Editorial: New outlook on energy

Saturday, June 9, 2007 | 7:33 a.m.

I n early 2001 Vice President Dick Cheney held a series of secret meetings with top managers of oil, gas and nuclear power companies in preparation for the Bush administration's energy proposals.

As the proposals moved through Congress, Democrats fought for greater conservation measures, delaying an energy bill for years. In 2003 Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev., was among 157 House Democrats who voted against that year's Republican attempts to pass an energy bill.

She likened the bill to a wish list for the gas, oil, coal and nuclear industries. When the Republican-controlled Congress finally passed a comprehensive energy bill two years later, it still read much like that wish list.

Now Democrats control Congress and it is they who are fashioning new energy policies, ones that end giveaways to Big Oil and concentrate on issues such as global warming.

The Senate, for example, is expected to vote next week on a bill that would require auto manufacturers to increase the average fuel economy of their cars and trucks about 10 miles per gallon by 2020, and achieve increases of 4 percent a year for the decade after that. This would greatly reduce emissions of greenhouse gases.

Previous efforts to significantly increase the fuel-economy standard, which hasn't changed much over the past 20 years, have not succeeded. But with global warming getting worldwide attention and gas prices moving toward $4 a gallon, the bill has a better chance this time, despite the usual howls of protest from the auto industry.

In the House, a bill authored by Rep. Nick Rahall, D-W.Va., is being readied for a vote in early July. The bill centers on oil and gas drilling on federal lands and in areas designated as wildlife habitats. One aspect of the bill would end the federal practice of issuing drilling permits within 30 days of application, which obviously does not leave enough time to assess environmental impacts.

Another bill, authored by Rep. Pete Stark, D-Calif., would impose a "carbon tax" on the domestic extraction or importation of coal, oil and natural gas. Stark makes sense when he says the tax would provide a "disincentive for the use of carbon-based fossil fuels (responsible for global warming) and an incentive for the development and use of cleaner alternative energies."

The bills in the House and Senate are signs that the people we send to Congress - not the fossil-fuel industries and auto manufacturers - might now be back in charge of the nation's energy policies.