Here’s a statement just issued by West Virginia Sen. Jay Rockefeller about the death of legislation to deal with the climate crisis:

I am continuing to push hard for my bill to suspend EPA action for two years, so that Congress, not federal regulators, can set national energy policy.

I have been arguing for months that more work and new solutions are needed for tackling climate change – the cap and trade proposals introduced in the last year don’t work for West Virginia.  So the decision this week to focus in the Senate on the oil spill and some non-controversial energy efficiency initiatives is a sound idea with bipartisan support.

But in the meantime, the EPA could do real harm to our economy if allowed to go forward precipitously, without additional direction from Congress. We also can’t wait to continue advancing clean coal technologies, like carbon capture and storage.

That’s why both my EPA and CCS bills are such a high priority.

I wonder if Sen. Rockefeller has read the U.S. Government Accountability Office report on his CCS bill yet … remember, it said:

Moreover, without a national carbon policy to reduce CO2 emissions nearly all stakeholders said CCS would not be widely deployed. Without a tax or a sufficiently restrictive limit on CO2 emissions, plant operators lack an economic incentive to use CCS technologies. Reports by IPCC, NAS, and the Global CCS Institute have all highlighted the importance of a carbon policy to incentivize the use of CCS.

You think he’s asked American Electric Power about this? Remember, AEP supported the climate change bill that passed the House of Representatives. And how about the United Mine Workers, which said this about that House-passed bill:

As it stands now, the amount of money dedicated to coal in this bill is remarkable, and the future of coal will be intact.