With help from Elana Schor, Andrew Restuccia, Nick Juliano and Esther Whieldon

TGIF, AND FIGT! “Friday It’s Green Testimony,” at the DNC, you see. Environmentalists will present the priorities they would like to see included in the party platform at today’s Democratic National Committee hearing in Phoenix. The hearing follows a similar two-day session in Washington last week, and marks the last time the committee will hear testimony before two more sessions on drafting, concluding in early July. Expect a lot of pressure today on the DNC platform committee to “keep it in the ground” — or stop all fossil-fuel leases on public lands — from more left-leaning green groups that rallied around Bernie Sanders’ climate hawk-tailored message.

Who’s showing up? The League of Conservation Voters, Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, and Environmental Action are all preparing testimony. The Sierra Club will be formally represented today by the Democracy Initiative, but it has privately shared recommendations with the platform committee, according to a copy obtained by ME. The six-page document calls for a permanent extension of clean energy tax credits and an end to new oil and gas drilling on public lands, among other proposals.

At today’s meeting, Environmental Action policy director Anthony Rogers-Wright is set to warn Democrats that President Obama, despite his second-term embrace of climate action, does not exactly have a perfect record.

“Climate denial is not limited to GOP boogeymen like Senators James Inhofe and Ted Cruz,” Rogers-Wright wrote in prepared remarks shared with ME. “By allowing the crude oil export ban to be lifted, and by allowing and considering an increase in offshore drilling in the Arctic and Gulf of Mexico, Democrats too are denying the science of climate change.”

Where’s Team Bernie? The Sanders campaign has several environmentalist allies on the platform committee, including 350.org co-founder Bill McKibben and Native American activist Deborah Parker. The Vermont senator delivered marching orders of his own in a speech to his backers late Thursday, promising to push Democrats for “the most progressive platform in its history.”

Sanders specifically urged backers to fight for a carbon tax and a ban on fracking, two other priorities that the DNC will hear pleas to support during today’s hearing — despite a decided lack of unity among environmental groups. LCV Action, Sierra Club, and the Natural Resources Defense Council Action Fund have all endorsed Clinton, whose camp is in favor of strict fracking regulations but avoids talk of a “ban” that the federal government would find impossible to enforce.

What about shared priorities? The DNC won’t be without crowd-pleasing options for its environmental platform. Energy efficiency, expanding renewable energy standards, and rallying around the implementation of and building on the Paris climate accord are expected to win favor from greens.

FRIDAY AND EVERYONE’S MOVING ! I’m your host Eric Wolff, and the goofy ads are already rolling out! Yesterday morning the U.S. Chamber of Commerce released an ad suggesting that Pennsylvania Senate candidate Katie McGinty wants to tax all the energy, even the hectic energy of kids on a playground (Featuring the line, “RUN JIMMY RUN!”) and then last night a PAC decided that Donald Trump’s hand size still has some mileage left in it and ran a one-minute commercial ran on MSNBC. If you spot crazy campaign ads like these, please send it, along with all your energy tips, quips, and comments to [email protected], or follow us on Twitter @ericwolff, @Morning_Energy, and @POLITICOPro.

HOUSE FISHING EXPEDITION MAY HELP WOTUS FOES: Oversight Chairman Jason Chaffetz has turned up more than 30,000 pages of internal Obama administration records as part of his investigation of how the Waters of the U.S. rule came to be. Whatever his endgame, Chaffetz’s cache could be a boon to the states and industry interests who filed lawsuits seeking to overturn WOTUS, Pro’s Annie Snider reports. That’s because members of Congress can demand a wider array of information than plaintiffs in court, something the Utah Republican already demonstrated by obtaining and releasing hot-button Army Corps of Engineers memos showing discord within the administration over the rule. “We stand for openness and transparency. I think the American people have a right to see these documents,” Chaffetz said of his new haul.

This wouldn’t be the first time critics looked to Capitol Hill for help in court. “It’s what I call the phenomenon of parallelism: you have litigation going and you have people going to Congress and stimulating Congress to do oversight,” said Stanley Brand, a former general counsel to the House under Speaker Tip O’Neill who now teaches at Penn State University’s Dickinson School of Law.

What’s in there, and will courts be interested? Chaffetz says his staff is still digging through the documents — 13,000 pages of which were just handed over Wednesday, as the committee prepared a resolution to hold Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs Administrator Howard Shelanski in contempt of Congress over the delay. But WOTUS critics will be looking for signs of confusion or disagreement between EPA and the Army Corps while they were writing the regulation, also known as the Clean Water Rule. It remains to be seen what could make it into a court case — agencies typically argue executive privilege to keep deliberative documents out of the official record.

HEY, SEN. CANTWELL, IS TIME RUNNING OUT FOR ENERGY BILL? “No, Jiminy, no, no, no, no, no, nope,” Sen. Maria Cantwell, the top Democrat on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, told reporters when asked if she was worried about the dwindling number of days House and Senate negotiators have to reconcile their dueling energy bills. Six principle negotiators met Tuesday night, but no breakthroughs followed this week.

