Photographer: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg

Joe Biden

Was Vice President Joe Biden showing his hand — and thus the administration’s — on the Keystone Pipeline?

A Sierra Club volunteer in South Carolina says Biden appeared to indicate his opposition to TransCanada Corp.’s Keystone XL in a brief conversation with her last week — and that’s not all he indicated.

Elaine Cooper, an environmental activist with the state’s Sierra Club chapter, said in a blog post that she asked Biden if
the administration was serious about addressing climate change and if President Barack Obama would reject the pipeline, which would carry diluted bitumen from Alberta to refineries along the U.S. Gulf Coast.

“He looked at the Sierra Club hat on my head, and he said ’Yes, I do – I share your views – but I am in the minority,’ and
he smiled,” Cooper wrote in the blog posted on the Sierra Club’s website.

Cooper said she talked briefly to Biden at a Friday night fish fry sponsored by Rep,James Clyburn, a South Carolina
Democrat, in Columbia, the state capital. The conversation took place as Biden was shaking hands with supporters along a rope line. The exchange was previously reported by website BuzzFeed.

Erich Pica, president of the Washington-based environmental group Friends of the Earth, said in a written statement, “Vice President Biden is to be commended for his blunt talk.”

Michael Brune, executive director of the San Francisco-based environmental group, also issued a statement and said that Biden’s comments were encouraging.

Critics contend that Keystone will exacerbate climate change by promoting development of the Alberta oil sands, which releases more greenhouse gases than production of more conventional crude oil.

Biden’s office referred to a March 2012 interview in which he said the decision “will be made in an environmentally
sound basis” after a process is completed. “The vice president has made his views known on this issue and his views haven’t changed,” according to a statement from his office.

A State Department draft environmental analysis calls the climate risks  minimal because the development in Alberta
would happen with or without Keystone. Supporters of Keystone say it will create thousands of construction jobs and improve U.S. energy security. The State Department has jurisdiction over the pipeline because it crosses an international border.

Original post is Biden Showing White House’s Hand on Keystone? by Political Capital.

Photograph by Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images

Gina McCarthy smiles during her nomination by President Barack Obama to run the Environmental Protection Agency on March 4, 2013 in the East Room of the White House in Washington, DC.

The Americans for Limited Government, which declares itself to be “perpetually ahead of the issue curve,” announced today that Gina McCarthy’s nomination as head of the Environmental Protection Agency will die in the Senate.

The reason: EPA’s finding that the State Department analysis of the environmental risks of the Keystone XL pipeline was insufficient. That “obstruction,” as ALG said in a news release today, “puts a nail” in the coffin of McCarthy’s nomination.

“The EPA’s attempt to further delay this project on specious grounds is evidence of just how far this rogue agency will go, and how little they care about what Congress thinks,” Nathan Mehrens, ALG’s general counsel, said in a statement. “It is time for the Senate to send a clear message to the EPA that they need to get out of the way.”

The ALG was referring to a non-binding Senate vote last month endorsing the pipeline.

The group supports limited government and “core American liberties.” This is how ALG describes itself on its website, getliberty.org: “Never shying away from the big issues, ALG is perpetually ahead of the issue curve taking on issues like the $100 billion International Monetary Fund line of credit while others are still trying to spell IMF.”

The EPA filed written comments yesterday in response to a draft State Department analysis of the Keystone project, which would carry a heavy form of oil from Alberta to refineries in Texas.

The agency urged State to conduct a more complete study of how the Keystone XL pipeline would affect development of Alberta’s oil sands, and therefore its impact on climate change. It also said the State Department needed to  “acknowledge” that cleaning up a spill from the pipeline might be more difficult to than if Keystone was carrying conventional crude. Environmental groups like the Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense Council said the EPA’s analysis shows why the administration should reject the pipeline.

ALG said it shows the Senate it needs to reject McCarthy, who is now the EPA’s assistant administrator for air pollution.

“Failure to reject McCarthy may effectively abdicate the last opportunity for Congress to rein in this power grabbing Agency that is sucking the life out of the U.S. economy.”

Original post is McCarthy’s EPA Confirmation Targeted by Political Capital.

