June 19, 2008; Page A14
In its storied history the U.S. Navy has defeated German U-boats and the British and Japanese Imperial navies, but we are about to find out if it can be whipped by whales and activist judges. Welcome to the new world of lawsuits as antiwar weapons.
The Supreme Court is currently deciding whether to take the case, National Resources Defense Council v. Donald Winter. For the sake of the U.S. military and the Constitution's separation of powers, this one deserves its day before the High Court.
Mr. Winter is Secretary of the Navy. The NRDC, a left-wing activist group that specializes in lawsuits, has sued him for conducting training exercises off the coast of California, as the Navy has done for 40 years. The NRDC claims the use of medium-frequency active sonar – a type of sonar especially useful for antisubmarine warfare – might harm whales, or at least confuse them.
When the issue was first raised eight years ago, the Bush Administration went out of its way to allay the concerns – though the Navy says that it has never harmed a whale with sonar, as far as it knows. It asked the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to study the issue under the Endangered Species Act. NOAA gave the Navy a permit to continue to train. Just to be sure, the Navy asked for another study, under the Marine Mammals Protection Act. NOAA replied that this would take time but granted the Navy permission to continue the exercises, noting that the Navy had adopted 29 separate measures to minimize any impact on marine mammals.
None of this was good enough for the litigious greens, who sued again in March 2007 to stop the training – in the middle of a war. Enter federal judge Florence Cooper, who ordered the Navy to halt the exercises while the suit is pending. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, in a rare moment of sanity, stayed the injunction "on the grounds that the district court had failed to consider the 'public interest' in having a trained and effective Navy." Talk about understatement.
This bout of clarity didn't last long. In January, Judge Cooper issued another partial injunction, allowing the exercises to proceed as long as no whales came swimming through. This time, the Ninth Circuit concurred. In response, President Bush, citing "emergency circumstances" and the "paramount interests of the United States," and implementing alternative safeguards, asked the judge to reconsider. Judge Cooper declined, saying there was no emergency. The appeals court affirmed.
The last time we checked, the executive branch was responsible for national security and the President is Commander in Chief. Having unelected judges order our troops to stand down in response to a phantom threat to whales is bad enough. But the laws at issue in this case are mere "paperwork" statutes. The Navy and Bush Administration are accused of having failed merely to complete an environmental impact statement on the possible threat to whales. Under the substantive laws intended to protect the whales, NOAA has already given the Navy the approval it needs.
Judge Cooper is a major culprit here, arbitrarily preventing the Navy from maintaining its military readiness training for the sake of compliance with a purely procedural law. But the larger problem is the culture of environmental law and litigation, which puts the speculative threat to whales above U.S. national security. The Supreme Court should leap at the chance to slap these activist litigants and judges down.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121383310973986705.html?mod=opinion_main_review_and_outlooks
Midwest Floods Dredge Up Dispute
By DOUGLAS BELKIN
June 19, 2008; Page A4
ST. CHARLES, Mo. -- Since the historic flood of 1993, nearly 30,000 homes have been built on land that was underwater around the Mississippi and Missouri rivers near St. Louis. This weekend, the dwellers may find out if they built wisely.
As the swollen Mississippi rolls south, breaching levees, drowning crops and submerging towns, a debate is intensifying among scientists, environmentalists and developers about whether development not only flirts with disaster, but helps cause it.
Developers started building a planned 5,700-unit subdivision called The New Town at St. Charles after the 1993 flood. Residents in this town 20 miles west of St. Louis said builders told them it would never flood. But now, as waters rise, many are uneasy.
"I asked my sister this morning if she had flood insurance," said Patty Moore, who was walking her dog near the town green this week. "She said, 'We live between two rivers, it would be foolish not to.'"
The White House on Wednesday asked Congress for $1.8 billion in emergency disaster aid in the wake of the Midwest floods. The money is intended to replenish the federal disaster-relief fund in anticipation of future losses. Losses from the current floods might have been higher if the federal government hadn't purchased low-lying land after the 1993 flood caused $12 billion in damage. The government has since bought out thousands of homeowners and turned much of their land into parks and undeveloped areas.
