“Let’s roll” was the oft-repeated refrain of Republican and some Democrat conferees Friday, as they met in an initial conference committee session and pledged to finish work by the end of the month on a comprehensive energy bill that would respond to the public’s concerns about an aging electric transmission infrastructure, potential winter price spikes in natural gas and obscenely high gasoline prices.

“The House members are anxious and, indeed, willing to roll up our sleeves,” said Rep. W.J. “Billy” Tauzin (R-LA), chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee and lead representative of the House energy conferees. “Let’s roll,” he told Sen. Pete Domenici (R-NM), chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee and chairman of the conference committee.

The “blackout ought to be a wake-up call for us. The time’s now [to pass energy legislation], and we ought to be about it,” said Rep. Ralph Hall (D-TX). “Let’s roll.” Often “more is said than done [in committees], and I think it’s time to do,” agreed Rep. Bill Thomas (R-CA), chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee.

Last year lawmakers made similar promises, but a national energy bill died in conference as a result of wide disagreements over electricity and drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). This year, however, they are feeling the pressure from an outraged public that has weathered a power outage, near-record natural gas prices, and gasoline prices that only move in one direction — up.

Setting an aggressive deadline, Domenici signaled last week that he plans to hold only two sessions for all of the conferees — the one on Friday and another later in the month — and will allow staffs of the Senate and House energy committees to resolve the less-contentious energy issues behind the scenes, leaving the more controversial items for the conferees.

The Republican plan drew immediate protests from Democratic conferees. The Republicans intend to “abandon [an] open, transparent process” during conference on the energy measure, said Rep. Edward Markey (D-MA). They will “immediately trigger a blackout” of the conference after the initial session, leaving Democrats and other minority interests in the dark about negotiations on energy issues.

Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-NM) and Rep. John Dingell (D-MI), the ranking Democrats on the Senate and House energy panels, also criticized the decision to limit the number of conference sessions, saying they hoped substantiative energy issues would be decided openly by conferees and not behind closed doors.

“There’s hardly an item [in the energy bill] that hasn’t been debated openly,” Domenici countered. “We don’t need hearings. We need action,” he told Democrats. “The time is to vote.”

There’s a “rumor afoot that we are going to muddy the water” even further by including President Bush’s Clear Skies’ initiative in the bill, Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) said. Inserting a clean air initiative in the energy measure would make it a “veritable Christmas tree,” Dingell intoned. He urged conferees not to inject “extraneous matters” in the bill.

Prior to the start of the conference session Friday, House Republicans defeated (211 to 176) a procedural motion by Democrats to instruct conferees to strip out the electric transmission reliability provisions from the broad energy bill and place them in a separate, stand-alone bill.

Dingell, whose home state of Michigan was affected by the Aug. 14 power blackout, offered the motion late Thursday. He and other Democrats argued that mandatory reliability provisions enjoyed widespread support and should be voted on separately in the event the energy bill was blocked again this year. The proponents further said a separate reliability measure could be passed by Congress quickly and sent to President Bush. But Republicans decried the move by Democrats, saying they simply were attempting to derail a comprehensive energy bill that they largely opposed.

Despite the loss, Dingell and other Democratic supporters continued to press for a separate bill on mandatory and enforceable reliability standards during the initial conference session.

There is “widespread consensus” that a “sore need” exists for enforceable reliability standards, Dingell told conferees. Rep. Bobby Rush (D-IL) called for Congress to approve a piecemeal reliability bill “as quickly as possible.” He argued that conferees could pass it out of conference this week, without “abdicating [their] responsibility” to address comprehensive legislation.

Both Domenici and Tauzin made clear their opposition to stripping issues out of the energy bill. “I do not support efforts to break it up in a piecemeal [fashion],” Domenici declared. “We are only two votes away,” one in the House and one in the Senate, “from presenting a comprehensive [energy] bill to the president,” Tauzin noted.

The conference committee is made up of 13 conferees from the Senate, and nearly 60 conferees from the House. The conferees’ task is to reconcile the differences in the Senate and House energy bills.

Since many of the energy bill issues will be ironed at the staff level, “we envision a swift, productive conference. There may be as few as two meetings with all the conferees,” said Marnie Funk, the Republican spokeswoman for the Senate Energy Committee, in an e-mail to reporters last week.

Electricity issues are expected to dominate the bill in the wake of the Aug. 14 blackout, but natural gas won’t be overlooked. “I think everyone is keenly aware of the looming price problems with natural gas,” observed Bill Wicker, a spokesman for the Democrats on the Senate Energy Committee. “I wouldn’t relegate it to the basement.”

In the coming weeks, the National Petroleum Council is due to release its much-awaited study on natural gas supply and demand, and a congressional task force will report its findings on the fickle gas market to House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-IL). Both are “high-profile” reports, Wicker said. “That’s going to guarantee that nobody’s going to forget about natural gas” in the energy bill.

Rep. Barbara Cubin (R-WY), a House conferee, last week called for the committee to reverse the “years of bad public policy” by the federal government on natural gas — promoting the use of gas, while limiting producer access to resources on public lands. “Production, not politics, will solve this problem,” she said.

Rather than boost supply, Rep. Rick Boucher (D-VA) believes the answer is to reduce gas consumption. The “best formula for relieving the pricing pressure on natural gas” is to provide power generators, major consumers of gas, incentives to use other fuels, such as coal, he said. The nation’s over-reliance on natural gas is threatening its economic recovery, he cautioned.

The staffs of the House and Senate energy panels have categorized the energy bill issues into Tier I and Tier II groups. “The majority of the issues are Tier II issues that can likely be resolved on the staff level. A substantial number of these will be resolved in the next 10 days,” Funk said.

Tier I issues “will include, but are not limited to,” electricity, drilling in ANWR, corporate average fuel economy, renewable portfolio standards, climate change, liability provisions in ethanol and Alaska pipeline incentives, she noted.

“Chairman Domenici believes S.14 as amended and his [substitute] electricity amendment most accurately reflect the Senate’s position on energy,” Funk said. This includes the deal that Domenici and Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL) reached prohibiting FERC from implementing standard market design (SMD) and mandating participation in regional transmission organizations (RTO) until Dec. 31, 2006.

“Nothing in [that] agreement can be interpreted to infer that FERC has authority to mandate participation in RTOs after Dec. 31, 2006. In short, we will leave it to the courts to decide whether FERC has that authority,” Funk said.

The agreement between Domenici and Shelby “was not reached lightly; it has not changed in the wake of the blackout,” she noted.

Although it is not part of the Senate bill, Domenici “strongly supports” opening ANWR to energy development, according to Funk. “If he sees any possibility for including ANWR in the conference report in a way that ensures the 60 votes needed for cloture, he will do so. We likely won’t know until the final hours of the conference whether the provisions in the conference report can draw 60 votes if ANWR is included. [So] ANWR will remain in play until the final hours of the conference.” The House energy bill supports ANWR development.

Domenici has agreed as part of the energy bill to abandon his nuclear energy loan guarantees and purchase agreements in favor of a different avenue for incentivizing the nuclear energy industry, Funk said. “The new provisions are being crafted. They will be addressed later in the conference.”

Like the House, he also believes that climate change “should not be addressed in the context of the energy bill,” she noted.

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