Americans for Balanced Energy Choices Executive Director Joe Lucas today issued the following statement ahead of President Bush's climate change summit on September 27-28 in Washington, DC.

"As world leaders meet in Washington, DC this week, I encourage them to have meaningful discussions about investing in technologies that are needed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions while still maintaining access to low-cost and reliable energy.

To meet these challenges at home, we must ensure the development and deployment of technologies for our domestic energy resources if we are going to meet our ever-growing energy appetite. This must be done in conjunction with making a significant reduction in the amount of global carbon emissions.

The President already has said this summit would place a special emphasis on how nations can work with the private sector to promote clean energy technologies. I would like to remind him that we already have the model for how to meaningfully reduce carbon emissions.

Recognizing that the existing clean air laws were going to be strengthened in early 1990's, the nation embarked upon a technology investment program. The federal government invested more than $5 billion, and industry matched that investment, in fact more, to develop and demonstrate the technologies to meet the more stringent environmental standards that were enacted in the early 1990's.

Why was the federal government's participation necessary? In many cases, these were first-of-their-kind technologies and bringing new technologies to the marketplace always brings an amount of risk. However, through this beneficial partnership, not only was the electric utility industry able to meet more stringent environmental standards, but this happened without any significant impacts to consumers.

It is my sincere hope the next two days bring a renewed focus on investing in the technologies that we will need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions while still maintaining access to low-cost and reliable energy."

About ABEC

Americans for Balanced Energy Choices (ABEC) is a non-profit, non-partisan group that promotes a dialogue with recognized community leaders across the nation to discuss balancing America's growing demand for electricity with the need to protect the environment. Because of its prominence in the nation's energy mix, electricity from coal is a major focus of the dialogue. For more information, go to .