As negotiations on a stripped-down bill to limit global warming pollution from coal-fired power plants reach the final hour, Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) is sympathizing with the utility industry’s attempt to suspend Clean Air Act rules on pollutants that kill tens of thousands of Americans a year. At a meeting with environmentalists, Duke Energy CEO Jim Rogers “led the call for regulatory relief on a number of existing Clean Air Act programs dealing with sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide and mercury, including a new EPA rule proposed last week that deals with interstate pollution.” However, thirty-one environmental and health organizations sent a letter to senators last week calling such rollbacks “simply unacceptable.” Center for American Progress senior fellow Van Jones called it a “literal poison pill.” Today, Lieberman made the ironic claim that polluters “just want a breather” from clean air rules:

That’s a tough one. They frame it in a different way. They just want a breather. And not an eternal pre-emption. These are all topics of negotiation. That’s what we’re supposed to be doing here.

Sen. John Kerry (D-MA), Lieberman’s partner in developing a Senate climate bill, last Thursday said there was a little room for negotiation, but opposed any “rollback.” “If we put those requirements into a different form so that we are still adhering to them, that is a different issue and those are two different choices,” Kerry said. “But there is not going to be a rollback of current requirements.”

Other Democrats don’t find this one of the acceptable “topics of negotiation.” “I’d not want to see any weakening of the authority they have today,” Sen. Ben Cardin (D-MD) said last week. “It’s been a major tool for cleaning up our air.”

The environmental and public health community — including NAACP and Green For All, Public Citizen and the American Lung Association, the Environmental Defense Fund and Environment America, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Union of Concerned Scientists — are united in their opposition, saying that “delaying the cleanup of these plants threatens the health of millions of Americans.” “I’m sure people throw everything on the table,” said League of Conservation Voters President Gene Karpinski. “But we’ve made it damn clear … that there are no trade-offs of any regulation of any [conventional] pollutants.”

Duke Energy CEO Jim Rogers, a critic of the US Chamber of Commerce’s reactionary stance on climate policy, has left the lobbying giant’s board. A Wonk Room review of the Chamber’s website found that six companies have left the board and thirteen joined since last year. Siemens USA’s George Nolen, another critic of the Chamber’s climate opposition, has also left the board. Duke and Siemens are members of the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, which helped develop the Waxman-Markey climate legislation that the Chamber opposed. In October 2009, Rogers had indicated he still believed his board membership was worthwhile:

“I feel like the chamber is open to evolving their thinking,” Duke CEO Rogers said in an interview. He said he thought he could push the chamber “to the center” on the issue by staying on the board.

He has evidently decided otherwise.

Although both Duke and Siemens publicly criticized the Chamber’s stance on climate policy, neither publicly announced they were leaving the board. Last year the utilities PG&E, Exelon, PNM Resources, and PSEG ended their membership with the Chamber, unable to reconcile their support for climate action with the Chamber’s denial of the science and hard-line opposition to President Obama’s clean energy policies. The Wonk Room has not ascertained whether Duke and Siemens have left the Chamber entirely, although it appears Siemens is still an active member.

Last year, USCAP had eight members on the U.S. Chamber board. This number is down to four (Alcoa, Dow, Deere, and IBM), with Siemens and Duke Energy leaving the U.S. Chamber of Commerce board and ConocoPhillips and Caterpillar leaving USCAP.

Purported climate action advocates Pepsi and IBM, who were on the board in the beginning of 2009, have returned to the board in 2010. With the enactment of health care reform, the health care industry has stepped up its involvement with the nation’s largest lobbying group, as health insurance giant WellPoint, pharmaceutical maker Sanofi-aventis, and private hospital group Clarian Health have joined the board.

The US Chamber of Commerce has also become more sinful, with the addition of US Smokeless Tobacco’s CEO Peter Paoli and Michael Leven, the president of Las Vegas Sands, the casino owned by right-wing billionaire Shel Adelson.

