Leadership Quote by Jerry Costello

Technocratic optimism does a lot of work here. Costello’s sentence is built to reassure two audiences at once: the industry-facing crowd that wants “clean coal” kept on the table, and the efficiency-minded voters who hear “conservation” and “lowering consumption” as moral and economic common sense. The phrase “in addition to” is the quiet tell. It frames clean coal not as the controversial centerpiece it was in mid-2000s energy politics, but as just one item in a broader, supposedly balanced package.

The intent is legislative salesmanship: to brand an “energy conference agreement” as pragmatic and forward-looking without litigating the hard parts (cost, enforcement, emissions). “Provisions instrumental” is classic Capitol Hill fog language. It signals seriousness while withholding specifics. Instrumental how? Through mandates, incentives, reporting requirements, or voluntary targets? The ambiguity is not accidental; it lets supporters project their preferred mechanism onto the bill and lets skeptics downplay the bill’s bite.

The subtext is a political hedge against a public increasingly aware of climate risk but still tied to fossil-fuel economics. “Clean coal” was, in that era, a rhetorical bridge between environmental pressure and coal-state realities, promising technological redemption without demanding immediate structural change. Pairing it with conservation language helps launder that promise: if the agreement also “lowers consumption,” then the fossil-fuel add-on can be cast as transitional rather than regressive.

Context matters: conference agreements are compromise artifacts. This line reads like a caption for a compromise - broad enough to survive internal party tensions, narrow enough to avoid triggering a policy fight on the floor.