Interviews/Profiles

Though her résumé says otherwise, Denise Bode has been lobbying Congress since she was 13.

Interior Secretary Salazar wanted someone tough enough to handle the hardball politics of offshore drilling.

Senators used Wednesday's hearing with President Obama's pick for ambassador to Burma to press the administration to allow oil-and-gas investments in the country.

The top Democrat and Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations East Asian Affairs subcommittee grilled Derek Mitchell on U.S. policy toward the country and said U.S. businesses would be at a disadvantage if the State Department goes forward with a proposed “sector by sector” approach to lifting sanctions. Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.) said there's a “need for consistency” and pointed out that the United States doesn't have similar restrictions on other repressive countries like China and Vietnam.

Mitchell, who has been the special representative and policy coordinator for Burma since last year, did his best not to tip the State Department's hand.

“There's nothing I can say here definitively on this, because it is an ongoing internal, interagency discussion,” he said. “But ... we are not looking to exclude any sectors from this.”

At 4:40 a.m. on March 11, staff at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission got word a massive earthquake had hit Japan.

Brian McCormack's new job in political affairs at the Edison Electric Institute means becoming a community organizer of sorts.

The chairman of a key environment subcommittee signaled Thursday that he supports legislation that would completely block the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) climate authority.

"I would lean myself toward just taking the regulatory authority away from them. But we haven't had the hearings, and I would like to hear all the information about it first," Rep. Ed Whitfield (R-Ky.), the chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee's Energy subcommittee, said.

Whitfield's comments are an important indication of how Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee plan to limit EPA's climate authority. Committee Chairman Fred Upton (R-Mich.) has said he wants to block or delay the agency's efforts to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, but his specific plans remain unclear. The committee outlined its plans in broad terms in a document obtained by The Hill on Wednesday.

Committee staff have met with a slew of industry and business groups to get their input on the issue. Whitfield said Thursday that many groups advocated for completely blocking EPA's climate authority, while others called for a delay. Committee staff will meet with the Natural Resources Defense Council next week, he said.

DALLAS — One of America’s richest men is using his fortune to try to end America’s addiction to foreign oil and meet the threat of global warming, but he’s having a hard time getting his message across in Washington.

 T. Boone Pickens minces no words as he laments his inability to convince Congress and the Obama administration that he has a plan, dubbed the “Pickens Plan,” to lessen America’s dependence on imported oil by harnessing wind power and other sources of renewable energy and by tapping into the nation’s vast reserves of natural gas.

At the offices of the Institute for Energy Research (IER), an old headline, blown up to poster size, is kept as a reminder that some energy goals are easier set than met.

“Solar Power Seen Meeting 20 Percent of Need by 2000,” it states. The article, which ran in The Wall Street Journal in 1978, wasn’t particularly prescient.

Solar has boomed in recent years, but as 2010 approaches, the sun still accounts for less than 1 percent of all the electricity produced in the United States.

Solar advocates say it’s not the sun’s fault. They say the lack of political support has undermined the industry.

But the former Republican aides who run IER, a small think tank funded in part by donations from energy companies, argue that basic thermodynamics are to blame. It is just easier to squeeze power out of coal and oil than it is to tap the power of the sun or the velocity of the wind. The former aides are eager to retrieve the 31-year-old headline to highlight for a reporter why they are skeptical of some of the predictions about green jobs that have emerged as a central issue in the climate change debate.

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Sierra Club Executive Director Carl Pope spoke with the The Hill last week about climate change. He touched on Senate action, including the effort by Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) to craft a compromise global warming bill. Pope cheered their collaboration, but threw in a caveat or two. This interview took place before the White House announced that it would offer a “provisional” U.S. emissions target at next month’s international climate talks in Copenhagen.

A transcript is below.

Q: [White House climate czar] Carol Browner did some interviews last week, or some panel discussions, and she said she thought the John Kerry-Lindsey Graham-Joe Lieberman process was a significant development. I wanted to get your view on that given the discussions of large new subsidies for nuclear plants as well as wider OCS production.

Carl Pope: It changes the landscape and it changes the landscape in a very positive way. It has been clear for quite a while that any bill that got 60 votes was going to have some things in it that I didn’t think were good public policy, and that those things were certainly going to relate to nuclear.