A retrograde energy policy

A retrograde energy policy

When Vice President Dick Cheney de- rided energy conservation last month as a virtually meaningless personal gesture and called for construction of a new power plant every week for the next 20 years, he clearly fixed the tone for President Bush's energy policy. With the exception of a chastened, symbolic nod to conservation, the policy unveiled Thursday calls precisely for his predicted prescription: Drilling, digging and destruction of the nation's cherished public lands.

The Bush administration intends to aggressively roll back environmental safeguards on power production and to uproot any remaining energy reserves to maintain, in the administration's terms, "America's blessed lifestyle." Messrs. Bush and Cheney might as well say their aim is to fuel more mind-boggling congestion, more gas-guzzling SUVs, and more forget-tomorrow consumption.

There are two problems with this. First, it is scandalously gluttonous, self-indulgent and negligent of our stewardship responsibilities. Secondly, there is no energy crisis to fix, and no meaningful shortage of power.

The Bush policy — developed by a handful of officials in greater secrecy than Hillary Clinton's health care plan — is rather a strategy in search of a problem to rationalize another agenda. Given the underlying factors behind the energy situation in California and some other states, it seems mainly a political payoff to Messrs. Bush and Cheney's energy industry contributors and former business colleagues.

Distribution bottlenecks

There are, to be sure, energy distribution and marketing problems that need to be fixed. These include bottlenecks in natural gas pipelines, an inadequate electrical transmission grid infrastructure, and a shortage of gasoline refinery capacity, all of which are aggravated by growing consumption. But there are ample available supplies of oil, coal and natural gas to be purchased or tapped in areas that are already open to extraction, and enormous savings to be reaped in conservation, energy efficiency, and mass transportation initiatives.

By failing to adequately address these dimensions of the energy equation, the administration's so-called energy strategy comes off mainly as a policy that promotes consumption, ostensibly aimed at boosting profits for big oil and private power producers.

And because the fossil fuel consumption trends it would promote are by definition unsustainable, it is a policy that ill serves our children's and grandchildren's future needs. Beyond that, its gratuitous rollbacks of pollution regulations — giving energy industries broader rights to pollute our air, exploit our finite resources, and diminish our rapidly vanishing stock of unspoiled public lands — are unconscionably injurious to public interests and public health.

It is difficult, in fact, to imagine that Mr. Cheney's working group, on which Mr. Bush lavishes so much praise, could produce and defend this policy in light of countervailing scientific opinion.

A detailed report based on three years of work by five major national laboratories, issued just weeks ago, concluded that a government-led efficiency program emphasizing research and incentives to adopt new technology could slash growth in electricity demand by 20-to-47 percent. That would cut Mr. Cheney's claimed need for 1,300 power plants by 265 to 610, depending on how aggressively the government pursued efficiency programs for buildings, factories and appliances.

Few here know it, but TVA's own commercial and industrial energy efficiency programs have demonstrated such: significant reductions in the past. Residential homeowners, moreover, could benefit equally significantly by a range of energy saving technologies and efficiency standards.

Savings through improved efficiency

Other efficiency initiatives in appliance and motor standards and in mileage standards for passenger vehicles, also could produce enormous savings. A 40 mpg standard for cars, SUVs and light trucks — now technologically achievable — could save consumers at least $45 billion a year in gasoline costs — and 3 million barrels of oil a day. That's more than the projected production from the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, current oil imports from the Persian Gulf, and off-shore drilling from California combined.

It has long been documented that the United States uses two to three times more energy per capita and per unit of industrial output, than the more energy-efficient economies of Japan, Germany and other major industrial states. Mr. Cheney's plan for President Bush shamefully ignores the economic challenge, cost and savings reflected in such differentials.

Equally staggering are the pollution costs, nuclear threats and public giveaways that underlie the Bush/Cheney energy plan.

In advocating increased nuclear production and extended licensing for older nuclear plants, the administration ignores huge safety and cost factors. It touts nuclear production as low-cost and environmentally friendly, and it is anything but. Operating costs for nuclear plants are indeed lower than those in coal-fired plants, but only if costs for building, uranium processing and spent-fuel storage are excluded. If included, nuclear costs almost double coal-fired generation. And even that fails to take into account current and future risks and safety issues.

Significant increases in hydroelectric power, by damming more rivers, is ecologically and environmentally untenable.

Untenable pollution rollbacks

And cutting back on pollution controls for older power plants that fail to meet current standards imposed on plants built after 1990 would be a shameful giveaway of gross pollution rights to undeserving electricity generators. That proposal also is politically untenable. In the TVA area, for example, it would exacerbate the enormous health and plant damage already occurring in regional air pollution and in the Great Smoky Mountains. Northeastern states, whose electric plants meet current standards, would not — and should not — tolerate the continuing transport of heavy air pollution from southeastern and midwestern states.

The administration, moreover, cannot justify its proposed policy by California's deregulation debacle, nor by the ensuing price gouging crisis in California that the administrator has negligently tolerated.

For all the hoopla and buildup surrounding the introduction of the Bush energy policy, it is shamefully deficient and reckless, transparent and costly.

Mr. Bush apparently wants so badly to promote the business of some of his biggest contributors that he is looking blindly past responsible stewardship and public needs. That no excuse to let him drag the nation back to the past with a one-sided policy that looks like an artifact of the Sixties.