From the New York Times Editorial
blog:
The Energy Bill: A Hero and a Villain
President Bush has just signed into law an energy bill that could have
been even better but still remains an impressive achievement. The long
struggle to produce that bill yielded the usual quotient of heroes and
villains, but two deserve special mention:
John Dingell, who could have been a villain but chose to be a hero;
and Mary Landrieu, who could have been a hero but chose to be a
villain.
Mr. Dingell was a most unlikely hero. A Michigan Democrat and a
reliable defender of the automobile industry, he had long resisted
efforts to mandate new fuel efficiency standards, which had not been
updated for more than 30 years.
But there has always been a softer, “greener” side to this crusty
octogenarian that people often overlook. An architect of the original
Clean Water Act of 1972, he cares a lot about wetlands preservation,
endangered species and other environmental causes. He is also a fairly
recent convert to the climate change issue, describing the global
warming threat with phrases like “Hannibal is at the gates.”
So when Nancy Pelosi, the House Speaker, made a personal pledge to
upgrade fuel efficiency standards, Mr. Dingell agreed, in exchange for
one or two modest concessions, to get out of the way. He did more than
that. When environmentalists complained that the Senate’s mandate for
a huge increase in ethanol could threaten forests, wetlands and
conservation areas, Mr. Dingell made sure the final bill contained the
necessary safeguards. He also insisted on a provision requiring that
ethanol from corn or any other source produce a net benefit in terms
of greenhouse gas emissions.
Ms. Landrieu was an altogether different story. The Louisiana Democrat
broke ranks with her Democratic colleagues and gave President Bush and
the Republican leadership the one-vote margin they needed to strike a
key provision that would have rescinded about $12 billion in tax
breaks for the oil industry and shifted the money to research and
development of cleaner sources of energy.
The White House argued that these tax breaks were necessary to insure
the oil industry’s economic health and to protect consumers at the
pump. Given industry’s $100 billion-per-year profits, these arguments
were absurd on their face, but Ms. Landrieu promoted both of them and
added one of her own: The energy bill was “one-sided policymaking”
that left “Louisiana footing the bill.”
Never mind that the rest of the country is footing the bill for the
repair and restoration of Louisiana in the aftermath of Hurricane
Katrina. That is a just and worthy cause and one that the nation is
willing to help pay for. But isn’t reducing oil dependency and global
warming emissions by rewarding traditional fossil fuels a bit less,
and rewarding newer, cleaner fuels a bit more, also a just and worthy
cause? One that Louisiana could help pay for? That is something Ms.
Landrieu might ask herself the next time she puts her state’s interest
ahead of the nation’s.