More details have emerged about the involvement by two lobbyists--who were senior Environmental Protection Agency officials during the George W. Bush administration--in crafting an amendment Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) tried to offer in the fall in an effort to bar the EPA from regulating greenhouse gases on its own.
Murkowski's staff director on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, McKie Campbell, and her energy staffer Colin Hayes, convened a meeting on Sept. 23 with aides to a handful of centrist Democrats to brief them on the final version of the amendment, according to participants and sources familiar with the session. The two lobbyists, Bracewell & Giuliani's Jeffrey R. Holmstead and Sidley Austin's Roger Martella Jr., called in by phone and walked the staffers through the changes that had been made to text, to reassure the staffers that Murkowski's amendment would not block the EPA from issuing new curbs on greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles in 2010 even as it would bar the agency from imposing those limits on power plants.
The meeting was aimed at seeing "was there a way to satisfy both sides of that issue," a participant said.
The meeting, which took place in Hart Senate Office Building 370 at 8:45 am, included two aides to James M. Inhofe (Okla.), the top Republican on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. Before leaving the room, participants were asked to turn in the documents Murkowski's aides distributed, confirmed Inhofe spokesman Matthew Dempsey. Holmstead and Martella dominated the opening of the meeting by describing how the revised amendment had answered the attacks lodged by some Democrats and environmental groups, a source said.
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http://views.washingtonpost.com/climate-change/post-carbon/2010/01/murkowski_and_lobbyists_take_three.html
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