Barack Obama suffered a setback to his green energy agenda yesterday when
three major corporations – including BP America – dropped out of a coalition of
business groups and environmental organisations that had been pressing Congress
to pass climate change legislation.

The defections by ConocoPhillips, America’s third largest oil company,
Caterpillar, which makes heavy equipment, and BP rob the
US Climate Action Partnership of three
powerful voices for lobbying Congress to pass climate change law.

They also undercut Obama’s efforts to cast his climate and energy agenda as a
pro-business, job-creation plan.

Only hours earlier, Obama and other cabinet officials had made a high-profile
announcement that $8.3bn (£5.3bn) was being awarded in loan guarantees for a
company building the first new nuclear reactors in America in nearly 30 years.

But the loan decision in favour of Southern Company, which was framed by the
White House as a kick-start for new nuclear plants, was upstaged by the
departure of the big three firms from the climate partnership.

Officials from BP and ConocoPhillips said that the proposals before Congress
for curbing greenhouse gas emissions did not do enough to recognise the
importance of natural gas, and were too favourable to the coal industry.

The House of Representatives passed a climate change bill last June, but the
effort has stalled in the Senate.

"House climate legislation and Senate proposals to date have disadvantaged
the transportation sector and its consumers, left domestic refineries unfairly
penalised versus international competition, and ignored the critical role that
natural gas can play in reducing GHG emissions," said the ConocoPhillips
chairman and chief executive, Jim Mulva, in a statement. "We believe greater
attention and resources need to be dedicated to reversing these missed
opportunities, and our actions today are part of that effort."

Opponents of climate change legislation said the departure of the big three
companies had all but killed off Obama’s last chances of pushing his agenda
through Congress.

"Cap-and-trade legislation is dead in the US Congress and that global warming
alarmism is collapsing rapidly," said Myron Ebell, director of global warming
for the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

Obama this week is stepping up White House pressure on Congress with a series
of events intended to show the job-creating potential of his green energy
agenda.

His announcement at a Maryland job training centre of the new nuclear loan
guarantees was a key part of the strategy.

"Even though we haven’t broken ground on a new nuclear plant in nearly 30
years, nuclear energy remains our largest source of fuel that produces no carbon
emissions," he said. "To meet our growing energy needs and prevent the worst
consequences of climate change, we’ll need to increase our supply of nuclear
power. It’s that simple." The guarantees would commit the US government to
repaying Southern’s loans if the company defaulted. They cover some 70 per cent
of the estimated $8.8bn cost of building two reactors at the company’s Vogtle
plant, east of Atlanta.

White House officials said yesterday’s announcement reinforced Obama’s pledge
in his state of the union address last month to expand America’s use of nuclear
energy and to open up offshore drilling.

Obama has also asked Congress to triple loan guarantees for the nuclear
industry, to $54bn from the current $18.5bn.

The pledge to the nuclear industry was seen as part of a strategy to win
Republican support for the climate and energy bill. Expanding nuclear power,
which supplies about 20 per cent of the country’s electricity, is one of the few
elements of Obama’s energy and climate agenda to win broad-based support. A
number of Republican senators have demanded Obama help fund the construction of
100 new nuclear plants over the next decade.

Lindsey Graham, the Republican who is working closely with Democrats to draft
a compromise cap-and-trade bill, is also on board with a greater role for
nuclear power. His state, South Carolina, gets nearly half of its electricity
from nuclear power.

But the subsidies have made some senators as well as environmental
organisations uneasy. "It’s a heck of a lot of money," said the Vermont senator,
Bernie Sanders, who is an independent. "The construction of new nuclear plants
may well be the most expensive way to go."

The administration is also stuck on a solution for nuclear waste, after
shutting down plans to bury the waste in the Yucca Mountain range in Nevada. The
administration last month set up a panel to recommend new waste disposal
solution.

Obama acknowledged those controversies , saying: "There will be those who
welcome this announcement, and those who strongly disagree with it. The same has
been true in other areas of our energy debate, from offshore drilling to putting
a price on carbon pollution. But what I want to emphasise is this: even when we
have differences, we cannot allow those differences to prevent us from making
progress. On an issue which affects our economy, our security, and the future of
our planet, we cannot continue to be mired in the same old debates between left
and right; between environmentalists and entrepreneurs."

The Southern projects must still win licensing approval.

White House officials said the new reactors could come on line by 2016 or
2017, and would generate 2.2GW. Construction alone would create 3,500 jobs, and
the plant itself would create 800 operations jobs.

The loan guarantees are the first of some $18.5bn in funding originally
approved by Congress in 2005.

Steven Chu, the energy secretary, said the loans were the first of "at least
half a dozen, probably more" loans for new nuclear reactor construction. "We
have a lot of projects in the pipeline", he told reporters, but did not indicate
a time for further announcements.

The Southern reactors are to be built with the new Westinghouse AP1000
design, which Chu said was safer and more economical than the older generation
of reactors. "If you lose control, it will not melt down," he said. "Three Mile
Island was a partial melt down. It was serious, but on the other hand the
containment vessel held."

Chu also disputed a report from the Congressional Budget Office that put the
risk of default on loans to the nuclear industry as high as 50 per cent. "We are
looking at ways to increase ways of building these projects on time and on
budget," he said.

This article first appeared at the
Guardian

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