Gristmill: What's not the matter with Kansas

Among the many names swirling in the Obama VP buzz is that of Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius. A second-term Democratic governor in what's traditionally seen as a bastion of conservatism, Sebelius earned national attention as the chair of the Democratic Governors Association in 2007 and for delivering the Democratic response to this year's State of the Union. But for many environmentalists, she made her mark with something else entirely.

Kathleen Sebelius.Photo: Mindy Ricketts

Earlier this year, Sebelius went head to head with a major utility company and the state's Republican-controlled legislature, three times vetoing bills that would have allowed two 700-megawatt, coal-fired power generators to be built in the state.

The battle began in October 2007 when a state environment official rejected Sunflower's permit to build the new plants on the basis of carbon dioxide emissions -- the first such rejection in the U.S. The state legislature fought back with bills that would have allowed the plants to proceed and stripped the state's environmental officials of the authority to grant permits, and the coal industry waged a nasty campaign against the governor. But Sebelius held firm, and in May vetoed the legislation for a third time, to the cheers of climate champions across the nation.

Derided by the coal industry and beloved by its critics, Sebelius has advocated for a major increase in the amount of wind power generated in the state, and pushed for massive reforms to the state's energy plan.

Grist caught up with Sebelius by phone this week to talk more about the coal fight in Kansas, the lessons it can deliver for other states, and what she would bring to Obama's ticket should she get the nod.

Grist: Every major coal group came to Kansas to fight you on this coal plant issue, because they thought it was the heartland and they could win there. So what happened?

Sebelius: I think that Kansans began to understand that there were some real choices to be made. A lot of the debate became about whether or not we were incurring too much harm for the good that would come out of additional power. Very little of the power that was scheduled to be produced was for Kansas. It actually was electricity that would be exported to Colorado and Texas, yet we would own the carbon. And Kansas already has a tremendously heavy footprint -- I think we're 10th per capita in the country in terms of our current carbon footprint. So we would get all the carbon, and we didn't really need the power.

[An] additional factor was that we have an enormous asset in wind energy, and folks in our state are very supportive of maximizing that renewable energy source before we do anything else, recognizing that it's underutilized right now, it has enormous potential, and it has no negative environmental impact. And so before we build any more coal, we should really ramp up wind. So the debate and the discussion was unlike what I think a lot of the coal companies expected, which was just basically a yes or a no, and this was all about economic development and jobs. It became [about] the consequences to that -- what are the choices and the health costs, the environmental costs. And I think for a lot of legislators that became a real tipping point.

Grist: Your message in the coal fight was that building additional plants now is likely to create a significant economic liability for Kansas in the future. So how do we promote this sort of message on a national level?

Sebelius: In the very least it's compelling to make an argument based on the uncertainty of [the future costs of coal]. Virtually everyone acknowledges that there will be some additional financial costs, and until Congress sets a clear set of rules, nobody knows what that is. That leads to an argument about [whether] it is just economically foolish to make a significant investment when you don't know what the final costs will be if there are other alternatives.