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The energy ghostwriters
It's no surprise an administration top-heavy with oil men would open its doors to energy producers. But documents released this week show that the Bush administration went out of its way to exclude environmental and consumer groups from contributing to the White House energy plan. That is no way to craft policy on an issue that affects every American. It's also no way to rally political support for a controversial energy strategy. No one expected this administration to put conservation or renewable energy at the forefront of its plan. But the White House did have an obligation to be diligent in preparing its plan. Ignoring consumer and environmental organizations made for skewed policy and unwise politics. According to documents the administration was compelled to release, Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham heard from 100 industry executives and lobbyists, but declined to meet with environmentalists. His office told representatives of environmental groups he was too busy. Considering all those meetings with representatives of Enron, ChevronTexaco, utilities and other energy groups, that may have been true. Only when the report was about to come out did lower-level officials deign to contact environmental groups, and those contacts were almost entirely for show. It is unclear whether the industry took the lead in this effort or whether the White House was already predisposed to launch an aggressive drilling strategy and reverse a web of environmental protections. Many of the 11,000 pages of documents, which legal and environmental groups had to sue to obtain, were heavily censored, leaving the public without a clear picture of who was involved and how they affected policy. The documents do show, however, that several recommendations of the industry were incorporated almost verbatim into White House policy. An executive order on energy issued last year looked almost exactly like a memo sent by the American Petroleum Institute to the Energy Department two months earlier. And Southern Company, the owner of utility plants throughout the South, suggested in an e-mail to Energy officials that the Bush administration alter the Clean Air Act. It promptly did just that, easing enforcement of the law against the worst polluters, which include Southern Company. "Big energy companies all but held the pencil for the White House task force as government officials wrote a plan calling for billions of dollars in corporate subsidies, and the wholesale elimination of key health and environmental safeguards," said John H. Adams, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council, one of the organizations that sued for the records. The public needs a fuller accounting of this one-sided effort, which appears to have been fatally compromised from its start. Vice President Dick Cheney, who headed the task force, should release a comprehensive record of his contacts, and the documents should be intact, not blacked out. Every household and business has a stake in the nation's energy supply and demand, and that range of interests should be represented in any national plan. The public and members of Congress who already had doubts about the integrity of this process now have every reason to question whether the proposal is in the best interests of consumers, or just of the utility, oil and gas companies. A corrupted process achieved a predictable result. This hardly will generate political consensus for the sacrifices the country will have to make to achieve energy independence.
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From the Times Opinion page |
