International Politics

	Vol. 226 No. 8
JOHN MCCAUGHEY, CONTRIBUTING EDITOR, WASHINGTON

Anglo-Irish poet and Nobel Laureate William Butler Yeats would be appalled by the pork dripping from the Senate energy bill.

Ek sal ’n plan maak... “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born....?” famously wrote the great Anglo-Irish poet, William Butler Yeats. Well, substitute Washington for Bethlehem, and we can answer that one. It is a fat, old raddled sow, groaning with weight, dripping with dewlaps (hanging folds of skin), burdened with thousands of special interest “earmarks” for individual members and barely able to walk. It is called the Energy Bill—at least $16 billion of pork in the Senate version and half that much in the House iteration. After years of stalemate and failure, the monstrosity may at last have some chance of a nativity.

Or perhaps not. Plenty of deal-breakers exist for the House-Senate conference committee to overcome, as members struggle to reconcile different versions from the two chambers. The vexing question of whether to protect manufacturers of MTBE (the fuel oxygenate petroleum additive) from liability lawsuits over groundwater contamination has torpedoed previous bills and may do the same thing this time around.

Drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) is another contentious issue, much opposed by enviros. It is in the House bill but not the Senate version. The Senate thought it was safer to stick the measure into a filibuster-proof budget bill. (Amusingly, a recent poll found that 4% of Americans believe that filibuster is a medical procedure, 2% think that it is a household appliance, and 1% are convinced that it is a type of sandwich.)

The White House also opposes several global warming amendments. Then there are ethanol subsidies that will make Midwestern corn farmers (and Archer-Daniels-Midland) multimillionaires overnight and install Missouri Sen. Jim Talent (Rep.) in the Pork Barrel Hall of Fame permanently. Yet, some studies have shown that producing ethanol uses more fossil fuels and adds more pollution than the ethanol prevents. Also added is a requirement that utilities improbably get 10% of their electricity from renewable sources by 2020.

Broadly, the House bill is more sympathetic to the energy industry, notably US oil and gas producers and wannabe nuclear plant builders. The 1,000-page Senate bill has a distinctly greenish tint, with lots of goodies for renewables and energy conservation. However, it offers a nod to the industry by considering the lifting of portions of an offshore drilling moratorium, an idea much opposed by Florida’s lawmakers.

Lawmakers are anxious to declare a victory, and to get the pork out to voters and lobbyists. Thus, they would like to get a bill to President Bush’s desk before Congress leaves town in early August for its recess. A mixed bag of 14 senators has already been named to negotiate with the House. Gridlock still seems likely, but perhaps, by some miracle, they will succeed. The House has not yet named its conferees, or even when they will start deliberations. Rep. Joe Barton (Rep. – Texas), chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, will almost certainly chair the conference committee.

Certainly, George W. Bush is so anxious for a bill that he will hasten to uncap his fountain pen, shoot his cuffs, finger nervously the knot on his tie and rush to the Rose Garden to sign pretty much any version offered to him. This is true, even if many items in the bill are distasteful to him.

“People got to understand our dependence on foreign oil didn’t develop overnight,” Bush told a conference in June, “and it’s not going to be fixed overnight. To solve the problem, our nation needs a comprehensive energy policy.” Unfortunately, his remarks ignore the fact that dependence on foreign oil (and attendant high gasoline prices) is outside the influence of Congress or the White House, short of shutting down the US economy.

No energy breakthrough—not steam, electric power, the internal combustion engine, gas turbines nor a hundred others—was ever impelled by energy bills or plans. They were all invented by clever men, far removed from government plans, policies or subsidies. True, civilian nuclear power and synfuels were powered by taxpayer money, but both technologies were economic nonsense. Legislation has never advanced energy policy or technologies.

The energy bill moving through Congress, said a Wall Street Journal editorial, “is mostly beside the point, or worse.” The Citizens Against Government Waste group calls the bill “a lobbyist’s dream and a taxpayer’s nightmare.” And, as one energy lobbyist admitted in a martini-fueled moment of candor (naturally, on deep background), “Some of these bills contain some good stuff, but that is invariably outweighed by the pork and other bad stuff. The real trouble is that there is a tradition of the Senate and House getting together in conference and adopting the worst parts of both bills.”

There is an old South African folk story about a Boer War scout who mistakenly strays into Hell and is having trouble finding his way out. He sits down upon a smouldering boulder and says to himself in Afrikaans: “Ek sal ’n plan maak” or “I shall make a plan.” It is this optimistic conviction, with its implication that no difficulty is insurmountable, that animates the President. George W. Bush has become a bit of a Boer on energy plans. 

John McCaughey edits and publishes Energy Perspective, a Washington-based, fortnightly publication featuring in-depth coverage of major energy topics. Mr. McCaughey has written and edited for Irish newspapers, an international news agency, the London-based Financial Times and the U.S.-based Energy Daily newsletter, and contributed to many other newspapers. He regularly contributes to this column.