Lobbyists were once the scourge of Washington

Ah, but that was during the Bush administration.  That was then.  This is now.

'Democratic lawmakers who spent much of the Bush administration blasting officials for letting energy lobbyists write national policy have turned to a coalition of business and environmental groups to help draft their own sweeping climate bill.

And one little-noticed provision of the draft bill would give one of the coalition's co-founders a lucrative exemption on a coal-fired project it is building.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry A. Waxman, both of California, were among the Democrats -- then in the minority -- who slammed Vice President Dick Cheney for holding closed-door meetings to draft energy policy early in the Bush administration.

Republicans "invited energy lobbyists to write the energy bill that gouges consumers with big payoffs to Big Gas and Big Oil," Mrs. Pelosi said in 2005. "They have turned Washington, D.C., into an oil and gas town when it is supposed to be the city of innovation, of new, of fresh ideas about our energy policy."

But the sweeping climate bill Mr. Waxman and Rep. Edward J. Markey, Massachusetts Democrat and chairman of the panel's key environmental subcommittee, introduced at the end of March includes a provision that benefits Duke Energy Corp., a founding member of the U.S. Climate Action Partnership (USCAP), whose climate plan released in January the lawmakers have frequently called a "blueprint" for their climate legislation.'

And if you think taxpayers aren't going to be gouged as a byproduct of environmental regulations, think again.

Comments

[CaptDMO]

Lest we fail to notice, a traditional SOROS figurehead endorsement/"investment" like minded "organizations" into profits to be found in
the mining of the VAST American reserves for energy using "Clean" (taxed, off set, "capped", whatever)Coal, and gasoline "adulterated" with the food that could be sent (free)to the Parade of Starving Children, subject to revocable adoption by UNICEF or UNESCO ambassadors.

Pickens/GE "investment" (primarily of other peoples money of course) in ecological wind farms?
How's the food quality fishing in the Hudson River these days?
How IS the Middle East going to run all those electric motors?

I know,I know, "But.... THAT'S DIFFERENT!