Washington Extra – Going nuclear?
Obama to renominate Republican to nuclear panel – President Obama will renominate Republican Kristine Svinicki to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, defying opposition from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a White House official told Reuters. Republicans want Svinicki, whose term as a commissioner expires in June, to stay on the panel and believe the process is being held up because she, along with three other commission members, accused the current NRC chairman, a Democrat, of bullying women. For more of this story by Jeff Mason and Roberta Rampton, read here.
U.S. House passes Republican business tax cut – The Republican-controlled House of Representatives passed a tax break for small businesses, giving voters a stark alternative to President Obama’s politically popular “Buffett Rule” surtax on the wealthy. In an escalating election-year war of words over taxes, the Republican measure, like the Buffett Rule, is not expected to become law. It is opposed by Democrats, who control the Senate, where the bill was expected to die. For more of this story by Kim Dixon, read here.
Lagarde sees deal in making on IMF funding – IMF chief Christine Lagarde said she expects to win a big boost in funding to help the lender contain damage from the euro-zone debt crisis now that Europe has taken significant steps on its own. For more of this story by Lesley Wroughton and Stella Dawson, read here.
Washington Extra – Pump It Up
Today it was rising gasoline prices that have Republicans and Democrats at each other’s throats. Both parties realize they really cannot do very much about retail prices, but they’re scrambling in hopes that voters don’t blame them for a pocketbook issue in an election year.
“Every time prices go up, there’s some sort of ruckus,” Marc Spitzer, an-ex energy regulator appointed by former President George W. Bush, told Reuters.
The current White House occupant seized on gasoline prices today, targeting potential oil market manipulators and calling on Congress to jack up civil and criminal penalties on those found to be messing with prices for their own financial gain.
“We can’t afford a situation where speculators artificially manipulate markets by buying up oil, creating the perception of a shortage and driving prices higher, only to flip the oil for a quick profit,” President Barack Obama said in the White House Rose Garden.
Republicans quickly dismissed Obama’s initiative. “It probably polls pretty well, but I guarantee it won’t do a thing to lower prices at the pump,” said Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell. While the Republican answer is more domestic oil production, Democrats argue that’s already happening and prices nonetheless have risen.
Look for this ruckus to only get louder if the average gasoline price breaches the $4-a-gallon mark this summer.
Washington Extra – Tea Party poopers
All that Tea Party support in 2010 for the 87 House Republican freshmen seems to have come with a price — and now it’s time to collect.
Representative Michael Grimm found his office filled with activists wanting to know why he hadn’t done more to slash government spending and why he had voted to raise the U.S. debt limit. He too is frustrated, the former Marine told them, but you just can’t shut down government and stop paying the soldiers.
There is Tea Party talk that the freshmen have become corrupted by Washington and part of the bureaucratic fabric that they very much despise. By one account, two-thirds of the freshmen have compromised while only 20 or so have maintained the zero tolerance Tea Party line on spending.
Alas, the Tea Party could end up giving the Republican freshman class of 2010 more grief than the Democrats heading toward the November elections. If 2010 was the year the Tea Party emerged as a political force in Washington, 2012 will be the year that determines whether the movement can live with itself on Capitol Hill.
Here are our top stories from Washington…
from Environment Forum:
Stern, in center of climate pessimism, hopeful about U.S.
Nicholas Stern, the British economist who warned five years ago that global warming could cost the world's GDP as much as 20 percent a year by 2050, hasn’t given up on the United States taking action on climate even though he’s down on Washington for not passing a bill that would do just that.
“If you look around the world, of all places to sit and wonder where (climate policy is) going, this is probably the most pessimistic place -- this city,” he told a small gathering of reporters at the World Bank’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. late this week.
But all one has to do is travel out of the U.S. capital to see enormous potential for taking action, he said. Stern is optimistic about U.S. companies in Silicon Valley and Boston and other places developing low-carbon technologies such as batteries for electric cars, or new biofuels that aren’t made out of food crops.
“There are so many technological ideas on the table that you don’t need all of them to work, just some,” he said.
He also takes heart in state level mandates for renewable energy and the reelection of Jerry Brown, the pro-solar governor of California, who wants to set the bar even higher for renewable energy.
Be that as it may, Stern is even more deeply concerned about the risks of climate change.
