A top aide to Vice President Dick Cheney and a staunch opponent of environmental policy is reportedly set to receive a senior position at the Department of Energy, according to a report in The Washington Post.

F. Chase Hutto III was instrumental in suppressing a report prepared by the Environmental Protection Agency that concluded greenhouse gasses was a contributing factor to Global Warming and needed to be regulated.

A report issued in July by the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming identified Hutto as one Bush administration official who argued against implementing new environmental regulations and sided with officials from Exxon Mobil Corp., and the American Petroleum Institute during a meeting on the issue.

“In developing its proposals to make a positive endangerment finding and to regulate the greenhouse gas emissions from both vehicles and stationary sources, EPA consulted with a wide range of environmental and industry stakeholders. Environmental stakeholders and, interestingly, some electric utility representatives, including the Edison Electric Institute (which represents the nation’s major investor-owned utilities), agreed that it would be best for EPA to proceed with regulation of both vehicles and stationary sources using Clean Air Act authority.

“But others, including oil industry representatives from ExxonMobil, the American Petroleum Institute, and the National Petrochemicals and Refiners Association, adopted a “not on my watch” approach – arguing that such regulations would tarnish President Bush’s conservative anti-regulatory legacy, and should be delayed until the next President took office,” the congressional report says. “Those arguments were echoed, within the White House, by Vice President Cheney’s energy adviser, F. Chase Hutto III.”

Jason Burnett, a former deputy administrator at the EPA, told congressional investigators during an interview that he clashed with Hutto time and again over regulatory policy related to Global Warming. Burnett said Hutto consistently sided with the energy industry’s views on the matter.

Last October, Platts Commodity News published a report that said Hutto and officials in the US Office of Management and Budget met with executives from a host of electric utilities met behind closed doors to discuss a “substitute legislative approach to adoption of a near-term [greenhouse gas] emissions cap and trade program.”

Hutto, whose grandfather patented at least seven piston inventions for the Ford Motor Company, has “an anti-regulatory philosophy and concern about what regulation means for the American way of life. He would talk, for example, about not wanting greenhouse gas controls to do away with the large American automobile,” the Post reported July 10.

Hutto, 39, is up for the position of assistant secretary of energy. But it’s unclear whether President George W. Bush will make a formal nomination or appoint Hutto to the position in an interim capacity. The Department of Energy’s website says the assistant secretary is the “primary advisor to the Secretary and the Department on energy and technology policy development” and “primary advisor to the Secretary and the Department on energy and technology policy development.”

Hutto, whose resume says he was a “recount team leader” in Duval County, Florida during the disputed 2000 presidential election, started his career in politics as an opposition research consultant during Spencer Abraham’s 1994 senate bid. When Abraham was appointed Energy Secretary in 2001, Hutto was appointed senior policy adviser. Hutto joined Cheney’s staff in 2005 after a year at the National Security Council where he worked as an energy adviser.

Controversial Appointments

Bush has a history of appointing individuals who strongly oppose regulatory controls to key positions overseeing the energy policy.

In February 2005, Bush named Samuel Bodman Secretary of Energy. Bodman sailed through his senate confirmation despite the fact that he ran a Texas-based chemical company that spent years on the top five lists of the country’s worst polluters.

The company Bodman ran, Boston-based Cabot Corporation, and released 54,000 tons of toxic emissions from its Texas refineries into the air in 1997. Cabot accounted for 60,000 of the more than half a million tons of toxic emissions released into the Texas air, according to report by the Texas State Summary of Emissions. Cabot is the world’s largest producer of industrial carbon black, a byproduct of the oil refinery process.

Last year, just hours after a devastating report by the world’s leading climate scientists warned that global warming is no longer a threat, but is a manmade disaster that has already impacted the environment, Bodman said he would continue to oppose mandatory reductions in greenhouse gases in the form of CO2 caps. Bodman said mandatory caps could financially ruin some of the energy companies responsible for polluting the air.

“There is a concern within this administration, which I support, that the imposition of a carbon cap in this country would – may – lead to the transfer of jobs and industry abroad (to nations) that do not have such a carbon cap,” Bodman said in February 2007. “You would then have the US economy damaged, on the one hand, and the same emissions … potentially even worse emissions.”

In July 2005, Bush appointed Joseph Kelliher chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the agency that controls the country’s natural gas industry, hydroelectric projects, electric utilities, and oil pipelines, and has played a critical role in the deregulation of those industries.