Around St. Louis, where the Mississippi is expected to crest this weekend, a number of scientists and activists argue the floods aren't caused by heavy rainfall but by irresponsible development. There has been considerable building since 1993 in Greater St. Louis, where demand for accessible property is at a premium. New and expanding communities pushed for new, taller and stronger levees.
By building along the riverbanks and forcing the Mississippi into a bed that is less than half the width of where it ran a century ago, residents are displacing water and forcing the river to run faster and higher. That, in turn, increases demand for taller, broader levees.
But as those levees make way for development that paves over wetlands, more runoff water is channeled into the river. Critics said the result is a self-perpetuating cycle: The rivers rise higher, new levees are built bigger, the rivers rise again.
Bob Chriss, a professor of earth and planetary sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, said about the same amount of water washed down the Mississippi during a flood in 1903 as did in 1993. But in 1903, the river crested at 38 feet in St. Louis; in 1993, the waters rose to almost 50 feet.
"We're making these flood levels higher," Mr. Chriss said. "A stage of 38 feet was almost unheard of 100 years ago. Now it happens all the time."
Tim Kusky, a professor of natural sciences at St. Louis University, said, "Eventually some of these levees are going to fail. The question is when, not if."
At the center of the problem is an absence of any comprehensive river-management plan. Each levee along the Mississippi is under local control.
"Each levee has a small impact, but cumulatively they can have a large impact," said David Busse, the chief of engineering and construction for the St. Louis District of the Army Corps of Engineers. "From an engineering point of view, it would be great to look at the system as a system." Past efforts to assemble such a plan have fallen short.
The Army Corps itself, which helps build levees, has been a target of criticism by groups such as the Great Rivers Habitat Alliance in St. Louis, an advocacy group led by Adolphus Busch IV, a scion of the beer-making family. The organization was founded in 2000 to fight development on the flood plain between the Mississippi and Missouri rivers.
Mr. Busch said floods have three times destroyed his home on a 2,000-acre spread west of St. Louis. In 1993, water rose to the second floor. Since then, he has had the structure raised onto an 18-foot-high mound of earth. "The Corps can't keep pushing more water downstream and then be surprised when there are serious consequences," Mr. Busch said.
Once planned, levees are rarely stopped, but a recent lawsuit halted construction of a levee on the Missouri River in Jefferson City, Mo., on environmental grounds.
"[Hurricane] Katrina was the real turning point for all of this," Mr. Busch said. "For a long time the Army Corps of Engineers was as close as you could get to God in the United States, but I think that's finally changing."
The Corps' Mr. Busse said the agency is neutral when it comes to building levees and acts at the request of Congress and local communities.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121379518004684125.html?mod=hpp_us_whats_news
Bush getting firsthand look at flooded Iowa cities
USA Today
June 19, 2008
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Bush plans to inspect two of Iowa's flooded cities, where the water is receding but families and businesses are knee-deep in the disheartening aftermath.
The president's trip to Cedar Rapids and Iowa City on Thursday are his first stops to the Midwest since heavy rains sent rivers surging over their banks. Bush was in Europe when the severe weather hit last week, but he made a point to show his deep concern from abroad.
Bush is first getting a briefing in Cedar Rapids, which endured its worst flooding ever. The town was submerged by Cedar River, which crested almost 20 feet above flood stage.
The president is then viewing the damage by helicopter on his way to visit Iowa City, a flood-damaged college town 30 miles to the southeast.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2008-06-19-bush-floods_N.htm?csp=34
Biotech crops seen helping to feed hungry world
Reuters
June 19, 2008
By Carey Gillam
SAN DIEGO (Reuters) - Biotechnology in agricultural will be key to feeding a growing world population and overcoming climate challenges like crop-killing droughts, according to a group of leading industry players.
"It is critical we keep moving forward," said Thomas West, a director of biotechnology affairs at DuPont, interviewed on the sidelines of a biotechnology conference in San Diego. "We have to yield and produce our way out of this."
DuPont believes it can increase corn and soybean yields by 40 percent over the next decade. Corn seeds that now average about 150 bushels per acre could be at well over 200 bushels an acre, for example, DuPont officials said.
