Bush offers "back to the future" energy package

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June 2001

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Bush offers a "back to the future" energy plan
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Bush offers "back to the future" energy package
"Going retro" is great fun for those college students who seek the latest fashions among the moth-eaten and forgotten on Salvation Army clothing racks, but it may not make for the best policy for America's energy-challenged future.

Major elements
Production
Ease restrictions on oil and gas development on public lands.

Open a portion of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska to drilling.

Ease permit process for refinery expansion and construction.

Speed license procedures for hydroelectric dams and geothermal plants.

Order agencies to expedite permits for energy-related projects.

Power Plants
Streamline approval process for siting power plants.

Give government authority to take property through eminent domain for power lines.

Provide tax breaks for developing clean coal technologies.

Ease regulatory barriers, including clean air rules, to make plants more efficient.

Nuclear
Adjust regulations to speed relicensing of reactors and licensing of new plants.

Pursue a national nuclear waste repository, despite controversy surrounding the Yucca Mountain site in Nevada. The only site being considered, Yucca Mountain is not singled out in the report.

Give tax breaks for purchase of nuclear plants.

Reauthorize law that limits industry liability from a nuclear accident.

Consider reviving technology that allows spent fuel from nuclear reactors to be reused to produce electricity. The technology was abandoned in 1970s because it was consider a proliferation risk.

Renewable Energy
Provide tax credits to encourage development of energy plants that use organic waste, or biomass.

Continue tax credits for wind energy generation.

Give tax credit of 15 percent for homeowners who purchase solar panels.

Study whether to require automobiles to meet higher fuel efficiency standards.

Propose $5 billion in new spending, most of which goes to tax credits for renewable energy and conservation projects.

Enact legislation to expand existing alternative fuels tax incentives to include landfills that capture methane gas emissions for electricity generation.

Conservation
Give tax credit for purchase of high-mileage, hybrid gas-electric vehicles.

Provide tax benefits and regulatory relief for co-generation plants that produce both heat and electricity

Expand federal Energy Star program to include not only businesses but schools, homes and hospitals.

John Bryne, director of the University of Delaware's Center for Energy and Environmental Policy suffered a severe case of deaj-vu when he reviewed President George W. Bush's new energy package. "I think most [energy policy analysts] regard the President's proposals as a bit out-of-date," he says. "It seems that the Bush Administration has proposed a strategy that is really much better suited to the 1970s. I just don't think it will work now."

Released on May 17, the President's 163-page plan calls for increasing domestic supplies of oil, gas, and coal and boosting production of electric and nuclear power. The supply-oriented strategy advocates opening up public lands to development and easing government regulations on the development of new pipelines, refineries, dams and power plants.

Byrne is particularly surprised by the proposal to use more nuclear power to light-up America's lava lamps. Byrne considers nuclear energy a dead industry and doubts that any major U.S. utility will be interested in building new nuclear facilities. No new nuclear plants have gone online in the US since 1973, and the last few plants constructed in the late 1970s proved to be billion dollar boondoggles, never used because of public and regulatory resistance.

"Nuclear plants are among our riskiest options [for energy production]," says Byrne. "They're costly to maintain, and they've made little investment in development in the last 30 years.

"I can't imagine any community in the United States that would be willing to accept a nuclear plant now," Byrne adds. While some new models for nuclear energy production are described as safer and more efficient than older designs, most Americans can recall with dread the 1979 near meltdown at Three Mile Island in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania and the horrific disaster at Chernobyl in the then Soviet Ukraine.

"And we have simply not solved the disposal problem" for spent nuclear fuel and contaminated equipment, Byrne says.

Introducing the plan last month in St. Paul, Minnesota, Bush said, "If we fail to act, this great country could face a darker future—a future that is unfortunately being previewed … in the great state of California. . . . America cannot allow that to be our future, and we will not."

The Bush plan loosens restrictions on oil and gas exploration, opens up previously verboten federal wildlife preserves and parks to exploration—most controversially in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR)—and eases restrictions on energy production from coal-burning. Though the plan includes a package of tax credits for companies that utilize renewable energy sources and consumers who purchase fuel-efficient cars or make their homes more energy-efficient, Democrats have attacked the proposals, charging that the president's policies would merely fatten oil producers' pockets while devastating the environment.

Other critics point out that any energy relief from Bush's proposals are years away—oil or gas from new fields may take as long as 7 to 10 years to reach the market. That means the administration's proposals will not respond in any meaningful way to the current crisis in California, nor prevent the energy crunch from spreading to other states in the immediate future.

Byrne says that tapping new oil reserves in the Alaskan wilderness will probably not result in much help at the gas pump, either. He thinks most new oil flowing into the global energy free market will simply be sold off to the highest bidder—probably Japan—before it could be funneled into the U.S. to bring domestic gasoline prices down.

Increasing coal burning may prove an especially controversial element of the Bush plan since coal-burning introduces environment hazards both in its extraction, which ravages Appalachian topography, and through burning, which degrades air quality and introduces high volumes of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Meanwhile, citing Department of Energy computer projections, Vice President Dick Cheney, who led the team which prepared the president's proposals, has called for the construction of at least 1,300 new power plants over the next decade to ensure America's energy supply into the next century.

None of these proposals make economic or environmental sense to Byrne, nor does he see much interest in a wave of costly new plant construction among America's energy producers. Before the nation tries on the energy equivalent of platform shoes and psychedelic bell bottoms, Byrne urges a deeper national commitment to renewable energy production from wind and solar power and conservation and calls for a more critical look at some of the nation's current energy-wasting fashions, like the explosion in the use of light trucks and sport-utility vehicles, that are contributing to this most recent energy "crisis."

"If we improve fuel efficiency by just 2 or 3 miles per gallon over three years, that would amount to all the oil that is projected to be found in ANWR," he says.

Byrne calls conservation the cheapest way to improve America's energy "reserves." More aggressive efforts to improve efficiency in consumer and industrial products such as automobiles, air conditioners, computers, and kitchen aids and new hi-tech improvements in lighting, air conditioning, and home retrofitting would do more to improve America's energy self-sufficiency than hundreds of new power plants.

Such improved energy efficiencies have been accomplished before. According to Byrne, between 1980 and 2000, while the U.S. increased its economic production by 125 percent, total U.S. consumption only increased by less than 40 percent. He thinks that the U.S. can do even better in the future. "We are still very wasteful compared to the Europeans," he says, burning more energy and producing twice the amount of greenhouse gases per capita than Europeans.

"Encouraging these new technologies and taking some of the waste out of the system would be better for the economy, better for the society, and better for the environment."—Kevin Clarke

For more information:
Center for Energy and Environmental Policy
Democrats offer contrasting plan
The Cheney Task Force report
How energy efficiency can turn 1300 power plants into 170—Alliance to Save Energy
LA Times explains the California Crisis for you
Why not drill?—International Herald Tribune
Three Mile Islands to go before we sleep—US Catholic
Our fake energy crisis: what really happened in California—Molly Ivins
Bush energy plan gets it wrong—Seattle Post-Intelligencer

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