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Critics charge that the newly signed bill will do little to reduce current gas prices or reliance on foreign oil while proponents point out that it will benefit the environment. Who’s right?
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Last week, President Bush signed the country’s first comprehensive energy bill (it’s 1,724 pages long) in more than a decade. While he called it vital to the U.S. economy, he acknowledged that it offered no short-term relief from surging gasoline costs. The $14.5 billion legislation, passed by Congress after four years of debate, seeks to increase oil, natural gas and electricity supplies and encourages the use of alternative energy sources.
Supporters of the energy bill say it will…
• provide environmental benefits from incentives to electric utilities to curb coal emissions and from tax breaks for reducing foreign oil dependence through the use of fossil-fuel alternatives such as biodiesel and nuclear energy.
• boost oil drilling to reduce reliance on foreign sources (for example, it streamlines federal requirements to make it easier for producers to drill for oil and natural gas in the Rocky Mountains).
• make coal into a cleaner-burning fuel.
• stretch gasoline supplies through the increased use of home-grown, corn-based ethanol (though critics counter that the call for a boost in ethanol production is nothing more than a farm subsidy and will not help ease dependence on foreign oil).
Environmental groups and some Democrats are critical of…
• its extensive tax breaks, subsidies and loan guarantees which are seen as massive giveaways to big energy companies already posting near-record profits.
• its failure to curtail oil imports with more stringent fuel mileage requirements for gas-guzzling SUVs and other vehicles. This op-ed piece points out that “energy experts, at least the ones who aren’t sucking industry sugar, agree that better mileage efficiency offers the fastest, cheapest and most productive way to displace a notable portion of our oil use and our dependence on sources abroad.”
• its over-emphasis on oil and gas recovery and lack of focus on conservation and the development of alternative sources of energy.
• its blatant big-energy favoritism. According to this opinion piece, “Federal support for developing and marketing new energy sources, which are struggling to get established, is boosted, but still only to about a third of the largess that’s to be lavished on the traditional energy industries.”
Who’s really benefiting?
“Big energy lobbyists may be cheering the bill’s enactment, but ordinary Americans had better hold fast to their wallets,” says Anna Aurilio, legislative director of U.S. Public Interest Research Group, as reported in this Reuters story. “As gasoline prices careen out of control, the bill keeps America speeding down the wrong road toward more oil consumption, more drilling, and more pollution.”
Currently, the country relies on foreign oil to meet 60% of its daily petroleum demand of almost 21 million barrels. Gasoline use accounts for 2 out of every 5 barrels consumed.
Most Americans will feel the impact of the new law in 2007 when daylight-saving time is extended by three weeks in the spring and a week in the fall to save energy. Consumers will also be able to get tax breaks for installing more energy-efficient windows and solar panels on their homes and purchasing hybrid vehicles.
Columnist Tom Teepen has this to say about the legislation: “The best that can be said of the final bill is that its giveaways are not as wanton or its policies as irrelevant as in earlier versions.”
What do you think of the newly passed bill?
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The bill does little to induce the energy efficiency of industrial heating facilities (multi family buildings, office buildings, Hotels, hospitals, etc.
The energy consumption of these fascilities can be resuced an average of 50% by replacing obsolete equipment. What is need is low interest loans and tax incentives.
It will benefit politicians and corporations. It does not provide for the development of alternative energy sources or for the addition of new production facilities for electrical and refinery products.