Crop shortages this year have sparked riots in some countries and steep price hikes in markets around the globe, and questions about how to address those issues were the subject of several meetings at the BIO International Convention being held this week.
Despite persistent reluctance in many nations and from some consumer and environmental groups, genetically modified crops, -- and the fortunes of the companies that make them -- have been on the rise. Growing food and biofuel demands have been helping push growth.
By using conventional and biotech genetic modification, crops can be made to yield more in optimum as well as harsh weather conditions, can be made healthier, and can be developed in ways that create more energy for use in ethanol production, according to the biotech proponents.
"You can bring a number to tools to bear with biotechnology to solve problems," said Syngenta seeds executive industry relations head director Jack Bernens. "As food prices increase ... it certainly brings a more practical perspective to the debate."
Syngenta is focusing on drought-resistant corn that it hopes to bring to market as early as 2014, as well as other traits to increase yields and protect plants from insect damage. Disease-resistant biotech wheat is also being developed.
Syngenta and other industry players are also developing biotech crops that need less fertilizer, and corn that more efficiently can be turned into ethanol.
Bayer CropScience, a unit of Germany's Bayer AG, has ongoing field trials with biotech canola that performs well even in drought conditions, said Bayer crop productivity group leader Michael Metzlaff.
Water scarcity is a problem seen doubling in severity over the next three decades even as the world population explodes, and will only be exacerbated by global warming climate change, he said.
With some 9 billion people expected to populate the planet by 2040 and 85 percent of the population seen in lesser developed countries, decreased land for agriculture and multiple demands on water use will come hand in hand with an expected doubling in food demand, said David Dennis CEO of Kingston, Ontario-based Performance Plants.
Performance Plants is working with the Africa Harvest Biotech Foundation International to develop and field test drought-tolerant white maize.
"The biggest problem we have in crops is environmental stresses and the biggest stress is drought," said Dennis.
Biotech crop opponents rebuke the idea that biotechnology is the answer, and say industry leaders continue to focus much of their efforts on plants that tolerate more chemicals even as they push up seed prices and make more farmers reliant on patented seed products that must be repurchased year after year.
"I know they love to talk about drought tolerance but that is not what they are really focusing on," said Bill Freese, science policy analyst at the Washington-based Center for Food Safety.
Freese said conventional breeding had the ability to address climate change and food needs, but funding cuts to public-sector crop breeders had reduced the ability of non-biotech groups to advance crop improvements.
"The facts on the ground clearly show that biotech companies have developed mainly chemical-dependent GM crops that have increased pesticide use, reduced yields and have nothing to do with feeding the world," Freese said. "The world cannot wait for GM crops when so many existing solutions are being neglected."
http://www.reuters.com/article/environmentNews/idUSN1841870420080619?sp=true
Tons of PCBs May Come Calling at a Down-at-the-Heels Texas City
New York Times
June 19, 2008
By ADAM B. ELLICK
PORT ARTHUR, Tex. — This downtrodden chemical town on the Gulf of Mexico has no shortage of nicknames: Cancer Alley, the Armpit of Texas, Ring of Fire.
Built on a gush of oil wealth, Port Arthur eventually wooed chemical and waste plants as well. But since the 1970s, this city, which is majority African-American, has complained that it has become a dumping ground for the nation’s toxic waste.
Now, if a French-owned waste management company has its way, the Port Arthur area will be the final destination for 40 million pounds of toxins from Mexico.
“Bring it all to southeast Texas,” Hilton Kelley, a community activist, said wryly. “Who’s next? Germany? Finland? England? Aren’t our oil refineries and chemical plants enough? We have a right to a clean environment, and the nation sees us as expendable in the name of big business.”
Despite a federal ban on importing PCBs, or polychlorinated biphenyls, the company, Veolia Environmental Services, has asked the Environmental Protection Agency for an exemption to move the chemicals by truck from Mexico and to burn them at its incinerator just outside Port Arthur. The incinerator has been disposing of the United States’ PCB waste since 1992.
In March, the E.P.A. gave tentative approval to the proposal. A final decision is expected after August.
