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A waste of energy

Congress rushed to meet President Bush's deadline for energy legislation, and passed a bill that offers no real solutions to our most pressing problems.

Given the time and fuss Congress put into writing a national energy policy, Americans might have expected a more energetic plan. The 1,700-page bill passed Friday does little to address the two most pressing problems: high gasoline prices and dependence on foreign oil.

Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., an architect of the plan, hardly gave it a rousing endorsement. He acknowledged the bill won't have any immediate effect on gasoline prices and that any benefits from the legislation will take five or 10 years to show up.

As for reversing our dependence on foreign oil, even the veracity-challenged Bush administration holds out no hope. To justify increased domestic drilling, the best argument the administration could make was that it would reduce oil imports from 68 percent to 64 percent of our energy needs in 20 years. The United States now imports 58 percent of its oil.

With no real solutions at hand, why was Congress in a rush to meet President Bush's artificial deadline for an energy bill? Perhaps the president and Congress hope frenetic activity will be mistaken for progress.

Not that the bill doesn't have some helpful provisions. It will spend a few billion dollars to expand renewable energy sources, particularly wind power, and promote the use of hybrid cars. But many more billions will go to the producers of oil, natural gas and coal at a time when profits at companies such as ExxonMobil and Shell grew by more than 30 percent.

So if the energy bill won't bring down the price of gas or reduce our need to buy oil from our ideological enemies, what will it do? It promises to improve the electrical grid, a good thing, and to promote more nuclear power generation, which is more problematic. The bill does nothing to help the nation figure out what to do with spent fuel from reactors, and until we solve that puzzle it is irresponsible to promote growth in the industry.

Environmentalists are excited about the bill's requirement to blend more gasoline with ethanol, distilled mainly from the highly subsidized corn crop. Some studies show no net energy gain from ethanol because of the reliance of petroleum-based products in the growing and distillation process. And the use of ethanol could actually add to the price of gasoline in some parts of the country.

So there's no need to get excited when Bush and Congress hype the new energy plan, although lawmakers did take one bold stand. No, they didn't demand that the auto industry improve fuel efficiency, which would have been the most effective way to save motorists money and to cut demand for foreign oil. That would have required courage.

Instead, summoning all of its capacity for bluster, Congress declared that daylight saving time would be extended by a month. That way, people stuck at home because they can't afford to fill up their cars won't have to sit in the dark.

[Last modified August 1, 2005, 00:58:09]