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Politics : Impeach George W. Bush -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: American Spirit who wrote (6584)	9/11/2001 2:48:07 AM
From: Mephisto	Respond to of 93284

The Senate has an opportunity to undo the damage that the House inflicted upon the American people when the House of Representatives fell for the Cheney-Bush Energy policy. Power Politics in the Senate Editorial From The New York Times September 10, 2001 This has not been a good year for clear thinking about energy. First came the Cheney-Bush "national energy strategy," which presupposed that the country was in the grips of a terrible energy shortage and that the only sure way to address it was to drill aggressively for more oil and gas, remove various regulatory impediments to the burning of coal and build 1,300 new power plants. The House of Representatives swallowed the Cheney-Bush scenario whole and produced an alarmingly unbalanced energy bill with $33 billion in tax breaks — $27 billion for traditional energy producers, only $6 billion for conservation. The Senate must now set things right, presumably at lower cost; even the Bush administration was appalled by the House's price tag . What this country wants is an energy policy that encourages oil and gas exploration without corrupting the environment, finds more efficient ways to use the energy we have and begins planning for the day when the fossil fuels we take for granted are less abundant at home or abroad. This will not be an easy task; energy politics gets nasty (and local) in a hurry. In the House, for example, many normally reliable friends of the environment voted in favor of opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to the oil companies and against increasing fuel economy standards because they were terrified of retaliation from organized labor if they did otherwise. This is a rare chance for the Senate to exercise statesmanship while reaping political rewards as well. Polls show that the two issues on which President Bush is most vulnerable are energy and the environment. The Senate cannot lose if it produces a plan more balanced and enlightened than his. It will be up to Jeff Bingaman, the chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, to devise such a plan. Then Tom Daschle, the Senate majority leader, must sell it to his colleagues. There are three areas where the House bill requires complete overhaul. Improving Efficiency : The House bill dedicates $5.9 billion in various subsidies for energy efficiency and renewable energy, versus about $27 billion for the coal, oil and gas industries. It creates modest tax credits for people who buy hybrid cars, for builders of more energy-efficient homes and for manufacturers of some energy-saving appliances. But it does nothing to improve the efficiency of one of the biggest energy users of all, air-conditioners, and it is here that the Senate could usefully resurrect the tough standards imposed by the Clinton administration that President Bush is trying to roll back. The most important and courageous step, however, and one the House refused to take, would be to close the so-called S.U.V. loophole, under which large vehicles like sport utility vehicles and minivans are classified as light trucks and thus escape the 27.5-mile-per-gallon standard required of ordinary cars. Closing that loophole, which Detroit is perfectly capable of doing, would result in oil savings of one million barrels a day by 2015, more than the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge could be expected to yield in the same time frame. Increasing Supply: At the heart of the House bill is a proposal to open up the refuge's coastal plain to oil exploration. That would yield only six months' to a year's worth of oil, even at favorable prices, while disrupting an ecological treasure. Industry assertions that drilling would create 750,000 new jobs have been widely discredited. There are other steps the committee can take to increase supply. One is to see whether there is an environmentally safe way of tapping and transporting the vast supplies of natural gas at Alaska's Prudhoe Bay, where the oil industry is already firmly ensconced. Such a scheme would be expensive, and in some quarters controversial, but it makes a lot more sense than invading the refuge, the national forests, the Rocky Mountain Front and other sensitive areas on which the oil industry and the Cheney task force have cast a covetous eye. Improving Reliability: The House was so fixated on subsidizing traditional energy producers, including the coal-fired utilities, that it paid no attention to the way electricity is regulated and transported. That was a huge oversight that Mr. Bingaman says he intends to remedy. As the now- receding California crisis demonstrated, electricity deregulation has not gone smoothly. There are transmission problems in the West and Northeast. Power does not move easily from one region to another, and the system is full of disincentives that discourage smaller — and potentially more efficient — producers of power from entering the market. None of this will come easy for Mr. Bingaman and Mr. Daschle. They must resist President Bush's seductive and specious argument that opening up new areas for oil and gas drilling and easing environmental regulations will provide an immediate economic boost. And powerful corporate and labor forces are arrayed against them. But the nation would like them to give it their best shot. nytimes.com.