Carbon-Based Fuels Face Growing Opposition, Lobbyist Says
This story appears in the May 9 print edition of Transport Topics.
WASHINGTON — The United States is enjoying a remarkable abundance of energy choices, much of it due to hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. However, there is a growing legal and regulatory challenge to reduce the production and use of fossil fuels by limiting their extraction and transport, a lobbyist said here in a briefing for an American Trucking Associations committee.
Michael Zehr, a former Capitol Hill aide for Republican senators, said much of the Democratic party has elevated the fight against climate change to an extent that it could imperil the economy. A vice president of the Consumer Energy Alliance, Zehr told ATA’s Environmental & Energy Policy Committee on May 2 that economic growth is compatible with a healthy environment.
“For the first time in history, a major national political party is openly and aggressively anti-fossil energy,” Zehr said of the Democrats.
Fighting against pipelines such as Keystone XL, he said, is short- sighted because, they are the safest way to transport petroleum and natural gas. He said the Kentucky Bluegrass Pipeline and the Palmetto Pipeline in the Southeast have also drawn significant opposition.
Glen Kedzie, ATA’s energy and environmental affairs counsel, invited Zehr to address the committee as part of an association meeting.
“At the local, state and federal levels, there are efforts under way to limit energy production,” Kedzie said after the meeting.
“If you take away the buyers for fossil fuel, the demand for it goes down,” he said in describing the strategy of environmental activists.
“Opponents are using very creative methods, such as blocking the infrastructure development needed for U.S. coal exports,” Kedzie said.
As a mobile consumer of energy, trucking is particularly dependent upon diesel, Kedzie said. While natural gas could provide more fuel for trucks, Kedzie noted that California only considers compressed or liquefied natural gas as a bridge to a no-carbon future.
“California wants to get rid of fossil fuels altogether, and that’s significant for our industry,” he said.
Zehr’s group represents consumers of energy, mainly groups of businesses. He said CEA’s goal is an “affordable, abundant and domestically produced energy supply.”
Describing Congress as “broken” and usually unable to pass significant legislation, Zehr said most federal energy policy is set through regulations from the Environmental Protection Agency and the Energy Department and in court challenges.
Manufacturers and other businesses have been cooperative on environmental regulation, Zehr said, and mentioned the reduction in the criteria air pollutants — nitrogen oxide compounds and particulate matter — as an example. Opponents of the use of petroleum, natural gas and coal do not want any new production brought online, he said.
Court cases, Zehr said, “are looking for every different way to restrict development” of new energy production sites and to create choke points for the transmission of petroleum and natural gas, such as the pipeline fights. He said environmental activists want to keep energy supplies underground and not extract them.
Zehr was most enthusiastic about crude oil and natural gas produced through fracking and said the boom in domestic energy production has been “nothing short of spectacular and is one of the major stories of this century.”
However, he said his alliance wants to pursue an “all of the above” range of options, including wind, solar and battery power and ran through a list of power sources.
Nuclear power’s two virtues are that plants can steadily produce a high volume of electricity and there is no carbon output. The drawbacks are that the facilities are extremely expensive to build, and the search for places to store spent nuclear fuel has generated sharp political debate.
Coal production is suffering because many electric utilities are switching to natural gas because it is even cheaper than coal, and recent federal rules on clean power plants favor gas, Zehr said. Coal should have appeal as an export to developing nations, but there are government restrictions working against coal export as well.
Hydroelectric power offers a rare example of political consensus, with both parties endorsing it, Zehr said.
Solar power has much to offer, but there is a major debate within the states on “net metering.” People and firms that install solar panels first use the electricity generated for themselves and then, if there is a surplus, sell extra electricity back to the local electric utility. How to price that electricity has caused a great argument.
“Net metering will be one of the great debates over the next 10 years,” Zehr said.
Asked about national security issues by Thomas Jensen, a senior vice president for UPS Inc. and the committee’s acting chairman, Zehr said that is an important argument in favor of fossil fuels.
“We are now more independent [on energy] than we’ve been in decades, and that does have bipartisan appeal,” he said.
