While our past reports on Alaska’s Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski have been based around her fight for U.S. oil exports, this is not the only issue she believes in advancing.
In fact, she has separated that issue from the many included in her recently proposed bill, The Energy Policy Modernization Act of 2015. It is a bipartisan bill put through with the help of Washington’s Democratic Senator Maria Cantwell.
Both women are part of the U.S. Senate Energy Committee. Murkowski says that creating the bill took months of compromise to find common ground on several of the issues.
Her final draft, released on Wednesday, July 22, includes some, but not all of her own energy agenda, and many provisions that will benefit both the entire country and her own state of Alaska.
Murkowski explains that the bill “does not have everything that I would like, but it doesn’t have everything the other side would like. That’s the nature of legislation.”
While oil exports are not in the bill, a push for quicker permit approval for LNG export terminals appears. The bill also encourages development of more hybrid electricity systems and the training of more people to keep these systems running smoothly. The bill also calls for the reclassification of hydropower as a renewable energy source.
As the name implies, the goal of the bill is to update energy policies that are redundant or outdated.
The bill will be presented to the entire Senate Energy committee next week, then brought before the general Senate where all attending senators will be able to comment and offer changes for the legislation.
To continue reading…
Click here to read the Alaska Public article.
Click here to read the main points of the bill in more detail.
Christian DeHaemer
Check us out on YouTube!Christian is the founder of Bull and Bust Report and an editor at Energy and Capital. For more on Christian, see his editor’s page.
