The Energy Bill

Great Debates
21

Jshore: Actually, I thought the vote was more bipartisan than that. I stand corrected.

But please, don’t mistake me for a defender of Republicans in these matters. I’d think you’d know me well enough by now to know that I hate big government in all its forms, and these days the Republicans are just as guilty of it as the Democrats (in fact, I’d argue that they are more so at this moment, since they are the party in power and are supposed to reign in the pork). As I said, a pox on both their houses.

And anyway, in this particular sense it may be that Republicans outnumber the Democrats, but that’s probably only due to the demographics - the ‘red states’ are the ones that benefit from ethanol, and the ‘blue states’ are the ones that get hurt by the MTBE exceptions. Pick up another issue where pork is involved but the Demographics are reversed, and you’ll find a majority of Democrats supporting it. C’est la vie. They’re all a bunch of whores, with a few principled exceptions on both sides.

But more to the point, it’s the nature of government that creates them, or at least selects for those who work this way. Thus it will always be.

Sofa King said:

I’m not a neocon, but in my opinion this is the best argument against drilling in ANWR. I think the environmental issues can be handled, but it seems to me this is one hell of a large ‘strategic petroleum reserve’. As long as there is other cheap oil available, why not leave it in the ground? One day it will be worth a lot more, and the American people will be glad to have the reserve.

22

Conservatives ought to be outraged because this bill privaleges certain energy sources not because they are more or less economically efficient (which wouldn’t need a bill anyway) but merely because they are concentrated in the districts of powerful congressmen. The ethanol bit is outrageous. Supporting ethanol is pure idiocy. It isn’t any cleaner. It isn’t any cheaper. It’s an utter waste of money for specially privalege it. It it was as good as claimed, you wouldn’t NEED to give it life support to keep it going.

23

Not only that, but ethanol is a net energy sink. It takes more than 1 gallon of ethanol fuel to make a gallon of ethanol, when you factor in transportation costs, fertilizer, harvesting, etc. It is a complete waste of time, money, AND energy.

But it keeps those corn farmers farting through silk, so y’all have to pony up for it.

24

Let’s not forget Archer-Daniel Midlands here.

25

Is that a deliberate misrepresentation, or are you honestly confused on this issue? This issue does not have anything to do with drinking water standards. It has to do with protecting companies that made a gasoline additive whose use was specifically encouraged by the government for pollution reduction.

The CAA Amendments of 1990 required that some States take methods to reduce their CO emissions under 211(m), and they were required to come up with oxygenated fuel plans to comply by EOY 1992.

But let’s just look at one State - the State which arguably is the center of this controversy - California.

See this document, prepared by the California Air Resources Board:

Note Sections 8 and 9 or Part 1, where the use of MTBE seems to be encouraged. And Note Part 3, which speaks highly of its abilities to reduce pollution. And note Part 5, subsection C, which does not note any negative human impacts due to MTBE. In fact, I will quote from the CARB report:

It really does not seem that MTBE was some environmental catastrophe foisted on an unknowing public - it was specifically studied and recommended by no less than CARB. And this issue isn’t about “drinking water” standards, as MTBE was already under direct order to be phased out:

and then, it was Davis who ended up countermanding his own phase-out with a postponement. You’ll note that it was Davis, a Democrat, who effectively would sacrifice drinking water quality over the “harm” to California’s economy. I’m sure any Republican would have done the same, but why is Bush being flamed again, exactly?

This issue seems to be about preventing trial lawyers from gaining YET ANOTHER source of income via frivilous lawsuits. They will still be free to sue into the Stone Age the people who leaked or misused MTBE. Just not the people who produced it to respond to a State environmental mandate. In fact, I thought Forbes reported that the Energy bill MTBE Subsection contained the following text:

Doesn’t sound to me like anyone’s getting off the hook for spills, misuse, mismanagement, gross negligence, fraud, or recklessness. Yes MTBE is bad, yes it has been shown to cause cancer after long-term exposure (like many common industrial chemicals), yes when it leaks into the groundwater it is bad. So sue the freaking gas station with the leaky tanks, not the company that made a chemical which was approved for motor vehicle use for pollution reduction in all 50 States by the US EPA.

Una

26

Wow…me and Una agree!

Who’da thought.

It’s like you drive a Saturn…you run over someone. They sue Saturn for making the car.

27

Isn’t that what they try to do with guns?

Anyway, I think this is a stupid bill as well.

28

Yeah, but is this really going to be a great enough effect to significantly offset the costs? Also, I thought the current status of any tax provisions is that the CBO did do some “dynamic” scoring at the microeconomic level (e.g., predicting how people will shift from using one product to another based on tax incentives) although not at the macroeconomic level (because noone really knows how to do this very well). Does anyone know if this is correct or not?

