Public opinion an afterthought

By Phoebe Sweet (contact)

Friday, Aug. 1, 2008 | 2 a.m.

When they concluded that Gov. Jim Gibbons’ climate change committee really was not intent on clamping down on greenhouse gases, environmentalists turned their hopes to the eleventh-hour public input period.

They figured once they had their say, their criticisms would have to be considered by the committee and addressed in the final report.

Wrong. Instead, those comments will be included “as an attachment in future printings of the report,” according to a spokesman for the governor. The committee officially presented Gibbons with its report Tuesday, two days after the final day to file public comments.

The result, according to Timothy Hay, a former Public Utilities Commission member and Nevada consumer advocate, is a report that “only pays lip service to the public input portion of the process. It just seems like an anomalous process for soliciting public comment on what purports to be a major study.”

But the brush off of environmental coalitions such as Nevadans for Clean Affordable Reliable Energy and the Southwest Energy Efficiency Project shouldn’t come as a surprise considering Gibbons’ lack of support for aggressive action to fight global warming, environmentalists said.

After all, this is just the latest complaint about his committee and its work. Some of it came from the one environmentalist on the committee — Kyle Davis, the Nevada Conservation League’s policy director. He said in June the committee had failed because it was treating as harmless the two industries responsible for most greenhouse gases — the auto and energy sectors — and proposing policies that would actually allow greenhouse gas emissions to increase over time.

Because the governor has refused to sign the state on to either a regional pact to reduce carbon emissions or California’s more restrictive limits for tailpipe emissions, the committee lacked executive support for progressive recommendations from the start.

Still, the governor’s April 2007 order was clear: The committee was supposed to “propose recommendations by which greenhouse gas emissions can be further reduced in Nevada.”

Davis said there may be a silver lining in presenting the public comments as an attachment to the report: Maybe this way they can get as much attention as the report itself.

“Whether the governor actually uses the public comments or not is an open question,” Davis said. “There is nothing saying that he will go with the recommendations of the committee, either.”

Gibbons spokesman Ben Kieckhefer said his boss is likely to adopt some of the committee’s recommendations and cast others aside, and “will likely take a more aggressive position than some of the recommendations in the committee report.”

That would be easy to do, according to critics of the report.

“I consider the lack of enthusiasm in seeking comments ... to be minor compared to the total lack of commitment to actually doing anything useful to mitigate climate change,” said Steve Wiel, another former PUC member and current Nevada representative of the Southwest Energy Efficiency Project.

Compared with others states, Nevada is making little progress, Wiel, Hay and Davis said.

“The report (is) essentially validating the status quo, saying the course Nevada is on is OK,” Hay said, adding that other states have set concrete targets for lowered emissions and signed on to the Western States Climate Initiative and California’s stricter auto emissions standards.

The committee’s report, on the other hand, recommends Nevada reduce “carbon intensity” by requiring new power plants to offset their greater emissions by closing older, more polluting facilities or building renewable energy facilities.

“It’s going to take more than a committee” for the state to contribute to the solution to global warming, Wiel said. “It’s going to take money and action and a cheerleader. Other states have a cheerleader in their governors and we don’t.”