E2-Wire

Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) suggested Wednesday that the bar for her vote on climate legislation is high.

The wind industry’s major trade group on Wednesday attacked legislation floated by several Senate Democrats that would require stimulus-funded renewable power projects to rely on materials manufactured domestically.

Denise Bode, CEO of the American Wind Energy Association, said the proposal would kill 50,000 American jobs. “This proposal would torpedo one of the most successful job creation efforts of the Recovery Act, which has already preserved half of the 85,000 American jobs in the U.S. wind industry,” she said in a prepared statement.

The stimulus law created a new Treasury Department grant program to support construction of wind farms, solar energy projects and other renewable energy generation facilities.

Remember the dispute between the Energy Department and critics of the administration's "clean energy" and climate agenda over a Spanish study that claimed government subsidies to renewable energy industries in Spain cost more jobs than they created?

Jim Tankersley of the Chicago Tribune has a run down of some of the behind-the-scenes activity that ended with an unusual rebuttal from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory to the Spanish jobs study, which Republicans seized upon to combat claims from the Obama administration that government subsidies for clean energy would create millions of new jobs.

NREL responded that the study was flawed. Free-market think tanks and other opponents of the administration’s climate plans cried foul. One, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, used public records laws to obtain emails showing NREL shared its response with groups supporting renewable energy policy, like the American Wind Energy Association, before releasing the rebuttal publicly.

Those emails are the basis for Tankersley piece.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar dropped some hints Wednesday about his long-awaited policy on offshore oil-and-gas drilling in federal waters, which he hopes to announce later this month.

Salazar said Interior’s next five-year offshore leasing plan will run from 2012-2017, rather than upending the current 2007-2012 program.

That’s interesting because the Bush administration, on its way out the door, had proposed a draft 2010-2015 plan that would promote oil-and-gas development in large areas off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts (among other expansions).

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar on Wednesday denied GOP accusations and vowed to work with Congress on conservation.

Four Senate Democrats want the Treasury Department to prevent a key renewable energy program in the 2009 stimulus law from supporting foreign wind turbine manufacturing, or halt the program until legislation passes that achieves the same thing.

The senators are pushing new legislation that would modify the grant program to ensure it supports only renewable power projects that use U.S.-made materials, and create the bulk of their jobs here.

“We believe Treasury has the discretion to consider domestic job preservation and creation when distributing Section 1603 grants for wind and other clean energy projects,” states a Tuesday letter to Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner from Sens. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), Robert Casey (D-Penn.) and Jon Tester (D-Mont.).

EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson blasted an effort in Congress to block the EPA from regulating greenhouse gases.

Climate scientists have been taking it on the chin of late. “Climategate” controversy of hacked emails from a leading climate research institution and errors in a U.N. climate report have weakened the public’s belief that humans are causing global warming.

Now the scientists are standing up to their tormentors and preparing to fight back.

“It’s clear that the climate science community was just not prepared for the scale and ferocity of the attacks and they simply have not responded swiftly and appropriately,” Peter C. Frumhoff, an ecologist and chief scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, tells the New York Times.

Democrats are generally happier with EPA under President Obama than former President Bush, but there are still flare-ups.

Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) on Tuesday said the agency is dragging its feet on imposing new restrictions on the plastics additive bisphenol-A, or BPA, which has been linked to developmental problems in children.

“As the author of the Senate bill that seeks to ban the chemical from children’s products, I strongly believe our government should err on the side of caution and deploy the most safeguards possible against the potentially harmful effects of BPA. In light of the serious risks posed by exposure to this chemical, the EPA’s decision to postpone action on BPA does not seem to convey the proper sense of urgency,” Schumer wrote in a letter to EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson.

Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee Chairman Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) is floating $6 billion legislation to create a consumer rebate program for home energy efficiency upgrades.

The idea is a White House priority and President Obama touted it in a speech Tuesday.

Bingaman said he hoped to move quickly to launch “Home Star,” which is aimed at boosting the construction, manufacturing and home-improvement retailing sectors while saving energy.