Climate Change Policy Update - April 19, 2010

Article by Kyle Danish, Shelley Fidler, Kevin Gallagher, Megan Ceronsky and Tomás Carbonell

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Commentary

The tick-tock on climate change legislation continues. The Kerry-Graham-Lieberman (K-G-L) team is targeting April 26th for their release date. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) has said he will shepherd the bill directly to the Senate floor . . . . The White House has been having preparatory consultations with environmental groups and industry . . . A group of 10 Democratic Senators from industrial states sent a letter to the K-G-L team with a list of asks for the bill, including transitional financing for energy retrofits and border adjustment measures . . . The states continue to make themselves heard. State air quality officials wrote to the Senators requesting that the bill not preempt state authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, and the Western Climate Initiative released a series of papers outlining issues and options for auctions, carbon market oversight, and offsets . . . The State Department will take a pass on the ALBA "People's" climate change conference.

Executive Branch

State Dept. Announces That U.S Will Not Formally Participate in "People's Climate Conference." The U.S. Department of State will not be a formal participant in the "People's World Conference on Climate and Mother Earth Rights" (People's Climate Conference) next week in Cochabamba, Bolivia. Instead, the U.S. will attend as an informal observer to the proceedings. The conference was organized by the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of our America (ALBA), a coalition of countries that includes Bolivia, Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua. The ALBA countries were vociferous opponents of the Copenhagen Accord. People's Climate Conference attendees are expected to include approximately 10 heads of state, as well as a number of ministers and ambassadors. DOE Launches Clean Energy Partnerships for the Western Hemisphere. U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Secretary Steven Chu announced several new Western Hemisphere partnerships aimed at addressing clean energy technology and energy security issues. Among the five new partnerships are an initiative aimed at creating an energy innovation center at the Inter-American Development Bank to coordinate financing of regional energy projects, and a project that will establish a biomass energy "innovation hub"...