Climate Progress: An insider's view of climate science, politics, and solutions

On Thursday, the Senate Environment and Public Works (EPW) Committee held a hearing on “Examining Global Warming Issues in the Power Plant Sector” (translation — cap and trade). A video of the hearing and all opening statements are available here.

President and CEO of Murray Energy Corporation provided great entertainment as a witness. His remarkably memorable claim that the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 were responsible for ending marriages most certainly caught the attention of those present, including our intern on the scene, Nat Gryll.

In Murray’s rant — and if you watch the video, you’ll see “rant” is the right word — he accused Rachel Carson of killing millions and the Democrats of destroying the economy, exporting jobs to China, and not caring about working people. (EPW Chairman Barbara Boxer responded by bringing up a 2006 article showing that Ohio’s two largest mines, owned by Murray, “recorded injury rates about one-fourth higher than the national average last year.“)

In fact, we will destroy our economy if we do not prepare our utilities for an emissions cap or similar global warming policy that Congress will discuss in the fall. As we procrastinate meaningful policy, the U.S. is failing to lead in innovation and clean technology exports. And inaction guarantees the high economic cost of catastrophic global warming.

On the bright side, the same day Senators John Warner (R-VA) and Joe Lieberman (I-CT) announced plans to write an economy-wide cap and trade bill. With the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, present as a witness at today’s hearing, and Republican Sen. Warner open to a cap an trade proposal, the environment and the environmental committee seem ripe for action.

So far, successfully fending off GOP efforts to promote something lame.

E&ENews PM (subs. req’d) has a long story on the effort by House Energy and Commerce Committee ranking member Joe Barton (R-Texas) to push a weak CAFE amendment to House energy legislation. The story of what Barton tried to do, and what the Democrats plan to do on both CAFE and energy, is rather involved, so I’ll just repost the whole story below the fold:
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Who knew John Dingell (D-Michigan) would channel Al Gore (D-Earth)?

Greenwire reports (subs. req’d), the chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee said of the climate bill he is working on:

We should set ambitious goals and targets for that legislation. It should stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations at levels that will avoid or avert large-scale climate change consequences. That will require a reduction in U.S. greenhouse gas emissions of between 60, and perhaps as much as 80, percent by 2050.

The rest of the story is below the fold:

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The Washington Post wraps up its series on Dick Cheney with a long story about his role promoting pollution: “The vice president has intervened in many cases to undercut long-standing environmental rules for the benefit of business.”

His actions directly led to “the largest fish kill the West had ever seen, with tens of thousands of salmon rotting on the banks of the Klamath River.”

Be sure to read to the end to see Cheney’s role pushing a new rule to gut the Clean Air Act, causing EPA administrator Christine Whitman to resign.

I just couldn’t sign it,” she [Whitman] said. “The president has a right to have an administrator who could defend it, and I just couldn’t.”

A federal appeals court has since found that the rule change violated the Clean Air Act. In their ruling, the judges said that the administration had redefined the law in a way that could be valid “only in a Humpty-Dumpty world.”

A Humpty-Dumpty world created by the Vice President. Or perhaps he should be called the Head Vice President, for the torture he has put the country through.