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Senate GOP Maps Out Energy Bill Strategy
Senate Republicans pulled out all the stops last week to get the Democratic leadership to move on energy legislation before the end of the session, and even vowed to tack on an energy bill to other legislation such as the economic-stimulus measure pending in the upper chamber.
Key Republicans in the Senate, led by Sen. Frank Murkowski (R-AK), indicated they were considering affixing the House energy bill, H.R. 4, to the economic-stimulus package, which the Senate Finance Committee is expected to mark up this week. They also said they haven’t ruled out a scaled-down energy bill of their own.
Majority leader Tom Daschle (D-SD) and other key Senate Democrats said any attempt to weigh down the economic-stimulus bill with an energy measure would be staunchly resisted.
H.R. 4 would open the door to oil and natural gas drilling in the coastal region of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) and would provide producers and energy consumers with an estimated $33 billion in tax incentives, as well as promote conservation, energy efficiency, environmental safeguards, renewable fuel production and traditional energy production initiatives.
The Republicans “threaten to attach it [ANWR] to every piece of legislation before Congress. They say it’s security; it’s not. They say it’s stimulus; it’s not,” said Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) at a press briefing last week. Both Kerry and Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D-CT) have said they will filibuster any effort to attach ANWR energy legislation to an economic-stimulus package.
In the meantime, “we’re not taking anything off the table. We’re keeping our options open” in terms of energy legislation, said a spokesman for the Republican members of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.
Despite the pressure from Republicans, considerable doubt still lingers as to whether any energy legislation — following the Sept. 11 attacks and amid the anthrax scares on Capitol Hill — will make it to the Senate floor this year. Senate Energy Committee Chairman Jeff Bingaman (D-NM) has conceded that the post-Sept. 11 “events make it less likely that the Senate may get to a bill” this session, said a spokesman for the Democratic side of the committee.
Although still barred from his anthrax-contaminated office in the Hart Office Building, Bingaman continues to work on a comprehensive energy bill to be forwarded to Daschle. He said he expects to send the measure to Daschle in about a week to 10 days after it’s completed.
He’s made it clear that ANWR won’t be in his bill. Speaking to an Alliance to Save Energy energy summit recently, he said ANWR was a “distraction from what needs to be done to boost domestic oil output in the next decade.” But a Bingaman initiative is likely to call for government financial incentives to help spur development and construction of a long-line natural gas pipeline from Alaska.
He believes an Alaska pipeline would be the “antidote” for what he sees as a “developing problem” — the nation’s growing dependence on foreign liquefied natural gas (LNG) supplies. “We are about to make a major policy mistake of becoming, as a nation, dependent on imported natural gas brought in on tankers for a substantial part of our natural gas consumption,” he noted.
Bingaman believes an Alaskan line is stalled because of a “lack of certainty about the investment risk of building such a major pipeline” amid fluctuating gas prices. “Since natural gas prices vary from $2 to $10/Mcf, it is hard for the free market to take this challenge on by itself. This is the classic kind of market failure that requires assistance from the government in order to achieve the right national policy result,” he said.
Such a proposal is likely to be met with considerable resistance from senators who, while they strongly back an Alaskan line, are opposed to any kind of government subsidies for the project. They contend it would set a dangerous precedent.
Despite the disruption since Sept. 11, Bingaman noted that “we have been making quiet progress on a number of fronts in the Senate,” such as on electricity. “There is also developing consensus in a number of other areas. I am hoping that I can complete a package of proposals to serve as the starting point for debate in the Senate in the near future.”
Meanwhile, Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham last Tuesday reaffirmed the Bush administration’s continued support for comprehensive energy legislation in the Senate.
“My preference, I think the president’s and the administration’s preference, is still to proceed with a comprehensive bill, as opposed to trying to somehow separate issues into stand-alone energy security issues and non-stand-alone energy security issues,” Abraham said during a press briefing sponsored by Energy Daily. “To me, these all are energy security issues at the end of the day — almost all of them.”
He believes Daschle’s decision to directly call energy legislation to the Senate floor, circumventing the Senate Energy Committee, has been a setback for the bill. “Prior to the decision that Sen. Daschle made to remove legislation from the committee process, I think we were making great progress in terms of resolving areas of disagreement.”
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