Congress is best suited to determine how a national greenhouse gas emissions reduction program should work. Therefore, any bill should explicitly preempt the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act.

Translation: They want Congress to empower Congress to do the EPA’s job.

This is an odd argument, considering that the EPA scientists would know vastly more about emissions science than any lawmaker on the Hill. So what does the Roundtable have in mind? Well, for one thing, the group appears to recognize that elected lawmakers are influenced much more easily by public outrage than unelected EPA officials. It also seems to be well aware of lawmakers’ tendency to protect regional industries, even when that protection runs counter to national interests. Having Congress monitor  compliance with new emission guidelines would almost guarantee that the rules wouldn’t be enforced as strictly, to the polluters’ benefit. Indeed, it’s groups like the Roundtable that are spending millions of dollars to ensure that leniency.

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The letter was sent to Rep. Tom Perriello (D-Va.), who has thus far confirmed that his office received 10 fake letters. Pennsylvania Democratic Reps. Kathy Dahlkemper and Chris Carney also received forged letters. Other letters have claimed to be from minority groups, senior groups, and a women’s educational group.

The latest letter also appears to be from Bonner & Associates, the consulting firm subcontracted by the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity. Bonner & Associates has thus far claimed that the forgeries were the work of a single rogue employee. With this many confirmed forgeries, it must have been a busy rogue employee.

Here’s the meat of the latest letter:

As veterans, members of my post have been willing to put our lives on the line to defend our country. Energy independence is important to American national security. Half of our nation’s electricity comes from coal, the cheapest power for creating electricity. America has enough coal right here in the continental US to last for more than 200 years. We need to use our readily available resources and focus on using new technologies to make coal more effiecient, therefore reducing greenhouse gases.

In our state there are over 10,000 jobs from coal, and 49% of electricity comes from coal. Please use your position to protect these jobs, establish America’s energy independence and encourage new cleaner technologies for coal use. Please make sure the Waxman-Markey bill includes provisions to promote American energy independence while protecting already cash-strapped constituents from increases in electricity prices.

I asked him what he and his fellow House members who passed the American Clean Energy and Security Act are doing to try to persuade their Senate counterparts to pass a bill. And it appears they’ve done more than has been widely reported.

Shortly after the passage of the House bill, Inslee said, he and a group of Democratic congressmen met with 14 moderate Democratic senators to discuss the legislation. He was surprised at their reception.

“I’ve never seen this happen before in my entire time in public life: there were members of the United States Senate actually listening to members of the House of Representatives,” he said. “There wasn’t one of them that looked like a closed mind to me.”

“Our job is to help them find a way to get to yes,” he continued. “But the attitude that we have is not threatening or intimidating, it’s, ‘How can we help you get to yes? What issue can we help you with?’”

Inslee’s two home-state senators are solid “yes” votes on climate legislation, but his colleagues, particularly those from Midwestern states, could have a real impact if, as Inslee said, they continue to pressure their Senate colleagues.

Senate Environment and Public Works Chairwoman Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) plans to unveil a major global warming bill immediately after Congress returns from the August recess, she said today….

Boxer predicted she would have at least one Republican co-sponsor on her bill, though she would not name names.

This last piece of news is potentially huge. Democrats have started giving up hope for bipartisanship on health care — to the chagrin of Republicans — but because a number of conservative Democrats are unlikely to vote for a cap-and-trade bill, it will be necessary to bring a few Republicans on board, at least to break a filibuster. A Republican co-sponsor could give cover to moderate Republicans — and fence-sitting Democrats — to vote for cloture, even if they have concerns about the political impact of a “yes” vote in the final tally.

If there is a GOP co-sponsor, it will most likely be Olympia Snowe or Susan Collins, the two moderates from Maine.

An ethanol production plant in South Dakota (iStockphoto)

Before the American Clean Energy and Security Act could reach the House floor for a vote on June 26, Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) took to the podium and launched an improvised filibuster in protest of last-minute additions to the bill by the Democratic leadership. For over an hour, he read passages from the more than 300 pages of amendments, lambasting provision after provision on behalf of his frustrated Republican colleagues who balk at the expansion of energy regulation.

Now, as the Senate takes up debate on the legislation, the objections to some of these late changes are coming from a very different camp: environmental advocacy groups.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

One of the most important amendments to the cap-and-trade bill, which seeks to lower the country’s greenhouse gas emissions and promote alternative energy sources, represents a compromise between the bill’s architects and House Agriculture Committee Chairman Collin Peterson (D-Minn.), who threatened to block passage if concessions were not made to agricultural interests. The amendment significantly reduces the criteria that biofuels, such as ethanol and wood pellets, would have to meet in order to be considered “renewable” — a victory for farmers who grow these materials.

But a study by the National Resources Defense Council shows that these changes could reduce the emissions-cutting effects of the legislation by as much as a third, thereby undermining the bill’s central aim.