Photograph by Joshua Roberts/Bloomberg

Steven Chu at the Department of the Interior in Washington.

And another thing…

Perhaps brevity is elusive for a man who once held the Theodore and Frances Geballe Professor of Physics and Applied Physics chair at Stanford University and is credited with producing one of the earliest atomic physics confirmations of the Weinberg-Salam-Glashow theory that unifies the weak and electromagnetic forces.

Energy Secretary Steven Chu announced his resignation today in a 3,800-word, bullet-pointed “Dear Colleague” letter. Posted on the agency’s Web-site, it runs six pages when printed.

“I came with dreams, and am leaving with a set of accomplishments that we should all be proud of,” Chu, who won the 1996 Nobel Prize for Physics, wrote in his letter, which quotes Martin Luther King, Michelangelo and an ancient Native American proverb that “we do not inherit the land from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children.”

The memo reads as much as a clean-energy manifesto and rebuke to critics as a goodbye to the agency. It lists more than 30 accomlishments — from a doubling of wind and solar energy and energy conservation upgrades to 1 million low-income homes to his personal involvement in capping BP Plc’s oil spill and the department’s “crucial role” in launching a clean-energy “ministerial.”

“In the scientific world, people are judged by the content of their ideas,” Chu wrote.

In places, the letter reads like a response to one of Chu’s and the department’s biggest stumbles: the half-billion dollar loan to Solyndra, a solar panel maker that went bankrupt two years later.

While the letter doesn’t mention the ‘S’ word, Chu does make a few veiled references to criticism from Republicans that Solyndra shows the folly of trying to pick “winners and losers” among companies.

“While critics try hard to discredit the program, the truth is that only 1 percent of the companies we funded went bankrupt,” Chu wrote of the Energy Department’s loan program.

Quoting Michelangelo, Chu wrote: “The greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short; but in setting our aim too low, and achieving our mark.”

“The test for America’s policy makers will be whether they are willing to accept a few failures in exchange for many successes,” Chu said.

The U.S. should continue to aim high, he encouraged. The letter ends with a passionate appeal to address the challenges of a warming planet.

“Ultimately we have a moral responsibility to the most innocent victims of adverse climate change,” Chu wrote. “Those who suffer the most are the people who are the most innocent: the world’s poorest citizens and those yet to be born.”

Policymakers, Chu said, should be judged “by the content of our decisions.”

Original post is Energy’s Chu: Success Requires Failure by Political Capital.

Photograph by Whitney Curtis/Bloomberg

A barge is filled with coal on the Mississippi River in Chester, Illinois.

Workers are returning to an Ohio mine its owner said was closing because of President Barack Obama’s “war on coal.”

During the height of the presidential campaign, Murray Energy Corp., which bills itself as the largest privately-owned coal company in the U.S., announced that the Red Bird West mine in Brilliant, Ohio, would shut down, leaving 56 people out of work.

Bob Murray, the company’s founder and CEO, said Obama’s environmental policies threatened the “destruction of an entire segment of the economy,” in an interview for an Aug. 23 Bloomberg story.

Coal regions in the  campaign battlegrounds of Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia were littered with “stop the war on coal” signs as part of an industry-funded campaign to block Obama’s re-election. Murray executives and employees donated more than $1.27 million to Republicans in the 2012 election, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a Washington-based group that tracks campaign and lobbying spending.

In announcing that Red Bird would close in September or October, Murray Energy said 32 of the workers at the mine would be relocated elsewhere in the company. It turns out some may be staying put.

OhioAmerican Energy, Inc., the Murray Energy subsidiary that operates the mine, has 42 workers engaged in the “process of performing reclamation work and clearing up certain coal remnants,” the company said in an email response to questions from Bloomberg.

“This is work that is required by law and does not represent a ‘reopening’ of the mine,” the company said in the email.

The New Republic first reported the new activity at Red Bird yesterday. The magazine said the work could last for two or more years.

While relatively low natural gas prices are seen by energy analysts as having the biggest effect on declining coal use in the U.S., Murray Energy insists environmental regulations are preventing the industry from expanding.

At its height, Red Bird employed 239 people. “Unfortunately, these 239 jobs are never coming back,” the company said.

