Shining a Light on U.S. Power Utility Lobbyists

With the Waxman-Markey climate change bill before the U.S. Senate, coal and energy utility lobbyists are out in force. While the legislation will only have direct effect in the United States, it will indirectly have a major influence on the negotiation of a replacement agreement to the Kyoto Protocol. (The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change hopes to complete a new climate change agreement at the COP15 conference in Copenhagen in December.) Earlier this year, the Center for Public Integrity, a non-profit investigative journalism group based in Washington D.C., launched a database on the mostly corporate lobbyists working on climate change issues. If you would like to help bring to the fore the details of the lobbying firms and individual lobbyists helping the top ten U.S. power utilities, here's a citizen journalism project that you can help with. See here for more details. If you have never added material to SourceWatch before, don't worry, as three of our regular editors are at hand to help get you started.