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Key senators said Tuesday they hope rising gasoline prices will serve as the impetus to reincarnate a bipartisan “gang” of lawmakers who worked in 2008 to develop a compromise energy bill. The lawmakers hope to revive a now-disbanded group of senators who developed an energy plan in 2008 – when gas prices were at an all-time high – that would have expanded offshore drilling and provided incentives for alternative vehicles, among other things. (snip) Klobuchar said she has reached out to Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Kent Conrad (D-N.D.), two of the founding members of the group, about whether they...

Obama said in 2007: [VIDEO AT SITE] or HERE"It is important for us to send some price signals to change behavior" "It's not going to be painless" He said one of the goals of his Cap and Trade was to ensure no one could build a coal powered plant, or if they did, it would bankrupt them. Now, we're all going bankrupt on rising gas prices: Gasoline prices are up again by double digits in all areas around the country compared to the week before. The national gasoline average is $.77 above the price this time last year. 77...

Ban Ki-moon, the normally buttoned-up Secretary General of the United Nations, swept into Los Angeles during Oscar week playing the role of Hollywood pitchman. His message: Make global warming a Hot issue. "I need your support," he told entertainment industry insiders during a daylong forum Tuesday that focused on recent heat waves, floods, fires and drought, which scientists link to human-induced climate change. ....about 400 writers, directors, producers, agents and network executives attended the outreach events. ....To coordinate with Hollywood, the U.N. has set up an office, the "Creative Community Outreach Initiative" in partnership with the United Nations Foundation, funded...

RGGI Is The Prototype For More Regional Cap & Tax Entities Soon RGGI will expand to every state and stick you with astronomical energy prices. RGGI is the model for two new stealth cap & tax entities. The Midwestern Greenhouse Gas Reduction Accord would bring the tax scheme to Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa and Kansas. The Western Climate Initiative will force California, Oregon, Washington, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah and Montana to start paying through the nose for energy. Both programs are set to start in 2012. The corruptocrats in Washington are completely responsible for this gigantic waste of tax...

Thanks to Ronald Reagan’s legacy and a legal miscalculation by leftist environmentalists, this week a California judge stopped the implementation of California’s Cap and Trade law: better known as Cap and Tax. This is the same type of carbon trading that Al Gore has hawked for years, but failed to get through the most radical Democrat Congress in generations. That’s how bad it was. Of course, that didn’t stop whacked out California from passing a Draconian version of the same job killing scheme.

House GOP Readies Ban on EPA Greenhouse Gas RegulationsPublished February 02, 2011 Associated Press WASHINGTON – In a sharp challenge to the Obama administration, House Republicans intend to unveil legislation Wednesday to ban the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act and expect to advance the bill quickly, officials disclosed Tuesday night. The officials said the bill would nullify all of the steps the EPA has taken to date on the issue, including a threshold finding that greenhouse gases constitute a danger to the public health and welfare. In addition, it seeks to strip the...

Last night’s State of the Union Address shows that President Obama learned only one lesson from the failure that was Copenhagen, the farce that was Cancun, the death of cap-and-trade, and the “slaughter” of House Democrats who voted for Waxman-Markey. Namely, dissemble, repackage Kyotoism in new verbiage, and press on with an agenda that voters rejected in November. Anyone paying attention to Obama EPA’s campaign to ‘legislate’ climate policy through the regulatory backdoor would expect as much. But — true confession — I was surprised when Obama proposed to restructure the U.S. electric power sector along the lines contemplated by H.R. 2454, the American Clean...

Energy: Keeping a campaign vow to bankrupt the industry, the administration revokes the permit for an approved, working coal mine in West Virginia. Guess those electric cars will have to get their energy elsewhere. We and others have warned that in the wake of November's "shellacking," the Obama administration would attempt to implement its agenda through regulations and rule making. As West Virginia's coal industry has found, it matters not even if you follow the rules. In pursuit of this agenda, the rules can be changed on the fly. The Environmental Protection Agency has revoked the coal mining permit for...

In a petition filed Tuesday with the state Supreme Court, New Energy Economy Inc. alleged that the administration circumvented the state's rule-making process and encroached on the powers of the Legislature and the state Court of Appeals. The petition filed by the New Mexico Environmental Law Center asks the state's highest court to order the new regulation reinstated and order Martinez to stop interfering with the rule-making process. Martinez's office did not respond to a request for comment on the petition. Immediately after she took office on Jan. 1, the Republican governor ordered a 90-day hold on proposed or pending...

Gov. Susana Martinez on Tuesday took aim at the controversial Environmental Improvement Board, announcing that she was removing all members over concerns about the board's approval in recent months of what she considers "anti-business" policies. The board — made up of members appointed by former Gov. Bill Richardson — was at the center of a heated debate last year over whether New Mexico should regulate greenhouse-gas emissions. The board ultimately decided to approve two proposals — one from an environmental group that aimed to limit the emissions of the state's largest polluters and another from the state Environment Department that...

