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Stories tagged with “American Clean Energy and Security Act”

Alyssa

From NBC to Antoine Fuqua, Secret Service Agents Are the Next Big Pop Culture Trend

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Aug 7, 2012 at 5:08 pm

With the announcement this morning that NBC bought a drama pilot that “follows an idealistic secret service agent who finds himself at the epicenter of an international crisis on his first day on the job. He will need to cross moral and legal lines as he navigates the highest levels of power and corruption on his search for the truth,” it’s official: Secret Service agents are the latest pop culture trend. We’ve already got two movies about attacks on the White House thwarted by a current Secret Service agent, Channing Tatum in Roland Emmerich’s White House Down, and a former Secret Service agent, Gerard Butler in Antoine Fuqua’s Olympus Has Fallen. In Political Animals, Secretary of State Elaine Barrish confides her presidential ambitions to her main Secret Service agent before anyone else. Eliza Coupe even showed up as a hilariously rigid agent in Community.

There’s an obvious difference between comedic and soapy portrayals of Secret Service agents and serious ones. But I think the fact that we’ve reached three in the latter category is indicative. Whether or not the threats against Barack Obama made during his presidency have been more credible, or at least more backed by true intent than the threats faced by both Presidents Clinton and both Presidents Bush, there is, I think, of the presidency being under threat. If you believe it’s obvious, as I do, that President Obama is a U.S. citizen, there’s something upsetting about the continued fringe campaign to prove that he is some sort of impostor, whether smuggled in from Kenya or a secret Muslim. Presidents have always been the subject of nastiness, whether it’s Rush Limbaugh referring to Chelsea Clinton as the family dog or a filmmaker imagining the assassination of President Bush. But there definitely feels something particularly pointed about the refusal to deny President Obama the facts of his own life. The attacks on his presidency may not be physical, but they encourage a paranoid uneasiness about the presidency. I can see why we’d want to escape into fantasies about defending the institution, and the most visible, looming manifestation of it.

Economy

Rep. Perlmutter: GREEN Act ‘Like A Pay Raise’ For Low- And Moderate-Income Families

By Pat Garofalo on Sep 17, 2009 at 3:00 pm

Tucked away inside the the American Clean Energy and Security (ACES) Act passed by the House of Representatives is the Green Resources for Energy Efficient Neighborhoods (GREEN) Act, crafted by Rep. Ed Perlmutter (D-CO). But given the uncertain timeframe for ACES coming up in the Senate, the GREEN Act will also be moved as a stand-alone bill in both chambers (and currently has 19 co-sponsors in the House).

The idea behind the GREEN Act is incentivizing green construction through a variety of means, including tax credits, lower mortgage rates, and innovative financing techniques. It would also provide for upgrading the energy efficiency of HUD housing and establish grant programs for states and localities to promote their own energy-efficiency programs.

The Wonk Room spoke with Perlmutter today, who explained the economic benefit that he hopes the GREEN Act will have for American households, and particularly those with low- to moderate-incomes:

It helps low- and moderate-incomes. It helps all income levels, because utility costs have been going up for, you know, the last umpteen years. And particularly for low- to moderate-income earners, that’s a big part of their discretionary income, what they have left over at the end of the month, after paycheck and groceries and everything else. So if we can help them control or even shrink utility costs, it’s like a pay raise to those people…We’re hoping to shrink energy costs by 30 percent.

Watch it:

One interesting aspect of the bill is a provision providing for the leasing of renewable energy equipment, such as solar panels or geothermal units, to get around the prohibitive, up-front installation costs that puts this sort of equipment out of the reach of many. In theory, the cost of leasing the equipment would be outweighed by the energy savings:

We have another aspect to the bill which we’ve been working with home-builders on, which is to lease, in effect, your solar or even your geothermal equipment so that people wouldn’t have the big up-front cost to put solar on their roof, but instead they could lease it from the home-builder who’s working with the financial community to put the solar units up on the roof, just like you would lease a satellite dish for your TV.

Watch it:

The GREEN Act is basically a panoply of ways to make greening homes and buildings a bit more affordable and cost-effective, and Perlmutter said that the powerful home-builder’s lobby is as “on-board as you can ever get the home-builders.” The act wouldn’t be a fundamental reorganization of energy policy, but it’s very easy to see how it would do a lot to reduce emissions and energy costs all over the country, when you bundle together the effects of its many parts.

Climate Progress

Top Obama Officials To Testify Next Week On Behalf Of Clean Energy Legislation

By Brad Johnson on Apr 13, 2009 at 10:59 am

John HoldrenRep. Ed Markey (D-MA), chair of the Energy and Environment Subcommittee, announced that top Obama officials will testify next week on the immediate need for clean energy legislation. Speaking at an event on building a clean energy economy hosted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Rep. Markey said that Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood, and Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson will testify in hearings on the Waxman-Markey American Clean Energy and Security Act, beginning on Tuesday, April 21.

John Holdren, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, told attendees that “significant harm to human well-being is already occurring” from global warming — including agricultural impacts from monsoon changes in China, greater floods “on practically every continent,” increased drought and soil drying, increased wildfires, worse air pollution and heat stress, and timber losses from Alaska to Colorado due to pest explosion — and “worse is yet to come.”

The MIT event is being webcast live.

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