News Release

A personal financial interest may have played a role in wealthy Dallas-based investor Sam Wyly’s $2.5 million expenditure on ads that vilify John McCain’s environmental record while characterizing George W. Bush as an environmental crusader.

Wyly owns GreenMountain.com (formerly Green Mountain Energy Resources), which bills itself as an environmentally clean electricity vendor. Wyly says he ran the ads to make clean energy an issue in the presidential campaign. If so, why did he mount a savage personal attack on McCain?

Last summer, Sen. John McCain reluctantly voted for a tax-cut bill that he had denounced as being riddled with pork. A provision that he singled out for ridicule gave poultry farmers a $30 million renewable energy tax credit (typically used to promote wind energy) for using chicken waste as a fuel to generate electricity.

As traditional electricity monopolies are deregulated, GreenMountain and other vendors are charging a premium for certified “green” electricity. The California-based Center for Resource Solutions set up this Green-e Renewable Electricity Program to certify certain forms of power as “green” renewable energy. Representatives of Wyly’s GreenMountain.com sit on regional and national boards of the Green-e program, including its Mid-Atlantic regional board. That regional board voted on February 25, 2000 to endorse all animal waste incineration as certified green energy.

Mike Ewall, a Pennsylvania Environmental Network activist (215/743-4884) who monitors the Mid-Atlantic regional board’s meetings, says GreenMountain representatives have pushed for the broadest possible certification of renewable energy sources. This includes incineration of poultry and lumber wastes, which Ewall says are dirtier sources of electricity than natural gas [for more information, see Ewall’s website: www.green-energy.org].
 

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