This article in particular shows how Bush Jr, a one time visionary on renewable energy in Texas, flip flopped once he became President and became anti-renewable energy in deeds, if not in words...
Bush’s Alternative Energy Flip-Flop
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD
theboard.blogs.nytimes.com
The White House has raised several objections to the breakthrough energy bill recently negotiated by House leaders. But there’s an interesting and ironic backstory to one of these complaints.
In a dyspeptic letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Allan Hubbard, the director of the White House national economic council, states that Mr. Bush is particularly unhappy with the bill’s Renewable Electricity Standard — a provision that would require states to produce 15 percent of their energy from renewable sources like wind and solar by 2020. The provision, Mr. Hubbard says, is “overly prescriptive” and would hurt consumers.
What the letter does not say, and what the White House would rather we not remember, is that as governor of Texas, Mr. Bush enthusiastically signed into law a renewable electricity mandate that was part of a broader bill encouraging deregulation and greater competition in the utility industry.
This 1999 mandate was extraordinarily forward-looking for its time (22 states have such mandates now) and the results were immediate. Texas now produces more wind power than any other state, to the great benefit of consumers of electricity and farmers who rent out their land for the giant turbines that create the power. Texas actually accounted for more than half the new wind energy installed nationwide this year.
One of the White House’s objections is that the bill’s “one size fits all” formula would create compliance problems for states with only modest amounts of renewable energy. It’s certainly true that few states are as reliably windy as Texas. But the bill has other ways states can satisfy their obligations, including a creative trading scheme that allows states that cannot meet their quota to buy allowances from states that can.
Mr. Hubbard’s letter doesn’t mention Mr. Bush’s real problem with the plan. It is this: the bill would force the power companies, who tend to like things the way they are, and who are among the President’s most ardent supporters, to make bigger and faster investments in cleaner sources of energy than they want to. Mr. Bush is not opposed to technological advances. But he is definitely opposed to mandates, especially those that discomfit his friends in the coal, gas, oil and power industries.
There is a historical pattern here. As a presidential candidate, Mr. Bush pledged to impose mandatory limits on emissions of carbon dioxide, the main global warming gas. But somebody got to him — industry, Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, probably all three.
In fairly short order, Mr. Bush renounced not only his campaign pledge but the 1997 Kyoto Protocol on climate change. That angered America’s closest allies and humiliated Christine Todd Whitman, the administrator of the Environmental Protection. She joined the administration in the misplaced hope that President Bush would turn out to be as adventurous on issues she cared about as Governor Bush appeared to be. |
