E2-Wire

Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) issued a report Thursday that accuses the regulators of botching their job on medical nuclear radiation exposure. 

Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) wants a decade-long delay before manufacturing plants and other industrial facilities face greenhouse gas emissions limits, but the emerging Senate climate plan would instead begin phasing in limits in 2016.

While Levain said yesterday that he’s not thrilled with that aspect of the plan Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) are crafting, he didn’t exactly throw down the gauntlet.

“It’s not the time frame I support,” Levin told reporters in the Capitol Thursday afternoon. “I assume that when a bill is introduced, it will have a lot of features to it, and that is going to be one feature that I don’t think goes far enough.”

Al Gore, on his website, flags this passage in Mitt Romney’s recent book No Apology:

“I believe that climate change is occurring — the reduction in the size of global ice caps is hard to ignore. I also believe that human activity is a contributing factor.”

Gore writes: “We can have disagreements about the solutions to this crisis, but we need to acknowledge fundamental truths. The science proving the existence of the climate crisis is not in question. That is where our debates about policy need to begin.”

Romney, a potential 2012 GOP presidential candidate, and Gore certainly disagree on solutions. The former Massachusetts governor, who failed to secure the 2008 GOP White House nomination, has bashed cap-and-trade, which Gore favors.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar hopes to make a decision next month about whether to approve the long-delayed Cape Wind project off the Massachusetts coast.

But opponents of the wind power project are already looking past that. This week they informed Interior and Massachusetts state officials of plans to file a lawsuit against the project under the Endangered Species Act, reports the Cape Cod Times and Boston Herald.

The New York Times has a detailed piece about the increasing number of companies – including Russian and American firms – looking to build small, basically off-the-shelf nuclear reactors.

If a large collection of environmental groups is worried about the direction of Senate energy and climate legislation, they didn’t show it publicly Thursday evening.

High-level officials from 10 or so groups met with Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) for roughly 1.5 hours in his Senate office.

The meeting came a day after Kerry and Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) met with a cross section of industry trade groups about their upcoming bill – a measure that’s expected to include several industry-friendly concessions as the senators seek traction for their uphill effort this year.

A few comments by the very liberal Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) Thursday afternoon illustrate the tricky task before Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) as they try and cobble together a climate and energy bill.

“The difficulty that Senator Kerry or anybody has is we don’t have 60 votes to pass a strong global warming bill that moves away from fossil fuels and greenhouse gas emissions,” Sanders told reporters in the Capitol. “It is a very conservative institution and we don’t have the votes.”

“The choice is, as I suspect Senator Kerry is wrestling with, is whether it is better to do something or nothing,” he added.

The U.S. EPA on Thursday spelled out plans to study the water quality and health effects of “hydraulic fracturing.”

Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colo.) wants to help homeowners pool their resources to buy solar energy systems that serve the multiple households.

He floated a bill Wednesday that would make jointly-owned projects – which are built on separate plots of neighborhood land – eligible for tax credits that are currently available for rooftop projects on individual households.

Under his plan, homeowners that help finance these “community solar” projects may claim the 30 percent tax credit on their share of the investment.

Various types of community solar projects have been popping up in different states (this week the New York Times looked at their emergence), but Udall’s office said the federal tax code needs updating to help move the phenomenon along.

It’s Big Oil out, Big Paper in for the U.S. Climate Action Partnership.

The coalition that unites major companies and environmental groups pushing for broad climate legislation announced Thursday that wood and paper products giant Weyerhaeuser has joined the group.

The arrival of the Washington State-based company represents a major addition to USCAP, which was in the news last month when oil giants BP and ConocoPhillips announced they were abandoning the group.

A major ethanol industry trade group plans to release a study Thursday that warns of major job losses and reduced federal revenue if a key tax credit expires later this year.

The incentive helps domestic ethanol producers by giving oil refiners and gasoline blenders a credit of 45 cents for each gallon of ethanol blended into gasoline. The credit is scheduled to expire at the end of 2010 and the industry is pushing Congress to extend the incentive.

The study commissioned by the Renewable Fuels Association concludes that allowing the credit to expire would cause the loss of over 112,000 jobs in ethanol production and related industries, hitting rural areas the hardest, according to a summary.

Other effects, the study finds, would include a 38 percent drop in U.S. ethanol production, loss of investment in next-wave biofuels, loss of billions of dollars in state and federal tax revenues, and reduction of household incomes by over $4 billion.