Cantwell said she wants “some recognition of the imbalance” between the Senate’s carefully negotiated, bipartisan bill and the House package, which passed mostly on party-lines and has drawn strong opposition from the White House. But she is not ready to give up. “I would like to get this done and we’d like to move forward on it, but we can’t jeopardize all the hard work of the Senate for just political hard line votes,” she said.

Tick Tock the Crocodile: The House has three legislative weeks before the summer break, and the Senate has four.

ENERGY EXTENDERS MAY NOT TAKE OFF WITH FAA BILL: Hope is dwindling for a package of energy tax breaks to be hooked onto the FAA reauthorization in the House, Pro Tax’s Brain Faler reports. The package of tax incentives for small wind and fuel cells, among other technologies, were left out of a tax deal in December. Proponents have been trying to find a vehicle for them ever since, but the FAA bill, which briefly seemed a promising carrier, appears to lack the lift needed to carry the package. “We saw what happened last time when the extension got loaded up, and there was some overreach by many members in the House and Senate and we didn’t get anywhere,” said Republican Rep. Tom Reed, a supporter of the extenders. “My fear is that we’re going down that same path.”

INHOFE: IGNORE THE EPA BEHIND THE CURTAIN: Inhofe is telling states not to pay any attention to the Clean Energy Incentive Program EPA proposed Thursday. The program creates an incentive for states to get a jump on building renewable power in advance of when the Clean Power Plan might go into effect. Of course, the Supreme Court stayed the rule while it’s being adjudicated, so EPA’s continued work is infuriating rule opponents. “EPA’s continued work on the Clean Energy Incentive Program is inconsistent with the stay and part of EPA’s last-ditch effort to save the president’s legacy carbon mandates,” Inhofe said in a statement. “States should not waste their resources or worry with the EPA’s latest actions.”

NUCLEAR PLANT’S WATCH IS ENDED: The Omaha Public Power District’s board of directors decided on Thursday to retire the Fort Calhoun nuclear plant by the end of this year, citing high costs and the lack of sufficient incentives in EPA’s Clean Power Plan for carbon-free nuclear power. The board said the decision to shutter the plant is not expected to result in a general rate increase at least through 2021. Retiring the plant and “rebalancing” the generation portfolio will save the OPPD between $735 million and $994 million over the next two decades, according to an outside report cited by the board. Nuclear Energy Institute President Marvin Fertel lamented the plant’s closing, which he said “will have long-lasting negative effects and will make it far more difficult for Nebraska and the nation to reach their clean air and climate change commitments.” The single-unit 478-megawatt plant’s license was previously slated to run into 2033.

OECD: A FOR U.S. ECONOMY, C FOR EMISSION: The U.S. economy is recovering nicely, but the country is not doing as well as other advanced nations in reducing its carbon emissions, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development said Thursday in its economic survey of the nation. “The US performs relatively poorly compared to the rest of the OECD on CO2 emissions reductions despite the strengthening of fuel economy standards and significant use of policies and incentives for renewable energy and energy efficiency at the State level,” the organization said. It then urged the U.S. to put a price on carbon emissions.

WHITE HOUSE PUSHING ENERGY STORAGE, MICROGRIDS: The White House Thursday said it would act to promote energy storage and microgrids throughout the power grid. Energy storage has long been touted as the next step in allowing variable generation like wind and solar to provide steady power flow, but it is not widely deployed on the grid. Microgrids allow discrete power networks like a college campus or a military base to detach from the grid and become self-supplying. In its announcement, the White House announced several steps, including a new report from the Council of Economic Advisers, a request for information on building-level energy storage from the General Services Administration, and the construction of microgrids on military bases. “Our grid is beginning to behave very differently. Customers are becoming generators and new technologies have made transmission a two-way street,” Sen. Martin Heinrich said at a White House summit to discuss emerging grid technologies.

NYU GIVES DIVESTMENT A PASS: New York University’s board decided Thursday not to divest from fossil fuels, despite a student request, POLITICO New York’s Conor Skelding reports. While a handful of universities have decided to stop their direct investments in fossil fuels, NYU joins a much longer list of elite universities that has decided to leave their investments in place. “To accomplish the goals proposed in the Senate resolution would require us to invest only with firms that have renounced fossil fuel related investments. This would significantly limit the choices we may make in investment managers, thereby limiting our ability to seek out the best long-term investment opportunities for the endowment,” they wrote.

QUICK HITS

— Environmental Groups Change Tune on Nuclear Power, WSJ

— Judge: Waste water from Colstrip ponds ‘alarming’, Great Falls Tribune

— U.S. Navy ‘Green Fleet’ fills up with Italian-made biofuel, Reuters

— Ex-Anchorage Mayor Dan Sullivan drops out of Senate race, Alaska Dispatch News

— Biggest U.S. Airlines Miss Cheapest Jet Fuel Prices in 12 Years, Bloomberg

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