That was a wish too far. But many items on that board–and other lists scribbled by other energy lobbyists in other offices around town–found their way into the recommendations that the president will unveil to the nation next week. The API list, in fact, was forwarded to George Bush’s transition team, which sent it to the Interior Department. On March 20, Interior sent many of the same ideas to the Energy Task Force that Vice President Dick Cheney had convened on Jan. 29. To close the loop, key leaders from that API meeting have since been appointed to pivotal positions in Bush’s administration–among them J. Steven Griles, an energy lobbyist and the new second in command at Interior, and Thomas Sansonetti, an energy lawyer recently named the top environmental cop at the Justice Department. The two, in effect, will help administer policies they helped to write.
If the Bush administration is homecoming weekend for the energy industry, Dick Cheney’s task-force report is the pregame tailgate party. Not since the rise of the railroads more than a century ago has a single industry placed so many foot soldiers at the top of a new administration. While the report will recommend an array of what one White House aide advertises as “high-tech, 21st-century conservation ideas,” its core will be a call to find and use new sources of fossil fuels, as well as a renewed commitment to nuclear power. What voters need to hear “loud and clear,” the president declared last week, “is that we are running out of energy in America.”
Is there a national “crisis”? California faces rolling summer-electricity blackouts. In New York City, officials are scrambling to add small gas-fired generators to handle peak demand. Natural-gas prices have doubled in the past year. The numbers on signs at filling stations are skyrocketing, and could hit $3 a gallon this summer in the Midwest. In a West Wing interview with NEWSWEEK, Cheney shied away from the C word. “I think the potential is there for it to adversely affect the economy,” he said.
But voters are using the word. In a NEWSWEEK Poll, 71 percent of those surveyed say there is an “energy crisis” in California; 53 percent agree there now is one in the country as a whole. Given an either-or choice between “protecting the environment” and “developing new sources of energy,” those polled selected energy by 52 to 41 percent, compared with a 49-44 ratio just one month ago.
There’s something to be said for turning to energy-industry alums in this situation–and Cheney, who like Bush is a son of the oilfields, is not shy about saying it. “The fact of the matter is [you get] a lot of expertise with people who have been dealing with these issues for a long time,” he told NEWSWEEK. In his own case, he said, his time at Halliburton, the globe-girdling oil-services company, taught him “a hell of a lot about the technology of the business,” such as benign new ways to drill in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
But Americans are skeptical of industry motives–and, by extension, of Bush’s ties. When asked to name who had contributed “a lot” to the current energy situation, those polled named two sets of villains: the U.S. energy companies (66 percent) and overseas energy suppliers, such as OPEC. Bush himself gets his lowest approval marks for his handling of energy and environmental issues. Democrats, naturally, are pouncing on what they see as a populist hole in Bush’s armor. Late last week House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt was stumping in Chula Vista, Calif.; with transmission lines as a backdrop, he vowed to impose new federal caps on electricity rates–an idea Cheney flatly opposes.
The administration may well have raised the political risk via the process it used to draft its plan. The Bushies used a secretive, believers-only process reminiscent of another such enterprise: Hillary Rodham Clinton’s effort to write a national health-care plan in 1994. Since the group comprises only government officials, White House aides say, it is entitled to keep its deliberations private. Still, industry leaders–who dumped $22.5 million into GOP coffers in the last election–enjoyed constant contact with the task force. Cheney met with a group of utility executives at the Edison Electric Institute, whose president, Tom Kuhn, was a leading Bush fund-raiser. No one has enjoyed better access than Enron CEO Ken Lay, who recently had dinner with his good friend the president.
The environmental community, meanwhile, got one mass meeting with the staff a month ago (and the promise of another this week with EPA Administrator Christine Todd Whitman). Efforts to meet with Cheney were rebuffed. Cheney himself confirmed he had not met with a single spokesman for the greens. That dynamic has only fueled suspicions among enviros about what’s going on behind closed doors. “They’re drumming up a fake energy crisis that doesn’t exist,” says Phil Clapp of the National Environmental Trust.
To be sure, the Cheney report will make many nods in the direction of conservation and renewable resources. Cheney confirmed that it will call for tax credits for both. The plan will herald and encourage the advent of less intrusive, high-tech means for finding and extracting oil and gas and for burning more coal. White House spinners have decided to divide the report into five parts–only two of which will deal with the extraction and the transmission of new sources of traditional types of fuel. The conservation measures will be high tech and optimistically can-do about using Yankee ingenuity to give Americans all the cars and appliances they want while using less electricity from state-of-the-art power plants. But there will be no paeans to the kind of pantywaist, tree-hugging self-abnegation the Bushies think President Carter sermon- ized about a generation ago. “This isn’t about not bathing or turning off your lights,” said a top Cheney aide. “This is about finding environmentally safe ways to make sure we have the energy we need.”
That’s not enough, environmentalists say, given the rising threat of global warming the green community is convinced comes from burning fossil fuels. “The test of any energy plan will be what it does to limit greenhouse gases,” says Fred Krupp of Environmental Defense. The Union of Concerned Scientists, concerned about global warming, says that renewables and conservation could displace 20 percent of traditional electricity demand by the year 2020–and greatly lessen the need for new power plants. Cheney thinks otherwise. In that span, he said, reliance on renewables could indeed triple–a “fairly optimistic” scenario but one that would still meet only 6 percent of total electricity needs. But that estimate does not include imposing tough new mileage standards on SUVs or mandating more efficient appliances. “Part of our task,” he said, “is to focus on reality, and reality is not ‘Well, gee, we’ll conserve our way out, we don’t have to produce any more,’ or ‘Wind and solar will take care of it, so we don’t need fossilfuels anymore’.”
Now comes the hard part: selling the plan to the public and to Congress. Some GOP strategists are sanguine about overcoming environmental concerns. “Nothing like $3-a-gallon gasoline to help make the case,” said one. But it’s probably not that simple. White House strategists are looking for clues on how best to hawk the package in polls done for them by the Republican National Committee. The surveys show that voters know very little about where energy supplies come from or how they now are distributed in what has become a relatively deregulated marketplace. “Voters out there think that the government guarantees cheap, abundant energy,” said one worried Republican polltaker, “and that’s not the way it works anymore.” Other insiders worry less about the Democrats than the news media, which they regard as addicted to showing videotape of belching smokestacks. “Bush will have the bully pulpit,” says GOP consultant Alex Castellanos, “but it’s not an easy sell.”
But sell Bush must. He’ll take his show on the road next week, joined by a fleet of cabinet secretaries. They will declare that action is needed after years of Clinton-administration neglect. They will say that there are no quick fixes, and tout their market-based, supply-side, long-term answers. They may use real-world vignettes about energy shortages. (On request, the Natural Gas Supply Association provided the White House some.) But politics is lived in the short term, and Bush late last week suddenly found himself in the role of conservation advocate. He ordered federal facilities in California to turn up thermostats, and pledged that they would reduce electricity use by 10 percent. Cheney, the interview over, hurried to the Cabinet Room for the announcement. It turns out that conservation matters a great deal, at least in California, at least for now.
