Letter to Pelosi: 20 Environmental Groups Call for Stronger Climate Bill

Twenty environmental groups including the Sierra Club, National Resources Defense Council and Audubon Society sent a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi today urging her to strengthen the renewable electricity standard in the climate bill and ensure that the EPA keeps its authority to regulate carbon emissions from power plants.

"Our top priority is to enact legislation that jump-starts a clean energy economy, creates millions of clean energy jobs and reduces global warming pollution while giving the U.S. credibility to lead international negotiations on climate change," the groups write.

"By strengthening and passing the American Clean Energy and Security Act, the House of Representatives can take a critical step towards accomplishing that goal."

The renewable electricity standard (RES) in the ACES bill currently calls for utilities to generate 20 percent of their power from renewable sources by 2020, however it allows them to fudge that number by counting in 8 percent from energy efficiency gains.

The RES started out stronger. The ACES bill that Reps. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Ed Markey (D-Mass.) introduced on March 31 would have required utilities to get 25 percent of their electricity from renewable sources by 2025. During a week of hearings, however, some southern lawmakers argued that their states wouldn't be able to meet that threshold. To get the bill through the Energy and Commerce Committee, the RES was watered down with enough exemptions to effectively zero out the gains in some parts of the country.

The letter calls on Pelosi to restore the RES to 20 percent by 2020, with the potential to count 3 percent from energy efficiency by 2020. It also calls for an increase in the energy efficiency requirement so utilities achieve 10 percent energy efficiency by 2020.

"Strengthening these standards will generate hundreds of thousands of new clean energy jobs," the groups write.

The letter also urges Pelosi to work to increase the portion of pollution allowance value under the proposed cap-and-trade plan that would be dedicated to delivering energy efficiency and renewable energy, creating green jobs and training workers to fill them.

And it calls on the House Speaker to preserve the EPA’s authority to regulate power plants' carbon dioxide emissions under the Clean Air Act. Waxman and Markey had eliminated that EPA's authority to regulate CO2 emissions in their original version, based on a compromise proposed by the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, a coalition of business and environmental groups.

Even with its flaws, the American Clean Energy Security Act is still the strongest framework the country has had so far to create a transformative energy policy, said Ross Macfarlane of Climate Solutions, one of the groups that signed the letter to Pelosi.

“We need to be working to improve this, but we also need to be starting immediately to turn this oil supertanker of a global economy around,” Macfarlane said.

Other groups, most notably Greenpeace, have said they can't support the legislation without major changes because the bill is too weak to meet the emissions cuts scientists say are necessary to avoid dangerous climate change.

The letter reads as follows:

June 8, 2009

The Honorable Nancy Pelosi
Speaker of the House of Representatives
Washington, DC 20515

Dear Madame Speaker,

Attachment	Size
6.8.09 ACES letter to Speaker Pelosi.pdf	30.01 KB

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