Another time Congress resorted to bipartisanship to make energy law, the US recommitted itself to fuel selection by politics instead of markets and created problems now becoming crises.
Yet bipartisan energy legislation is back, growing like a strudel as lawmakers roll in layers of goodies—some of them, as before, actually good.
The earlier triumph was the Energy Policy Act of 2005, which set mandates for biofuels and distributed tax breaks of varying generosity to politically favored energy forms. Oil and gas received incentives for natural gas produced from deep wells in the Gulf of Mexico.
Generally, EPACT reestablished energy policy-making by command, control, and political handout. Two years after passing it, Congress expanded the biofuel mandates to proportions and complexity now proving costly and impossible to meet.
The new bipartisan effort began as a simple energy-efficiency initiative. But bipartisan energy is never simple.
The basic Senate bill would authorize spending of $350 million over 5 years on energy-efficiency programs by the government and industry.
It has attracted amendments expressing support of the Keystone XL pipeline border crossing, trimming the Environmental Protection Agency's carbon-emission standards for electric power plants, delaying implementation of ObamaCare, and requiring high-level government officials to use ObamaCare health exchanges.
Individually, each amendment has merit. But what does ObamaCare have to do with energy?
Yes, the Senate works this way. With energy, though, the snowballing tendency of Senate legislation too often comes to grief. The conservative amendments won't survive in a Senate controlled by Democrats. But they might doom the basic bill.
That outcome would be regrettable. The question is worth asking why the government should spend money on energy-use efficiency, which improves steadily on its own. But $70 million/year is small change, and the programs aren't egregious.
If the Senate passed the bill in its mostly innocuous original form, it could claim to have acted on energy and move on—perhaps to fixing problems originating in the bipartisan energy beast it passed 8 years ago.