Original post is Alleged Victims of Obama’s ‘War on Coal’ Heading Back to the Mine by Political Capital.

Photograph by Spencer Platt/Getty Images

Equipment used for the extraction of natural gas is viewed at a hydraulic fracturing site in South Montrose, Pennsylvania.

How Congress will weigh in on the push to expand natural gas exports remains to be seen. The issue, though, is already causing headaches for Washington’s big business lobbying groups.

After endorsing increased exports of natural gas last week, the American Chemistry Council reversed course this week, saying it had come to understand views of its member companies had “evolved” on the sensitive subject.  Some chemical and steel companies say they oppose significant natural gas exports, fearing the overseas sales could raise energy costs for U.S. manufacturers.

Dow Chemical Co., one of the council’s largest members, threatened to leave the group over its export stance, according to a Jan. 17 Wall Street Journal article. Dow did announce its departure from the National Association of Manufacturers after that group backed expanded natural gas
exports.

The chemistry council’s initial endorsment “accurately reflects executive committee policy dating to February 2012,” Scott Openshaw, a spokesman for the group, said in an e-mail. “However, the issue and its implications for some of our members have evolved. We therefore plan to further discuss this issue to assure all members’ views are fully represented and the implications understood.”

The issue of exports promises to be among the most hotly contested energy debates in Washington this year, as differences emerge over what the U.S. should do with its newfound energy bounty. The drilling technique known as hydraulic fracturing is boosting oil and gas supplies and turning the U.S. into an energy powerhouse.

Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat and new chairman of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, has said he’s concerned unlimited exports could raise fuel prices in the U.S., jeopardizing an ongoing manufacturing renaissance here. He plans to hold a hearing on the matter in upcoming weeks.

Both Wyden and officials with Dow were critical of an Energy Department analysis released last month that said exports offer almost unqualified  benefits to the U.S. economy. Dow uses natural gas as an energy source, and it uses ethane, often produced with gas, as a main ingredient for its products.

Exxon Mobil Corp., the nation’s largest producer of natural gas and also a
member of the chemical lobbying group, says the market should decide how much gas is exported.

“It’s a false choice to claim that increasing exports comes at the expense of domestic manufacturing,” Ken Cohen, Exxon’s vice president of public and government affairs, wrote on the company’s blog. “If more markets are opened to their sale, then there will be more demand, more investment and more production.”

Original post is Natural Gas Export Push No Easy Issue for Lobby Groups by Political Capital.

Photograph by Konrad Fiedler/Bloomberg

Wind turbines generate power at the San Gorgonio Pass Wind Farm in Whitewater, Calif.

Phil Gramm, a former U.S. Republican senator from Texas who now advises hedge funds, may have a new role: chief wind-energy antagonist.

Gramm, a fiscal conservative who sought to cut federal spending during his career in Congress, says a tax credit for wind projects is a particularly egregious example of a wasteful federal subsidy. Wind is an unreliable and expensive form of power, and government support distorts the market, taking away capital from more worthy sources of energy like natural gas, he says.

Gramm, who left Congress in 2002, laid out many of these complaints in a Dec. 25 editorial that ran in the Wall Street Journal.

In an interview at his Washington office, Gramm added a fourth count to his list of complaints — wind turbines are an eyesore.

The 1920s-vintage windmill he uses on his Texas home west of San Antonio to draw water is “purdy,” he said, exaggerating his Southern drawl for affect. Modern wind turbines that reach more than 100 meters in the air are not, he said.

“I don’t understand people who love the environment and nature not being offended at how ugly” modern wind turbines are, Gramm said.

Gramm, who said he wasn’t the sort to be inspired to write a couplet by a majestic outdoor scene, said he nevertheless considered a collection of blades spinning — or not spinning — atop vistas in West Texas and other areas to be a form of “sight pollution.”

Gramm, a senior scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington-based group that promotes free enterprise, is reaching out to reporters to discuss why wind’s tax credit should come to an end. He says he’s motivated by a dislike of government subsidies and that none of his clients produce natural gas, the production of which he says can help revive the economy.

