Bob Tippee
The administration of US President George W. Bush has objected to two of the three most obnoxious provisions of energy legislation under consideration by a House-Senate conference committee.
Energy Sec. Spencer Abraham assessed the legislation in a June 27 letter to House Energy Committee Chairman Billy Tauzin (R-La.), who chairs the conference committee.
The obnoxious provisions, all introduced by the Senate, are on a list of controversial measures that the conference committee says it will debate after Labor Day, Sept. 2.
One of them is a price floor to encourage construction of a pipeline for Alaskan North Slope natural gas passing southward through Alaska en route to the Lower 48, rather than eastward into Canada then south.
Properly opposing the subsidy, Abraham says "market forces" should determine the pipeline route. That would rule out not only the price floor but also the legislation's preclusion of the Canadian route.
Indirectly, Abraham also rebuked the energy legislation's unwholesome embrace of controls on greenhouse-gas emissions like those of the Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change.
The energy secretary said the administration would support a program based on voluntary cuts, such as it has proposed.
The climate-change issue is complex and controversial. It deserves separate discussion and shouldn't be part of sweeping energy legislation.
Where the administration stumbles is in its support of a mandate for ethanol in gasoline. The legislation requires that 5 billion gal/year of the substance be added to gasoline by 2012, almost three times current production of fuel ethanol.
This, Abraham writes, "will improve the nation's energy security, farm economy, and environment."
That's only one-third right. It will improve the already lavishly subsidized farm economy, which is why it enjoys bipartisan support in Congress and probably will pass.
It will do nothing for energy security or the environment, however. The ethanol mandate is just another political goody for farm interests and grain distillers that will hurt everyone else.
National energy interests would be better served if the administration applied the same market orientation to ethanol that it does to climate change and the Alaskan gas pipeline.
(Online July 5, 2002; author's email: [email protected])