“The ACES bill is supposed to require a 17 percent reduction in carbon emissions by 2020,” David Hawkins, director of climate programs at the NRDC, stated in his written testimony to the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee on Tuesday. “Because of the biomass loophole in the House-passed bill, the real reduction achieved could be far less — as little as 11 percent.”

In an ideal world, biofuels would produce no net emissions, since when plants grow, they take carbon out of the environment, and when they are burned, they release that carbon back into the air. However, there can be indirect contributions to greenhouse gas emissions — for example, if the land on which crops for biofuels are planted would otherwise have been used for carbon-reducing trees, or for food that is then instead planted on a freshly cleared rainforest in South America.

The version of the bill passed by the Energy and Commerce Committee tried to enforce biofuel carbon-neutrality by factoring in these indirect effects on emissions and restricting the conditions under which biofuels would be considered renewable. The Peterson amendment stripped the bill of several of these provisions and prevented the Environmental Protection Agency from accounting for indirect land use issues outside the United States for the next five years. According to Peterson and his backers, indirect land use is difficult to calculate, and the EPA will need some time to properly assess its impact.

The legislation establishes a national cap on greenhouse gas emissions and requires polluters to purchase allowances for each ton of carbon dioxide they emit. However, Hawkins charges that under the House bill, power plants could reduce their need to buy carbon allowances without actually cutting back on emissions.

“If a coal power plant replaces half of its coal with biomass, it has to hold carbon allowances for only half of its pollution,” he said in his statement to the Senate. “This makes sense only on the assumption that 100 percent of the carbon dioxide released when the biomass is burned was taken up from the atmosphere during its production.”

Nathanael Greene, director of renewable energy policy at the NRDC, concurred with his colleague. “In a worst-case scenario,” Greene said, “you’re going out to an old-growth forest that’s sequestered carbon over hundreds of years,” he said. “You take that, you chop that down, you burn that, and from the atmosphere perspective, it’s exactly the same as burning coal. In that case, it really doesn’t matter that you’re displacing coal. You’re adding just as much carbon to the landscape.”

The NRDC study on the effects of the lower biofuel restrictions was conducted about a month ago, but the figures were not released until Hawkins’ testimony on Tuesday before the Environment and Public Works Committee, according to Greene, who helped produce the study. Hawkins could not be reached for comment.

The 11-percent effective emissions reduction figure invoked by Hawkins represents the low end of the potential range calculated by NRDC; more likely, the number would be around 14 percent. Both figures are below the 17-percent target recommended by President Obama and prescribed by the legislation, which itself is too low for many scientists and environmental advocates.

Rolf Skar, a senior forest campaigner at Greenpeace, worries that additional support for biofuels could reduce the incentives for cleaner energy sources, such as wind and solar. “Putting them in the mix here just means that they’re going to substitute for windmills and other true sources of renewable energy,” he said, adding that the Peterson amendment “was clearly based on politics, and not science.”

On the other side of the debate, the farm lobby has cheered Peterson’s efforts. Farmers could derive substantial income from provisions that subsidize the production of biofuels.

“As a general proposition, we support what Mr. Peterson got in the House bill,” said Paul Schlegel, director of public policy at the American Farm Bureau. But he added that the Bureau opposes cap-and-trade legislation overall due to its costs for farmers and consumers of energy.

In a statement following the passage of the House bill, Peterson said, “This bill promotes homegrown, clean burning renewable fuels, which is one of the best things we can do for the economy and the environment.” Peterson’s office did not respond to a request for further comment.

Many environmentalists still hold out hope that the biofuels provision will be changed in the Senate.

Josh Dorner of the Sierra Club is optimistic that given the relatively liberal composition of the Senate Energy and Public Works Committee’s Democratic membership, the committee might be able to strengthen the biofuels language in ways the House could not. “If you look at the EPW Committee compared to the Energy and Commerce Committee in the House, it’s a much more hospitable environment,” he said.

Still, there is already evidence that the fight to maintain the farm-friendly biofuel provisions could be bipartisan. On Wednesday, Senate Agriculture Committee Chairman Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) stated his intent to keep all of Peterson’s provisions in the Senate version of the bill, and to add “more allocations and allowances” for agriculture.

“Farm interests probably have a stronger hand in the Senate,” Dorner conceded, “given that people in nearly every state have some sort of agricultural interest.”

I caught up with the governor following his testimony before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee today. After chatting about energy policy (more on this below), I asked him if, given the shrinking pool of potential 2012 candidates, he was considering throwing his hat in the ring. He replied:

I’ve said, when I was chairman of our party in 1993 and [1994], that in the first two years of a Democratic presidency, we need to focus all our attention on those two years — in this case, ‘09 and ‘10. And any Republican who’s thinking about 2012 doesn’t have his eye on the ball. I’ve told thousands of people that, and I’m taking my own advice.