Gramm does work as an adviser to Exelon Corp. The Chicago-based utility opposed extension of a wind production tax credit that was set to expire last year, and was booted out of the American Wind Energy Association as a consequence.

Congress approved a one-year extension of the 2.2 cent per kilowatt hour credit in the budget deal that avoided tax hikes and automatic spending cuts.

The American Wind Energy Association is now looking for a six-year phase-out. The time will give companies the chance to further reduce costs to better compete with fossil fuels, the group argues.

The industry is worth supporting because wind energy doesn’t pollute and has created tens of thousands of jobs, the group argues.

Gramm calls wind was a “hot house industry” that couldn’t stand on its own.

Original post is Gramm: Windmills an Eyesore, Energy Tax Credits a Waste by Political Capital.

Photograph by Emile Wamsteker/Bloomberg

Union members and community activists gather during an AFL-CIO demonstration in Trenton, New Jersey.

Labor and other progressive activists are kicking off a final flurry of lobbying to keep Congress from taking a wrong turn in trying to avoid the fiscal cliff, the end of the year deadline when automatic spending cuts and tax increases kick in.

Representatives from at least 33 states are in Washington today and tomorrow to urge lawmakers to protect benefits for Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, and instead allow the George W. Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthy to expire, according to the AFL-CIO.

As part of the campaign, the labor federation is releasing a state-by-state accounting of residents who benefit from the entitlement programs, which some experts say need to be trimmed to fix the nation’s fiscal woes.

“Working people, jobless people and retirees, who just voted for a middle-class economy, shouldn’t have to sacrifice their health care and retirement security so that the richest 2 percent can continue getting more tax breaks,” said AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka in a statement.

Trumka said the labor group will also continue to hold events in congressional districts as Congress tries to reach a tax and spending deal.

Original post is Labor Tries to Flex Post-Election Muscle by Political Capital.

Photograph by Thomas D. Mcavoy

The Energy Information Administration said today households that use heating oil to fend off winter’s chill can expect to pay record amounts for the fuel.

As gasoline prices remain stubbornly high even after the summer driving season, consumers in some states are facing another hit to their pocketbooks: Higher home heating costs.

The Energy Information Administration, which tracks and analyzes energy data for the U.S., said today households that use heating oil to fend off winter’s chill can expect to pay record amounts for the fuel. Natural gas prices also are expected to increase.

“It is going to be colder than last year and as a result of that, heating bills are going to be higher,” Adam Sieminski, administrator of the EIA, said in Washington today.

Energy has been a subset of the broader economic themes shaping the presidential race so far, and conceivably higher costs could be a drag on President Barack Obama’s chances if it causes additional economic anxiety in homeowners.

Still, most of the pain, if predictions hold true, would come as temperatures dip in December, Janurary and February. The election is Nov. 6.

Republican challenger Mitt Romney accuses Obama of not doing enough to promote domestic oil and gas production. Obama has countered by saying the U.S. was drilling more oil and natural gas than it had in years.

The EIA also had some good news. Gas prices are expected to decline in 2013.

They stood at $3.81 yesterday, about 40 cents higher than a year ago, according to AAA’s daily fuel gauge report. The EIA projects gas to average $3.44 per gallon in 2013, as more oil comes on the market. By the time the next summer driving season starts in May, the election will be far beyond the rear-view mirror.

See the full report at Bloomberg.com.

Original post is Heating Costs Rise — Thermometer Holding Past Nov. 6? by Political Capital.

Photograph by Frederic J. Brown/AFP/Getty Images

Smog in Los Angeles.

Barack Obama and Mitt Romney don’t agree on much, except maybe Gina McCarthy’s qualifications as an environmental adviser.

McCarthy, who is now EPA’s assistant administrator for air quality, also worked for Romney as a top environmental advisor during his tenure as the Republican governor of Massachusetts.

Today, McCarthy announced new standards for soot that she said would protect public health from a “serious pollutant” linked to heart attacks strokes and respiratory ailments. Her old boss may not approve. Romney has called the EPA out of control, and said its regulatory proposals were threatening job growth.

Check out the story here.

Original post is EPA Romney Called ‘Out of Control’ is Staffed by Former Key Advisor by Political Capital.