On Thursday, the agency will conduct a public hearing featuring all of the players, from incinerator lobbyists to local leaders, who have pledged to sue if the exemption is granted.
The mayor of Port Arthur, Delores Prince, has not taken a position on the proposal, saying that the incinerator is outside the city limits and that the exemption is a federal matter.
Dr. Allen Hershkowitz, a senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council, and an expert on waste incineration who is not involved in the case, called the situation in Mexico an “immediate environmental risk.”
Dr. Hershkowitz defended the concept of accepting PCBs from Mexico, saying that proper incineration would be better than leaving the toxins where they were, in temporary facilities.
“This is not about Americans versus Mexicans,” he said, “but about protecting what’s most at risk for Homo sapiens and eco-regions.”
Still, Dr. Hershkowitz and other environmental experts said Port Arthur, with a population of about 58,000 people, faced a legitimate risk of exposure to PCBs, which have been linked to cancer, brain and liver damage, skin rashes and harmful effects to the reproductive system. And he questioned whether the incinerator, given its record, could do the job safely.
PCBs are used as a coolant in electric generators, although they were banned from manufacturing in 1979. No private companies have applied to import them into the United States since 1996.
Officials at Veolia said their incinerator had a 99.99999 percent efficiency rating, reflecting the percentage of PCBs that the process destroys. Veolia employees receive annual blood tests for PCBs, and the company said no problems had been found.
“We’re in the business of destroying waste,” said Daniel Duncan, the plant’s environmental, health and safety manager. “It’s better to destroy these here than let them go unaddressed down in Mexico.”
PCBs from Mexico are now exported to Europe at three times the cost, Mr. Duncan said. He declined to estimate the value of a contract to dispose of the PCBs.
Environmental groups cite dozens of reported problems with Veolia’s incinerator and insist that incineration in general, the oldest and most widely accepted means of disposal, is imperfect.
Dr. Neil Carman, director of the Lone Star chapter of the Sierra Club, who is leading the fight against Veolia, said PCBs were so dangerous that even small doses of the 40 million pounds that the company wanted to transport here would significantly add to the health problems in Port Arthur. Jefferson County, where Port Arthur is located, has a cancer rate about 20 percent higher than the state average.
No one disputes that PCBs are dangerous.
In 1981, an electrical fire spread PCBs throughout a state building in Binghamton, N.Y., resulting in a 13-year, $53 million cleanup.
And since 2002, General Electric has been under a federal order to clean approximately 40 miles of the Hudson River where its factories discharged PCBs.
By 2025, all electric transformers with PCBs must be out of service in the United States, a regulation that is likely to keep the Veolia incinerator busy.
PCB disposal is a divisive issue, partly because there are no continuous monitoring devices in the United States for PCBs, an odorless and colorless compound. Veolia’s efficiency claims are based on test burns, which are conducted every five years.
Dr. Carman, who conducted emissions tests for the state for 12 years, said the tests were “a crude measure under ideal conditions.”
Ideal or not, the Veolia incinerator has an “average” compliance history, according to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.
The company, which has spent $22 million since 2002 upgrading its incinerator to comply with tougher standards of the Clean Air Act, reported 70 deviations, or faulty occurrences, from 2006 to 2008. That included 30 reports of carbon dioxide emissions, a standard indicator of poor combustion, in six months in 2006.
That same year, according to the federal Toxics Release Inventory, an E.P.A. database, the company emitted the most toxins in the United States. But Mr. Duncan attributed that finding to a bookkeeping error, and the company has submitted an amended report.
Dr. Hershkowitz, who reviewed Veolia’s violations, called the incinerator “routinely and disturbingly substandard.”
Opponents said they were baffled as to why the Mexican companies responsible for the PCBs, mainly the utility company CFE, had not pursued more eco-friendly disposal alternatives, like portable incinerators, which they say are cheaper and have been used in Canada and may soon be used in Vietnam to destroy toxins from the defoliant Agent Orange.
The E.P.A., however, said portable incineration could not handle the PCBs from Mexico.
Although the most common wind currents blow emissions from the incinerator away from Port Arthur, Mr. Kelley said that was little comfort.
