Earth Equity News

Utilities Bickering Over Allocations in Waxman Bill. By Darren Samuelsohn and Katherine Ling, ClimateWire, August 5, 2009. "When House Democrats wrote their global warming bill this spring, they relied on a carefully crafted agreement reached by some of the country's biggest electric utility companies that appeared to bridge decades of dispute among users of coal, natural gas and nuclear power. Surprising many longtime observers, liberal Reps. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Ed Markey (D-Mass.) incorporated a proposal from the Edison Electric Institute that helped determine how to slice up emission allocations potentially worth billions of dollars between power companies with a wide variety of fuel mixes. But headed into this fall's Senate debate, CEOs from some of those same power companies are fighting to keep their coalition together. They face blistering dissent from at least eight Midwestern electric utilities with dominant coal portfolios -- companies that say they never signed off on the original deal and are now worried that the climate bill includes an allocation formula that will be too expensive for their customers."