The U.S. Chamber of Commerce today announced its economic agenda, continuing its hard stance against regulation of global warming pollution. In “The State of American Business 2009,” the chamber “agenda for recovery, jobs, and growth” says the nation should “address climate change.” However, they fear that President-elect Barack Obama may take immediate action to actually address the pollution:

Congress should reassert its legislative authority over climate change policy and not leave it to EPA regulators to impose a top-down approach.

In the press conference releasing this report, chamber president Thomas Donohue claimed carbon dioxide regulation by federal regulators would “strangle the economy.” In contrast, R. Bruce Josten, the chamber’s top lobbyist, praised the draft legislation of Reps. John Dingell (D-MI) and Rick Boucher (D-WV) as “being a very workable approach.”

Strangely enough, when Bush ran the White House, the chamber’s position was very different. The Chamber of Commerce tarred Congress’s attempt to address climate change — the Lieberman-Warner cap-and-trade bill — as “HillaryCare redux,” using shoddy economic analysis to spread fears of a world without electricity or automobiles.

In all likelihood, the Chamber of Commerce’s policy of obstruction and inaction will continue as long as its directors include the likes of rabid global warming denier Don Blankenship, the right-wing coal magnate. Stripped of platitudes, the chamber’s position on global warming and energy policy remains the same — a continued call for massive subsidies for the oil, coal, and nuclear power industries and the prevention of any regulation of their pollution.

[In his famous essay, "Politics and the English Language," George Orwell wrote: "The English language ... becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts." He warns that "Political language ... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind." The importance of language and rhetoric is a subject near to my heart (see Why scientists aren't more persuasive, Part 2: Why deniers out-debate "smart talkers" and Part 1.]

Washington, D.C., is to the English language what Paris is to fashion. Every season, perfectly good words go out of style and new ones are trotted out on the national runway of rhetoric. Some words are considered so worn out, politically incorrect or laden with baggage that they can no longer be used in public discourse. When that happens, people like me find ourselves scrambling for suitable synonyms.

That was the case a few years ago with “sustainable development.” I operated the Center of Excellence for Sustainable Development at the U.S. Department of Energy, helping communities understand and apply the practice. Before long, signals came down from Capitol Hill that the words “sustainable development” had become the kiss of death for any program that used them. The term “smart growth” was invented to take “sustainability’s” place.

More recently, Congress has avoided using the word “climate” in legislation that clearly is meant in part to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions — legislation such as the “Energy Security and Independence Act of 2007″. The Bush people call torture “enhanced interrogation” and call kidnapping “rendition.” Healthy Forests and Clear Skies became the titles of the Bush Administration’s programs to cut trees and pollute the air, respectively.

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If the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) starts acknowledging that residential energy efficiency has a “positive rate of return” — and advocating federal support to capture the full energy savings possible — perhaps the world is changing.

Then again, it may just be temporary institutional schizophrenia, since others in AEI continue to assert (without any supporting evidence), “No matter what you’ve been told, the technology to significantly reduce emissions is decades away and extremely costly” (see “AEI: Still crazy with denial and delay after all these years“).

Kevin Hassett, AEI’s director of economic-policy studies, has a Bloomberg News column I am excerpting below, because of its surprising degree of common sense — and because he cites actual research:

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Part 1 presented a new study that puts the generation costs for power from new nuclear plants at from 25 to 30 cents per kilowatt-hour — triple current U.S. electricity rates!

Nuclear plants with such incredibly expensive electricity and “out of control” capital costs, as Time put it, obviously create large risks for utilities, their investors, and, ultimately taxpayers. Congress extended huge loan guarantees to new nukes in 2005, and the American people will be stuck with another huge bill if those plants join the growing rank of troubled assets (see “Nuclear energy revival may cost $315 billion, with taxpayers’ risking over $100B“).

The risk to utilities who start down the new nuke path is also great. A June 2008 report by Moody’s Investor Services Global Credit Research, “New Nuclear Generating Capacity: Potential Credit Implications for U.S. Investor Owned Utilities” (PR here), warned that “nuclear plant construction poses risks to credit metrics, ratings,” concluding:

The cost and complexity of building a new nuclear power plant could weaken the credit metrics of an electric utility and potentially pressure its credit ratings several years into the project, according to a new report from Moody’s Investors Service….

Moody’s suggests that a utility that builds a new nuclear power plant may experience an approximately 25% to 30% deterioration in cash-flow-related credit metrics.

And this would likely result in a sharp downgrading of the utility’s credit rating.

The application by Florida Power & Light (FPL) for a large nuclear plant came in at a stunning $12 to $18 billion, and the utility concedes that new reactors present “unique risks and uncertainties,” with “every six-month delay adding as much as $500 million in interest costs.”

The report Climate Progress published this week, Business Risks and Costs of New Nuclear Power by power-plant cost expert Craig Severance, has an extended discussion of the business risks to utilities and hence investors:

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