“We don’t want to set a precedent in this community, where we are set up and prepared to take toxic waste from the world,” he said. “It’s not fair to children, or to me.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/19/us/19PCB.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin
Idea of Offshore Drilling Seems to Be Spreading
June 19, 2008
By Damien Cave
MIAMI — Gov. Charlie Crist stepped on the third rail of Florida politics this week when he abandoned his opposition to drilling offshore for oil and natural gas. But surprise, surprise, he did not die.
His call for cautious reconsideration, in fact, is spreading.
In the Capitol and along the coast here minds once closed to offshore drilling have been cracked open by the prospects of safer drilling technology and an awareness that dependency on foreign oil has heavy costs.
“It’s something we need to do because of the bigger picture,” said State Senator Burt L. Saunders, chairman of the Senate Environmental Preservation and Conservation Committee. “We need more energy independence.”
Governor Crist’s position appears to line up with Senator John McCain’s call for an end to the federal moratorium that prevents coastal drilling. With President Bush now in support, Democrats say the proposal is a gimmick that will blow back against the Republicans.
But the public debate over drilling suggests that the political landscape has changed.
Several elected and appointed Florida Republicans have publicly shifted their positions in the past week. Senator Mel Martinez said Tuesday that he would consider drilling as long as it is at least 50 miles off the coast. Nicki Grossman, vice chairwoman of the Florida Tourism Commission, said Wednesday that the high price of gasoline might be more of a threat than drilling.
Mr. Saunders, a Republican from Naples, said his opinion started to change after oil rigs near Louisiana survived Hurricane Katrina without major spills that reached the shore.
He did not mention that Hurricanes Katrina and Rita did cause 124 smaller spills that released more than 700,000 gallons of petroleum products, according to Coast Guard estimates.
But, he said, the cost-benefit analysis has changed because current proposals would push drilling up to 150 miles offshore.
“Initially, we were talking about drilling very close to the Florida coastline and we were talking about technology that had not necessarily been proven,” he said. “Not anymore.”
Most of the discussion about Florida drilling has centered on the Gulf Coast. The National Petroleum Council estimates that beneath the Gulf of Mexico’s eastern edge, there might be 36.7 trillion cubic feet of natural gas and 5.2 billion barrels of oil — numbers that would require extensive exploration to verify.
In the area’s beach communities, opposition to drilling has been a constant. Environmentalists have long predicted a catastrophe, with ruined beaches and marine ecosystems.
But some people wonder whether the conventional wisdom has become outdated. Dan Rowe, president of the Panama City Beach Convention and Visitors bureau, said, “You can no longer just dismiss it out of hand” because gasoline prices and drilling technology have changed.
In Mexico City Beach, a three-mile strip of sand and water with about 1,200 residents, some were unsure. “Before, it didn’t seem like the way to go,” said Jason Adams, 38, the owner of Marquardt’s Marina. “Now I have to think about it a little bit more.”
Mr. Adams said he knew it would take years for drilling to produce results.
A 2007 Department of Energy study found that access to coastal energy deposits would not add to domestic crude oil and natural gas production before 2030 and that the impact on prices would be “insignificant.”
But Mr. Adams said he was studying the issue because when it comes to energy “we need to be more independent.”
Similar views could be heard in California, where 33 offshore oil operations are part of the daily vista for residents of the south and south-central coast.
“I work at the beach, I wouldn’t want anything to jeopardize that,” said Pat Kennedy, 23, a lifeguard on the Buena Ventura State Beach south of Santa Barbara. But, he said, “we probably need to drill here to be less dependent on foreign countries.”
The shifting opinions may reset if oil prices drop. Ms. Grossman at the Florida Tourism Commission said many business owners still fear that drilling will ruin the state’s beaches. “Now, the only possible mitigating factor is that we’re also afraid of losing business because of gas prices,” she said.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California and some other Republicans opposed to drilling have also held their ground. Ray Sansom, who is in line to become speaker of the Florida House, representing the coastal town of Destin, said Wednesday that he still opposes drilling. And former Gov. Jeb Bush, in an e-mail message, said that while he supported Mr. Bush’s efforts to develop domestic energy sources, “this does not diminish the long-term need to conserve and develop alternative sources of energy.”
