The Washington Post: An Energy Plan We Can Start Now

Reuters: U.S. sets awards to evaluate CO2 storage technology

The New York Times: Saudi Blasts American Energy Policy

U.S. Needs Climate Law Before Copenhagen: Officials

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States needs to have a climate change law in place before international talks on a climate pact begin in December, two top Obama administration officials said on Monday.

The U.S. House of Representatives narrowly passed legislation in June to cut U.S. carbon emissions from utilities, manufacturers and others 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020.

The Senate is set to take up its own version of the bill in September when lawmakers return from their summer recess.

It is unclear whether the bill will make it into law before the international climate negotiations in Copenhagen in December. The highly contentious debate over health care reform is likely to crowd the legislative agenda in the fall.

"We think it is important for the president to be empowered to be able to say to the rest of the world that America stands ready to lead on this issue," Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack told reporters after an energy briefing at the White House.

Groups from the oil industry, agriculture and manufacturing have lined up to oppose climate change legislation, saying it would add costs for producers, farmers and consumers without guaranteeing environmental gains.

Vilsack and Commerce Secretary Gary Locke met with groups from the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic states to press their message that a climate change law would be good for the environment and economy.

A U.S. Agriculture Department study shows farmers could boost their net income by $10 billion to $20 billion in the long term earning money from offsets -- contracts to plant trees or change the way they till land to lock more carbon in soils, Vilsack said.

Locke pointed out that many developing countries such as China are resistant to fighting global warming, even though they are large emitters of greenhouse gases.

"The United States needs to set a very firm and clear example if we are to be successful in getting the other countries to be equally aggressive in addressing climate change," Locke said.

Vilsack warned against delays for the climate bill.

"How are we going to be able to move other nations in the same direction we want to move on trade issues or on fighting extremists if we can't deliver on climate change, when the rest of the world is moving forward?" he asked.

An Energy Plan We Can Start Now

Energy plans, like health-care plans, tend to be complex. These days they are particularly complicated because any modern energy plan needs to dovetail with real solutions to climate change, perhaps the single most urgent socio-environmental issue mankind has ever confronted. With regard to timing, energy plans must differentiate between what we can realistically do in the next five to 10 years and what we can hope to achieve by 2030 to 2050.

Simply put, most Americans want access to reliable, affordable and increasingly sustainable power. Yes, we're all worried about national security. We're also concerned that the burden and benefit of a new energy plan be shared equitably among the various regions of our country. But consumers are tired of promises for the distant future. We don't want to try to plumb more than a thousand pages of strategy to discern what the goal might be for tomorrow. We want a comprehensible plan for the here and now.

In recent years there has been a tectonic shift in our energy usage as our country trends away from fossil fuels in favor of "natural" energy, such as wind and solar. If we are to focus on these types of God-given energy sources, we need to go to our energy rather than have our energy come to us, as we do with fossil fuels.

A progressive, pragmatic energy plan would focus on taking the first steps toward national energy sustainability. It would start with technologies that are ready for large-scale deployment but are concentrated on regions where they can be demonstrated and deployed at scale to their best advantage. Consider what could happen if we focused on these five goals:

The West gets the sun. Al Gore's vision of a Sonora Desert covered in a 90-square-mile sea of solar thermal mirrors powering the entire country is admirably visionary, but transmission constraints would make this more practical, at least in the near term, at the regional level. So let's set aside an area and get started. California provides sufficient scale; its peak electricity demand is coincident with sunlight, and it is only 250 miles from the Sonora Desert into the heart of the Southern California population center.

-- The Midwest gets the wind. Wind is the predominant renewable in the United States today, but for it to be a major factor in the energy mix of the future we need to tap into the wind resources of the upper Great Plains states, which are currently stranded. To date, the focus has been on getting wind resources from places like southeastern Wyoming to California. Instead, let's take wind from the Dakotas and feed it into Chicago. It is 1,100 miles from Cheyenne, Wyo., to Los Angeles, but only 600 miles from South Dakota to Chicago.

-- The South gets nuclear. Democratic policymakers have focused like lasers on wind, solar and efficiency. They need to recognize that the South, still one of the nation's most economically dynamic growth areas, lacks suitable wind and solar resources. The geology of much of the Southeast is not well-suited to sequestering the carbon emissions that must be captured by truly "clean coal." On the other hand, the populace of the South (and that includes Texas) is generally comfortable with nuclear power, and its incumbent utilities are deeply experienced in nuclear operations. Nuclear energy should be the "renewable of the South."

-- Pursue "clean coal" as a national priority. We must set as a national priority -- perhaps a "national project" -- the demonstration and large-scale deployment of "clean coal." All of the zero-carbon regional solutions described above, if forcefully implemented, could have a meaningful impact on U.S. carbon emissions, but only "clean coal" can actually capture the enormous carbon emissions from the new coal plants coming on line in China and India. It comes down to a mathematical certainty: We cannot solve global warming through clean coal alone; but without clean coal, we simply cannot solve global warming.

This regionally focused "here and now" energy plan would get us started quickly and on the right foot. What are we waiting for?

The writer is president and chief executive of NRG Energy, a Princeton, N.J.-based wholesale power producer that owns and operates numerous generation facilities, including wind and nuclear, and is developing solar power.