It may seem like a bipartisan agreement, but underneath the Senate’s 11th-hour compromise to approve energy legislation written by Democrats is merely a pathway to future dependence on foreign black gold.
While it wasn’t the ironically-titled Securing America’s Future Energy Act (SAFE) that President Bush was hoping for, the energy bill agreed upon by the Senate will soon come under the whim of a Republican-controlled House-Senate committee, and will be morphed into the little brother of SAFE.
Likely to be discarded in the rewritten form are requirements for raising the average fuel economy of automobiles from 27.5 miles per gallon to 40, laws regulating the powers of utility holding companies like Enron, and requirements for America to get a mere 10 percent of its energy from renewable sources.
Included in the revised bill will be $10 billion worth of subsidies for already polluting power industries, provisions for offshore-drilling expeditions and tax breaks for the nuclear power industry that will inevitably lead to more nuclear waste in the Hanford storage site.
While this bill does have incentives for research and development for ethanol fueled vehicles, the majority of it is made up of subsidies and tax breaks for polluting industries. If the majority of the bill were dedicated to finding alternative and renewable sources, the nation would have taken the first step in the 12-step program to kick the petroleum habit.
We have the technology and interest for a revolution in renewable energy sources, such as hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles, biomass energy and wind and solar power. But instead of developing those sources and putting this country on the path away from dependence on fossil fuels, legislation like this has perpetuated our love of foreign oil and created a mindset that fossil fuels will be around forever.
If changing the way we acquire energy was too hard, one would think that conserving the finite sources of fossil fuels left would be a priority, but this legislation blocks efforts to preserve the limited stockpiles of oil we have left. According to a Union of Concerned Scientists study, raising the miles-per-gallon standard to 40 would result in a reduction of exhaust emissions by 600 million metric tons and save consumers millions of dollars at the pump, while reducing consumption of oil by 3 million barrels per day — more than we import from the entire Persian Gulf, or could extract from the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve combined.
The next SAFE that may find its way to Congress should do much more to secure our future energy needs and set us on a path toward renewable and clean energy sources.
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