The Solve Climate blog has this interesting bit of news today, headline, “Climate bill earmarks $500 million for clean coal ‘admin. expenses.”

According to the story:

Rep. Rick Boucher (D-Va.) has been trying for the past year to get Congress to set up an independent corporation dedicated to clean coal development. He introduced the Carbon Capture and Storage Early Deployment Act (HR 6258), which provoked some hearings in 2008, but it went nowhere and died. So this spring he reintroduced the bill, virtually unchanged (HR 1689).

What happened next is further proof of the enormous leverage Boucher wields as a coal state Democrat in shaping national climate legislation.

His bill was incorporated wholesale as pages 52-75 into the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 (ACES), the climate bill Reps. Henry Waxman and Ed Markey are shepherding through the House.

It goes on:

It would create the Carbon Storage Research Corporation and funnel $10 billion to support the corporation over the next 10 years, with up to $500 million designated simply for “administrative expenses” to be spent at the discretion of its officers.

The most curious part is where all that money is going to come from. The answer: from every ratepayer who uses electricity, in the form of an almost invisible tax that would average 50-cents-a-month and conveniently referred to as an “assessment.”

Interestingly:

There is no parallel provision in the Waxman-Markey bill to set up a a federally created corporation … to support solar or wind energy development at such an astonishingly generous scale.

Read the whole thing here.  And remember, the coal industry is against the Waxman-Markey bill …