He thinks he underestimated the risk in the Stern Review issued five years ago. But now he doesn’t describe the risks in terms of percentage points of lost GDP. He believes hundreds of millions of people could be forced to migrate in coming decades because of global warming, resulting in conflicts, or even wars.
bst23, how do you explain shrinking polar ice caps, vanishing large fresh water lakes, increased desertification and rising sea levels globally? Also how is it that atmospheric oxygen content is diminishing while CO2 is 30% higher right now than at any point during the last 600,000 years? These are facts that our Congress has been well aware of since the early 1960s. Scripps was the first to start collecting such data as early as 1957 and reports their findings every year to Congress.
For those interested in the truth google “Scripps Institute of Oceanography” and open their website. Their work has been duplicated and verified by universities and research institutes around the globe. Everyone can find the answers for themselves.
from Environment Forum:
Harry Potter, horcruxes and Steven Chu
Anyone familiar with Harry Potter knows as least two things: 1) this is the U.S. opening weekend for the final movie in the blockbuster series about the boy wizard and 2) ultimate villain Voldemort uses horcruxes to hold bits of his soul and extend his life.
Leave it to U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu to riff on horcruxes to explain energy storage.
"While I confess I haven't yet seen all of the Harry Potter movies including the “Deathly Hallows Part 2,” a staff member (who might be a bigger nerd than I am) was telling me about Lord Voldemort's "horcruxes" -- objects he used to store his life energy. Without them, he lost his power and couldn't survive," Chu said on his Facebook page.
"In the 'muggle' world, energy storage is crucial to our future as well, but for more positive reasons. It is the key to greatly expanding the use of renewable energy sources that are intermittent like wind and solar power. Better batteries will mean longer range, lower cost electric vehicles, and will make our entire electricity generation and distribution system more efficient by smoothing out fluctuations in demand."
Check out what the Nobel laureate says about the seven "clean energy horcruxes" in the rest of his post.
This isn't the first time Chu has used pop culture to make some serious points about energy efficiency. Just before last Halloween, he posted a photo of himself as a zombie to get people to beware of "energy vampires": electric appliances like DVD players, computers and stereos that suck up power even when they're turned off.
Photo credit: REUTERS/Lucas Jackson (A Harry Potter fan waits in line with a Potter-themed pillow before opening of the film "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - Part 2" in New York July 14, 2011)
Way to stretch that Chu. Real Potter fans wouldn’t be amused.
from Environment Forum:
John Kerry has had it up to HERE with “The Flat Earth Caucus”
You remember John Kerry, right? Tall, silver-haired, urbane enough to be accused of being French. But there's a feisty side to the senior senator from Massachusetts, and it was on display at a forum on energy and economic growth, where Kerry teed off on congressional Republicans and others who doubt the seriousness of the challenge of climate change.
"After a while you get exasperated and jaded and frustrated about it all," Kerry told The New Republic forum at the National Press Club. "I've had it just about up to here with America's indifference to the realities of this crisis ... the United States is like an ostrich putting its head in the sand."
How do you feel about the U.S. political establishment, Senator Kerry? "I don't know what's happened to us in the body politic of this country where facts and science seem to be so easily shunted aside and disposed of in favor of simple sloganeering, pure ideology and little bromides of politics that are offered up, that offer no solution to anything but might get you through an election."
Your Republican colleagues in Congress? "In the Republican party ... about half the class that came in (to Congress) this year doubts that humans have anything to do with climate change or that climate change is happening ... The Flat Earth Caucus is growing."
How about the billionaire Koch brothers? "The Koch brothers are funding a lot of efforts to prevent us from doing anything (about climate change). They funded this climate doubters Berkeley study in the hopes that one study out of thousands would ... show that all the rest of this stuff is fabricated ideological bunk from the left." (As it turned out, and as Kerry noted, the Berkeley Earth Science Project agreed with most other studies that climate change is occurring and human activities fuel it.)
Kerry said he was troubled that China is now "winning the clean energy race," with Germany second and the United States slipping to third.
"I think America's greatness, America's capacity to lead, is really on the line," he said. "And I see it and feel it as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee in the many conversations I have with leaders in various parts of the world ... I just see them and feel them doubting our resolve, doubting our capacity, doubting whether we'll really be there in almost anything ... whether our political system will let it happen."
Donjr, do you think the Supreme Court in it’s present pro business form would have ever appointed a Republican or for that matter rule against business?
As a condition of accepting a life time to the Court, Justices should be required to divest themselves of all stock investment and similar vehicles by law so that there rulings might be less tainted by financial self interest. They can pay off debt or acquire annuities with the proceeds of their holdings.
Cicero and Tacitus both stated “One can tell how corrupt a society is by how many laws they have”. Clearly the Nation is suffering from a crisis of character.
Washington Extra – Energy epiphany
If you thought you’d heard it before, you have.