Yet Kelliher was one of a handful of insiders who, as a member of Vice President Dick Cheney’s energy task force in early 2001, solicited executives at corporations like Enron to help write President Bush’s National Energy Policy.

In a March 10, 2001 email to energy lobbyist Dana Contratto, Kelliher asked Contratto that if he were “King” or “Il Duce” “what would you include in a national energy policy, especially with respect to natural gas issues?”

Contratto responded with a three-page list of ideas, many of which were included in the final version of the energy policy.

On another occasion, Kelliher sought out Stephen Craig Sayle, an Enron Corp. lobbyist, to make similar recommendations. Sayle, former counsel for the House Commerce Committee, sent Kelliher Enron’s “dream list,” that included a recommendation that the administration commit to market-based emissions trading, which was also used in administration’s National Energy Policy.

Sayle wrote Kelliher that the energy policy should also include “a multi-pollutant regulatory strategy should be estimated for the power generation sector including: Gradually phased in [mercury, nitrogen oxides and sulfur dioxide emissions] reductions; Reform/replacement of NSR; Use of market-based/emission trading programs; Inclusion of both existing and new plants and equal treatment for both. The last bullet is the critical one to ensure that: a) we encourage the new generation that is required b) we ensure that the new technologies developed through DOE programs can come into the market.

“Obviously, this is a dream list,” Sayle said in the March 23, 2001 email he sent to Kelliher. “Not all will be done. But perhaps some of these ideas could be floated and adopted.”

Sayle also provided Kelliher with a PowerPoint presentation on behalf of his other energy clients in the so-called Clean Power Group, a consortium made up of a handful of the country’s biggest energy companies, including NiSource Inc., Calpine Corp., Trigen Energy Corp., and El Paso Corp, whose mission, according to the group’s website, is to “streamline requirements under the Clean Air Act for electric generating facilities while at the same time making major reductions in air emissions.”

The PowerPoint presentation, A Comprehensive Multi-Pollutant Emission Control Strategy for Power Generation, summarized the Clean Power Group’s support of a “cap and trade” method in addressing emissions of mercury, nitrogen oxides and sulfur dioxide from power plants, but included a proposal for a voluntary cap on carbon dioxide. The Clean Power Group stood to benefit from the initiative it urged Kelliher to get the White House to adopt in that the companies could release more emissions under its proposed plan than under the more restrictive rules the Clinton administration had put in place.

After receiving Sayle’s email and supporting material, Kelliher recommended that President Bush “direct the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to propose multi-pollutant legislation that would establish a flexible, market-based program to significantly reduce and cap emissions provide regulatory certainty to allow utilities to make modifications to their plants without fear of new litigation; provide market based incentives, such as emissions-trading credits to help achieve the required reductions,” all of which the president approved and was eventually incorporated into the National Energy Policy.

In fact, President Bush’s “Clear Skies” initiative consists of many of the bullet points laid out months earlier in Sayle’s email to Kelliher.

In addition to Kelliher correspondence with Sayle, he also met with oil and gas industry lobbyists who helped write executive orders that Kelliher passed on directly to the White House. Two months later, President Bush issued executive orders nearly identical to those Kelliher received from the lobbyist’s months earlier.

Hutto Opposes Rule to Protect Endangered Whales

Tuesday’s Post report claims Hutto has, in recent months “helped scale back a rule proposed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to protect North Atlantic right whales — one of the most endangered animals on the planet — from lethal ship strikes. The rule NOAA submitted 1 1/2 years ago originally would have required ships within 30 nautical miles of several East Coast ports to slow to 10 knots or less during parts of the year when the whales are migrating.

“Acting on Cheney’s behalf, Hutto questioned whether there was sufficient scientific evidence to justify the economic costs that the rule would impose on shippers. The White House plans to issue a revised ship strike rule next month that will reduce the perimeter around the ports from 30 to 20 nautical miles and will “sunset” the rule after five years, changes that New England Aquarium research scientist Amy Knowlton said would “undermine the scientific integrity of the rule,” since right whales have been spotted within 30 miles of the ports.

On other occasions, Hutto has questioned whether NOAA was responding too slowly to energy industry petitions. Shell Oil petitioned the agency last year for an “incidental harassment authorization” that would have allowed it to injure or kill a small number of marine mammals in connection with oil and gas drilling off Alaska in 2008; Hutto inquired about getting a quicker decision on Shell’s request in light of the Arctic’s limited drilling season,” the Post reported.