already ongoing, but not aggressively opening up other areas such as the Atlantic Ocean, President Obama is striking a delicate balance of trying to appease drilling proponents but avoiding the ire of environmentalists and drilling opponents.

Still, environmentalists are sure to question the opening of the Arctic, as Coast Guard officials and others have often warned the area is not prepared for an offshore oil spill. Meanwhile, drilling proponents are sure to find that the plan is too limited.

The Interior Department's plan is set to be released at noon on Tuesday

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White House orders independent review of Energy-loan program

Amy Harder and Coral Davenport — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0400

White House Chief of Staff Bill Daley said on Friday that the administration is ordering an independent analysis of the Energy Department program that gave a $535 million loan guarantee to Solyndra, the bankrupt solar-energy company that is already facing an FBI probe.

The move is one of the most explicit acknowledgements from the White House to date that the Energy Department's loan-guarantee program deserves scrutiny. At a press conference earlier this month, President Obama defended the program despite Solyndra's downfall.

"The president is committed to investing in clean energy because he understands that the jobs developing and manufacturing these technologies will either be created here or in other countries," Daley said in a statement. "And while we continue to take steps to make sure the United States remains competitive in the 21st-century energy economy, we must also ensure that we are strong stewards of taxpayer dollars."

The 60-day review will be conducted by former Assistant Treasury Secretary Herb Allison, who was charged with helping stabilize the financial sector and oversaw the Troubled Asset Relief Program.

White House officials said that following the 60-day review, Allison will issue a public report to the administration that includes an evaluation of the current state of the loan-guarantee program, recommendations to improve monitoring and management of the program, and the establishment of an early-warning system to identify potential concerns in the future.

Meanwhile, House Republicans next week plan to continue their investigation of the program. The Energy and Commerce Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee is scheduled to vote on Thursday to subpoena the White House for internal West Wing communications on Solyndra after White House Counsel Kathryn Ruemmler refused to turn over all documents last month.

"Subpoenaing the White House is a serious step that, unfortunately, appears necessary in light of the Obama administration's stonewall on Solyndra," Energy and Commerce Chairman Fred Upton, R-Mich., and Oversight and Investigations Chairman Cliff Stearns, R-Fla., said in a joint statement on Friday.

House Republicans are seeking all White House communications dating back to President Obama's inauguration in January 2009.

That request "implicates longstanding and significant institutional Executive Branch confidentiality interests," Ruemmler said in a letter to the GOP leaders on Oct. 14. "Encroaching upon these important interests is not necessary, however, because the agency documents the committee has requested, which include communications with the White House, should satisfy the committee."

Energy Secretary Steven Chu will take the hot seat on Nov. 17, the next scheduled hearing on Solyndra. The documents Republicans are seeking from the White House will be critical to the hearing, which will focus on DOE's approval of Solyndra's loan in 2009 and the decision to restructure the loan in February 2011.

Republicans allege that the Energy Department violated the Energy Policy Act of 2005 when it restructured Solyndra's loan and made the government's debt obligation secondary-or "subordinate"-to that of private investors, including a foundation founded by oil billionaire George Kaiser, a major 2008 bundler for Barack Obama's presidential campaign.

While some of Stearns's GOP colleagues on the committee have said Chu should resign over Solyndra, Stearns is not quite ready to "commit" to that yet.

"I think before I commit on this, I'd like to hear from him personally," Stearns said on CSPAN's Washington Journal last week. "One of his counsel has indicated their interpretation of the Energy Policy Act of 2005 is that they could subordinate … so let's hear their side before we make a judgment on Secretary Chu."

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EPA chief: Agency feeling heat from right and left

Coral Davenport — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0400

The Environmental Protection Agency faces an "unprecedented … overreaction" as Republicans put Clean Air Act rules at the center of their political attack on so-called "job-killing" regulations, EPA administrator Lisa Jackson said on Friday.

But Jackson noted that several Obama administration moves also have angered environmentalists and some Democrats. The EPA is now actively seeking to mend fences on both sides of the political aisle, Jackson said at a breakfast event sponsored by Politico.

"We need to tell people who care deeply about the environment that we've made amazing strides," she said. "There's tons we've done and I don't think often enough we tell what we've done."

To some extent, EPA's slew of new pollution-control regulations, most of which require coal-fired power plants to curb emissions of greenhouse gases and toxins like mercury, arsenic, and sulfur dioxide, are a natural target for today's tea party-driven agenda against government regulation of industry. Republicans and so-called super PACs are putting the regulations at the center of their campaigns to defeat President Obama and reclaim the Senate in 2012.

On the other side, Jackson has come under attack lately from environmentalists who say her agency hasn't done enough on regulations. Many in the environmental community were deeply dismayed after Obama last month delayed a major rule that would have limited allowable smog, or ground-level ozone. Some environmentalists called on Jackson to step down over the decision.

While environmentalists aren't likely to cross party lines in 2012, their disappointment with the administration could dim the energy of a key part of the Democratic base, the same groups that helped get out the vote for Obama in 2008.

Jackson is touring farm states ahead of EPA's forthcoming rules on farm dust, claiming they won't harm agriculture's bottom line. The rule would rein in pollution of "particulate matter," which can be inhaled and damage lungs, and would cut down on air concentrations of soot and dust. Farm-state Republicans are working on legislation to block the rule.

Jackson said that if she had to do one thing differently in her tenure, she would have preemptively reached out to farmers to let them know about the farm-dust rules and what they entailed, rather than doing damage control after it became a partisan political issue.

"It is always harder to go back and talk to people after they've been frightened about what you do," she said. "I think I would have spent more time doing that proactively, had I known how quickly the seeds would spread."

Jackson said she will remind green groups that EPA brokered historic deals with auto companies to lower tailpipe emissions by 2025 and that it's in the process of implementing the nation's first-ever regulations on greenhouse gases that cause climate change.

She acknowledged EPA has another big decision that could anger environmentalists, depending which way it goes: In the coming weeks, EPA must recommend to the State Department whether it should approve the 1,700-mile Keystone XL pipeline, which would import oil extracted from the Canadian tar sands. Environmentalists, who demonstrated for weeks in front of the White House this summer against the pipeline, say approving it could be environmentally devastating, since the tar sands oil extraction process produces 30 percent to 70 percent more carbon emissions than standard oil production.

"That pipeline's a big issue," she said, declining to offer a hint of what her agency would recommend. To date, the State Department has given several signals that it is likely to approve the pipeline.

Jackson noted that the agency is reviewing the safety of the controversial natural-gas extraction method of hydraulic fracturing, known as fracking. The Obama administration has generally spoken favorably of fracking, since it allows production of cheap natural gas, which emits only half the carbon emissions of coal. But it has come under scrutiny as many fear the fracking process could contaminate water tables. The fossil-fuel industry has resisted any regulations on fracking.

"When it comes to natural-gas development, the key is to make sure that we say, 'Engineers, make sure we do it safely without harming water supplies,' and I think we're well on the way," said Jackson. "On chemicals, we don't have data that shows those chemicals showing up in someone's well. Over time that may not be a true statement. Unless there's a problem with well construction, [hydrofracking chemicals] shouldn't end up in aquifers."

For now, companies aren't required to disclose which chemicals they inject in the ground during hydrofracking, but, Jackson said, "disclosure of those chemicals is a very good idea."

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