Energy's Last Stand

As a last blow to what has been a disastrous month for energy, David Obey, the House Appropriations Committee Chair, announced Tuesday that a provision continuing the moratorium on offshore drilling will be dropped this year from a stopgap spending bill.

Earlier this month, House Democrats unwillingly negotiated a compromise with Republicans, ceding land 50-100 miles off America’s coasts to offshore drilling. Although this measure gave Republicans 90% of what they asked, President Bush, in an unsurprisingly irresponsible political move, threatened a veto if the moratorium continued. Driven by fear of losing votes in the upcoming election, Congress bowed to President Bush giving him –and Big Oil –everything they asked for.

Republicans are congratulating themselves on supposedly saving the American people from an energy-driven economic crisis. But the move is obviously flawed and reckless. Richard Charter, a consultant to the Defenders of Wildlife Action Fun, observes that "coastal states could reasonably expect a pre-lease planning timeline of approximately 18-24 months, at a minimum, between the approval of a federal lease sale and the actual sale of seafloor lands and drilling rights to the oil industry in a lease sale," meaning that years would pass before the reserves could even be tapped, much less impact the price of oil.

The short-sightedness of the Republican leadership isn’t all-together shocking, seeing as how Big Oil funds many Congressional –and Presidential –campaigns. But rather than stand up to special interests and reject fundamentally flawed energy initiatives, Congress simply caved under pressure from their various “constituents” (a.k.a. oil conglomerates) and pushed American farther and farther away from a sustainable energy policy grounded in renewable energy investment

Democrats plan to revisit the energy problem after November, hoping to limit offshore drilling and invest heavily in renewable resources. We eagerly await their return to Congress, and hope that the drilling issue is simply a microcosm of a broken Bush/Cheney energy policy that will be swept out of Washington come January, and not symptomatic of a greater shared –and inaccurate –belief that we can drill our way out of the energy crisis.