It's been "logrolled and porked!"
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November 15, 2003
Accord Reached by Republicans for Energy Bill
By CARL HULSE NEW YORK TIMES
WASHINGTON, Nov. 14 — Congressional Republicans announced Friday that they had agreed on wide-ranging national energy legislation that would provide billions of dollars in tax breaks for power producers and impose new standards intended to reduce the chances of blackouts like the one that hit the Northeast and Midwest last summer.
The proposal, which the Republican leadership will try to push through Congress next week, was stripped of a provision that would have opened the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil exploration. But that victory for conservation groups did not quiet critics who consider the measure — the first major energy bill in a decade — too generous to the oil and gas industry and lacking in proposals to promote energy efficiency.
Senator Pete V. Domenici, Republican of New Mexico and chairman of the conference committee resolving differences between the House and Senate bills, acknowledged that the measure, drafted almost exclusively by Republicans, was bound to attract criticism. But Mr. Domenici said it would help the nation increase and diversify its energy sources, ease a growing dependence on natural gas and improve the aging electrical transmission grid.
"We did a total reform of the electricity laws in the country," Mr. Domenici said. "We are very hopeful that what we have done will, over time, minimize if not avoid blackouts like the one we had in New York."
The voluminous measure, the passage of which would be a victory for President Bush, was scheduled to be made public on Saturday. Lawmakers and senior aides said the electricity section would impose new mandatory reliability standards on large electricity providers. It would allow utilities to decide whether to join regional transmission organizations that some experts believe could help reduce the risk of widespread power failures. The federal government will also be given the authority to designate the routes of new high-voltage lines of "national significance" if states and local governments cannot settle land disputes.
The measure does not go as far as the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission had proposed in its initiative to standardize the electrical grid nationwide, a plan that utilities in the South and Northwest lobbied hard to keep out of the measure. But industry and federal officials said the enactment of an energy law would spur investment in upgrading the transmission infrastructure.
Authors of the bill agreed to double the use of corn-based ethanol as a gasoline additive, a provision viewed as essential to building political support among farm state legislators. As part of that deal, producers of the additive MTBE, which has been blamed for groundwater pollution in many parts of the country, would gain immunity from product liability lawsuits and the substance would be banned nationwide as of 2015. The MTBE provision was a priority of Representative Tom DeLay, the House majority leader, and other lawmakers from Louisiana and Texas, where MTBE is produced.
Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, has threatened to filibuster the energy measure over the MTBE provision, which he called the "worst break for polluters" he had seen in two decades in Congress. But it was unclear whether enough Democrats would object to the measure to prevent it moving forward.
Energy legislation has been a chief goal of the Bush administration, and passage of the measure would be a victory for President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, who headed an energy task force early in 2001 and came under criticism for conducting much of its business in secret. Mr. Cheney personally interceded in the Congressional talks when they became snagged on tax policy. Late Friday night, the White House issued a statement by President Bush in which he said that he applauded the conferees for reaching an agreement on the measure.
"A good energy bill is part of my six-point economic plan to create the conditions for job creation and a sustained recovery," the president said in his statement. "By making America less reliant on foreign sources of energy, we also will make our nation more secure."
But the outlook for the measure was uncertain, mainly in the Senate, where Democrats are angry that they were not allowed a role in the negotiations. Some Republicans were unhappy with the emerging bill as well. In a letter this week to Mr. Domenici, Senator Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania, raised several concerns about the direction of the measure, and other Republicans from the Northeast have indicated they will oppose it.
Lobbyists and lawmakers said the key to passage might be the Democratic leader, Senator Tom Daschle, who has pushed the ethanol plan to benefit corn growers in his home state, South Dakota, and across the Midwest. If Mr. Daschle supports the measure, they say, the threat of a filibuster will fade.
"I'm not going to pop any Champagne corks until we finish our conference meeting next week, until the House votes and the Senate votes," said Representative Billy Tauzin, Republican of Louisiana and the chief House negotiator on the measure.
Senator Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico, the senior Democrat on the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, said he would be reviewing the measure over the weekend to figure out which way his colleagues should vote.
"I think we are being asked to take it or leave it," said Mr. Bingaman, who said the fact that Arctic drilling was not included was not enough to let the bill pass. "The old adage, `It could have been worse,' is not an adequate judgment for people to vote for it."
Though Mr. Domenici and Mr. Tauzin said they would present the measure to a full House-Senate conference committee on Monday, Republican tax writers were still working out some final details Friday, and no price tag for the tax incentives was available. But the bill was expected to provide $18 billion or more in tax breaks to promote greater use of coal in power plants, to renew interest in nuclear power, to encourage oil companies to drill in deep waters in the Gulf of Mexico and to expand the generation of power through wind, among other things.
The measure apparently does not include a provision sought by Mr. Bingaman and others to require electricity producers to increase their use of renewable fuels, nor does it institute new auto mileage standards that advocates say could significantly lower petroleum consumption.
Knowing they will come under fire for the wide benefits the measure grants to the energy industry in the form of tax breaks, research projects, incentives for a new natural gas pipeline from Alaska and easing of regulatory requirements, Republican authors on Friday began promoting the capacity of the measure to create hundreds of thousands of jobs. "This is, in essence, a jobs bill," Mr. Tauzin said.
Environmental organizations immediately attacked the measure as a special interest grab bag for the nation's energy companies. An official of the League of Conservation Voters called it "bad for the environment, bad for public health and bad for American taxpayers." Another group, Public Citizen, warned that the repeal of the almost 70-year-old Public Utility Holding Company Act, as proposed in the bill, would allow corporations and investment banks to acquire utilities and could lead to more "Enron-style scandals."
The proposal does not include a controversial plan to conduct an inventory of oil and gas reserves in coastal areas now off limits to drilling, though Mr. Tauzin said he would pursue that separately.
nytimes.com |