“I have one yardstick by which I test every major problem -and that yardstick is: Is it good for America?” Dwight D. Eisenhower. Driessen and Soon‘s article in New Year’s day CanadaFreePress (CFP) identifies the growing conflict as the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) tries to take control of energy in Texas. EPA is manipulating a completely unnecessary and scientifically unjustified control of energy and must be stopped. Fortunately, the Texas case is currently stayed by a court order, but EPA history is to do anything to achieve their goal.

(snip) Dig long enough and just about every Republican has a green skeleton in their closet. Many of them have their last presidential nominee, Arizona Sen. John McCain, a longtime cap-and-trade enthusiast, to thank for it. (snip) "I support a reasonable cap-and-trade system," [Pawlenty] said. "I think it'd be good for the federal government to take that up rather than have states take it up as clusters of regions." Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor, appealed to a New Hampshire audience in October 2007 on moral grounds by saying he backed a cap-and-trade system to reduce greenhouse gases and faulted the...

Environment: Ignoring both Congress and the voters, the Environmental Protection Agency starts the new year governing by decree with job-killing regulations. Take a deep breath, but if you exhale you're a polluter. Cap-and-trade is dead, long live cap-and-trade in the form of regulations promulgated in the coming year by what George Orwell might call the Ministry of Environment. It claims that the Clean Air Act and a Supreme Court ruling in 2007 let the EPA regulate carbon dioxide as a planet-warming pollutant. We recently commented on the EPA's recent commandeering of the permitting process from Texas, with which it is...

With Republicans controlling the House and ramping up oversight and investigations of the Obama administration, focus at least initially in the next Congress will be on the Senate to lay a potential pathway for legislative compromise on energy and environmental policy. “The Senate will set the energy agenda especially at the beginning,” said Paul Bledsoe, a senior adviser with the Bipartisan Policy Center and a former Senate Democratic aide. (snip) Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.)Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.)Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska)Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) Sen....

AK Steel announced Tuesday it plans to close its Ashland, Ky., coke plant permanently in 2011, a decision that will affect its 263 employees. Procedures for the closure will begin immediately and be completed early in the second quarter of 2011, according to a press release from the company. ------------------------------------------------------ Ray Finley, 54, of South Point, has been a contracted employee at the plant for the past three years. Finley blamed the Obama Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency for the closure. “It’s sad that the federal government is going to let the American people starve,” while jobs go to...

And so it begins, and on the most fertile red-state territory in the nation. Texas, which got four more seats in the House through the 2010 Census reapportionment, has had its air-quality rules superceded by the EPA as part of its aggressive new action on carbon emissions. Governor Rick Perry promises a fight: The federal Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday effectively declared Texas unfit to regulate its owngreenhouse gas emissions and took over carbon dioxide permitting of any new or expanding industrial facilities starting Jan. 2.The EPA also set up a framework for regulating greenhouse gas emissions in seven other...

Complete title: EPA To Require Power Plants and Refineries To Use Pollution-Reduction Technologies To Trim Greenhouse Gas Emissions (CNSNews.com) -- The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has announced that to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the United States, it will decide which pollution-reduction technologies work best for power plants and refineries and will then set regulations over the next two years that require those industries to implement similar pollution-reduction technologies.However, the EPA acknowledged that it does not yet know how much greenhouse gas emissions will be reduced through its new regulatory plan. Also, the American Petroleum Institute criticized the EPA's action...

California often leads the nation, especially in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The act of leading is one thing, however. Leadership's outcome is another matter entirely. On Friday, the California Air Resources Board (CARB), the bureaucracy charged with implementing AB 32, the California Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006, adopted a cap-and-trade scheme to reduce California's greenhouse gas emissions by about 15% by 2020. CARB's regulations go into effect in 2012. The unelected officials at CARB intend to reorder California's use of energy. In so doing they blandly declaim that their rules will create jobs while admitting to higher energy costs...

We now know how cap-and-trade will be rebranded for the start of the 112th Congress - and we also know the Republican weak spot in the Senate. As reported today by Energy & Environment News, [A] proposal for a clean energy standard, which has been batted around for years and introduced most recently by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), has created a buzz on and off Capitol Hill in recent weeks. What is a "clean energy standard" (CES)? Graham's CES is essentially a national renewable electricity standard (RES), where nuclear power and so-called "clean coal" qualify to meet the RES. Reportedly,...

Is a 2011 Senate coalition on energy starting to take shape? Sen. Mark Begich (D-Alaska) said he called Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) late last week after learning that the South Carolina Republican wants to be a player again on energy in the next Congress. The freshman Begich says he, too, wants to be in the thick of talks aimed at crafting a long-term U.S. energy policy – a politically tricky and elusive task. “That is what I am going to be pushing hard for,” Begich said in the Capitol Monday. “I will continue reach over the aisle with other Republicans...