Markey to replace Boucher as chair of Energy and Air Quality Subcommittee? Let’s hope so!
January 2nd, 2009Congressional Quarterly Online reported this week:
The two senior House Democrats with jurisdiction over energy and telecommunications policies could swap gavels in the 111th Congress, with potentially dramatic implications for the shape of climate change legislation expected next year.
Since 2007, Rick Boucher of Virginia, the Energy and Commerce Committee’s fourth-ranking Democrat, has led the Energy and Air Quality Subcommittee, which has taken the lead role in crafting legislation to address global warming.
But Boucher said in an interview Tuesday that he expects Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts, No. 3 among committee Democrats in seniority, to bid for the subcommittee chairmanship. Boucher said he would “respect that decision” and stake his own claim for chairmanship of Markey’s Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet.
“I’m awaiting his decision,” Boucher said. Markey has not yet made up his mind, a spokesman said.
This would be almost as big a deal as Waxman defeating Dingell for committee chair. Just as Dingell-Boucher co-authored a House climate bill last session, one would expect that if this change occurs, Waxman and Markey would co-author a House Bill in this session. And it certainly wouldn’t be as lame (see “Q: Does Dingell-Boucher have meaningful auctioning of CO2 permits before 2026?“).
The story continues:
A move by Markey to leadership of the Energy and Air Quality Subcommittee would represent a significant philosophical shift in the leadership of a panel charged with writing the climate legislation that House leaders and the Obama administration want to pass this year.
Boucher, who hails from a coal-rich corner of Virginia, worked with recently ousted Energy and Commerce Chairman John D. Dingell, D-Mich., a champion of his state’s ailing auto industry, to produce a draft global warming bill that some environmentalists criticized as too soft on industry.
Markey, however, is a leading liberal in his caucus and is closely aligned with environmentalists. He also is strongly allied with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., who named him chairman of a Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming in the 110th Congress, and with the new Energy and Commerce Chairman Henry A. Waxman, D-Calif.
Markey introduced his own climate bill (HR 6186) in June, which would cap greenhouse gas emissions at 85 percent below 2005 levels by 2025, a target far more aggressive than Boucher and Dingell proposed in their draft.
Markey has long been the top Democrat on the telecommunications subcommittee and may have some reluctance about giving up that prominent post.
But with President-elect Barack Obama signaling that a major global warming bill will be among his top priorities this year, Markey may find the prospect of taking a lead role in writing the legislation. His select committee has held dozens of hearings on a wide range of climate and energy issues, but lacks any legislative authority.
I can’t see the point in keeping the Select committee if Markey switches positions. But in any case, the switch itself is what matters. It would be a good way to start the new year.
January 2nd, 2009 at 4:37 pm
Joe, if this is such a good change, would it also not be a good change for Rahall to step down as Chair of the House Committee on Natural Resources. Dingell had a relatively progressive record with the major and over-riding consideration concerning everything to do with the Auto Industry. Rahall has a similar allegiance to the coal industry. All of the West Virginia CongressCritters do: Rahall, Mohollan, Capito, Byrd, Rockefeller. You don’t get elected from West Virginia with bowing to the great god coal.
If you really believe that coal has to go, then just look at >a href=”http://resourcescommittee.house.gov/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=415&Itemid=27″>Rahall’s Agenda for Natural Resources for the 111th Congress.
Wes Rolley: CoChair EcoAction Committee Green Party US
January 2nd, 2009 at 4:53 pm
Sorry for an off topic comment, but I read this last night and wondered if you have read it and what do you and others think?
“Sustainable Energy without the hot air” by David JC MacKay
http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/sustainable/book/tex/cft.pdf
MacKay paints a dismal picture of the prospects of renewable energy in the UK. The UK does have geographical limitations which we don’t have in the U.S, so he may be right as far as the UK is concerned.
It’s a pretty comprehensive analysis, but I (non scientist) found it lacking or questionable in some respects.
For one thing, his analysis of the prospects of nuclear power are much more optimistic than what I’ve seen at Climate Progress and contradicts what the author of “The Lean Guide to Nuclear Energy” says about future supplies of nuclear fuel.
What to believe?
He speaks tentatively of filtering uranium from seawater, which doesn’t sound practical to me. The Lean Guide says we would have to filter 40,000 cubic miles of seawater every year to supply enough uranium for 200 reactors.
By his own estimates it seems gargantuan.
“To power a once-through 1GW nuclear power station, we need
160,000 kg per year, which is a production rate 100,000 times greater than the Japanese experiment.
1GW would thus need cages having a collecting area of 4.8 km2 and containing a weight of 350,000 tons of adsorbent material – more than the weight of the steel in the reactor itself.”
This is projected from a small pilot study in Japan
In comparing land use for nuclear and land use for wind the author doesn’t include the land use for mining uranium or disposing of the waste. Nor does he include the carbon footprint of building and erecting these huge filtering systems in the ocean. Not does he figure in the fact that wind only uses abou 2.5% of the land it is sited on, thus being able to coexist with agriculture.
He uses the old canard that since people aren’t killed or made sick by nuclear power plants, like from coal, then nuclear is safe.
Obviously, it’s the one time catostrophic disaster that people fear. I don’t like nuclear weapons, even though we haven’t had a nuclear holocaust yet.
But he does include this anecdotal story of nuclear safety failure.
“The safety of nuclear operations in Britain remains a concern. The THORP reprocessing facility at Sellafield, built in 1994 at a cost of £1.8 billion, had a growing leak from a broken pipe from August 2004 to April 2005. Over eight months, the leak let 85 000 litres of uranium-rich fluid flow into a sump which was equipped with safety systems that were designed to detect
immediately any leak of as little as 15 litres. But the leak went undetected because the operators hadn’t completed the checks that ensured the safety systems were working; and the operators were in the habit of ignoring safety alarms anyway.
By April 2005, 22 tons of uranium had leaked, but still none of the leak-detection systems detected the leak.”
What he says about the potential of solar thermal in the desert contradicts what so many others have said.
“All the world’s power could be provided by a square 100 km by 100 km in the Sahara.” Is this true? Concentrating solar power in deserts delivers an average power per unit land area of roughly 15W/m2. So, allowing no space for anything else in such a square, the power delivered would be 150GW.”
The claim was that 92 miles by 92 miles would power the U.S.
Not that 100 km by 100 km would power the world.
The claims regarding the Sahara are that 1% could power the world.
Not that he doesn’t think solar thermal has great potential in deserts.
Maybe this could be the subject of an article.