Remember the Christian Coalition of America?

Under the political operative Ralph Reed in the 1990s it was an electoral force to be reckoned with as it mobilized millions of conservative Christians to vote for mostly Republican Party candidates and causes.

It has since lost influence and political ground to other "religious right" groups such as the Family Research Council. But it remains a sizeable grassroots organization and is still unflinchingly conservative.

So it will no doubt surprise some to see that this week it has joined with the National Wildlife Federation -- whose 4 million members and supporters includes 420,000 sportsmen and women -- to run an ad urging the U.S. Senate to pass legislation that among other things addresses the pressing problem of climate change.

"Defending the status quo is no longer an option. We need swift action
to ensure America is the world leader in clean energy technology.
We can put Americans to work making and installing the clean,
renewable energy technologies that reduce our dependency on
foreign oil and address climate change.
Senators should work together to move forward with a clean energy plan for America," says the ad, which ran this week in Politico.

It comes as the U.S. Senate considers a bill to curb the greenhouse gas emissions linked to global warming.

Other U.S. Christian groups and prominent evangelicals such as Florida mega-pastor Joel Hunter have urged action on climate change -- a top priority of President Barack Obama -- on the grounds that the poor will bear the brunt of warming temperatures. They also see a biblical responsibility to care for God's creations.

(PHOTO: Vanishing Arctic Sea ice is one of the most visible signs of global warming. REUTERS/NASA/Handout)

But influential conservative Christians such as Richard land of the Southern Baptist Convention have spent the past months assailing the cap and trade provisions of the bill as a massive tax hike. In many religious right circles the climate change issue is seen as downright hysterical or an attempt by leftists to cripple the U.S. economy.

But even the most hard-line conservative Christians are no longer united on this issue.

Lindsey Graham, a conservative Republican Senator from South Carolina, broke ranks with his party and recently outlined a compromise to limit carbon emissions in a New York Times op-ed piece he co-wrote with Democratic Senator John Kerry.

That won him praise from national hunting groups and local ones in his home state, which has a robust shooting and fishing culture woven into its rural fabric.

We have recently blogged and written on U.S. hunters and anglers -- many of whom are evangelical Christian, conservative and Republican -- urging action on climate change, not least because of its threat to the game they pursue.

Roberta Combs, the president of the Christian Coalition, told me in a telephone interview that her group joined forces with the NWF on this issue because it saw a biblical need to look after God's creation. But she said it also wants America to pursue alternative energy policies to reduce its independence on foreign oil including expanding its use of nuclear power -- a stance sure to make many greens see red.

"We don’t agree with environmental groups on everything but if we can find things we agree on this will be a better bill…I’m real proud of Senator Graham. He’s a man of lots of wisdom,” she said.

Republicans are mostly skeptical of any move to "cap and trade" U.S. carbon emissions that result from burning coal and oil, decrying it as a massive job-killing tax by forcing the use of more expensive wind and solar power.

But a big chunk of their base seems to be parting company with them on this issue though climate change skepticism still runs deep in the U.S. heartland.

According to a Pew Research Center poll released on Thursday, 36 percent of Americans say global warming is a result of human activity, down from 47 percent in April 2008.

Amanda Sutton looks over a wheat field in northern Colorado and sees a potential project that could help curb greenhouse gas emissions linked to global warming.

“This is a patch of highly-cultivated land that could provide potential carbon offsets,” she said, standing by the field which is owned by the city of Fort Collins and the surrounding county.

“What we would do is take this wheat field and restore it to a native grassland which would sequester carbon from the atmosphere which we could potentially sell,” said Sutton, an environmental specialist with the city.

(See more Sutton comments in the video below)

Potential projects in the emerging carbon market are sprouting like wheat after a good rain across the United States in anticipation of “cap and trade” provisions in a climate bill that has narrowly passed the U.S. House of Representatives but could see significant revision in the Senate.

They could be part of a strategy to meet the bill’s current target to cut U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 17 percent of 2005 levels by 2020. A cap and trade inspired market in Europe has been in place since 2005 and is the biggest by far.

Carbon trading and projects are already underway in various versions in the United States and contribute to a global voluntary market that last year saw turnover more than double to $705 million, according to Ecosystem Marketplace and New Carbon Finance, which track such trends.

Three regional U.S. groups are trading or in the process of creating regulated carbon trading markets.

To trade on such markets, a project must reduce greenhouse gas emissions or, in the case of converting a cultivated field to its natural state or reforesting a patch of land, act as a “carbon sink” to absorb emissions spewed elsewhere.

Once a project is certified and its “carbon offset” is measured in tons, it can sell them as “credits” to polluters unable to meet their emission targets, or even to groups that want to say they have cut their “carbon footprints.”

Some experts say carbon sinks are increasingly important because the world is failing to curb greenhouse gases from power plants, planes and cars fast enough, and so needs to buy more time to avoid dangerous climate change.

