Concern about a disintegrating economy hasn’t daunted lawmakers who seem determined to force up the costs of energy. As Oil & Gas Journal’s Nick Snow reported from Washington last week, industry trade associations have three main hopes for moderation of Congress’s most extreme urges: concern by congressional leaders for the economy, growth in the number of centrist Democrats, and migration toward the political center by an incoming administration facing urgent national problems (OGJ, Jan. 12, 2009, p. 20). Senate and House leaders quickly are dispelling the first two of those hopes. If the last one has any validity, intraparty conflict between the White House and Capitol is inevitable.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid made his course clear by pushing forward, in a rare Sunday session Jan. 11, a lands bill that will create 2 million acres of wilderness (OGJ, Jan. 12, 2009, p. 18). To overcome a filibuster led by Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), Senate leaders last year created a package of 150 land, water, and other bills, many of them local spending measures. A dozen more bills joined the bundle, called the Omnibus Public Lands Management Act, this year. Sixty-six senators voted to take the bill to the Senate floor.
New bureaucracy
Oil and gas groups worry chiefly about the bill’s sanction of the National Landscape Conservation System, which they fear will become a new bureaucracy that environmentalists will use to block exploration and production. Supporters of the system of course argue that the program simply protects unique terrain and that it has been under preparation for many years and just needed to break the Senate logjam. But lawmakers opposed to oil and gas leasing already are said to have plans to expand the system’s 26 million acres.
That drilling and production should be excluded from some exceptional areas is beyond dispute. The politics of land use in the US, however, by treating drilling and production as wholly destructive of all natural values rather than the temporary and diminishing disturbances that they are, seeks mainly to lock away as many acres as possible without truly balancing values. No reason has emerged to see the new land bill as a departure from that one-way tendency. The Senate thus marches forward with an effort to curtail the wealth generation of resource development just when the US needs it most.
The House, meanwhile, has shifted leftward again with energy committee assignments. The first such lurch was the successful campaign last November by Henry Waxman of California to replace John Dingell of Michigan as chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee. Dingell had been the committee’s ranking Democrat for 28 years. Waxman, whose coup is believed to have had the tacit backing of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, thought Dingell’s support for the auto industry made him insufficiently aggressive in climate change legislation crafted by his committee. Dingell worked on the bill with Rep. Rick Boucher of Virginia, chairman of the Energy and Environment Subcommittee. Boucher’s affiliation with the coal industry made him suspect with Waxman’s environmentalist supporters.
No surprise
Boucher’s displacement therefore came as no surprise (OGJ, Nov. 17, 2008, p. 72). It happened Jan. 8, when the energy committee announced Boucher would swap roles with Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts, chairman of the Communications, Technology, and Internet Subcommittee (see Washington Pulse Blog, OGJ Online). A fierce critic of the oil and gas industry, Markey is chairman of the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming. In that role he orchestrated hearings last year at which he lambasted oil company chief executives for profiting from high oil prices and for investing in renewable energy sources at rates he deemed insufficient. Waxman and Markey won’t have much time for centrist party colleagues.
The 111th Congress thus begins with an attempted land grab by the Senate and the radicalization of House energy leadership. Both developments bode ill for oil and gas supply, for the affordability of energy in general, and by association for US economic health. Barack Obama, who becomes president Jan. 20, has yet another problem.