Here are the changes from last year to now:

This analysis was assisted by the Public Accountability Initiative‘s LittleSis.org project.

Electric utility giant Duke Energy has quit the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE) because of the coal group’s unethical opposition to President Obama’s clean energy reform agenda. For the last few years, Duke has been one of the most prominent industry voices calling for the regulation of industrial global warming pollution, but has also supported the efforts of various right-wing lobbying groups to prevent such action. ACCCE, in addition to promoting “clean coal” Christmas carols, employs right-wing public relations firms to paint the American Clean Energy and Security Act as a job-killing energy tax through whatever means necessary — even blatant forgery. According to the National Journal, Duke has finally recognized that the time has come to choose energy reform over old pollution:

Duke Energy left the American Coalition for Clean Coal Energy on Tuesday over differences with “influential member companies who will not support passing climate change legislation in 2009 or 2010,” the company said.

Duke Energy left the right-wing National Association of Manufacturers in May for similar reasons, but Duke’s CEO, Jim Rogers, still sits on the board of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce — alongside right-wing climate deniers Don Blankenship, Harry Alford, and George Argyros — which is spending tens of millions of dollars to kill clean energy jobs.

Members of business coalitions like the U.S. Climate Action Partnership (USCAP) and Business for Innovative Climate & Energy Policy (BICEP) have advocated for the establishment of a mandatory carbon market (“cap and trade”) to promote investment in clean energy while reducing global warming polution. In the meantime, business coalitions like the National Association of Manufacturers, ACCCE, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and the American Petroleum Institute (API) are running Astroturf campaigns to kill clean energy legislation.

However, Duke is not the only company that has been playing both sides of the field:

– Members of USCAP and ACCCE: General Electric, Alstom Power and Caterpillar

– Members of USCAP and NAM: Dow Chemical, Ford, Chrysler, General Electric, ConocoPhillips, and Caterpillar

– Members of USCAP and API: Siemens, Dow Chemical, Shell, General Electric, ConocoPhillips, and BP America

– Members of USCAP and the Chamber of Commerce: Alcoa, Caterpillar, ConocoPhillips, Deere & Company, Dow Chemical, Duke Energy, and Siemens

– Member of BICEP and the Chamber of Commerce: Nike

Other ostensibly green companies on the boards of NAM and the Chamber include AT&T, Procter & Gamble, Verizon, Corning, Ford, Honda, Toyota, 3M, Intel, and IBM.

Our guest blogger is Frank O’Donnell, president of Clean Air Watch.

This morning, a federal appeals court struck down key elements of a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency clean-air rule designed to make sweeping reductions in air pollution from coal-fired electric power plants in the Eastern half of the nation. The suit brought on behalf of the coal-burning industry has crippled the signature air pollution control effort by the Bush Administration. It’s the legal equivalent of a dirty bomb: literally tens of thousands of Americans could see their lives cut short by dirty air.

This decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit to vacate the Clean Air Interstate Rule is without a doubt the worst news of the year when it comes to air pollution. It is potentially disastrous news for public health. In the words of Conrad Schneider, advocacy director of the Clean Air Task Force, “This decision will leave tens of millions of Americans exposed to dirty air. It will mean avoidable death and disease.”

The Bush administration needs to do more than file the obvious legal appeal: it needs to come up with a fix that is legally foolproof. If the Bush administration isn’t up to the task, then Congress must step in and fix this mess — the bipartisan legislation introduced by Senator Tom Carper (D-DE) is one obvious vehicle.

The villain in this case is the coal-burning electric power industry. No wonder some are starting to call Duke Chairman and CEO Jim Rogers the Duke Dirt Devil. Rogers — supposedly a “green” leader — led an industry attack because he wanted to save a little money rather than clean up.

When it announced the rules in March 2005, the EPA itself projected that they would prevent 17,000 premature deaths a year. The vast majority of those avoided deaths would happen because of reductions in electric power emissions of sulfur dioxide, which chemically convert to deadly fine-particle soot. To quote from then-acting EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson, the rule “will result in the largest pollution reductions and health benefits of any air rule in more than a decade.” So you can see what we are losing.

