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You may have seen one-sided action alerts about how a great clean energy
bill got passed in the U.S. House on 12/6 and was rejected Friday (12/7)
by the Senate. As with ANY legislative alerts that urge you to
support something, we encourage you to look into some of the
details. At a minimum, please look at the table of contents of the
bill and see what it is you'd be supporting.<br><br>
If you look over the 1,038 page bill, as I've been doing for the past
day, you'll notice many problematic policies in the bill.<br><br>
While we've had some great victories so far, in keeping $50 billion/year
in nuclear power subsidies out of the bill and in placing some limits on
the bill's support for agrofuels and trash incineration, there is still a
lot of work to do to make this a bill clean enough to deserve unqualified
support.<br><br>
<b>The bill still supports ethanol, waste-to-ethanol, coal, trash
incineration, biomass (including poultry waste) incineration, landfills
and nuclear power. Visit
<a href="http://www.energyjustice.net/energybill/" eudora="autourl">
http://www.energyjustice.net/energybill/</a> for a link to the bill and
details on how the bill supports these dirty energy sources.<br><br>
</b>The vote in the Senate will be close. There are efforts to
overcome the Senators who are opposing the bill for the wrong
reason. These efforts will weaken the bill be pulling out some of
the stronger renewable (but not necessarily "clean") energy
policies in the bill (like the 13.8% by 2020 Renewable Electricity
Standard).<br><br>
This is a great opportunity to push back on them and work to change the
debate. If we can get even 1-2 senators to vote against the bill
for the right reasons, we can have a chance of getting a cleaner bill
passed. It's only a matter of time until the big enviro groups --
with all of their alerts on the issue -- get the extra votes needed to
PASS the bill by persuading Senators to support the good aspects of the
bill. Given the grave consequences of the dirty aspects of the
bill, it's worth however many months it might take to send this back to
the drawing board in order to clean it up before passing it.<br><br>
PLEASE look over our
<a href="http://www.energyjustice.net/energybill/" eudora="autourl">
http://www.energyjustice.net/energybill/</a> page. Read over
it. Feel free to check the bill itself (or call me) to verify
things. Then, call your Senator and urge them to remove the
Renewable Fuels Mandate, the language supporting the coal and waste
industries as well as the other dirty energy issues outlined
there.<br><br>
Thank you,<br><br>
Mike Ewall<br>
Energy Justice Network<br>
215-743-4884<br>
catalyst@actionpa.org<br>
<a href="http://www.energyjustice.net/" eudora="autourl">
http://www.energyjustice.net<br>
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