E2-Wire

The climate part of comprehensive climate and energy legislation is surely the harder sell in Congress. But lawmakers face tough questions about energy policy too.

Here are two that some powerful utilities are worried about: who should decide where new transmission lines will be built? And who should pay for them?

A Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee-passed energy bill would give federal regulators new authority over transmission line siting decisions – language designed to overcome NIMBY hurdles and speed up a process that can take years.

Rep. James Moran (D-Va.) will likely take the helm of the House appropriations subcommittee that controls Interior Department and EPA spending.

He would replace Rep. Norm Dicks (D-Wash.), who’s poised to assume chairmanship of the defense spending subcommittee in the wake of Rep. John Murtha’s (D-Pa.) death.

The change would place Moran in an interesting spot as an easterner overseeing Interior's budget.

Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) says those who think climate change legislation is dead for the year are “dead wrong.”

Those who think blizzards and record snow falls in Washington will make it tough to move a global warming bill are guilty of "inside the beltway" thinking, Kerry said.

"The inside-the-Beltway conventional wisdom that this issue has stalled is dead wrong," Kerry said in a statement e-mailed to The Hill. Read more...

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The Washington Post editorial page hopes the Senate can find a way forward on floundering climate legislation, and has some nice things to say Wednesday about a proposal by Sens. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine).

The Wall Street Journal checks in again on the embattled Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

“Some top officials of a Nobel Prize-winning climate-science organization are acknowledging the panel made some mistakes amid a string of recent revelations questioning the accuracy of some of the information in its influential reports,” the Journal piece notes.

Sen. Jim DeMint’s (R-S.C.) attempt to use the latest D.C. snowstorm to fuel skepticism about global warming is drawing fire from liberal and environmental bloggers.

As Tuesday’s snowstorm approached, DeMint proclaimed via Twitter that “It's going to keep snowing in DC until Al Gore cries ‘uncle.’”

On the blog Treehugger, Daniel Kessler writes, “It's to be expected that climate change skeptics and deniers would use any strange weather to back up their case that climate change is a hoax, but this is beyond the pale.”

The New Republic’s environmental blog has flagged an interesting analysis of the much-maligned, nonbinding deal struck at the Copenhagen international climate talks in December.

Both the TNR post and the Peterson Institute for International Economics analysis explore, in essence, whether the “Copenhagen Accord” is underrated.

Under the limited accord salvaged at the end of the fractious climate talks, countries are voluntarily listing their 2020 emissions reductions targets (the U.S. is offering a 17 percent cut below 2005 levels but that’s contingent on final climate legislation).

Clean-energy advocates talked more about tax breaks and a mandate for renewable electricity production on their 2010 wish list.

Even people who hail from a country that lies partly within the Arctic Circle are tired of the snow.

“The record snow fall of the past few days is too much even for us Finns!” says Kari Mokko, spokesman for the embassy, in an email. “Therefore the event celebrating Embassy of Findland’s green building status has been rescheduled.”

The event has been rescheduled for Feb. 24 at 7 pm. The embassy is the first in D.C. to be certified as green by U.S. Green Building Council.

Read more...

Draft Senate jobs legislation would provide a one-year extension of lapsed tax credits that are vital to the battered biodiesel industry.

The draft bill follows House tax legislation approved last year by extending the $1-per-gallon credit until the end of 2010. The Senate will vote on the jobs package as soon as this week.

The industry has been pressing hard for extension of the credits.

Clean energy advocates talked more about tax breaks and a mandate for renewable electricity production than a controversial cap-and-trade bill when laying out their 2010 wish list on Tuesday.

Five leaders of clean energy trade groups barely mentioned climate change legislation during a more-than-hour-long conference call with reporters.

Instead, the executives focused on the thousands of new jobs their industries would create with the right incentives from Washington. Extending tax credits and other incentives included in the 2009 stimulus bill could lead to 35,000 to 45,000 jobs in solar industry in 2010, Rhone Resch, the president and CEO of the Solar Energy Industries Association, said.

Read more...