Almost six
months to the day after President Bush urged Congress in his State of the Union
address to help break America’s addiction to imported oil,
the Senate approved a bill yesterday that would do nothing to cure that
addiction and could actually make it worse.
The bill,
which would open up 8.3 million acres in the Gulf of Mexico for new energy
development, is bad fiscal policy, since one-third of the royalties that would
normally accrue to all Americans from drilling in federal waters would flow to
just four gulf
states. Even as a drilling bill it makes little sense;
to placate Florida’s senators, it prohibits drilling in
offshore areas that are richer in resources than the areas it opens up. And as
energy policy it’s hopelessly one-sided, encouraging production while ignoring
consumption.
After Mr.
Bush’s address in January, the Senate legislative machinery went into overdrive
and produced scores of energy-related bills, at least two of which were
comprehensive, bipartisan measures aimed at reducing oil consumption by half
over the next quarter-century by encouraging energy efficiency and alternative
fuels. But Bill Frist, the Senate majority leader, prohibited any changes to
this bill, pretty much shutting the door on any grown-up discussion of the
country’s energy future.
Mary
Landrieu, a Democrat whose home state of Louisiana would benefit handsomely, conceded
that by ignoring demand the bill represented only “half the solution” to the
country’s energy problems. Even that is a big exaggeration. The gulf might well
yield enough natural gas to make a difference in price. But there is not enough
oil there or anywhere else in the United States to make a difference in
the price of a barrel of oil or a gallon of gasoline at the pump. Why the Senate
persists in deluding itself on this remains one of the mysteries of the
age.
