With the ink barely dry on the health care bill, the Senate turns to climate and energy. (image: DoubleSpeak Media via flickr.com and media.cleveland.com)

On Friday, just two days before the all-important health care vote in the House of Representatives, 22 senators sent a letter to Majority Leader Harry Reid urging him to make comprehensive energy and climate legislation a priority in the near future. The letter echoed previous arguments of proponents for climate and energy action that connect limiting carbon emissions and stimulating green industries to job creation, energy independence, and economic health.

Just a few hours after President Obama signed the health care reform bill into law, three prominent senators got back to work at promoting climate and energy legislation. The Hill reported on Tuesday that Senators Kerry (D-MA), Graham (R-SC) and Lieberman (I-CT) made a PowerPoint presentation to 19 senate colleagues in an attempt to drum up support for their climate bill, meant to attract support from both parties. In their presentation, the trio laid out the basic principles of their plan, including limiting carbon emissions, expanding domestic oil and natural gas production, and offering incentives for low- and no-emission power plants and transportation. After the meeting, Sen. Lieberman explained that the aim of the presentation was to get feedback from senators that will inform the first draft of the planned bill, to be written during Congress’s two-week recess that begins on March 29. Sen. Kerry reinforced the group’s accelerated timetable, saying, “we have some really key meetings in the next few days . . . we have a lot of work to do in the next 48 hours.”

Determined activity by Senate heavyweights in close proximity to the end of the health care battle that had consumed both houses of Congress for over a year hints that the next item on the ruling party’s legislative agenda will be climate and energy. Opposition to energy or climate action (or a combination of the two) will be strong, but probably not as vehement as Republicans’ resistance to health care reform. For example, expansion of offshore drilling for oil and gas, long a cause of Republican lawmakers, is a central part of two of the three climate/energy proposals currently floating around Congress (blogger Donnie Fowler wrote up a clear and concise summary of all three for the Huffington Post last week), which will likely win some Republican support or at least tone down opposition.

Further support for moving climate and energy legislation along sooner rather than later comes from Sen. Kerry’s claim in late February that Majority Leader Reid, who sets the Democratic agenda in the Senate, is “deadly serious about making progress this year on climate and energy reform.” According to Mother Jones, Kerry elaborated further in comments to the Washington Post:

Senator Reid made it clear to me the other day that he wants a bill and he wants it soon. I can’t give you an exact timeline, but we are working very very diligently with our colleagues and all of the stakeholders to think this through carefully and get this done right, and get it done in a way that can pass the Senate.

With the Majority Leader and at least 25 other senators on board with making climate and energy legislation the next big push in Congress, chances are that it will happen soon. Legislative efforts on that front will be focused in the Senate, as the House passed a climate and energy bill (known as the ACES or Waxman-Markey bill) in June of last year.

Most observers agree that the best hope for passing climate and/or energy legislation in the next few months is to tie the legislation to job creation and economic recovery and include concessions to satisfy Republican interests. The American economy is still suffering, and unemployment rates remain extremely high, which make job creation the number one action that Americans would like to see come out of the halls of Congress ASAP. If supporters can make a strong case that a comprehensive energy bill will create a significant amount of American jobs, the bill will gain pubic support and make opposition a risky tactic for any politician. Furthermore, if consulting with Republican senators in sessions like the Kerry-Graham-Lieberman PowerPoint presentation yields Republican ideas that make it into a final version of the bill, the minority party could take some ownership of it and maybe even throw some votes behind it (although only one Republican besides Sen. Graham, Sen. George Voinovich (OH), attended the PowerPoint session).

The biggest question is what form a final Senate bill on climate/energy will take. With two bills and one proposal in various stages of development and approval, one can bet that the basic principles of the final energy bill are already in circulation.

Until that final bill is written, it is impossible to say whether it will be a positive or negative development for heating oil users. For instance, the Waxman-Markey bill includes funding increases for programs that provide heating oil to needy Americans, but also includes a cap and trade system that would increase the prices of consumer petroleum products like heating oil.

