Energy and the Environment

Policy Accomplishments for 2007

• Led an aggressive media campaign opposing the Lieberman-Warner climate change bill.
• Organized a CO2 working group to address shortcomings in EPA's rulemaking on greenhouse gases related to fuels and vehicles, particularly the Prevention of Significant Deterioration (PSD) rule, which would have a negative impact on stationary sources that emit greater than 100 tons of CO2 annually.

• Established the Institute for 21st Century Energy, led by Gen. (Ret.) Jim Jones, to educate the public and help create forward-looking policies to increase and diversify America's supply of fuel and power.

• Defeated several anti-business amendments to House and Senate energy legislation, including: (1) a Senate amendment calling for the establishment of a national greenhouse gas registry; (2) a Senate amendment seeking to create a mandatory federal renewable portfolio standard (RPS) that would require 15% of every state's electricity generation to be solely from non-hydro renewables; (3) a Senate amendment to establish a set of punitive taxes on oil and gas producers; and (4) a proposed House amendment that called for unnecessarily stringent corporate average fuel economy (CAFE) standards.

• Successfully persuaded EPA to include in its notice of proposed rulemaking on National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) for ground-level ozone the current standard of 80 parts per billion.

• Successfully opposed a number of attempted rollbacks to the Energy Policy Act of 2005 (EPAct), including attempts to defund or discontinue the "national interest" transmission corridor program and limit exploration in the North Aleutian Basin. Preserved the EPAct royalty-in-kind program and softened attempted repeals of EPAct's oil and gas categorical exclusion provisions and oil and gas leasing deadlines. Developed and widely disseminated a report, EPAct2005+2, which clearly indicates the failure of Congress to follow up and fund energy technology programs that are essential to America's energy security.

• Filed a data quality correction request with DOE's Energy Information Administration (EIA) that calls on the agency to review and improve natural gas market data. DOE's EIA has consistently released biased natural gas market data that forecasts grossly overoptimistic natural gas reserves and underestimates natural gas pricing. Reliable natural gas market data are essential for developing viable climate change policy.

• Promoted the expansion of nuclear energy for electricity generation.
• Supported spent nuclear fuel reprocessing or the completion of the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository as solutions to the country's spent nuclear fuel storage problem.

• Supported final implementation of regulations establishing "national interest" transmission corridors on federal lands in the Northeast and Southwest United States. By designating final transmission corridors, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) is empowered to use backstop siting authority to move stalled transmission projects in those designated corridors.