C-SPAN Live and in the Flesh

Look, Ma! I'm on TV!

Today was the Subcommittee Hearing on the Carbon Capture and Sequestration Bill in the House. And I went. And it was awesome.

Tracy, from the GA department here, invited me to tag along with her and a couple other people from EEI, so off I went to The Hill. Through the metal detectors, and we were there! The political heart of America! The workplace of the country's biggest movers and shakers! I was probably 10 feet away from someone absurdly powerful every minute I was there!

Anyways, we file into the hearing room, and Reps trickle in throughout the hearing. Apparently punctuality is not a requirement for legislators. Phew! There were 5 witnesses, one industry guy, one environmentalist, one state commissioner, and 2 scientists. All the Reps got to make a brief opening statement (Reptitive? Maybe. Still awesome? Heck yes.), and once everyone had done that they took turns asking the witnesses questions.

During the whole thing, the Reps were making fun of each other, cracking jokes, and generally acting like real people. Wait, what? Weird, I know.

My favorite part was after the environmentalist guy was spouting some statistics and cited BP to make his point. I jotted down on my notepad: BP? British Petroleum? What do they have to do with electricity generation?. Wouldn't you know it, one of the representatives asked him the same thing. I couldn't see his face, but I'm pretty sure Mr. Gu (pronounced "goo", talk about a rough childhood) was bright red seeing as he got totally called out. I felt so smart. Still do, as a matter of fact lol.

Other than the excitement of the hearing, I basically sit at my desk all day and either do nothing, blog, or research. I basically don't know anything about the industry, current rules, or what the issues are. Whoops. It turns out there is a LOT of stuff that I don't know. For example, I looked up CAIR (Clean Air Insterstate Rule) and had to look up a stack of other things before I could figure out what was going on. MACT, BTA, SCR, IGCC... It's a serious bowl of alphabet soup. Luckily I made an acronym cheat sheet where I record all the ones I come across so I don't feel like a total doofus when someone says something random like NAAQS. National Ambient Air Quality Standards, in case you wanted to know. It's nerdy, but extremely helpful.