Posted on 08/20/2003 12:15:28 PM PDT by William McKinley
ASHINGTON, Aug. 19 — President Bush stood at a gasoline station near his ranch in Texas today and said he had been calling for an energy bill to modernize the nation's electricity grid "for a long time."
Mr. Bush is quite right. A comprehensive energy policy was part of his platform as a candidate for president and seemed prescient from his very first week in office, when he was forced to ensure there was enough power in California to ease the state's rolling blackouts. By May 2001, largely because of the California crisis, Mr. Bush had released his energy plan.
But the president's ambitious policy quickly became a casualty of energy politics and, notably, harsh criticism from Democrats enraged by the way the White House had created the plan. Although the policy included recommendations to improve the nation's electric grid that everyone agreed on, they were lost in the shouting and have been dormant in Congress for the past two years.
Since last week's blackout, those proposals have again taken on new urgency, and Mr. Bush, like other politicians, has been compelled to speak out. This morning, he told reporters that he was assured on Monday night by Congressional Republicans that a conference committee would begin work within 20 days on a final package of energy legislation.
"Now is the time for the Congress to move and get something done," the president said.
Mr. Bush first outlined the details of a wide-ranging energy plan during his presidential campaign in September 2000, in Saginaw, Mich., when he called for more domestic fuel production, better relations with foreign oil suppliers and the opening of 19 million acres of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, in northeastern Alaska, for oil exploration. The plan also called for the production of more electricity to meet demand, but that part of it received little notice. Most of the attention was focused on the uproar by environmentalists over Mr. Bush's proposal to drill in the wildlife refuge, referred to in Washington shorthand as ANWR.
That focus shifted by the time Mr. Bush became president, when California's blackouts were shaking the world's energy industry and developing into a political and economic crisis. On his third day in office, after promising that he would not intervene, Mr. Bush agreed to extend for two weeks federal orders ensuring that California would not be left in the dark. But his administration warned that it was a short-term fix and that it would move ahead with an energy plan to solve problems like those in California over the long term.
"The president used that issue, the crisis in California, to highlight the need for a comprehensive energy policy," said Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico, who was the secretary of energy under President Bill Clinton.
The issue was considered so important that Vice President Dick Cheney was put in charge of a task force to draft the plan.
Four months later, the task force produced the National Energy Policy Report, which in large part mirrored Mr. Bush's energy plan when he was a candidate.
Although one of the driving forces for the report was by then gone — California's blackouts had eased — Chapter 7 called for improvements to the nation's power grid, and specifically recommended federal standards for electricity reliability on the nation's utilities. But as before, most of the attention was focused on the criticism over Mr. Bush's call for new drilling.
Democrats also criticized the methods of the task force itself. In a move that is still being fought in court today, Mr. Cheney, a former chief executive of Halliburton Inc., an oil services company, consulted privately as the task force went about its work with people from his old industry. One of them was Kenneth L. Lay, chairman of Enron.
Democrats and environmentalists vigorously attacked the meetings as evidence that the administration was relying too heavily on advice from people in the energy industry. And although administration officials just as vigorously responded that the task force did not give in to the wish lists of the industry, they also acknowledged that the criticism had a political impact and turned the energy debate into one about the methods of the task force, not its findings.
"Most people focused on the process and not the substance," said Dan Bartlett, the White House communications director. Other administration officials say the criticism caused them to push less forcefully on the legislation than they otherwise might have.
The legislation was in any case largely forgotten after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, as the White House and its critics turned to the more pressing issues of terrorism and national security. By early last year, the legislation grew more politically charged with the collapse of Enron and the disclosures that Enron had sought to manipulate California's electricity markets for profit.
The task force had by then disbanded, and Mr. Cheney receded as the administration's public face on the issue. Today, although White House officials say he is still deeply involved in the administration's energy policy, the gravitational center of the plan has shifted to the Department of Energy and its secretary, Spencer Abraham. Mr. Cheney has not given any speeches on energy since the work of the task force ended.
Today, administration officials say that 90 of the energy plan's 105 recommendations have been put into effect, including a proposal to repair a power transmission bottleneck in California that was a factor in the state's blackouts and high energy prices in 2001. A federal plan to build a power line that would help alleviate that bottleneck, officials say, is near completion.
But the broader provisions of the plan are still caught up in the larger politics of the energy bill. Both Democrats and Republicans said this week that the proposal to improve the electricity grid continued to be held hostage by the White House insistence that the bill include a plan for drilling in the Arctic refuge, and the vehement Democratic opposition to that position.
"ANWR is the Holy Grail for Democrats because of the environmental ties to the party, and ANWR then became the Holy Grail for the oil and gas Republican stalwarts," Mr. Richardson said.
At this point, White House officials say that Mr. Bush will agree to an energy bill only if it includes a provision for drilling in the refuge, even though, as Mr. Bartlett said, "The president fully understands the explosive nature of the debate." Senate Democrats say they will agree to the bill only if Arctic drilling is out.
But Democrats also say Mr. Bush will be under increased pressure this fall to pass a bill to address the nation's electricity problems and that the White House may be forced to abandon Arctic oil drilling as its price.
Yeah, maybe. And Democrats may catch all sorts of grief if the White House sells this history right - much as the [gasp] NY Times just did.
Didn't think so.
Still it's a good editorial. Shame it's only a token piece the Times can point to when charged with bias. It'll be buried under the mountains of anti-Bush propaganda the Times puts out every week.
Didn't anyone catch the ANWR error? Bumiller says that the plan is to open up 19 million acres for exploration. This is patently false. The plan is to open up just a miniscule FRACTION of that area, and the actual landscape where the exploration would occur is as flat and featureless as a sheet of white copier paper.
Funny thing - NBC amongst the major broadcast nets KNOWS this, because they sent one of their reporters up to ANWR to do a story on it. Bob Hager I think was the one tapped to do the story. They flew him in and he showed the landscape - solid, flat white as far as the eye could see in any direction. He pointed out that there were none of the towering mountains, gurgling trout-filled brooks, soaring eagles and child-pleasing daisies to be seen. Just a flat, featureless snow-covered tundra.
And NBC ran the story. BUT they ran it when no elections were imminent, the bill wasn't before Congress - in other words, when it didn't matter and everyone who saw it would soon forget it.
What NBC aired when the bill DID appear before congress was footage supplied BY the Sierra Club with towering mountains, gurgling trout-filled brooks, soaring eagles and romping elk, and fields of child-pleasing daisies out to the horizon. When it counted, NBC reverted to form.
Michael
Well, technically it's a National Monument, but ...
Grand Staircase/Escalante does contain the world's largest reserves of low-sulphur coal - now off-limits to mining. That leaves the old X42-(i) buddies the Riadys left holding the next largest reserves in Indonesia. It was one of the biggest payoffs if not THE biggest in history.
Michael
Let me know if you wish to be added or removed from this list.
Mr Bush is not like any other FRigging politician he is the President...
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