“But you’re not ruling it out?” I followed. At which point he uttered a drawn-out “Uhh” and mumbled something about how he was “just seeing that clock.” Then he took his leave.

He was more loquacious on the topic of cap-and-trade legislation, though, where he had this folksy analogy to offer:

When you grow up in the country, like I did, when you cook a frog, you don’t drop him into hot water, cause he’ll jump out. You drop him into cool water, and then you turn up the heat, and it heats up slowly. And politically, the left has tried to protect themselves by pushing the effects off a few years. Because they know once the job losses start and the higher costs kick in, which they inevitably will, that will be bad for them.

When I asked him if he thought it was necessary to take action to address climate change, he distanced himself from many of his Republican colleagues in the Senate by replying, “I do. I do. I do.”

But he added:

I do not think that the need to address climate change is urgent, that it’s more important than the economy. I’m like most Americans. I don’t think we ought to sink our economy in the name of climate change.

Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Chairwoman Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) opened the hearing with a shot at her colleagues across the aisle. “Today, I expect you will hear fierce words of doubt and fear and worse from the other side of the aisle regarding our legislative efforts to move forward with clean energy jobs legislation,” she said. “This is consistent with a pattern of ‘No, we can’t.’”

Committee ranking member James Inhofe (R-Okla.) countered, “You can be sure of this: once the American public realizes what this legislation will do to their wallets, they will resoundingly reject it.”

None of the so-called swing senators on this legislation — with the possible but unlikely exception of Sen. George Voinovich (R-Ohio) — are present at the hearing right now, so I don’t think we’ll be seeing much common ground between the two sides in this debate.

But on the plus side, in keeping with the GOP’s newfound love of inscrutable charts, Sen. Kit Bond’s (R-Mo.) staff just pulled out the hearing’s first inscrutable chart. It’s a huge blue webbed number with the title “Waxman-Markey: A Bureaucratic Nightmare.”

More updates to come.

Update (as promised): Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), reading from his opening remarks, just stumbled over the GOP’s word of choice to describe the administration’s global warming fears. “A-pa-ca… A-pa … A-pa-ca…” he attempted, emphasizing the first syllable, confusing himself in the process and reddening visibly. A chorus of senators and audience members came to his aid.  “Apocalyptic,” they said in unison.

The vote was largely along party lines, with 44 Democrats crossing the aisle to vote against it and 8 Republicans supporting passage.

The bill, officially known as the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 (ACES), was first introduced by Energy and Commerce Chairman Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Energy and Environment Subcommittee Chairman Edward Markey (D-Mass.) as a discussion draft on March 31, and it passed out of Waxman’s committee on May 25. In the past few days, the Democratic leadership scrambled to whip up the necessary votes for passage by the full House, and even today, the bill’s prospects remained murky, with a large number of moderate Democrats still uncommitted.

A vote was expected around 5 p.m., but Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) conducted his version of a filibuster by giving an hour-plus-long closing speech, reading excerpts from practically every page of the 309-page manager’s amendment to the bill. When Waxman objected, Rep. Ellen Tauscher (D-Calif.), who presided over the hearing, said that House tradition allowed each party’s leadership to deliver closing arguments without time constraints. “The gentleman’s had his thirty years to put this bill together,” Boehner said, addressing Waxman.

The bill now moves to the Senate, where it is not expected to receive a vote until after the resolution of the health care debate.

Apparently, he had to go pretty far back. From a new blog post titled “Speaker Pyrrhus,” by Senate Environment and Public Works Committee ranking member-turned-classical historian James Inhofe (R-Okla.):

[The Waxman-Markey bill] will be, in short, a Pyrrhic victory—so named after King Pyrrhus of Epirus, whose army, during the Pyrrhic War, suffered irreplaceable casualties in defeating the Romans in two key battles.

So we consulted Plutarch for his historical account of King Pyrrhus and his unfortunate victories. According to Plutarch, after his victory, Pyrrhus lamented, “If we are victorious in one more battle with the Romans, we shall be utterly ruined.” In the spirit of Pyrrhus, Speaker Pelosi appears to be traversing down the same path to ruin. And with mid-term elections in 2010 looming on the horizon, voting for an energy tax could provoke the same backlash that occurred in 275 BC. Again, Plutarch: “For he had lost a great part of the forces with which he came, and all his friends and generals except a few; moreover, he had no others whom he could summon from home, and he saw that his allies in Italy were becoming indifferent, while the army of the Romans, as if from a fountain gushing forth indoors, was easily and speedily filled up again, and they did not lose courage in defeat, nay, their wrath gave them all the more vigor and determination for the war.” As George Santayana once said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

If the Democrats forget the lessons of Plutarch, it appears their defeat in 2010 will be bloody indeed.