GOP to host “Mock Climate Hearing” (a.k.a. Coal/Oil-apalooza 2009)
House GOP leaders intend to stage a “mock climate hearing” to attack the Waxman-Markey “American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009” currently being debated by Congress. Led by Republican Conference Chairman Mike Pence (R-Indiana), the “hearing” might as well be called the Summit of Dirty Fuels Industry Apologists.
Pence has invited John Engler, former Governor of Michigan and current president of the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), and a slew of oil and coal industry apologists to slam the cap-and-trade legislation as harmful to consumers and the economy during the mock event to be held in the new Capitol Visitor Center. Among the “handful of other experts,” according to Politico, are unnamed “scholars from the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute, the president of Laredo Petroleum and a former official at the Environmental Protection Agency.”
Pence, who stated recently that the cap and trade legislation “amounts to an economic declaration of war on the Midwest by liberals on Capitol Hill," has been named by House Republican Leader John Boehner (R-OH) to head the new House GOP American Energy Solutions Group (a.k.a. the Drill Baby Drill! Group). No doubt several members of the group will show up at the mock hearing, including Pence’s co-chairmen Reps. John Shimkus (R-IL) and Fred Upton (R-MI).
The hearing is part of the GOP’s plan for a “communications offensive over the next four weeks” to assert that the Waxman-Markey climate legislation “amounts to a national energy tax that will destroy jobs and increase costs for every single American.”
We hope the tourists and grade school field-trippers enjoy this sideshow in the Capitol Visitor Center, but the real debate about the future of America’s energy and climate security will take place in the actual halls of Congress.
And how convenient is it that KPMG's Global Energy Institute just released a report showing that 52 percent of 382 oil and gas executives believe alternative energy won't reach commercial-scale viability until 2015 at the earliest?
To give them credit, 17 percent did see wind as the biggest gainer, and coal (42 percent) as the biggest loser, but it's clear the energy industry will stand opposed to cap-and-trade to its dying breath, and do its best to cripple the growth of clean energy wherever possible, though greenwashing concessions will still be made. As the Natural Resources Defense Council notes, the scale of energy company investments in alternative energy is, "...so mind-numbingly small it's hard to find them."