Democrats, meanwhile, have pounced. The Florida Democratic Party said Tuesday that Governor Crist switched sides because he is “desperate to be Mr. McCain’s running mate.”
Then on Wednesday the state’s Democratic delegation in Congress released a statement accusing Republicans of pandering to the public’s frustration with gasoline prices and selling out to “big oil.”
Representative Kathy Castor, a Democrat from Tampa, said drilling could become a reality because the Republicans are breaking ranks.
“It used to be a unified front,” she said. “What’s particularly frustrating is there is now a crack in the armor.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/19/us/19offshore.html?hp
McCain Sets Goal of 45 New Nuclear Reactors by 2030
New York Times
June 19, 2008
By Elisabeth Bumiller
SPRINGFIELD, Mo. — Senator John McCain said Wednesday that he wanted 45 new nuclear reactors built in the United States by 2030, a course he called “as difficult as it is necessary.”
In his third straight day of campaign speechmaking about energy and $4-a-gallon gasoline, Mr. McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, told the crowd at a town-hall-style meeting at Missouri State University that he saw nuclear power as a clean, safe alternative to traditional sources of energy that emit greenhouse gases. He said his ultimate goal was 100 new nuclear plants.
Mr. McCain has long promoted nuclear reactors, but Wednesday was the first time that he specified the number of plants he envisioned.
Currently there are 104 reactors in the country supplying some 20 percent of electricity consumed. No new nuclear power plant has been built in the United States since the 1970s.
“China, Russia and India are all planning to build more than a hundred new power plants among them in the coming decades,” Mr. McCain said in this pocket of Missouri that is reliably Republican. “Across Europe there are 197 reactors in operation, and nations including France and Belgium derive more than half their electricity from nuclear power. And if all of these nations can find a way to carry out great goals in energy policy, then I assure you that the United States is more than equal to the challenge.”
Although there has been a shift of opinion in the industry and among some environmentalists toward more nuclear power — it is clean and far safer than at the time of the Three Mile Island nuclear accident in 1979 — most environmentalists are skeptical of the latest claims by its advocates. They also say that no utility will put its own financing into building a plant unless the federal government lavishly subsidizes it.
“Wall Street won’t invest in these plants because they are too expensive and unreliable, so Senator McCain wants to shower the nuclear industry with billions of dollars of taxpayer handouts,” said Daniel J. Weiss, who heads the global warming program at the Center for American Progress Action Fund, a liberal research group.
Douglas Holtz-Eakin, Mr. McCain’s chief domestic policy adviser, said Mr. McCain had arrived at the goal of 45 as consistent with his desire to expand nuclear power, “but not so large as to be infeasible given permitting and construction times.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/19/us/politics/19nuke.html
Will $4 Gasoline Trump a 27-Year-Old Ban?
New York Times
By Sheryl Gay Stolberg
June 19, 2008
WASHINGTON — One was an oilman from Texas, the other a high-paid energy executive. Despite that, or perhaps because of it, for seven years George W. Bush and Dick Cheney have been unable to persuade Congress and the public that domestic oil drilling is an answer to America’s energy needs.
With the clock running down on his presidency, Mr. Bush made one last push Wednesday by calling on Congress to end the 27-year moratorium on most offshore drilling. With oil at more than $130 a barrel, gasoline over $4 a gallon and the broader economy threatened, the White House is betting it can finally break a decades-old Washington deadlock between those who favor domestic oil exploration and those who say conservation is the key.
The question is whether Americans are feeling enough pain at the pump to force their elected leaders to go along, and whether it will make any real difference if they do.
“If Congressional leaders leave for the Fourth of July recess without taking action, they will need to explain why $4-a-gallon gasoline is not enough incentive for them to act,” Mr. Bush said Wednesday in the White House Rose Garden. “And Americans will rightly ask how high oil — how high gas prices have to rise before the Democratic-controlled Congress will do something about it.”
