Energy Bill: ; Senate, House Bills Flawed

IT’S TOO bad more Americans don’t pay attention to what’s actually going on in Congress. While consumers fume about high gas prices and the Internet hums with ridiculous schemes to get back at oil companies by holding one-day “don’t buy” strikes, both the House and Senate have come up with energy bills that give big tax breaks to those very companies. But no one is howling, despite the fact that President Bush himself has said subsidies to oil companies are unnecessary since prices are so high.

The Senate version of the bill is a little more attractive than the House’s, since it does demand that companies start producing some of their energy from renewable sources. The Senate’s bill also omits the House’s provision to ban lawsuits against producers of MTBE, an additive that has poisoned groundwater all over the country. And the Senate rebuffs the House’s permission to open the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve to oil drilling.

But both versions are seriously flawed. Both encourage offshore oil drilling. Neither closes the ridiculous loophole that allows SUVs and light trucks to escape pollution controls. And both contain provisions to repeal the New Deal-era Public Utilities Holding Company Act, a law that prohibits utility companies from consolidating. Without this law, utility owners would be free to create holding companies that could raid company assets and use them for whatever speculative investments they wanted. (Remember Enron?) It would also allow American utilities to be sold to foreign investors.

The president insists this bill will reduce American dependence on foreign oil, but it gives little support to conservation or development of renewable resources here at home. Perhaps it’s fortunate that, according to most observers, the bill may very well founder in the conference committee on the MTBE issue. Neither version addresses the nation’s real energy problems. Both continue to reward Americans’ profligate energy consumption. Until congressional leaders develop the courage to do this, it’s better not to pretend.