Big Scary Energy Bill Please contact your U.S. Senators today and urge them in the strongest terms to vote against the energy bill when it comes before the Senate in the next few days. Phone calls would be most effective, and we've provided talking points for you below. Please help stop this legislation by calling Senator Harkin and urging him to filibuster this bill. A vote is expected at any time, so please call Tuesday. To reach the capitol switchboard please dial: 202-224-3121 On Saturday November 15th, the Republican-controlled Senate released a 1700 page energy bill representing a monumental giveaway to dirty energy producers such as the coal, nuclear, and oil industries. This weekend was the public's first look at the disastrous legislative language that emerged from the highly secretive committee process. The Senate is set to act upon this energy bill within the next 48 hours. If passed, the bill would open new lands and waters to oil and gas exploration, give permanent new powers to Vice President Cheney's energy task force, will increase rather than reduce the emissions of greenhouse gases, and allow the cancer-causing gas additive MTBE to be used for another decade. This terrible legislation contains nothing remotely close to an energy policy for the country. It is an industry wish list directed to increased profits for some of the wealthiest companies in the world. It is complex legislation that does harm not just to our public lands, but to public health, consumers of electricity, and to taxpayers generally. And it does this without regard to the real energy needs of our country - the need to diversify our energy sources, to move away from reliance on fossil fuels and to use energy efficiently. With respect to public lands, it seeks to allow the industry to open some of our most spectacular public lands and richest offshore areas to drilling rigs, in most cases for minimal amounts of oil and gas. In the process, it undermines some of our most basic environmental protections and showers subsidies on those industries to the tune of more than $18 billion. We very urgently need your help to stop this bill in its tracks. *********************************** BACKGROUND: Billions for Production, Zilch for Conservation A reasonable human would guess that if energy is precious enough to warrant destruction of some of our most valuable public lands that it's precious enough to use wisely. Not in this energy bill. It includes billions of dollars in unwarranted taxpayer subsidies to already-profitable energy companies. It includes unnecessary exceptions and exemptions to important environmental laws-the Safe Drinking Water Act and the Clean Water Act among them. Although there are a few provisions that nod in the direction of energy efficiency and the development of benign renewable technologies, these provisions are minimal window-dressing for a bill that contains billions and billions of dollars in handouts for the oil, gas, coal and nuclear industries. But you will look in vain for any provisions that even acknowledge in passing the looming challenge of global climate change. Suffice it to say that the energy bill in its present form effectively establishes oil and gas development as the dominant use of public lands. Everything else - clean water, the property rights of ranchers and farmers who own surface lands but not minerals beneath them, wildlife and wildlife habitat, wildlands and their protection, cultural, historical and recreational values -- all are shunted aside in favor of energy production. It risks turning the public servants who are supposed to manage those lands for all of us into little more than adjunct employees of Big Oil. The bill also drastically limits many of our bedrock environmental safeguards. The guiding principle of the legislation is industry profit. Clean air, clean water, and our public lands, take a back seat to greed in the energy bill. Here is a short list of dangerous public lands provisions in the energy bill. It would: * Prohibit drilling fluids from being considered pollutants of drinking water under the Safe Drinking Water Act; * Exempt from the "stormwater" requirements of the Clean Water Act all oil and gas construction activities, including roads, drill pads, pipeline corridors, refineries, etc.; * Allow the Interior Secretary via secretarial order to designate utility and pipeline corridors across public lands with no public involvement; * Give applicants for federal drilling permits up to two years to comply with application requirements but give the BLM only 10 days to make important decisions on drilling permit applications; * Establish an "Office of Federal Project Coordination" within the White House to expedite the permitting and completion of energy projects on our public lands and to override environmental safeguards; * Require the U.S. Geological Survey to identify any "restrictions and impediments" to development of federally-owned oil and gas deposits. These "impediments" include any inconvenient rules and regulations meant to protect fish and wildlife, wild lands, and cultural and historical values on our public lands. * Put the Department of Energy (DOE), which has no history or expertise in public land management, in charge of implementing an executive order requiring our public land management agencies, before "taking any action" to determine whether such actions would have "a significant adverse effect" on energy development; * Allow oil and gas lessees to be compensated, via reduced royalties, for costs they incur for complying with whatever remains of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) if the bill passes; * Waive existing law and allow expeditious oil and gas leasing throughout the entire National Petroleum Reserve Alaska without regard to wildlife and other environmental concerns, and allow waivers of the royalties due American taxpayers from the exploitation of these public lands resources. 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