Heckuva job on energy policy, Dick!

[OKIsItJustMe]

http://www.newhavenadvocate.com/article.cfm?aid=12293

The Behinder We Got

Heckuva job on energy policy, Dick!

Tuesday, March 24, 2009
By Alan Bisbort

It seems much longer ago than eight years that Dick Cheney was scolding his fellow Americans for demanding higher conservation standards and more alternative and sustainable energy sources. Conservation, the vice president imperiously told us, was merely "a sign of personal virtue," not a basis for a "sound" national policy. Any attempt to curtail the nation's profligate consumption of finite resources was, he implied, at odds with our national exceptionalism. It was God's will that we consume more, not less, than other nations, that we build and buy bigger cars, that we widen and increase highways. Public transportation? Expanded train networks? Green buildings? Screw 'em!

Instead, our policy was "Drill, baby, drill!" This brilliant strategy, reprised for the McCain-Palin campaign, was built upon the sandy foundation of secret meetings in the White House with the CEOs of the oil, gas, coal and timber companies. These czars were part of an "energy task force" that dictated the policy that has now reached a dead end. Among this secret society — whose names were only released after a six-year legal battle that, at one point, reached the Supreme Court — was Kenneth Lay. No wonder they wanted to keep their criminal enterprises hidden!

As the Washington Post put it at the time, "The list of participants' names and when they met with administration officials provides a clearer picture of the task force's priorities and bolsters previous reports that the review leaned heavily on oil and gas companies and on trade groups — many of them big contributors to the Bush campaign and the Republican Party." A clearer picture, indeed.

Because of the opposition of a few retrograde Republicans like Cheney, efficiency and environmental oversight were not bases for our energy policy. That failure has now put the U.S. eight years behind the rest of the world. A clearer picture of this can be seen in Yale's Environmental Performance Index (EPI), which grades 149 participating nations on how well they are doing through multi-dimensional statistical indicators that include energy efficiency and sustainability. In 2008 — the most recent EPI — the U.S. slipped from 28th to 39th place, passed by Albania, Croatia, Malaysia and Slovenia.

…