Take a deep breath, America. The brutal political battle over health care reform is essentially finished, but the fight over climate legislation and our country’s energy future is about to begin.

President Obama is officially eyeing a U.S. emissions reduction target. (image: tdbimg.com and seedcapitalfunds.com)

Last week, President Obama ended months of speculation concerning his pre-holiday travel plans by announcing that he will personally attend the upcoming climate conference in Copenhagen. The announcement is significant for two reasons, according to Darren Samuelson and Lisa Friedman in Wednesday’s New York Times.

First, Obama will be the first sitting president to attend the conference since George H.W. Bush in 1992, which lends the visit substantial symbolic value, even if Obama’s attendance doesn’t lead to an international pact. The fact that Obama is boarding a plane at all marks a break from the previous administration, whose public comments on climate change most often consisted of a wan shrug.

Second, Obama will bring with him a real, if “provisional,” plan to reduce US greenhouse gas emissions. This is the first time that the United States has gone on record with specific goals concerning the reduction of its emissions, and many supporters of climate legislation now hope that the president’s announcement of a firm target will encourage other industrialized and developing countries to offer specific goals of their own. While no one expects Copenhagen to produce a legally binding treaty, it is generally hoped that the conference will act as a “steppingstone” toward a global climate agreement, as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton put it earlier in November.

In his announcement, Obama said that the United States will cut greenhouse gas emissions “in the range of 17 percent below 2005 levels” by 2020. This goal parallels recent plans outlined by Congress, which have incited various rumblings and approbations from Republicans and Democrats. The House climate bill, which passed earlier this year, also calls for an emissions reduction of 17 percent by 2020, while the Senate bill includes plans to cut emissions by 20 percent, although this target will likely be diminished during subsequent negotiations. The administration has hitherto avoided stating specific emissions goals, mainly because climate legislation has stalled in the Senate—and in Washington, as elsewhere, it is unwise to put the cart before the horse. In other words, Obama is taking a bit of a risk.

No doubt this is one reason why his remarks have been lauded by Democrats in favor of climate change legislation. With uncharacteristic verve, Senate Foreign Relations Chairman John Kerry (D-Mass.) referred to Obama’s proposal as “one hell of a global game changer with big reverberations here at home.” Moreover, Obama’s public commitment to climate change legislation could put to rest the longstanding, largely conservative opposition to such legislation. According to Senator Kerry, the numbers offered by the United States will “lay the groundwork for a broad political consensus at Copenhagen that will strip climate obstructionists here at home of their most persistent charge, that the United States shouldn’t act if other countries won’t join with us.”

Another big question, of course, still remains: will other countries join us? With the United States leading the way, many have hoped that China and India—along with the US, the biggest emitters of greenhouse gases—would follow along. And while the results of Obama’s forward charge have been fairly encouraging, it seems ill-advised to call it a decisive victory. On Friday, the United States and India announced a “green partnership,” pledging—rather vaguely—to work together to fight against climate change. While significant, the announcement did not include specific emissions reductions targets, and did little to indicate exactly how much money the United States plans to give India to help bolster its green initiatives.

While visiting China earlier this month, President Obama released a similar joint statement with Chinese President Hu, suggesting that the Copenhagen conference should “include emission reduction targets of developed countries and nationally appropriate mitigation actions for developing countries.” This is simply a nice way of saying that the United States and China will be held to different standards when it comes to cutting emissions, despite exhortations from the United States and Europe that China deal more aggressively with skyrocketing pollution. Thus, taking advantage of yet another political euphemism, China has agreed to reduce its “carbon intensity” by 40 to 45 percent, rather than cut its “carbon emissions”—a different enterprise altogether, and one that allows its overall carbon emissions to continue to increase.

But here’s another way to look at it. The World Resources Institute calculates that President Obama’s goal of a 17 percent emissions reduction is equal to slightly more than a 40 percent reduction in emissions intensity—the percent reduction that China has proposed. Stated that way, it appears that the United States and China have a like-for-like deal, though each apparently prefers to state the deal in different terms. One wonders, of course, why China is so resistant to actual emissions cuts, and what effect that may have on future climate policy.

