Representative Henry Waxman of California was voted Chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee today. Waxman ousted longtime committee Chairman John Dingell of Michigan by a vote of 137-122 in a secret ballot amongst House Democrats. Dingell had been the Chair or Ranking Member of the Energy & Commerce panel for the past 28 years. The Waxman-Dingell battle for the committee was one of the more hotly contested intra-party battles in DC in recent memory and clearly signals a new direction in the House regarding Energy Policy.

Waxman holding the gavel on energy matters in the House is what we call good news around here. Michigan Democrat Rep. Dingell was one of the staunchest advocates of the policy wishes of the Big Three Detroit automakers that the Capitol Dome had ever seen and it’s kind of hard to drastically change the energy policy, the way President-elect Obama and the Democratic leadership have proposed, when a key committee chair from your own party undermines you.

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Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi is sticking to her guns, firmly rejecting the notion the House solely vote on whether or not to drill offshore.   The California Democrat will instead introduce comprehensive energy legislation which includes limiting tax breaks for oil companies and funding alternative, renewable energy with the royalties from new drilling in approved areas.   The Republican backed measures for a simple yes or no vote on offshore drilling, sidestepping or ignoring all other energy concerns in the United States for the GOP’s corporate oil sponsors, were described as “a hoax on the American people,” by the Speaker.

The Baltimore-bred, San Francisco Congresswoman went on to tell KQED television’s “This Week in Northern California“:

You want to drill? We want the royalties for the American people, and we want that to pay for renewable energy resources. We want to connect all that together.

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John McCain wants to unleash the power of American innovation to ween the country off oil with an old fashioned, but effective motivator; a cash prize. The presumptive Republican nominee for President proposed awarding a $300 Million prize to the inventor who could come up with a car battery far advanced from the current technology available, in a recent speech at Fresno State University.

While enormous strides have been made in recent years in battery technology, what’s currently available for mass production limits plug in electric cars to about a 250 mile range per charge, and leaves little to no room for trunk storage with the space needed for the Lithium Ion Batteries. The batteries are also costly which prompted Senator McCain to require the winner of his proposed challenge to deliver battery power at 30% of current costs having as he put it, “the size, capacity, cost and power to leapfrog the commercially available plug-in hybrids or electric cars.”

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