Here is an unanticipated benefit of the nation's gaping budget deficit: It will make it difficult for Congress to pass a pork-ladened, environmentally unfriendly energy bill. Not that some members aren't still trying to patch together a collection of corporate tax breaks and bailouts disguised as wise energy policy.
Last year, when the proposed legislation began its trip through Congress, the price tag was $18-billion. By the time the bill fell two votes shy of passage in the Senate, it had been loaded down with corporate payoffs that nearly doubled the cost. Though President Bush favored the bill then, the theme in this re-election year is fiscal responsibility.
At first, Senate Energy Committee Chairman Pete Domenici, R-N.M., had the bright idea of attaching the energy measure to this year's transportation bill. Except the president and Congress are at odds over the cost of highway spending, and Bush had threatened a veto - it would be his first of a spending bill. Domenici has dropped that plan and says whatever the Senate proposes will be scaled down from last year's version, though details remain a closely guarded secret.
There is very little reason to trust the process, however, and that is too bad. Conservation, a key to our energy future, gets little attention in the legislation. Automobile mileage and global warming are completely ignored, and a program to make government buildings more energy efficient has been tossed out. Congress should be addressing the reliability of the nation's electricity grid, yet that seems an afterthought to protecting special interests.
The two most divisive issues are back - ethanol production and fuel-additive pollution. It will be difficult to resolve the massive tax subsidies promised to ethanol makers. In an election-year effort to buy favor in the Corn Belt, politicians of all stripes have promoted increased ethanol production using the false argument that ethanol is a desirable gasoline additive and efficient alternative fuel.
The controversy over the fuel additive methyl tertiary-butyl ether (or MTBE) could, and maybe should, be a deal killer. House Republican leaders still insist that additive makers be absolved of liability for widespread water pollution by their product. If the House will not drop that demand, then Americans would be better off with no energy bill. (And if the House brings up drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge again, we will know they are not interested in compromise.)
Before the process is over, Americans might be grateful that they cannot afford an energy bill.
