The spirit of bipartisanship to which everyone in Washington, DC, must pretend for a while longer took an interesting turn last week. The Democrat whom Pres.-Elect George W. Bush nominated as Secretary of Transportation has been head of a department in the administration of Pres. Bill Clinton that last month scorched a little earth in the area of energy supply.
Maybe a transcendent sense of national purpose will ensure the loyalty of Norman Mineta, now Secretary of Commerce, to a Republican president. It can happen. Model patriots inhabit the land. Maybe Mineta is one of them. If so, good for him. Good for Bush. Good for the country.
But Bush's nominee as Secretary of Energy has reason to be skeptical. The department Mineta led under Clinton has complicated life for outgoing Sen. Spencer Abraham (R-Mich.).
Questions about supply
During confirmation hearings and later, Abraham will face questions about how the government should keep the US from approaching another winter with oil and gas supplies perilously lean. His most convincing response would be a list of government plans for encouraging producers to increase drilling for oil and gas. It's a simple concept: more drilling, more energy supply. And the corollary-less drilling, less supply-makes any policy that discourages drilling a mistake.
With the price of natural gas touching $10/Mcf in a cold North American winter, the need for more energy supply-and more drilling-is clear. Yet a late-term rule by an agency of Mineta's Department of Commerce promises less drilling-and therefore less energy supply. It is not something for someone headed for the Department of Energy to cheer.
The Dec. 8 rule by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration makes it easier than ever for coastal states to block oil and gas activity on the Outer Continental Shelf. It broadens the scope of requirements under the Coastal Zone Management Act of 1972 that federal activity affecting coastal land, water, or natural resources be consistent with state management plans. States opposed to oil and gas work have used the consistency provision to prevent federal oil and gas leasing off their shores.
Among other things, the NOAA move stipulates that geography doesn't limit a state's ability to invoke consistency if there are "reasonably foreseeable coastal effects." The National Ocean Industries Association points out that Florida has considered using extraterritorial consistency arguments to keep floating production and storage facilities out of federal water off Texas and Louisiana. NOIA said it and other industry groups are considering a legal challenge to the rule.
The CZMA consistency requirement already gives coastal states great clout. It partly explains why negligible oil and gas leasing and drilling occur on the OCS off the East and West Coasts and in the Gulf of Mexico off Florida. It therefore partly explains why negligible amounts of oil and gas flow from those areas to inland consumers now desperate for energy.
This collision of state and federal interests has roots in a statutory conflict. The OCS Lands Act of 1953, amended in 1978, requires the federal government to lease and otherwise promote development of natural resources on offshore federal land for the benefit of all Americans. Yet CZMA consistency provisions let state governments annul the mandate.
NOAA has in effect lengthened this lever by which coastal residents let exaggerated fear about drilling and producing operations deprive all Americans of energy supply and federal revenues generated by leasing and production. It is precisely what an energy-short country doesn't need. And it is environmentally unwarranted. The drilling and production operations from which the states so feverishly wish to protect their coasts are not that threatening.
Booby-traps
That Bush nominated Mineta and Abraham on the same day is an amusing coincidence. A politician with Abraham's experience will know better than to let appeals to bipartisanship camouflage the political booby-traps Clinton loyalists have been leaving behind en route to the private sector. NOAA's move looks like one of them.
Mineta deserves the benefit of the doubt, of course. Maybe he had larger worries at Commerce and didn't know how NOAA planned to sabotage OCS drilling. Maybe he really is above all that. In his confirmation hearings, senators shouldn't let the spirit of bipartisanship prevent their asking him about it anyway.
