This article from NYTimes.com
was sent to the Sierra Club Energy Forum by [log in to unmask].
Forwarded by Jack Eastman


The Missing Energy Strategy

March 23, 2003

The Senate struck a blow for the environment and for common
sense last week, defeating President Bush's second attempt
in less than a year to open the Arctic National Wildlife
Refuge to oil exploration. Credit goes to the Democrats,
who mainly held firm in a close 52-to-48 vote, and to a
small, sturdy group of moderate Republicans, which now
includes Norm Coleman, a Minnesota freshman who wisely
chose not to renege on his campaign promise to protect the
refuge despite an aggressive sales pitch from senior
Republicans and the White House.

The pitch included the usual hyperbole from the Alaska
delegation, which typically inflates official estimates of
economically recoverable oil in the refuge by a factor of
four. It also included a new but equally spurious argument
minted for the occasion, namely that rising gas prices and
the war in Iraq made drilling more urgent than ever. In
truth, Arctic oil will have no influence on gas prices
until it actually comes out of the ground, and even then it
is likely to reduce American dependence on foreign oil by
only a few percentage points.

Nevertheless it is much too soon for the environmental
community or its Senate champions, like Joseph Lieberman,
John McCain and James Jeffords, to rest on their
well-earned laurels. Drilling proposals will almost
certainly resurface, most likely in energy bills now on the
drawing boards in both the House and Senate. Beyond that,
neither the White House nor the Republican leadership shows
any appetite for developing what America really needs:
innovative policies that point toward a cleaner, more
efficient and less oil-dependent energy future. Instead,
the White House and its Congressional allies continue to
push a retrograde strategy - of which Arctic drilling was
just one component - that faithfully caters to President
Bush's friends in the oil, gas and coal industries and
remains heavily biased toward the production of fossil
fuels.

On this score, the energy bills now being drawn up on
Capitol Hill offer no more hope than the 2002 models. Last
year's energy plan, which mercifully expired in a
conference committee, was top-heavy with subsidies for
industry and light on incentives for energy efficiency,
alternative fuels and other forms of conservation. The news
from the relevant Congressional committees suggests more of
the same. Just last week, Edward Markey of Massachusetts
offered his colleagues on the House energy committee a
proposal to increase fuel economy standards for cars and
light trucks, including S.U.V.'s, by about 20 percent by
2010. This is not an unreasonable goal, given Detroit's
technological capabilities, and would save 1.6 million
barrels a day, more than double the recent imports from
Iraq and far more than the Arctic refuge could produce in
the same time frame. The committee crushed the idea.

The last two years have given the country plenty of reasons
to re-examine its energy policies: a power crisis in
California, the attacks of 9/11 and now a war in the very
heart of the biggest oil patch in the world. It is plainly
time to move forward in a systematic way with new ideas.
But the best we can do, it appears, is to beat back bad
ones.
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