View From The Hill

Congress Passes Bad Energy Bill

08/19/05

It could have been worse -- though not by much. That’s just about the only good thing that can be said about the bloated energy package that President Bush signed into law August 8.

After five years of trying, the Bush administration succeeded in pushing much of its outdated, misguided energy policy through Congress this summer, passing a bill that will perpetuate the nation’s dependence on fossil fuels and other dangerous, polluting technologies.

Absent from the final bill, but present in early drafts, were measures that sought to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling, exempt MTBE manufacturers from nearly all liability for ground-water pollution, and weaken clean air protections for some of the most polluted cities in the nation. Unfortunately, the environmentally damaging provisions that made it into the final bill utterly dwarf the measures that were successfully barred from the legislation.

In addition, several pro-environment provisions included in the Senate version of the bill were eliminated in the final version, including a renewable electricity standard that set a goal of producing 10 percent of our nation’s electricity from renewable sources by 2020, and a one million barrel-per-day oil savings goal. Also dropped was Senator Jeff Bingaman’s (D-NM) global warming Sense of the Senate Resolution, which represented the first time the Senate went on record recognizing global warming as a serious problem that needs to be addressed.

Advocates for public health, the environment, taxpayers, and our national security all urged Congress to take America forward by promoting clean energy technology. Instead, we’ve been given a bill that will stuff billions of dollars into the energy industry’s already brimming pockets. Of the actual $20 billion in energy tax breaks and credits contained in the bill, more than six out of every ten dollars will go to fossil fuels and nuclear power.

By contrast, the bill includes about $1.3 billion for energy efficiency and conservation programs, and a mere $3 billion for renewable energy sources, primarily wind power. In a stunning bit of misdirection, the bill extends renewable energy production tax credits to coal from Native American lands. (The Senate version of the energy bill contained a better than 50-50 tax credit split between traditional and renewable energy sources, with approximately $8.9 billion for green/energy efficiency programs.)

Harder to quantify are the enormous benefits the energy industry will receive via the bill’s numerous exemptions from fundamental environmental protections. Our water supplies will be threatened by provisions that amend the Safe Drinking Water Act to allow the injection of chemicals and toxins resulting from oil and gas activities into our nation’s groundwater, and exempt the oil and gas industries from Clean Water Act provisions aimed at controlling polluted runoff from oil and gas construction activities.

The energy bill threatens the wildlife and subsistence values of the 23 million-acre National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska by allowing oil and gas companies to hold their leases forever, whether or not they contribute anything to America’s energy needs.

The bill attempts to significantly increase the chances that a broad range of oil and gas activities will be excluded from review under the National Environmental Policy Act, weakening public involvement and undermining the assessment of their harmful impacts.

And while the final bill failed to provide a blanket liability waiver for the manufacturers of the cancer-causing gasoline additive MTBE, the bill could provide backdoor immunity for manufacturers by making it more difficult for citizens, communities, and states to recover their costs of cleaning up contaminated drinking water supplies.

I could go on and on. The 1,725-page bill is so packed with perks for the energy industry that conservation groups are still struggling to comb through all the potential environmental pitfalls it contains.

In the end, the energy bill does nothing to reduce our dependence on foreign oil, nothing to reduce consumption, and fails to address the biggest threat facing our planet: global warming. What it does do is provide billions of dollars in tax breaks and subsidies to an oil and gas industry that is already bragging about record profits.  

Cat Lazaroff, Press Secretary for Policy and Legislation