Congress Wimps Out on Energy Policy

By Joe Rothstein
Editor, USPolitics.einnews.com

June 28, 2007

You probably saw Gallup's recent poll that gave Congress a 14% confidence rating from the public. 14% is not quite within the margin of error, but it's close. The message is about as clear as polls can be: hardly anyone has confidence in Congress.

Much of this is due to Republican obstructionism, of course. Senate Republicans are forcing Democrats to come up with 60 votes just to consider a piece of legislation on the Senate floor. And since the Democrats have only 48 healthy members (Tim Johnson is still ailing, Joe Lieberman has declared his independence and Bernie Sanders proudly wears his "I" for independent, as he always has), getting to 60 is a stretch.

So blame the Republicans for trying to make Congress inoperative. They consider it good politics. They did the same thing in the first two years of Bill Clinton's presidency and it resulted in the Republican takeover of 1994.

But blame the Democrats, too. Blame them for timidity. On two big issues of our time, the Iraq war and energy policy, blame them for gross timidity.

Exhibit A of the Democratic failure is Iraq. I've talked about it Iraq before, and will again.

Exhibit B is the energy bill passed this week by the Senate.

The energy bill should be a massive, Manhattan Project-type of effort to convert the nation to renewable resources as quickly as possible. It should devote big bucks to subsidies to encourage conversion, deployment and research.

The energy bill should do what Germany did way back in 1991 when it mandated above-market payments for renewable energy producers to feed into the nation's power grid.

By the end of the 1990s, Germany had transformed itself into a renewable energy leader. With a fraction of the wind and solar resources of the U.S., Germany now has almost three times as much installed wind capacity and is a world leader in solar photovoltaics as well. Germany now generates 4.5 percent of its electricity with the wind and appears on track to meet government targets of 25 percent by 2025.

And Germany has created a new, multibillion-dollar industry and tens of thousands of new jobs. The German wind industry now employs more people than nuclear power (an industry that provides 30 percent of the nation's electricity) without a commensurate increase in electricity costs.

At about the same time the Senate was passing its version of the energy bill, Canada's Ontario Province announced a $610 million fund to develop a green technology industry and $210 million to help municipalities retrofit buildings. Consumers will get big subsidies to buy energy efficient light bulbs and appliances and to convert their homes to solar. Ontario wants to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 15% below 1990 levels by 2020 and 80% by 2050.

A few years ago California passed a law requiring its utilities to generate 20% of their energy from renewable sources by 2010. The other day, Pacific Gas & Electric signed big wind and solar generation contracts that call for major new renewable facilities to go on line by 2009.

Meanwhile, back in Washington, senators voted down a $32 billion billion program for alternative energies and voted against a federal requirement that power producers generate 15% of their electricity from renewable fuels by 2020.

Instead, they opted for a bill that has three major provisions:

---An increase in auto fuel economy standards to 35 mpg by 2020---a number that's likely to be reduced before the bill is finally enacted and sent to the President.

---A major push toward ethanol conversion---a questionable policy given all of the conventional energy it takes to convert corn and other products to ethanol.

---Demonstration projects to see whether carbon can be captured from coal plants and stored safely underground---another questionable policy, promoted by the coal industry and coal state senators. Coal produces carbon, just as nuclear produces radioactive waste. Both present huge disposal risks to the planet.

Both the Senate and House are playing around the edges of serious energy policy.

Okay, they aren't giving away Fort Knox to the oil companies the way the Republican Congress did in the last energy bill. And they aren't buying into nuclear the way so many heavy hitters would like. But should what Congress isn't doing to make things worse be considered good policy to make things better?

By now most Americans are well aware that we have a dangerous dependency on oil and gas, much of which comes from some of the most politically unstable places on earth.

By now most Americans are well aware that we keep massive military forces in the middle east to protect our energy interests there, an enormously costly subsidy to the oil and gas industry, and a dangerous policy that can get us embroiled militarily in places we'd rather not be.

By now most Americans are well aware that the climate is changing in ways we don't fully understand, but that the result of that change could be cataclysmic to the U.S. and to mother Earth itself.

By now most Americans have noticed that the price of gas for our cars and power to heat and cool our homes is spiraling upward, with dangerous ramifications for our personal budgets and national economy.

So Congress answers with a mealy-mouth mpg standard (by 2020!) that many vehicles already meet; with a conversion plan to ethanol that will raise food prices without reducing reliance on fossil fuels; with a futile gasp at trying to salvage a coal industry that today, and in the future, will produce some of the dirtiest air we experience?

...and the Democratic leaders of Congress feel they are being misunderstood by the public?

I don't think so. The times call for heroic action. The public knows it. The public's ready for it. That's why people are no longer willing to tolerate wimps.

Maybe Congress will get the full meaning of that 14% approval rating while there's still time to pass a really serious energy bill.

Joe Rothstein, editor of US Politics Today, is a former daily newspaper editor and long-time national political strategist based in Washington, D.C.

See all previous articles by Joe Rothstein here.