Well, it is understandable how you might assume that when you hear that Daschle is supporting the bill. But, this is one case where Daschle is not very representative of the Democratic position as a whole.

29

Well, after all, he’s a uniter, not a divider…

30

While much of this thread has focused on the ethanol and MTBE provisions, I am concerned about another topic altogether.

The bill also addresses a desirable objective - to reduce the reliance of the US on foreign oil. Well, at least it includes policy that would appear to work toward that objective.

There are certainly a few different paths that would reduce our dependence on foreign (read: middle east) oil. Unfortunately, this one takes the least strategic path. The bill includes “incentives” to increase domestic oil production, instead of the more obvious path of simply reducing our long term demand for oil generally (which would also decrease our reliance on foreign sources).

What is wrong with this approach? There are many problems, some of which are consistent with the criticisms that Republicans usually aim at Democrats, others are traditional Republican tactics.

Why is domestic oil production declining? Because the easily accessible and producible oil within the US has already been produced. We are running into the laws of diminishing returns, and the cost to produce domestic petroleum is much higher than purchasing middle eastern oil. The energy bill’s approach to solve this problem is to provide “incentives” (tax breaks and direct subsidies, both are a form of subsidies, nearly $30 billion in total). For example, if a middle eastern barrel of crude costs $20, and producing a domestic barrel of crude costs $40, under this energy bill, the US taxpayers will kick in the other $20 so that our oil companies can produce domestic oil without being financially harmed. In that sense, it is no different from the farm subsidies despised by true conservatives. It is the government micro-managing the free market, and the government doesn’t have a good track record in this regard.

In the short term (while this administration is in power), the policy would reduce our dependence on foriegn oil. But it doesn’t solve the problem, it simply mortgages it for future generations to deal with. It simply moves the problem further out into the future, and at the same time, guarantees that the future problem will be even more difficult to solve. It is a traditional “cut taxes and spend” Republican tactic. It tends to look good come election time, but years later, we wonder how we got into this mess.

Perhaps worse, it smacks of special interest influence. It doesn’t benefit US taxpayers, it benefits specific US companies (with strong correlation to those contributing most significantly to Republican party generally, and the Bush administration in particular). Wasn’t that Zell Miller’s biggest criticism of the Democratic Party?

So what could they have done? They could have passed policy that diminishes our reliance on oil altogether. In the long run, no other course achieves the desired objective. Unfortunately, the oil companies aren’t big on that policy. If the government wants to meddle in the free market, it would be better off dis-incenting greater oil production, not vice-versa. Yet passing the buck to future generations is much more politically expedient.

The shame, of course, is that the US public doesn’t generally have a clue about these issues. The press can’t really address it, because, frankly, discussions on this subject can’t compare in entertainment value with Michael Jackson, Kobe Bryant, and Jessica Lynch. As close as the Senate vote was, it is highly likely that a little tweaking, like dropping the MTBE provision, will allow it enough support to pass and become law.

And while I strongly criticize the Republican’s on this one, I recognize that if the Democrats were in the same position, they’d end up with something just as ugly. In the end, we, the American people, get what we deserve. And until we reward politicians for making the tough decisions, instead of shape-shifting to bring pork to our state, it will continue.

31

Actually, I think Dick Cheney said it best: Conservation is a moral virtue, and a good thing for everyone to practice. But it is not a substitute for energy production. Sure, you can get everyone to wear sweaters in their houses, and drive smaller cars, and turn off their computers at night, and all the rest, but this will only make a very small dent in America’s energy needs. It’s a lot more difficult to tell a factory to use less energy, or turn off street lights in cities, or to tell restaraunts and shops that they must be dimmer or colder, or to try to limit the amount of trucking of goods.

Outside of the fringes of consumption, real cuts in energy usage are hellaciously expensive. For example, residential energy use only makes up about 20% of the total energy consumption in the U.S. If we are generous and assume that we can cut that by 10%, that only cuts overall energy consumption by 2%, which only moves the demand curve back by a year or so.

Conservation only buys you a little time. And hey, I thought one of the arguments against drilling in ANWR was that it would only buy the U.S. a little time, so in the long run it was useless. The same can be said for conservation.

32

Sam: Sometimes I think you just like to bait us. :wink: Moral virtue, bah! Conservation is the fastest and cheapest way to decrease our reliance (as Amory Lovins puts it, “it’s the rapid deployment resource”) and it is one that has the ancillary benefits of decreasing pollution and emission of greenhouse gases. I don’t see why it is necessarily difficult to get factories to use less energy. There is a hell of a lot of waste in the manufacturing sector and a hell of a lot of ways to reduce energy usage! And, in fact, some companies are doing it already.

