Secy Chu Testifies before Senate, Secy Clinton Unveils Pollution Requirements, Rare Coalition Opposes Pipeline

Secretary Chu will appear before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee this morning.  This hearing is certain to be more friendly than Chu’s last appearance before Congress, where the secretary spent more than five hours in front of a House panel defending his decision to grant a $535 million loan guarantee to failed solar panel firm Solyndra. This time, Chu will appear before a more friendly, Democrat-controlled committee. He’ll defend the Energy Department’s budget blueprint, which seeks to boost renewable energy funding and repeals billions of dollars in oil industry tax breaks, among other things.  He can expect some questions about Solyndra and the Energy Department’s loan program. The Energy Department loan guarantee program would not receive any expanded funding authority under President Obama’s budget request. The plan instead calls for continued oversight of the existing loan portfolio.

Today, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will unveil an effort to target reductions in pollutants that are shorter-lived than carbon but have powerful effects on heating up the planet. She'll be joined in her announcement by EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson plus officials from Bangladesh, Canada, Ghana, Mexico, Sweden and the U.N. Environment Programme. The plan will focus on education efforts and projects to cut emissions of short-lived pollutants including methane (like from landfills or fossil fuel mining), black carbon (in soot from diesel exhaust) and hydrofluorocarbons. State say such materials cause about a third of current global warming, and "have significant impacts on public health, the environment and world food productivity."

The Roll Call has an interesting story that shows how a rare coalition of Tea Party conservatives and liberal environmental activists has formed in some states to fight Keystone on the ground. Conservatives don't like the idea that pipeline builder TransCanada could use eminent domain powers to build on their land and lay a pipe that could threaten their water if it leaked at some point. Environmentalists say while they can mobilize lots of email from across the country to try slowing House and Senate efforts to approve Keystone quickly, land rights activists in the pipeline's path could have more impact in places such as Texas and Nebraska.