‘GET OUT OF JAIL FREE’

But some environmentalists feel trading in pollution is ultimately a ruse.

“By using offsets, industry will be able to sidestep emissions reductions. It is a get out of jail free card,” says Damon Moglen, the Global Warming Campaign Director for environment group Greenpeace.

Trees store carbon while they grow and release it back into the atmosphere when they rot. So in the vocabulary of carbon markets a healthy forest is a “carbon sink.” Tree growth in the United States currently sucks up about 12 percent of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions — a huge total.

The U.S. climate bill may provide an economic windfall to land owners including non-profit organizations, cities, farmers and forest owners who can turn farmland or cleared land back into forests. It may also reward “sustainable forestry” practices, though their carbon benefit will be tough to gauge.
“We see emerging carbon markets as a every exciting revenue source for small family forest owners,” said Bob Simpson, vice president for the Center for Family Forests.

But the cost to a small family landowner of having their offsets measured and certified remains unclear.

GROUPS BAND TOGETHER

Groups like Woodlands Carbon in Oregon are forming around the country to reduce the costs of market entry by joining several forest owners into one portfolio.

Many investments currently being made are essentially “bets” on the bill that ultimately emerges from Congress, according to Mary Grady, a director at the American Carbon Registry.

“The current legislation is very favorable … It is a wonderful first step and it is sending the first signals to the market. But the general feeling is that the legislation is not going to pass in its current form,” she said.

Once the bill passes, a billion tons of carbon could accumulate in the market by 2012 or 2013, when the regulations are supposed to take effect The American Carbon Registry currently has 22 projects worth about 30 million tons.

Grady also said carbon traders worried that the legislation currently says that the “administrator”, which depending on the project could be the Environmental Protection Agency or the U.S. Department of Agriculture will approve programs — but it does not name the programs yet.

“If it was clear people would have lots of confidence in making their investments but people don’t know where to place their bets,” she said.

Getting a project verified has spawned a whole new industry that could create some of the “green jobs” President Barack Obama has said will go with the new green economy.

These include independent, third party project verifiers who apply financial accounting techniques while also using gadgets like gas analyzers to measure carbon tonnage.

The American National Standards Institute accredits firms as third party verifiers but it is all so new that there is no official university degree to train in the profession.

Back at the field in Colorado, Sutton says if this project were to become a reality — a big if — it would have to meet the stringent standards of the voluntary market and show it is removing more carbon from the atmosphere than would have happened naturally.

For now, the wheat will remain.

More coverage:

U.S. consumers spared big costs in climate bill

(Photo: Forest Service Rocky Mountain Research Station electronics engineer John Frank shows a carbon dioxide analyzer and a sonic anemometer in his laboratory in Ft. Collins, Colorado July 21, 2009. Such tools can be used for science and carbon markets)

A half-dozen fake letters, signed by people who don’t seem to exist and who work at made-up jobs, are causing a bit of buzz in the environmental world — mostly because the letters urged a Virginia congressman to vote against a cap-and-trade system to curb climate change.

The Sierra Club calls it “dirty tricks.” The Union of Concerned Scientists points out that the PR firm said to be behind the fake-letter lobbying effort has a history of working against climate legislation. Rep. Ed Markey, who chairs a House committee on energy independence and global warming, said the committee will investigate. The Daily Progress newspaper in Charlottesville published a detailed story.

The congressman, Tom Perriello, voted for the cap-and-trade bill anyway. It passed by a slim margin and the Senate is expected to take up this matter in September.

The alleged forgeries came in letters made to look as if they were sent from two civil rights organizations: the local branch of the NAACP and Creciendo Juntos, a network for Charlottesville’s Hispanic community — neither of which oppose cap-and-trade. The Daily Progress tracked the letters to a Washington lobbying firm, Bonner & Associates. A partner at the Bonner firm apologized to Creciendo Juntos, but that probably won’t be the end of the matter.

Jack Bonner, the president of Bonner & Associates, responded to a call for comment by e-mail: “We take our business very seriously. A temporary employee—lied to us—and contrary to our policies sent these letters. We—no one else—we on our own found this out. We immediately fired the person. We then, called those effected, explained what happened and apologized. In the case of the group in the story—we did it in person and by letter. This should not have happened—we had a bad employee—but through our internal checks, we found the problem, and on our own initiative took the step to notify the affected group.”

Interesting thing about the Bonner firm: its acknowledged specialty is “grassroots” lobbying — even though grassroots politics used to mean efforts that come from the ground up, from the rank-and-file members of a group. The Union of Concerned Scientists, which strongly favors the legislation that Bonner’s clients presumably oppose, pointed reporters to a now-defunct Web site Bonner put up for the Western Fuels Association to oppose the carbon-capping Kyoto Protocol back in the 1990s.

The association said the site generated 20,000 e-mails in opposition, including one from a mythical “George Jetson.” The cartoon character complained that he would have to pay an extra $24,239,987.52 a year if Congress ratified the Kyoto pact. They didn’t, and the United States is now the only industrialized country that hasn’t joined the protocol.

