NCEP helped pass a 2007 law increasing fuel economy standards for the first time in years. Bipartisan energy panel calls it quits

A bipartisan panel of well-connected energy experts is ending its work after eight years of pitching several ideas successfully into law – although the biggest fish got away.

The National Commission on Energy Policy follows several prominent environmental groups that also have closed or recalibrated their campaigns following the collapse this summer of a comprehensive global warming and energy bill.


Formed in the early days of the George W. Bush administration, NCEP's collection of Democratic and Republican specialists tried to bridge deep partisan chasms over global warming, fuel economy and the future of coal, oil and nuclear power.

Congress replicated several of its suggestions in 2005 and 2007 energy laws, but one of the group's primary missions – a cap on greenhouse gases – couldn't get enough traction in the Senate despite a large Democratic majority and President Barack Obama as an ally in the White House.

"After the inability to advance an agenda led by climate change, our sense was it's important to step back and reevaluate," Jason Grumet, NCEP's executive director, told POLITICO.

The group will officially announce its closure Tuesday.

Grumet, a former 2008 Obama campaign adviser, will launch a new energy program in the spring under the banner of the Bipartisan Policy Center, another group he runs. Talks are already under way with several soon-to-be retiring members of Congress about signing up to help with the energy work at BPC.

"Honestly, it's refreshing to shake the Etch-a-Sketch and you get to draw a new picture," Grumet said. "The energy debate needs a new picture."

That work will likely dovetail with Congress’ efforts to address the ballooning federal debt. “The obligation to address the $14 trillion overhang is going to force change in everything from tax credits to regulation of energy markets,” Grumet said.

NCEP launched in 2002 with a multimillion-dollar grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. At the time, Congress was at a standstill on energy legislation, with Democrats challenging Vice President Dick Cheney over closed-door deliberations he'd led with industry to come up with the administration's energy policies.

"It appeared that there really was no oxygen for nontraditional approaches to energy development," Deputy Interior Secretary David Hayes, who at the time was a private attorney, said in an interview. "It was all about a need to site a zillion new coal plants. The National Commission really provided a vehicle to step back and take a broader look on a sector by sector basis at our energy economy and open up the possibilities."

NCEP's membership over the years has covered the political spectrum, including co-chairs William Reilly, a former EPA Administrator under George H.W. Bush, John Holdren, now Obama's top White House science adviser, Exelon Corp. CEO John Rowe and Susan Tierney, a former Energy Department official from the Clinton administration. Other participants were former CIA Director James Woolsey, Andrew Lundquist, an industry lobbyist who served as Cheney's top energy adviser in the White House, Nobel Laureate Mario Molina and Ralph Cavanagh, co-director of energy programs at the Natural Resources Defense Council.

In 2004, NCEP released a series of recommendations including calls for a mandatory cap-and-trade program for greenhouse gases, increased nuclear and clean coal production and stronger automobile fuel economy standards.

With Republicans controlling Congress, Bush in 2005 signed an energy law with several of the commission's ideas, including a complete Interior Department inventory of oil and gas resources on the Outer Continental Shelf and $200 million per year for research on coal-based gasification and combustion technologies at power plants.

Two years later, a Democrat-led Congress sent Bush another energy law that included the first increases in fuel economy for automobiles in decades – one of the ideas NCEP's members had long championed.

One of the commission’s ideas that generated heated debate but didn’t reach the finish line was its 2004 call for a cap-and-trade program with a firm ceiling on the price of a greenhouse gas allowance.

Power companies, labor groups and several moderate senators endorsed the approach as a way to give industry a level of economic certainty. Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee Chairman Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) and Alaska Republican Sens. Lisa Murkowski and Ted Stevens included it in a climate bill they introduced in 2007.

But environmental groups complained that the so-called "safety valve" would stymie clean-energy technology innovation and it went through several more modifications to ensure compliance prices didn’t stay too low. The House in 2009 passed a cap-and-trade measure reflective of the compromise, but the bill died in the Senate.

On the energy front, several front-line groups from the left have shifted or shuttered their operations since the demise of the climate bill. Al Gore's Alliance for Climate Protection has scaled back its field work from 25 states to about seven. And the Clean Energy Works coalition that included greens, labor and religious groups has put its campaign on the backburner.