The energy plan proposed by the administration of US President George W. Bush succeeds mainly for what it doesn't propose. For what it does propose, the program deserves qualified praise.
Timing could not be worse for the making of energy policy. Gasoline prices have reached levels that inspire television reporters to conduct insipid interviews at service stations and politicians to demand investigations of oil companies. An electricity shortage grips California, evoking a torrent of blame-shifting and martial nostrums from a governor who needs a vacation.
When gasoline prices reach stressful levels, an impulse arises within government to control them by fiat. When market cycles elevate oil company profits, an impulse arises to impose punishing taxes. When demand pushes against the limits of deliverable supply, an impulse arises to manipulate consumption. This is history.
Avoids temptation
In the administration's energy proposal, however, there are no mentions of price controls, "windfall profit" taxes, or consumption mandates. There is no groping for immediate solutions to problems that will solve themselves. There is no gratuitous scolding in the manner of former President Jimmy Carter's "moral equivalent of war."
The proposal thus avoids the perennial temptation in times of shortage to do something about energy-anything-even if it's wrong. Its authors obviously recognize that past government action on energy more often harmed than healed, especially when taken in haste. For this they deserve credit.
Another important omission is that of carbon dioxide from the list of target substances in the proposed "multipollutant legislation" for emissions from power plants. Somehow, CO2-which only climate-change zealots can consider a pollutant equivalent to sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and mercury-sneaked onto this list during Bush's campaign. The program makes clear that the president intends to correct the error.
Some of the plan's numerous recommendations are proper and bold. The much-anticipated and probably futile call for leasing of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge coastal plain fits this category. So do efforts on behalf of expeditious leasing of federal land elsewhere and review of the unnecessarily strict regulations strangling refiners.
The main problem with the plan is that it amounts to a grab-bag of mostly beneficial tactics-many of them already in progress-left dangerously open-ended by an absence of clear strategy. There are "basic principles," but they're too fuzzy: comprehensiveness; environmental friendliness; and integration of energy, environmental, and economic policies in service to living standards.
Who's to object? The problem is that those principles can lead in any number of directions, not all of them economically sound.
Straining for salute lines, the program carries on excessively with empty phrases like "modernize conservation." Why not leave conservation to the market, where it always performs best, and just say so? Also, the program lets excessive worry about im- ported oil lead it into trouble, such as overpromotion of costly alternatives.
The absence of strategic focus breeds internal conflicts and troubling implications. The program urges presidential support for initiatives by specified oil exporters to open energy projects to foreign investment. It also calls for work to improve "dialogue" among energy-producing and consuming nations. Elsewhere, however, it recommends presidential action to "increase international cooperation on finding alternatives to oil, especially for the transportation sector."
How does the administration hope to reconcile the expressly antioil ambition of that last recommendation with hope for cooperation from oil exporters? For that matter, how does it reconcile the ambition with the domestic oil producers it seems eager elsewhere in the program to support? The oil and gas industry should wonder whether the phrase "finding alternatives to oil" implies a strategic objective. If it finds that it does, it needs to ask whether the motivation is strategic or environmental, then whether the goal warrants the cost.
Mostly sound
On balance, the program seeks to do mostly sound things on energy and avoids historic, knee-jerk mistakes. It proposes actions that should have taken place long ago and remedies to errors that shouldn't have been made. It is a collection of generally sound and occasionally controversial tactics relying heavily on executive initiative and minimally on legislation.
That might be its most important attribute. Weakened by strategic ambiguity, the plan needs every route the administration can find for it around the political hazards just ahead.
