A New Year, A New Administration.(energy policies of new Bush administration)(Brief Article)

New faces, new policies

In a recent issue of EUN (December 2000), Representative Joe Barton (R-TX) said that there were significant differences on energy policy between the two presidential candidates, George W. Bush and Al Gore. He also said that we should look to the new president's first appointments to see whether the new administration will match its rhetoric with deeds.

As of January 3, 2001, President-elect Bush had made two cabinet-level appointments, naming Governor Christie Todd Whitman of New Jersey to the helm of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and former Senator Spencer Abraham of Michigan to be Secretary of Energy. Their senate confirmation hearings will be just one way that the nation can discern the outline of the new administration's energy policies.

Concerns about the reliability and price of energy in California and growing new concern about the same issues in Minnesota and New York make it absolutely imperative that Senate confirmation hearings be conducted on substantive issues so that the new administration can deal directly with these problems. Those still convinced that these are regional concerns could instead debate the wisdom of the new administration's proposed policies on natural gas and oil supply.

Of course, President Clinton still had much power to affect energy policy in the waning weeks of his administration. Some groups, while praising his decision to protect large tracts of land from oil and gas exploration, were urging him to go further. His decision to use the Antiquities Act to bar exploration of the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge for oil and gas deposits would earn him praise from some quarters. At the same time, any further use of this presidential power would limit the new administration's options for dealing with the escalating crisis. At least one senator has vowed to attempt to overturn any such designation by President Clinton.

If confirmed, Abraham will have the responsibility of exercising the emergency powers of the DOE--an agency he once proposed to eliminate--to help California. Whitman's opponents seem most concerned about issues such as racial profiling and abortion, and less about her environmental record as governor of New Jersey. Many in the Northeast consider her politically close to George Pataki. As New York's governor, Pataki recently urged the EPA to order the Hudson River dredged to eliminate PCB contamination and wrote the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to secure final approval of a gas-fired 1080-MW power plant further south in the same valley. As EPA administrator, Whitman will have a voice in these and numerous other energy and environmental projects.

She and Abraham will be heading the two agencies that developed the Energy Star program. Jean Lupinacci expects that the strong track of this voluntary energy-saving program will ensure ...