WORKING TO DEVISE A BETTER ENERGY POLICY
The bill would do little to reduce our reliance on foreign oil. The United States is nearly 60 percent reliant on foreign oil, and this number will only rise in the coming years – reaching as much as 70 or 75 percent in the next 10 to 15 years. Senator Landrieu of Louisiana, Senator Specter of Pennsylvania, and I offered an amendment to the Senate version of the energy bill that would have saved one million barrels of oil per day by 2013, and it passed by a vote of 99 to 1. Inexplicably, this provision was dropped from the final bill.
This legislation also contains numerous wasteful and expensive subsidies, including an ethanol mandate that will cost taxpayers $2 billion to subsidize corn production in the Midwest at the expense of higher gas prices in New England. Ethanol is more expensive than gasoline, is difficult to transport, is of dubious value to the environment, and does little to reduce our reliance on foreign fuels. In fact, studies show that it takes about four gallons of oil to produce five gallons of ethanol. If the goal is to reduce reliance on foreign fuels, we would be much better off increasing automobile fuel economy standards or mandating other achievable efficiency improvements.
I am disappointed that a renewable energy provision that I authored with Senator Bingman of New Mexico was not included in the final version of the bill. This provision would have required that 10 percent of our electricity come from clean, renewable energy sources by the year 2020. Unfortunately, the House of Representatives voted to remove this important provision, passing up an important opportunity to increase fuel diversity, decrease natural gas prices, and reduce greenhouse gases.
This bill also includes a liability waiver for manufacturers of MTBE, which is an environmentally harmful gasoline additive. This provision definitely does not belong in the bill – MTBE is a suspected carcinogen and has contaminated a number of groundwater supplies in Maine. In 1998, for example, a groundwater system serving 5,000 people operated by the Portland Water District was contaminated by MTBE. The incident cost the Portland Water District $1.5 million. The liability provisions in the bill will leave MTBE manufacturers with little incentive to clean up contaminated water supplies. The likely result will be that municipal ratepayers will have to shoulder a majority of clean-up costs.
The bill's provisions that relate to electricity are troubling and do nothing to help reduce rates in New England, which are among the highest in the country. Three months ago, the nation suffered the largest blackout in our history, illustrating the fundamental flaws in a haphazard and poorly regulated electricity market. Electricity regulators in the areas most affected by the blackout – the Northeast and Midwest – said that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) needs to move ahead with standardized electricity markets in order to improve the reliability of our markets. Since electricity flows across power lines without regard to state boundaries, we need clear and consistent electricity rules that apply to the entire nation. Unfortunately, this bill would actually prohibit FERC from moving ahead with standardized markets for another three years.
I am also troubled by the subsidies for some of our nation's dirtiest power plants. Why should taxpayers pay for pollution control technologies for 40-year-old coal-fired power plants that were grandfathered under the Clean Air Act? Recently, when three advanced natural gas plants were built in Maine, these plants installed state-of-the-art advanced pollution control technologies, without any subsidies. The cost of this technology was borne by electricity consumers in Maine and other states in the Northeast. The cost of electricity from the oldest coal-fired power plants has long been subsidized through exemptions from the Clean Air Act. To further this subsidy by authorizing billions in taxpayer subsidies for the dirtiest plants makes no sense at all, and will have the effect of continuing to ensure a disparity in the price of electricity between regions in which pollution and other costs are subsidized, and regions such as the Northeast which are not the beneficiary of these subsidies.
Another problem is the bill's failure to address climate change. It seems a near certainty that greenhouse gas emissions will increase by hundreds of millions of tons under this bill, and yet provisions to direct more money to research climate change were completely eliminated. If we are going to spend billions of dollars on oil, gas, and coal projects that will increase greenhouse gas emissions, then we should at least determine whether such an increase in emissions could cause an abrupt – and potentially dangerous – change in our climate. Unfortunately, the abrupt climate change provisions that I authored were dropped from the bill.
In summary, this bill does not offer the balance that America needs in a national energy policy. In a vote on November 21, I joined in a successful effort to prevent the legislation from going forward, and I hope that this will prompt our colleagues to draft a new, improved energy bill that increases energy efficiency and renewable energy, protects the environment, reduces our reliance on foreign oil, and gives FERC adequate authority to provide reliable electricity markets. A better bill will bring about a far more balanced energy policy for our nation and would save taxpayers billions of dollars.
