OUR POLITICIANS have never shown their best side when confronting energy policy issues. In recent weeks Iraq's Saddam Hussein cut off his nation's oil exports to show solidarity with the Palestinians whose families he pays to strap suicide bombs to their children. Saudi Arabia, for its part, warned the New York Times that it was considering using the "oil weapon," because the ruling family could "no longer defend our relationship [with America] to our people." And the Venezuelan "street" trumped the nation's generals by returning control of Venezuela's oil industry to Hugo Chavez, an America-hating Castro clone. Those countries are our sixth, second, and fourth largest suppliers of oil, respectively, together accounting for almost one-third of our imports.
In response, the Senate showed its steel by voting to make poultry farmers a tiny bit richer (by subsidizing the use of chicken, er, droppings as fuel for electricity generation) and to make Iowa and other corn-state farmers, along with Archer Daniels Midland, the famous price fixer, a lot richer (by requiring a huge increase in the use of costly corn-based ethanol in motor fuel). But the Senate wouldn't even consider a House-passed provision to increase domestic oil supplies by drilling in an insignificant corner of the vast wastelands that comprise the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
Perhaps it's best not to complain, since the senators could have done far worse. They declined, after all, to impose higher gasoline efficiency standards that would force Americans into dangerously smaller and lighter vehicles. In the end, they ladeled
out a mere $14 billion in subsidies for various conservation measures, to encourage the production of renewables such as solar and wind power, and, of course, to increase the availability of more exotic energy sources (see chickens above). Even when we add to that the $10 billion the Senate voted in loan guarantees for an Alaska natural gas pipeline--a liability that, Enron-style, will not appear on the government's balance sheet--the Democratic Senate remains a piker compared with the Republican House. The House version of an energy bill emerged bearing $33.5 billion in gifts to energy producers of various sorts.
The Senate-House conference to resolve differences in the two bills will be more contentious, however, than a simple game of $14 billion bid, $33.5 billion asked. The president and his Republican allies generally favor subsidizing the development of indigenous energy resources; Democrats see subsidies for conservation and renewable sources of energy as the main way to go. Even though the Senate also throws some money at producers, and the House at environmentalists, the difference in philosophy is so large that an impasse looms. But, as Jeff Bingaman, the New Mexico Democrat who was floor manager of the Senate bill, reminds us, "There's no requirement to have an energy bill this year."
That raises the prospect that the nation's lawgivers will follow Ronald Reagan's famous dictum, "Don't just do something, stand there." Not a bad thing. William Hogan, an energy policy expert at Harvard's Kennedy School, reminds students and colleagues that if you ask the wrong question, you get wrong and often quite silly answers. And our politicians continue to ask themselves the wrong question: "How can we become independent of foreign oil?" Successive presidents have asked that wrong question, and, predictably, come up with wrong answers. They have looked to price controls and increased domestic production "to meet our own energy needs without depending on any foreign sources" (Nixon); subsidies for massive coal liquefaction projects, auto fuel efficiency standards, and a strategic petroleum reserve with no policy for its effective use (Ford); a new Department of Energy and woolly sweaters (Carter's moral equivalent of war, or MEOW); sucking up to the Saudis and sending aircraft carriers and half a million men to drive Saddam out of Kuwait (Bush the first); and drilling in the not-so-oil-rich Arctic wildlife refuge (Bush the second). Alone among these White House occupants, Bill Clinton stands blameless. Having been too distracted by other matters to pay much attention to the national security issues raised by our reliance on oil imported from an unstable and frequently hostile region of the world, Clinton left the matter to his vice president, who expanded the list of demons from whom we must seek independence to include "big oil" and energy wastrels who drive SUVs of the sort used to transport Al Gore to important meetings.
Val:Y
|