Our guest blogger is Frank O’Donnell, president of Clean Air Watch.

In yesterday’s New York Times Sunday Magazine, Clive Thompson profiled Duke Energy CEO Jim Rogers in a 5,000-word hagiography entitled “A Green Coal Baron?” According to Thompson, Rogers is “brimming with enthusiasm” for solar power, “one of the electricity industry’s most vocal environmentalists,” with “a nerd’s optimism” for technology ideas that have “fired up” Bill Clinton.

This article truly demonstrates that perhaps no corporate official in America has a better PR machine than Duke’s charlatan CEO.

Yes, he is “charming and natty.”

But his company is leading one of the most vile dirty-air efforts imaginable: it has sued to overturn the effort by the EPA to reduce deadly sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides from coal-burning electric power plants like those owned by Duke. (This is one of the few positive moves made by the Bush EPA.) The EPA calculated these cap-and-trade rules would prevent 17,000 premature deaths a year — and yet Rogers wants those requirements thrown out so his company can make a few extra bucks!

And he is the master of doubletalk. His company sought to gut “new source review” requirements for power plants (he lost at the Supreme Court), arguing that “cap and trade” would be a preferable approach to reducing power company emissions. Yet, as noted above, he simultaneously is trying to block “cap and trade” restrictions. What astonishing hypocrisy.

Oh, yes, there’s also the global warming issue. He claims he wants action to reduce emissions, but he bitterly opposed the so-called Lieberman-Warner plan, even though it would have given his company more than a billion dollars in free emission credits. Yet, Rogers wanted even more, and was willing to hold the bill hostage so he could get more. Duke sits on the board of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, and is a member of American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, all of whom vigorously lobbied against the bill with misleading talking points. Duke even rallied corporate customers against the bill, sending out form letters for them to hand to their senators. No wonder it failed so miserably.

We’ll have a new President in January. But Rogers will still be there.

Our guest blogger is Frank O’Donnell, president of Clean Air Watch.

Jim Rogers, President and CEO of Duke Energy, has become one of the most prominent industry voices calling for the regulation of global warming pollution from power plants and other sectors of the economy. Not only does Rogers advocate a cap-and-trade system, like that adopted in Europe, but he also proposes a “surcharge” on all electricity use to fund low carbon technology research and development.

However, as one of the largest producers of global warming pollution, Rogers’ policy prescriptions warrant special scrutiny. In making his case for action, Rogers includes a very important caveat: regulate greenhouse gases, but regulate in a way that ensures that the American taxpayer foots the bill for cleaning up the company’s aging and high-emitting power plants. In 2007, Duke’s coal-heavy fleet released 108,500,000 tons of CO₂ to the atmosphere, the equivalent of about 18 million cars. This climate two-step is not new for Rogers:

Rogers’s sleight-of-hand lies in his proposal for distributing the emissions permits (allowances) under a greenhouse gas cap-and-trade program. According to Rogers, Congress should stick to the grandfathering approach that was used more than two decades ago when it established the Acid Rain program, by which he means giving allowances away for free to companies based on their proportional share of historic CO₂ emissions.

What he neglects to mention is that Duke Energy would receive an allocation valued at more than $2.0 billion annually (equivalent to 10% of the North Carolina state budget), which the company’s unregulated generating assets will use to drive up company profits while at the same time raising consumer electricity costs — precisely the issue that lead to criticism, and ultimately modification, of the European Union’s cap-and-trade system.

Rogers argues that cap-and-trade based regulation is “not about punishing people for making decisions 40 years ago.” However, nor should it be about rewarding the biggest polluters and preserving the status quo. If companies want free allowances, they should earn them by investing in renewable energy technologies, carbon capture and storage technology, and energy efficiency.

Read more here.