Green Energy Reporter

13 November '09
4:16 PM EST
No Comments

Grandmothers Furious at Exclusion From Cap and Trade Hearings

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Just when you thought cap and trade couldn’t find more powerful enemies… behold, legislators have offended the AARP.

A coalition of consumer groups including the lobby group for retired Americans, the National Consumer Law Center and others have complained that groups representing regular citizens have been almost shut out of the hearings on climate change legislation, Greenwire reports.

By the coalition’s tally, schools and think tanks have been the main microphone hogs with 25 witnesses, followed by 15 witnesses from energy companies, 15 from non-energy companies and 13 from environmental groups.

Only two witnesses came from citizen advocacy groups. (The tally doesn’t even include the awful group that Sen. Max Baucus put together for the Senate Finance Committee hearings.) Read More »

Tagged: AARP, cap and dividend, cap-and-trade, Chesapeake Climate Action Network, Max Baucus, Senate Finance Committee

9 November '09
11:38 AM EST
No Comments

Policy

Baucus Puts Together A Strange Witness List for Climate Bill Testimony

UPDATE: Congress Matters gets right to the heart of what we were writing about earlier: Sen. Max Baucus is stacking the deck against the Kerry-Boxer climate change bill in order to weaken it. Notably, the American Council on Capital Formation, where witness Margo Thorning works, has received a little over $1.6 million from Exxon Mobil since 1998. Let’s see, just for fun, if natural gas, which Exxon has been pushing recently, in her testimony tomorrow.

ORIGINAL POST: Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.), chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, will get his chance to tear into climate change legislation that is, at best, adrift and without a hope of passing in its current form.

Baucus, the only Democrat who voted against the Kerry-Boxer legislation in the Environment and Public Works Committee, has promised deference in at least the allocation of allowances.

He told ClimateWire’s Darren Samuelsohn:

“I don’t want to say we’re going to do something totally different,” he said. “I’m respectful of the House allocation.”

But, if the witness list is any indication, he’s going to look at import taxes to protect American manufacturing and more nuclear. At least two out of the five witnesses , curiously, don’t support climate change legislation at all. Read More »

Tagged: carbon tax, Environment and Public Works Committee, Kerry-Boxer, Max Baucus, Senate Finance Committee, Waxman-Markey