From: Patricia Lay-Dorsey
Date: Mon, 20 Oct 2003 18:44:26 -0400
Subject: We must STOP the Energy Bill!

Dear friends

We have seen many dangerous bills reach the floors of Congress these past few years, most of which passed. I'm afraid it's easy to numb out and say, "Oh to heck with it. Let them do what they want." That is the temptation, but we can't give up now. The Energy Bill coming up soon for a final vote is perhaps the most dangerous bill of all because its effects will be felt by the entire planet for generations to come.

The House and the Senate have each approved their own versions, and now top Republicans are writing the final bill behind closed doors. They're being very secretive about exactly what deals are being struck--not sharing the new language even with the Democrats on Capitol Hill who may have to vote on it any day now--yet they're pushing for a final vote as soon as this week.

This bill is so bad that the New York Times has called on the Senate to stop it with a filibuster--the Senate's ultimate tool for stopping exceptionally dangerous bills. (See the Editorial printed at the end of this email).

I am writing everyone I know to PLEASE urge your Senators to support this filibuster against the joint bill. It is our only chance to stop it.

This bill, as written, will do so much damage that it's hard to list its consequences, but here are a few, courtesy of the National Resources Defense Council. It would:

1. Overturn a decades-old ban on exploring for oil and gas off our coasts. The bill will allow damaging seismic blasting off our beaches and even in marine sanctuaries.

2. Open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling, create incentives for logging our national forests, and sacrifice other public lands to drilling.

3. Add $19 billion to the deficit -- handing over your tax dollars the mature, polluting industries with no consumer benefits. In fact, tax incentives would be provided for technologies that increase pollution.

4. Repeal the main law that protects consumers from energy market manipulation and fraud: the Public Utility Holding Company Act.

5. Leave landowners, ranchers and others affected by oil and gas development under their property powerless to protect their land and water from irresponsible development activities.

6. Encourage nuclear proliferation, by reversing a long-standing U.S. policy against reprocessing waste from commercial nuclear reactors and against using plutonium to generate energy from commercial use.

7. Dramatically increase air pollution and global warming with huge new incentives for burning coal, oil and gas.

8. Increase dependence on foreign oil by adding loopholes that weaken fuel economy laws.

9. Provide no standards for clean, renewable energy sources that could save consumers money while benefiting farmers, creating jobs, and reducing air pollution and global warming emissions.

10. Threaten drinking water sources by exempting from the Safe Drinking Water Act the underground injection of diesel fuel and other chemicals during oil and gas development, and let polluters off the hook for contaminating groundwater with MTBE and other fuel additives.

11. Exempt oil and gas drilling sites from water pollution prevention requirements that other construction activities must follow.

12. Threaten America's rivers by adding new delays to hydropower licensing, reducing standards for environmental protection, and creating a huge subsidy for new hydropower development.

13. Ease access for oil, gas, and coal companies to Native American tribal lands without providing meaningful public participation and review of impacts on cultural and natural resources.

PLEASE CALL NOW!

in hope for the future
Patricia Lay-Dorsey
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http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/29/opinion/29MON1.html

The Energy Bill Gets Worse

New York Times editorial, September 29, 2003

This country needs a purposeful long-term energy strategy that reduces its dependence on foreign oil and deals with climate change and all the other air-quality issues that are directly related to the burning of fossil fuels like oil and coal. So how has Congress chosen to develop such a strategy? By passing two mediocre energy bills and then handing the task of reconciling them to Senator Pete Domenici and Representative Billy Tauzin, both reliable allies of the fossil fuel industry (although Mr. Domenici is also a big fan of nuclear power) and neither a visionary thinker. Since Labor Day, these two veteran deal makers have been cherry-picking provisions they like, discarding those they don't and for good measure infuriating their colleagues by adding new items of their own.

This process is undemocratic even by Congress's clubby standards. Even worse is the almost certain outcome: a tired compendium of tax breaks and subsidies for energy producers leavened by a few gestures toward energy efficiency. The best evidence of Congress's bias in favor of production as opposed to conservation is the fact that the legislation would authorize oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge while doing nothing to improve the fuel economy of automobiles and light trucks -- a more certain and less destructive path to both energy independence and cleaner air.

Indeed, we can think of only a handful of positive provisions in these bills. One -- a Senate proposal that Mr. Tauzin is trying to kill -- would require power plants to generate 10 percent of their electricity from renewable sources by 2020. A second would open up the huge natural gas reserves on Alaska's North Slope, where oil drilling already occurs. Exploiting these reserves would obviate the need to go poking around in ecologically sensitive areas elsewhere, which the administration seems determined to do. A third provision would devote serious money to promising ways of cleaning up coal, the dirtiest but most plentiful of fossil fuels.

None of this, however, propels the country toward a new energy future. What America needs, and what the bill comes nowhere near providing, is a game-changer: a huge effort to help Detroit build entire fleets of fuel-efficient vehicles using available technology, for instance, or an equally ambitious program to convert cellulose to fuel -- not just corn but grasses, wood and agricultural wastes of all kinds -- in quantities large enough to make a real dent in oil imports.

Instead, Congress insists on thinking small, settling for timid research programs and unnecessary tax breaks for established industries that, as it happens, provide lots of campaign money. Since the Democrats also benefit from this money, they are unlikely to do the honorable thing, which is to filibuster this bill into extinction.