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Non-Tech : The ENRON Scandal -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mephisto who wrote (3210)	3/1/2002 2:23:59 PM
From: Mephisto	Respond to of 5185

Two Thousand Acres The New York Times March 1, 2002 By PAUL KRUGMAN According to my calculations, my work space occupies only a few square inches of office floor. You may find this implausible, but I'm using a well-accepted methodology. Well accepted, that is, among supporters of oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Last week Interior Secretary Gale Norton repeated the standard response to concerns about extensive oil development in one of America's last wild places: "The impact will be limited to just 2,000 out of 1.9 million acres of the refuge." That number comes from the House version of the Bush-Cheney energy plan, which promises that "surface acreage covered by production and support facilities" will not exceed 2,000 acres. It's a reassuring picture: a tiny enclave of development, practically lost in the Arctic vastness. But that picture is a fraud. Development won't be limited to a small enclave: according to the U.S. Geological Survey, oil in ANWR is scattered in many separate pools, so drilling rigs would be spread all across the coastal plain. The roads linking those rigs aren't part of the 2,000 acres: they're not "production and support facilities." And "surface acreage covered" is very narrowly defined: if a pipeline snakes across the terrain on a series of posts, only the ground on which those posts rest counts; bare ground under the pipeline isn't considered "covered." Now you see how I work in such a small space. By those definitions, my "impact" is limited to floor areas that literally have stuff resting on them: the bottoms of the legs on my desk and chair, and the soles of my shoes. The rest of my office floor is pristine wilderness. There's a lesson here that goes well beyond the impact of oil drilling on caribou. Deceptive advertising pervades the administration's effort to sell the nation on its drill-and-burn energy strategy. In fact, those of us following this issue can't see why people made such a fuss about the Pentagon's plan to disseminate false information. How would that differ from current policy? Remember that this latest push to open up ANWR for drilling follows on the heels of an attempt to portray a plan to do nothing much about global warming as a major policy initiative. What else has the administration said about its energy plans that isn't true? Top of the list, surely, is the claim that drilling in ANWR is a national security issue, the key to ending our dependence on imported oil. In fact, the Energy Information Administration's preferred scenario says that even a decade after development begins, ANWR will produce only between 600,000 and 900,000 barrels of oil a day - a small fraction of the 11 million barrels we currently import. Then there's the absurd claim that ANWR drilling will create hundreds of thousands of jobs - a claim based on a decade-old study by, you guessed it, the oil industry's trade association. But the most nefarious aspect of the administration's energy propaganda is its persistent effort to link energy shortages to environmentalism - an effort that, it's now clear, has often been consciously dishonest. For example, last spring Dick Cheney lamented the fact that the U.S. hadn't built any new oil refineries since the 1970's, linking that lack of construction to environmental restrictions. I wrote a column last May pointing out that environmentalism had nothing to do with it, that refineries hadn't been built because the industry had excess capacity. What I didn't know was that several weeks earlier staffers at the Environmental Protection Agency had written a scathing critique of Mr. Cheney's draft energy report, making exactly the same point. The final version of the report, by the way, doesn't say in so many words that clean-air rules cause gasoline shortages - but it conveys that impression by innuendo. For now, it's possible for diligent citizens to cut through these deceptions - for example, you can read on the Web what the U.S. Geological Survey actually has to say about oil reserves in the Arctic. But I keep wondering when the administration will shut down those Web sites. After all, under John Ashcroft's new rules, agencies are no longer instructed to release information whenever possible; they're supposed to refuse requests to release information whenever there's a legal basis for doing so. And honest assessments of oil reserves in environmentally sensitive locations might be useful to terrorists - you never know. nytimes.com

To: Mephisto who wrote (3210)	3/3/2002 2:40:22 PM
From: Mephisto	Respond to of 5185

Energy Firms Were Heard on Air Rules, a Critic Says The New York Times March 2, 2002 By DON VAN NATTA Jr. WASHINGTON, March 1 - In considering new rules for enforcing the Clean Air Act, a senior official at the Energy Department consulted 64 energy corporations and industry trade groups and only one environmental group, a Democratic congressman charged today. The congressman, Representative Henry A. Waxman of California, disclosed those findings in a letter to President Bush. Mr. Waxman said the corporations whose industry representatives met with the Energy Department had contributed a total of $6.4 million to Mr. Bush and other Republican candidates since 1999. The energy corporations gave a total of $2 million to Democratic candidates over the same period, Mr. Waxman found. Mr. Waxman argued that the pattern was similar to a report published in The New York Times today that 18 of the energy industry's top 25 financial contributors to the Republican Party advised Vice President Dick Cheney's national energy task force last year. "As in the case of the Cheney energy task force, access to the Department of Energy on this crucial energy and environmental issue appears to be heavily tilted toward industry and closely correlated with campaign contributions," Mr. Waxman wrote to the president. The meetings involved Frank Blake, the deputy secretary of energy, who represents the department in the administration's redrafting of rules for a program called new source review that requires corporations to modernize pollution controls when they upgrade their factories. Jeanne Lopatto, a department spokeswoman, said Mr. Blake had eight meetings over four months with a total of 65 people, including a representative of the Natural Resources Defense Council. She said campaign contributions had nothing to do with the consultations. "That's Blake's job," Ms. Lopatto said. "We interact with a wide array of people - environmental groups, conservation groups, industry representatives and think tanks - in the course of our work, and we will continue to do so." Mr. Waxman said lower-level staff members at the department met with other environmental groups on the issue on July 18, 2001. That same day, Mr. Blake was meeting with representatives of the Sinclair Oil Company, Mr. Waxman said. "I also understand that environmental groups have had two meetings with officials of the Environmental Protection Agency, but according to the groups, the E.P.A. did not seriously engage the environmental groups nor follow up on any of the issues raised," he wrote. Mr. Waxman urged Mr. Bush to reconsider his refusal to disclose the list of executives who met with the energy task force last year, which is being sought by the General Accounting Office in a lawsuit filed against the vice president. Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney have refused to identify the industry executives who met with the energy task force last spring before it sketched out a new national energy policy. Earlier this week, a federal judge here ordered the Energy Department to release 7,500 pages of documents related to the task force. Today, Mr. Bush said he was in favor of releasing the material. "I hope the Energy Department gets the documents out there as quickly as they possibly can," Mr. Bush told reporters in Des Moines. But Mr. Bush drew the line at releasing details of meetings between Mr. Cheney, the chairman of the energy task force, and industry executives. "I receive advice and in order for people to give me sound advice that information ought not to be public," Mr. Bush said. ExxonMobil, the second-largest energy industry donor to the Republican Party, confirmed today that its executives met with Mr. Cheney. It was among the handful of companies that had declined to comment earlier this week about whether its executives had met with Mr. Cheney or members of the task force, although it did say that its interests were represented by the American Petroleum Institute, a trade council. In an interview today, company officials confirmed that the ExxonMobil chief executive, Lee Raymond, met with Mr. Cheney for 30 minutes on Feb. 8, 2001. ExxonMobil officials also met with task force staff members for 45 minutes on Feb. 14 and made a presentation about future energy supply and demand, the company disclosed. The company said that on the same day, executives made a similar presentation to the General Accounting Office and to staff members of both political parties on the House and Senate Energy Committees. Explaining ExxonMobil's decision to disclose the meetings, Tom J. Cirigliano, a company spokesman, said: `We decided to talk about it now because there's a lot of misinformation floating out there right now. So we wanted to make clear Exxon Mobil's position on the need for a coherent energy policy." nytimes.com