President Barack Obama said today the United States must reduce its dependence on oil. And even he acknowledged this is not a new idea.
“Richard Nixon talked about freeing ourselves from dependence on foreign oil. And every president since that time has talked about freeing ourselves from dependence on foreign oil,” he said at Georgetown University.
“Politicians of every stripe have promised energy independence, but that promise has so far gone unmet,” Obama said.
As all of those presidents found, it is no small task to wean the world’s largest oil consumer and importer away from that addiction — especially since U.S. domestic oil production peaked in the early 1970s.
So why will this time be any different?
Obama has set a goal that he says is “reasonable,” “achievable,” and “necessary,” of reducing oil imports by one-third over a decade.
Washington Extra – Sticky situations
It is a natural instinct to review one’s own situation when a friend or neighbor is hit by a crisis.
So the risk of a nuclear disaster in Japan after the earthquake and tsunami prompted the United States to look inward. The upshot is that President Barack Obama is committed to nuclear power, and “it remains a part of the president’s overall energy plan,” White House spokesman Jay Carney said.
The administration is not going to switch gears on nuclear policy while a crisis unfolds, so that type of statement is to be expected while it assesses the situation.
Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chairman Greg Jaczko saw a “very low probability” of any harmful radiation levels reaching the United States from Japan.
On the other side of the world, Saudi Arabia grew alarmed by anti-government protests in neighboring Bahrain and decided to offer some kingdom-to-kingdom support by sending 1,000 troops to militarily enforce peace.
“This is not an invasion of a country,” Carney said.
He avoided a yes or no response to questions about whether Saudi Arabia should pull its troops out, reflecting the difficult spot the United States is in and its deliberate avoidance of picking sides: protesters demanding democratic reforms or important Mideast allies that happen to be ruled by monarchies?
The future of nuclear power is in Thorium breeder reactors.
It’s difficult to understand why most of the world continues to embrace uranium as the primary nuclear fuel source when a much safer and more abundant alternative stands waiting.
Steven Chu: Energy Secretary, Nobel Laureate, Zombie
You sort of have to like a U.S. cabinet secretary and Nobel Prize winner who knows how to have a little fun while getting out a message.
That would be Steven Chu, who posted a picture of himself as a green-faced, blood-dripping zombie on his Facebook page. Just in time for Washington’s scrupulously-observed Halloween weekend, Chu used his own zombification as a platform to point out power-sucking appliances — energy vampires, he called them.
“Garlic doesn’t work against these vampires,” Chu wrote. “But by taking some simple steps – like using power strips or setting your computer to go into sleep mode – you can protect yourself, and your wallet.” Then he linked to the Energy Department’s “energy star” page .
Perhaps it’s a profile-raising approach?
Chu’s got nearly 15,000 Facebook followers but he’s near the bottom of a recent accounting in Politico about which cabinet secretaries can claim the highest media profile. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton tops the list, based on how often her name showed up in major newspapers, network evening television news shows, the White House blog and its Flickr feed in the last year. Only Gary Locke, Hilda Solis, Shaun Donovan and Eric Shinseki ranked lower than Chu (you can see which departments they lead by clicking on the link in this paragraph).
But how did Chu come up with the zombie angle? Turns out that my alert colleague Tom Doggett, who reports on energy issues, saw the zombified version of Chu online last week and passed it along to Energy Department spokeswoman Stephanie Mueller. To soften the blow, Tom urged her to tell Chu not to take it personally: “I hear (Interior Secretary Ken) Salazar looks much worse.” She wrote back: “Your email inspired a Facebook posting … The Secretary loved the zombie website. Be sure to check out his Facebook page.”
And even though Halloween has passed, you can still see what you’d look like undead by going here .
Schwarzenegger sours on politics; eyes memoirs, movies?
Memoirs, maybe movies, but no political office.
That’s what the immediate future holds for California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who’s leaving office in January.
After seven years running the most populous state the in country, Schwarzenegger seems to have soured on politics and partisanship.
“Politics destroys everybody,” he said in an “ABC World News” interview on Wednesday. “The more you can take the politics out of things, the more you can accomplish. Because otherwise, it becomes kind of like, ‘I’m representing my party. My party is not happy with this. We’re doing it this way.’”
Schwarzenegger called politicians in Washington “wimps” for not tackling energy and environment policy and he spoke against Proposition 23.
Here’s a video clip from the interview.
If approved, the measure on next Tuesday’s California ballot would scuttle many of the governor’s clean energy and environmental policies. Specifically Proposition 23 would suspend California’s landmark climate change law until the state unemployment rate drops to 5.5 percent or lower for one year.
