Today, the Senate Finance Committee released its version of the Health Care Reform package.  Now our national leaders have something to negotiate that should lead to a final bill.

Remember the Cap and Trade Legislation that cleared the House earlier this year?  Right, neither does anyone else.

It seems likely that the time between now and Thanksgiving will be taken up with getting health care done, but then we have to immediately move on to protecting the climate.

Luckily, the Obama lead government is taking steps in the right direction even while the legislative push is focused on health care.  The EPA issued new mileage standards for the auto industry today, and the incentives for energy efficiency in the government stimulus plan are being spent at a faster and faster clip.

Speaking of faster and faster, are we all ready to lobby and show our commitment to climate change legislation when our turn comes?  We better be, or the forces of the status quo (read big coal and big oil) will get the upper hand.  Their powder has been kept dry during the summer, but it is ready to burn at a moments notice.

It is going to take the people, business and government working together to make the changes necessary to achieve endependence, energy independence that ends dependence on polluting fuels.

On your mark, get set, ……….

Yesterday, I attended The Fourteenth Annual POWER Conference on Energy Policy and Research hosted by the Center for Study of Energy Markets (CSEM).

Suffice it to say that it was very high level.  Economists presented their findings including sophisticated regression analysis and lots of numbers, charts and graphs.  Wow, was it detailed and math heavy?

What was the takeaway?  There is much more to energy policy issues than is reported in the news, shown in oil and natural gas commercials or chanted in drill, baby, drill rallies.

Here is a video that shows every president from Nixon to Bush 43 talking about Energy Independence:

http://endependence.info/research/videos-c-12-v-65.html

Now, President Obama is making energy policy a major focus of his budget, intending to turn talk about energy independence into action.

When energy policy is being shaped by governments (local, state or federal) and public utility regulators, they need information about what works and what doesn’t work (or what might work and what might not work).  This is where the economists come in with their complex formulas and statistical analysis.

What question needs to be answered, what data is available, what data needs to be included in the study, what needs to be excluded, what time period is relevant, what was going on at the time that would skew the results, etc., etc., etc.  After they have that figured out, then they have to reduce it to a formula and use computers to run the data through the formula.  Here is a sample of the topics:

“Regulation, Allocation, and Leakage in Cap-and-Trade Markets for CO2“

“How Do Firms Exercise Market Power in Hydro Dominated Markets?“

“What Do Emissions Markets Deliver and to Whom? Evidence from Southern California’s NOx Trading Program“

Presentations were made by the economists and consultants and then “discussants” (other experts in the field) made suggestions for improvement or further study.  You should have been there.

Actually, we should be thankful that there are people working so hard on these and other energy issues.  Their work should lead to better decisions by policy makers, if they base their policies on science instead of knee jerk reactions and political expediency.  That is a big IF.