Carl Pope, Sierra Club’s executive director, praised Perriello for voting for the bill and for looking into the efforts of “the dirty, old business-as-usual players who tried to sway his vote.” Pope also noted that other members of Congress may have received the same kind of forged letters, urging them to vote against the bill: “It is disturbing, to say the least, to think that some congresspeople may have, in good faith, voted thinking they were representing their communities when in fact they were not.”

So the question is: did this lobbying effort, and others, sway the vote on the climate bill in the House? Will the same efforts come into play in September in the Senate? And is this an outrage, or just the way Washington works?

Photo credit: REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst (U.S. Capitol dome, February 24, 2009)

“If you liked credit derivatives swaps, you’re going to love cap-and-trade.”

One can presume that Chevron Chief Executive David O’Reilly is not a fan of the current deep worldwide recession — which was worsened by a credit-market lockup blamed in part on hard-to-value securities.

And, he made it very clear on Thursday that he is not enamored of the system the Obama administration hopes to use to reduce U.S. emissions of greenhouse gases including carbon dioxide, which are produced through the burning of fossil fuels sold by the No. 2 U.S. oil and gas company.

“It’s smoke and mirrors,” O’Reilly told a Boston business group. “Personally, I think it’s going to be a difficult system. I don’t think the American people trust it.”

A proposal working its way through the U.S. Congress would put in a place a cap-and-trade system that would give individual U.S. companies the right to emit certain quantities of greenhouse gases, which contribute to global climate change. Companies whose emissions are below their allotment could sell their extra rights to other companies.

The Obama administration in its budget proposal released on Thursday called for the initial emissions permits to be sold, rather than given away free. That would give businesses a financial incentive to reduce their emissions.

O’Reilly argued that an easier way to reduce emissions would be to raise taxes paid on gasoline for cars. He said Washington has embraced cap-and-trade to avoid the appearance of raising taxes.

“Politicians like it because they don’t like to talk about taxes,” O’Reilly said.

It was a discussion that would have made George Bernard Shaw smile. The British Nobel Prize-winning writer said America and England were separated by their common language.

Such was evident recently during a panel discussion at the Milken Institute Global Conference in Beverly Hills. The panel focused on the effort to limit carbon dioxide emissions by trading carbon credits, commonly called a cap-and-trade scheme, and creating such a system in the United States.

That’s the rub, said Elizabeth Kanna, a marketing professional who said that “scheme” is an awful choice because, for most Americans, it means something sinister.

“Most Americans don’t understand carbon. It’s a confusing subject,” said Kanna. “You can’t convince Americans it’s a good idea by calling it a cap-and-trade ’scheme’. I know ’scheme’s’ a bad word. In other countries ’scheme’ is not a bad word but you cannot create a global market using a word like ’scheme’ that doesn’t work everywhere.”

To the British, scheme means a plan of action. Scheme is also used often for programs at the United Nations, where its meaning is neutral. But to Americans, it implies a plan of action in an underhanded way.

In fact, both definitions are correct. U.S. dictionary Merriam-Webster defines scheme as “a plan or program of action; especially: a crafty or secret one.” However, it also gives another definition: “a systematic or organized configuration.” The Oxford English Dictionary gives similar definitions, including “a secret or underhanded plan” and “a systematic plan”

“We have to come up with a better word,” said Kanna, who lives in Sacramento, California. “Here’s a story to illustrate my point. In January, I was in New York. In the cabs now, they have the news on flat screen.  On the bottom of the screen, it said, ‘Madoff Ponzi Scheme.’ It was a new assessment of the money lost. Scheme. At the same time, the cab driver has on the news and they said ‘The cap-and-trade scheme was going forward in Washington.’ ”

While “scheme” may not evoke images of green fields and clear skies for some, the word is a better choice than what has been used in the past, said Robert Hahn of the American Enterprise Institute.

“We’ve come a long way from ‘license to pollute,’ ” said Hahn, referring to the phrase common in the 1990s when the northeastern U.S. states formed a market to trade sulfur dioxide emissions in a successful effort to curb acid rain. (Nevermind that outside the United States, sulfur is spelled sulphur.)

“Carbon tax” is also a marketing non-starter, said Andrew Treusch of Environment Canada, the federal agency.

What do you think? Is this a serious concern? Should the use of scheme be capped? Scrapped?

Photo Credit: Reuters/Dan Riedlhuber (Petro-Canada’s Edmonton Refinery and Distribution Centre glows at dusk in Edmonton February 15, 2009)

Home electric bills could rise as much as 30 percent under a U.S. cap-and-trade plan to address carbon dioxide emissions, Moody’s estimates.

The tough part for households is that Moody’s expects industrial users to figure out a way to duck the cost with special rates, meaning residential electric customers will carry “the vast majority” of the cost burden. Check out our story here.

If Moody’s is right, and if the cap-and-trade plan slows global warming, is the price right?