Other Republicans, notably Senator John McCain, the party’s presumptive presidential nominee, are abandoning their long-held opposition to drilling in coastal waters. Newt Gingrich, former speaker of the House, recently posted an online petition, headlined “Drill Here, Drill Now,” to strengthen support for domestic oil exploration, and gathered 650,000 signatures in two weeks.
“My prediction is that unless oil prices go down below $60 a barrel, you are now at a fundamental turning point at which you will see a new political coalition emerge,” Mr. Gingrich said in an interview. “This is a huge populist issue, and politicians who ignore it do so at their own peril.”
But Democrats do not feel especially imperiled. Although one moderate Democrat — Senator Mary L. Landrieu of Louisiana, who has long advocated expanding drilling in the Gulf of Mexico — is drafting legislation aimed at increasing domestic production, the leadership is holding fast. Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California said Wednesday, “We cannot drill our way to energy independence.”
If anything, Democrats say, the White House action gives them a chance to paint Mr. Bush as beholden to the oil industry and Mr. McCain as a clone of Mr. Bush, a message that will only grow louder as the November election draws near.
“To have President Bush be the face of this issue for the Republicans means having the worst possible spokesman,” said Geoff Garin, a Democratic strategist who helped run Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s presidential campaign.
“What Republicans are doing for themselves right now,” Mr. Garin added, “is deepening the impression that they are the party of Big Oil.”
Whether $4-a-gallon gasoline is producing more support for domestic drilling is hard to discern. A Gallup poll conducted last month found that 57 percent of those surveyed favored drilling for oil in coastal and wilderness areas that are now off limits, but there are no earlier data for comparison. In March, before the latest spike in gasoline prices, a Pew Research Center survey found that 50 percent opposed drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, in Alaska, while 42 percent were in favor.
Mr. Bush has long supported the proposal to drill along a coastal strip of the refuge. But he has not before taken up the cause of offshore drilling, partly because it was such a hot-button issue in the state of Florida, where his brother Jeb was governor. Congress first adopted its moratorium against drilling on the outer continental shelf, 3 to 200 miles offshore, in 1981. In 1990, Mr. Bush’s father signed an executive order reinforcing the ban; Mr. Bush promised Wednesday to rescind the order if Congress ended its moratorium.
In the Rose Garden, the president made the case that in the long run, the solution to high prices was to reduce demand for oil by promoting alternative-energy technologies, a view widely shared across the political spectrum. But “in the short run,” he said, “the American economy will continue to rely largely on oil, and that means we need to increase supply, especially here at home.”
The federal Energy Information Administration estimates that 18 billion barrels of oil are in the area covered by the moratorium, and the White House says that is enough to match current American production for 10 years. But a 2007 analysis by the agency concluded that opening up drilling in the moratorium area “would not have a significant impact on domestic crude oil and natural gas production or prices before 2030.”
The primary concern about offshore drilling has been that unsightly oil rigs would dampen tourism, or that spills would threaten the environment. Advocates, and even critics, say new technology has greatly reduced the risk of spills. But David B. Sandalow, an energy expert at the Brookings Institution in Washington who advises Democrats, argues that the amount of oil that could be recovered is so small as not to be worth the environmental risk.
“It’s like walking an extra 20 feet a day to lose weight,” he said. “It’s just not enough to make a difference.”
But Robin West, who managed the offshore leasing program for the Reagan administration and is now chairman of PFC Energy, a consulting company, argues that additional supply could make a difference in price, especially if domestic drilling were coupled with aggressive conservation efforts. He said it would take time, though — a minimum of five or six years, even if drilling were to begin today.
“A logical energy policy,” Mr. West said, “is to encourage production and discourage consumption. And prices will go down.”
But with just seven months left in his presidency, the relationship between Mr. Bush and Congressional Democrats is already set, and unlikely to produce fresh agreement on what might be a logical energy policy, especially in the thick of a presidential election season.
As Vin Weber, a Republican former congressman from Minnesota, said: “I think we have been deadlocked on energy over ideological concerns for a long time, and the urgency in the country was not there to break out of this debate. And now the urgency of the country is there, and it’s too late for this administration.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/19/washington/19energy.html&
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