Sometimes, it pays to fight tokenism with tokenism. US lawmakers serious about energy should defend a feature of bills passed by the House last year and the Senate last month that some will want to discard in a race for reconciliation, worried about a presidential veto.
Emerging in political metabolism immunized by activists against thoughtful treatment of energy, the bills could be worse. Seemingly most important to the oil and gas industry are measures in both bills that would expedite permitting of LNG export terminals. True to the mood of the day, environmental groups oppose those initiatives because they would encourage hydraulic fracturing, which the bills don’t address. The House bill also streamlines permitting of cross-border energy projects, eliciting a promise by the White House Office of Management and Budget to recommend a veto if the provision survives reconciliation. Official prejudice is consistent and strong against work involving oil, gas, and coal.
Expansionism rears
In other areas, the bills address problems of the aging power grid, security of electricity and computer systems, retraining of workers displaced by changes to the energy economy, energy-use efficiencies of buildings, and federally sponsored research and development. In places, governmental expansionism rears menacingly. The Senate bill, for example, seeks an accounting for expected energy savings in applications for federally backed home loans under a program incorporating an “energy efficiency report.” Vaguely purposed intrusions such as this are too easily corruptible.
A large but subterranean problem with bills from both houses comes to light in the glare of promotion. “We are passing today the first energy bill since 2007, almost 9 years,” declared Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), ranking member of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee and a cosponsor, with Republican Chairman Lisa Murkowski, of the Senate bill. Cantwell described the legislative intent as “modernization of America’s energy system.”
Her reference to the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 weakens the case for successor legislation that makes no mention of the Renewable Fuel Standard. With the RFS, created in 2005 and expanded by the EISA, Congress demonstrated why the government should restrain itself when dealing with energy. The 2007 law requires sales of more renewable vehicle fuel from conventional sources than the market can use and more unconventional biofuel than suppliers can produce. Lawmaking can’t get much worse. Although a resumption in growth of gasoline consumption eases immediate pressure to act, Congress should have fixed its RFS mistake long ago. Failure of the new bills to address this unfinished business hurts congressional credibility on energy and makes claims about modernization seem, at best, misinformed.
Congress can show substance nevertheless by defending provisions in both bills to repeal a 2007 requirement to phase out fossil energy in federal buildings. The president has pointed to these provisions as veto targets. Lawmakers should accept the dare.
The fossil-energy phase-out was a minor gesture when added to sweeping energy legislation 9 years ago, after former President George W. Bush disastrously complained about a national “addiction to oil.” The administration of Barack Obama has turned that token of vague intent into a benchmark of policy-making. Having once paid lip service to an “all-of-the-above” energy policy, it now, through regulations, tax proposals, and approaches to legislation, tries to discourage the production and use of oil, gas, and coal and to encourage their substitution by uncompetitive forms of energy.
Multiplying cost
A strategy based on hostility to just the use of fossil energy would be unsustainably expensive. To also discourage production, especially at the start of a boom in development of unconventional oil and gas resources, promises to multiply the cost.
Congress should show it understands the folly of strategies that forswear fossil-energy advantages, such as affordability and scale, in deference to climate remedies of dubious benefit. It should stand by its rejection of ill-considered tokenism in a new gesture of determination to conform environmental ambition with economic reality. It should defy the veto.
