At a hearing March 13 on “Keystone XL and the National Interest Determination,” the Senate Foreign Relations Committee will hear testimony from James Hansen, Sierra Club executive director Michael Brune, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and Gen. (Ret.) James Jones, former Obama national security adviser and now a paid advisor to the American Petroleum Institute.
The hearing is scheduled to convene at 11:15 a.m. on Thursday, March 13, in 419 Dirksen Senate Office Building. It will be webcast on the Committee website. Witness panel as of March 11:
President and CEO Institute for 21st Century Energy
U.S. Chamber of Commerce
Washington, DC
Director of the Program on Climate Science, Awareness and Solutions Adjunct Professor
Columbia University Earth Institute
New York, NY
Executive Director
Sierra Club
San Francisco, CA
President
Jones Group International
Washington, DC
The Committee is chaired by Robert Menendez (D-NJ) and includes, among others, Democratic Senators Barbara Boxer (CA) and Ed Markey (MA), and Republican Senators Bob Corker (TN)(Ranking Member), Marco Rubio (FL), John McCain (AZ), and Rand Paul (KY). We’ll see who shows up. Should be interesting.
Hansen and Brune should make a formidable combination on the anti-pipeline side.
It should be noted that Gen. Jim Jones, USMC (Ret.), who earlier served as Commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps and then National Security Adviser to President Obama in 2009-2010, now has his own consulting firm and apparently is currently a paid advisor (lobbyist?) to the American Petroleum Institute and the Chamber of Commerce. So you can expect predictable energy policy pro-pipeline talking points from him at the hearing, filtered through his prestigious military career.
(Thanks to Media Matters for America, BuzzFeed, and Nick Sundt.)
Earlier posts:
Comment to State Department on Keystone XL pipeline “National Interest Determination”