While it may be true that one can’t get huge percentages of our total energy use out of any one area (such as residential use…although I think your estimate of 10% reduction is not particularly generous), when you add everything together it amounts to a lot more. There is no reason to believe we can’t get substantial savings in all sectors of our economy. Here and here are two articles by Amory and Hunter Lovins on the subject of energy. While they may be a little on the optimistic side, there is still plenty of room for improvement even if you discount for that.

But, the real point is that it is ridiculous to be subsidizing energy such as fossil fuels. It is a mature technology and there are so many external costs associated with its use that what we ought to be doing is heavily taxing it rather than subsidizing it. Then you would miraculously see the market coming up with oodles of intelligent ways for us to be more energy-efficient.

It amazes me that the very same people who claim, for example, that we can build (in the next few years yet!) a working ballistic missile defense where the offense has so many inherent advantages suddenly lose all faith in the market and innovation and all that when it comes to making us use energy more efficiently!

-jshore, soon (well, once my name gets to the top of the ~6-month waitlist!) to be the owner of a 2004 Prius!

33

What the energy bill should have looked like:China Passes Fuel Efficiency Laws That Are Stricter Than the U.S.

It makes sense to conserve both from an environmental standpoint and from a national security POV. Would that Congress and the President would show an equal measure of wisdom.

34

Yes, by FORCING people to do it. Yeah, we really want to emulate China and just force everybody to do whatever we consider desirable.

35

First, it’s interesting that the article does not cover Chinese NOx emissions standards on vehicles. I don’t have a cite, but I think that their NOx emissions limits are a bit higher than the US limits, which would make it a bit easier to have higher fuel economy.

Second, I note that the Chinese legislation also exempts pickup trucks. Although pickup trucks and SUVs are not nearly as prevelant in China as the US.

Third, I don’t think the actual limits are mentioned in the article - odd, that. Instead, what I read was this:

Good on the Chinese for trying to do something early about their impending pollution disaster there. But for an article with that much column space, I wonder why the NYT can’t actually list the proposed standards.

Would that the Clinton Administration in its first two years in office, when Democrats controlled the Congress, have spent their time trying to raise CAFE (something I support) than banning scary-looking guns. If they could push the ill-conceived “assault weapons ban” through over such resistance as they had, they certainly could have raised CAFE to 30mpg and eliminated the SUV/light truck exemption (both of which I support as well). But I guess it wasn’t that important to them, relatively speaking. Who knew?

36

Una Persson (Why the name change, BTW?): Unfortunately, I think it is true as a general rule that Clinton was never willing to expend much political capital on behalf of environmental issues. Apart from some legacy-building in the last year or two, he did not do a whole lot of positive things for the environment. (On the other hand, in the current administration the question is not just about lack of positives but of active harm being done.)

37

The main point I was trying to make up there was that the Chinese are actually being forward looking. We should do the same, both because with hybrid engines coming on stream the technology is obviously there, and because it’s a helluva lot cheaper, and way better in the long run, to conserve than to depend on the Middle East and Russia to keep us warm.
As for Clinton, yes he was wrong on this subject. The problem with Bush is that you know he’s not going to veto this turkey, both because he’s for it anyway, and because he has yet to veto a single bill coming out of this Congress.
This is one of the main reasons why the deficit is now running at more than 2.5 billion dollars a day in the fiscal year starting 10/1/2003. He hasn’t ever said no to a Congressional Republican, and on the evidence I don’t think he ever will. He may no longer be a party animal, but he’s definitely a Party man.

38

And adaher, the Cato Institute figures a hike in the gas tax is better than imposing CAFE standards. I’d actually rather we had that solution, because I actually agree with them on this point. It attacks gasoline consumption directly, and keeps the government out of the business of deciding what kinds of cars should be produced. From an editorial on their website:

Link: http://www.cato.org/dailys/03-04-02.html

Other things that should be done are things like increasing the tolls on bridges, tunnels and toll roads leading into the big cities during rush hours to reduce that traffic, encourage use of mass transit, and fully reflect the demand for the resource - the road - at that time of the day. Everywhere else the price rises when demand on a limited resource goes up. But when it comes to roads, the price doesn’t reflect the demand at all.
The price of driving doesn’t begin to reflect the cost of subsidizing it, even in our defense budget, where we have to allocate money because of the instability of the ME. Drivers should pay that cost, and if they did, consumption would automatically go down and the cars produced would by now be far more efficient than they currently are.
But regardless, this President shows no interest in any measures to increase conservation. The Cheney quote Sam Stone cited above fully reflects their philosophy on the subject.

39

If you stole this line, tell us where. If you didn’t, go make some more.

40

Recipe for good lines: five and a half slices of french toast, hot apple cider, tea, and a warm dog on your lap.