An offshore drilling platform in the Gulf of Mexico. (image: eightylbs via flickr.com)

The hot topic of climate change has infiltrated debates over whether or not to allow oil companies to expand offshore oil drilling. On Thursday, the Houston Chronicle reported that Shell executives spoke before a Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee panel investigating whether or not Congress should attach more environmental safeguards to offshore drilling operations.

Asserting that more restrictions are not necessary as Shell’s environmental safeguards and technological advancements allow the company to drill with little environmental impact, Shell president Marvin Odum went on argue that the government should allow oil companies to expand offshore oil and gas production.

Shell’s request for expanded offshore drilling rights may be affected by the cap and trade legislation that is currently being debated in Washington. On October 21, HeatingOil.com reported that oil and gas companies rejected a compromise offered by Senators John Kerry and Lindsey Graham that would allow for expanded drilling provisions in return for support of a cap and trade system. To further restrict offshore drilling might only increase the energy industry’s opposition to any climate bill.

Oil and gas companies are not the only ones Democrats have been willing to compromise with. On November 17, HeatingOil.com reported that some Senate Democrats are open to increased use of nuclear power in return for Republican support of cap-and-trade. However, much like big oil and gas, increased use of nuclear energy has yet to entice Republicans into accepting cap and trade.

While it is impossible to tell as of now whether oil and gas companies will ever support cap and trade legislation, it is clear that all future discussions concerning energy production will be at least partially framed by environmental impact and climate change.

Former Institute for 21st Century President, and current Obama Administration national security advisor, Gen. James Jones. (image: wikipedia.org)

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has been one of the loudest voices of skepticism regarding the push to curb climate change. According to a Wall Street Journal article published on Thursday, the group has issued a report detailing its concerns on how intellectual property rights may be violated in attempts to cut down carbon costs, which could result in a lack of investment in new technology.

This issue stems from the divide between the developed and the developing world. According to the report, one goal laid out by climate change proponents is the so-called “50-by-50” measure which calls for carbon emissions to be reduced by 50 percent by the year 2050. This would require drastic changes in energy usage from developing countries; however, developing countries lack the technology to do so.

As a result, they have asked for financial help from advanced countries. And they have also asked for free access to the technology which could help reduce carbon emissions.

But an entire new set of problems could emerge if developing nations gain free access to advanced green technologies from the U.S. and other wealthy nations. And this is what concerns the U.S. Chamber of Commerce:

Without intellectual property rights, there is precious little incentive for companies to invest in advanced technologies if their inventions could be expropriated outright by companies in developing countries and manufactured and sold around the world at reduced cost.

And, the COC says, a lack of property rights will prevent the world from reaching its goal of drastically reducing carbon emissions:

How rapidly advanced energy technologies develop and are adopted commercially will be the most important factor in determining how quickly and at what cost greenhouse gas emissions can be reduced.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which represents American business interests and is usually associated with backing Republicans, does have at least one important voice that is routinely heard in the White House. General James Jones, a former president of the Chamber’s Institute for 21st Century Energy, now serves as President Obama’s national security advisor. Secretary of State Hilary Clinton also plans on discussing financing and the transfer of technology at the upcoming climate change conference at Copenhagen scheduled for December.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce long fought against legislation in Congress which would limit carbon emissions. But, as previously reported here on HeatingOil.com, the Chamber recently threw its support behind a proposal introduced by Senators John Kerry and Lindsay Graham; perhaps not coincidentally, many prominent companies such as Nike, Exelon and Apple left the organization due to the organization’s previous opposition to climate change legislation. The recent report marks another shift in position by the COC. Rather than criticizing legislation and international agreements aimed at mitigating climate change outright as anti-business, it seems to have accepted the inevitability of new climate and energy policies and chosen to use its considerable influence to shape the details of such policies.