The Missing Energy Strategy

NYT reported The House is moving quickly and with sad predictability toward approval of yet another energy bill heavily weighted in favor of the oil, gas and coal industries.

Which industries do you suggest they should be addressing? The windmill industry? The leftists dont want them obscuring their scenic view. Corn farmers? Ethanol does not generate that much energy when it is used for fuel. Hydrogen powered cars? It takes too much energy to separate water into Hydrogen and Oxygen.

In due course the Senate may give the country something better. But unless Mr. Bush rapidly elevates the discussion, any bill that emerges from Congress is almost certain to fall short of the creative strategies needed to confront the two great energy-related issues of the age: the country's increasing dependency on imported oil, and global warming, which is caused chiefly by the very fuels the bill so generously subsidizes.

What's maddening about this is that there is no shortage of ideas about what to do. Step outside the White House and Congress, and one hears a chorus of voices begging for something far more robust and forward-looking than the trivialities of this energy bill. It is a strikingly bipartisan chorus, too, embracing environmentalists, foreign policy hawks and other unlikely allies. Last month, for instance, a group of military and intelligence experts who cut their teeth on the cold war - among them Robert McFarlane, James Woolsey and Frank Gaffney Jr. - implored Mr. Bush as a matter of national security to undertake a crash program to reduce the consumption of oil in the United States.

The consensus on the need for a more stable energy future is matched by an emerging consensus on how to get there. In the last two years, there have been three major reports remarkable for their clarity and convergence, from the Energy Future Coalition, a group of officials from the Clinton and the first Bush administrations; the Rocky Mountain Institute, which concerns itself with energy efficiency; and, most recently, the National Commission on Energy Policy, a group of heavyweights from academia, business and labor.

Homage is paid to stronger fuel economy standards, which Congress has steadfastly resisted.

Fuel efficient vehicles are available now; people just don't want t buy them, even with current gas prices

But all three reports also call for major tax subsidies and loan guarantees to help Detroit develop a new generation of vehicles, as well as an aggressive bio-fuels program to develop substitutes for gasoline.

Brad DeLong blogged Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps? (The New York Times Editorial Board Is a Clown Show Department)

Ezra Klein blogged Watching the Times scratch the dandruff from their hair and wonder why the Republican-led House is pushing such a myopic snarl of industry giveaways and poor policy is bad enough, reading their pleas for Bush to sweep in and save the day is unforgivable. This bill may as well be authored by the President himself. He's not going to dive in and save it, hell, he probably thinks the environmentalists got too much out of the deal.