Climate and energy

Morning, everyone. Happy Monday! Sorry to do this to us, I’m sure we’ve all heard more than enough about coal, but I have to get through these articles first so we can get to the rest of the week.

Actually, I didn’t even try to list them all – to sum up, the Kansas press is doing a very strong job of following up on how their local legislators are voting on the Holcomb/ energy bill currently before the Governor. My google news alerts overfloweth. Yay for the Kansas media.

Kansas and coal. The legislator forum in Salina this weekend – “What’s Up with Coal in Kansas?” – drew a standing room only crowd (Salina Journal). That gives me chills. On the hot seat (ha — a little pun, there, global warming, hot seat, coal, get it?) were Representatives Josh Svaty, D-Ellsworth, who voted against the Holcomb bill, and Sen. Pete Brungardt, R-Salina, and Rep. Deena Horst, R-Salina, who voted for. Everyone explained their reasoning.

No global warming deniers in the Salina contingent, though, apparently – they all agreed on climate change.

All of the legislators said Kansans should expect to be affected by climate change.

“I learned very early, on the farm, there’s a cause and effect to everything,” Svaty said. “You can’t do anything in abundance and not think it’s going to change something.”

He said there’s no doubt that the extraction of fossil fuels and pumping of carbon into the atmosphere has had an effect.

“When we create chemical reactions, it changes the environment,” Svaty said. “I do believe that is causing the earth to warm. I think that we have to do something about that. … We have to begin to look for ways in which we can extract power without making such great and enormous chemical reactions that alter our environment.”

Editorial coverage. Randy Schofield of the Wichita Eagle put it pretty bluntly: “Plan for It: Carbon regs are coming.” The Eagle editorial board also extensively interviewed Westar’s Jim Ludwig and Bill Moore about the utility’s new deal with KDHE. Sunflower Electric and others have criticized this deal, more or less characterizing Westar as having been bullied into it.

However, Moore and Ludwig did not seem very cowed. Quotable:

“Our focus on regulatory uncertainty doesn’t focus on Rod Bremby and KDHE at all,” said Westar president and chief executive Bill Moore. He cited “about 50 different proposals” in Congress for addressing climate change with carbon regulation.

“We’re pretty convinced that in the next few years we’re going to have federal legislation reducing greenhouse gases,” said Jim Ludwig, Westar’s vice president for public affairs. “That’s really to us the foundational issue on regulatory uncertainty.”

In response to the growing scientific and political consensus on warming, Westar adopted a climate change policy (last August, before the Bremby decision) and recently announced an agreement with KDHE in which Westar will work to voluntarily reduce greenhouse gases from existing coal plants.

“We’re trying to be an early adopter,” Moore said.

Westar sees these steps as hardheaded, prudent business responses to a changing energy market.

Likewise, Bremby recently said that his Holcomb denial was based in part on the probability of rigorous new federal rules that could reduce carbon emissions 60 to 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050.

Both Bremby and Westar agree on the need to lay the groundwork for these looming changes and not be taken by surprise later.

Speaking of carbon regulation… what might it look like? The Council for Foreign Relations gives an overview of the green policies of the three presidential candidates. Also, EnergyBiz interviews PewClimate’s state energy policy expert Eileen Claussen and others, to investigate the need for a federa Renewable Portfolio Standard that will tie all the state ones together a bit better.

— Maril Hazlett, www.climateandenergy.org