National Day of Action for Clean Energy: May 20th

Tuesday May 20th is the National Day of Action for Clean Energy. It’s a day on which companies, industry groups, advocacy organizations, faith-based coalitions and many others are making a joint effort to urge Congressional legislators to extend clean energy tax incentives (credits) without delay.

You can find the Solar Nation Action Alert here.

To recap: Congress has spent nearly a year debating how to pay for these expiring tax incentives, which make it cheaper for individuals and companies to install renewable energy systems and build energy-efficient buildings. The House doesn’t want to pass any legislation without an identified source of funding, and the Senate won’t consider raising taxes elsewhere to fund the clean energy provisions.

Call it stalemate, call it deadlock, call it a stand-off; the bottom line is, the clean energy revolution is being strangled. Every day that passes without an extension places more green jobs and investment at risk* and slows down our transition to a clean energy economy.

*Estimated at 119,000 jobs and $20 billion. The report can be seen here.
The bill now working its way through Congress is HR6049; it’s summarized here.

A Way Around the Congressional Impasse?

Have you noticed the fatal flaws in the year-long string of unsuccessful attempts in Congress to keep tax credits alive for solar installations?

In brief, they’ve all been about funding: the bills either targeted oil & gas industry revenues to pay for the tax credits, or they had no source of funding at all. So they all ran into roadblocks manned, respectively, by Senate Republicans or House Democrats. To this day, no-one is willing to budge an inch from their position, even with legislation as important as this.

This week we heard something different from Capitol Hill. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer and Speaker Nancy Pelosi are urging the House Ways & Means Committee to support a small ($6-8 billion) renewable energy tax extenders package that would include Solar and that would be funded, not from the oil & gas industry but from the reporting of credit-card transactions to the IRS.

It’s a new and potentially winning strategy, but it could still fail if House and Senate Republicans–particularly those on the Finance and Ways & Means committees–try to reject the package out of hand. If they indicate that they are leaning this way, House Democrats could very well be discouraged from moving forward with this innovative approach.

We’re targeting just ten senators on the Finance Committee and three representatives on the Ways & Means Committee*, and if you’re a constituent of one of them we urgently need you to call their Washington office and make sure they understand what’s at stake here.

CAN YOU HELP?

(more…)

Once again, Solar getting dropped. Worth getting mad about.

Congressional leadership has done an about-face. After a year of unsuccessful attempts to get Congress to authorize long-term extensions to solar energy investment tax credits by enclosing the measures in energy bills and economic stimulus packages, Speaker Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Reid had been planning to include these measures in the Iraq War supplemental legislation. We now understand that they may decide to drop the renewable energy provisions from this bill.

This is a serious setback and will mean great hardship for the solar energy community. Spending $110 billion for security in Iraq without spending a dime on energy security in the United States does nothing to advance us as a renewable energy society.

Read more and take action here!

Solar Tax Credits Redux

So much for that idea…..

After three unsuccessful tries by the House of Representatives in the last year, the U.S. Senate made its own attempt this month to pass legislation to extend tax credits for renewable energy installations and energy efficiency. The bill introduced by U.S. Sens. Cantwell and Ensign became an amendment to the Senate’s comprehensive housing bill (HR 3221), and passed the Senate by 88 votes to 8* on April 10. Included in the bill were $6.6 billion in tax credits for renewables, and a lifting of the $2000 cap on residential solar installations.

What was not included in it, unfortunately, was a method of funding the tax credits, and we now hear that the House has no intention of passing a bill without such “pay-fors”.

With earlier attempts the initial impetus came from the House, and the stumbling block for the Senate was always the source of funding for the tax credits–reducing some of the government subsidies enjoyed by the oil and gas industry. In this case it was a Senate-originated bill with no identified source of funding, and a week after it passed the upper chamber, that lack of revenue base sealed its doom. (more…)

Clunk! Solar Tax Credit Roller Coaster off the Rails

Roller coasters have, by design, a multitude of ups and downs, but it’s comforting even to thrill-seekers to know they rarely become completely derailed. The roller coaster that represents the latest iteration of the Congressional energy bill, however, has finally done that.

The news from Washington is that the House of Representatives has no intention of moving forward with the “Cantwell-Ensign” clean energy provisions that the Senate made part of their comprehensive housing bill in early April (see ‘News from the Hill’ below). House Democratic leadership does not believe:

• that energy provisions should be included in housing legislation
• that energy matters should be part of any future ‘Economic Stimulus’-type legislation
• that bills with tax titles should be passed with no identified source of funding

Unfortunately, those three characteristics well describe the clean energy amendment that Senators Cantwell and Ensign succeeded in attaching to the housing bill. (more…)

New Energy Bill from Senate has Good Prospects–with your help!

Senators Maria Cantwell (D-WA) and John Ensign (R-NV) have introduced a bipartisan bill—S2821—in an attempt to break the Congressional deadlock over renewable energy tax credits. Their bill, know as the Clean Energy Tax Stimulus Act of 2008, contains much of what we’ve been fighting for over the past year, and needs a total of 61 senators to co-sponsor it, to ensure passage.

The bill is a pared-down version of previous House-originated bills that have failed to find means of financing acceptable to the Senate. It has a price tag of $7 billion, and proposes to:

• extend the investment tax credit for commercial solar power installations for 8 years
• extend the residential solar investment tax credit for one year and remove the current $2000 credit cap
• remove the exemption on utilities for claiming these tax credits
• allow the tax credit to offset alternative minimum tax
• extend incentives for energy efficiency improvements

What’s really vital is for this bill to garner enough co-sponsors in the Senate (61) to insure it against the threat of a filibuster. Could you send an e-mail today to your senator(s)’ office and urge them to get on board?
TAKE ACTION NOW! Go to this link, enter your ZIP code, and send your message.

http://capwiz.com/re-action/go/S2821

And thanks!