A Times Editorial

Exploiting a crisis

It's no time for President Bush to exploit California's energy crisis to manipulate our energy and environmental policy. It will just make things worse.

© St. Petersburg Times, published February 5, 2001

Fair use for educational purposes only!

President Bush says Washington can't do much to help California solve its power crisis, but he wants to use the state's predicament as justification for weakening the Clean Air Act and drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Maybe thepresident has a point about letting California extricate itself from the mess it made of deregulation. But California's blackoutshave almost no connection to pollution laws or oil exploration.

Bush administration officials have said they will relax federal clean air regulations because they are hampering power generation in California and other states. It is true that many power-producing companies would rather dirty the air than spend millions of dollars to clean up their smokestack emissions.

But they had no choice after 1990, when President Bush's father amended the Clear Air Act to set deadlines for cities and states to reduce air pollution.

In California, power plants were able to delay meeting the restrictions by buying pollution credits, but that program has grown more expensive each year. Have the federal mandates reduced the amount of electricity available to Californians, as the Bush administration claims? Very little, and that answer comes from power company executives.

"We factor the air quality regulations into our daily operating basis, and they are not causing us to withhold power," Richard Wheatley, spokesman for the company that operates four California power plants, told the Los Angeles Times. Other companies echo that point.

Would having more domestic oil and gas available to burn for electricity give California relief? Once again, very little. Rising fuel prices have raised the cost of electricity throughout the country. Others factors are at work in California, however. Deregulation faltered on two key miscalculations: future power consumption and competition. California began the deregulation process during a recession and didn't foresee a historic technology boom; so electricity demand has been three times greater than anticipated.

That changed competition assumptions. Instead of power generators competing to sell their product to utilities, the reverse happened. Utilities had to compete with each other for limited electricity supplies, driving up prices.

What does any of that have to do with sinking wells in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge or in the Gulf of Mexico? Nothing.

While the country might want to accelerate the search for domestic sources of oil and gas, it should do so carefully, after a full debate of the issues.

Do we really want to risk damaging such important environmental assets as the Gulf beaches and the arctic wildlife habitat to get cheaper prices at the pump? We should give conservation and other alternatives a chance first.

The same argument goes for dismantling the Clean Air Act. Maybe California needs temporary relief from air pollution restrictions to let two idled plants in Glendale fire up. But that isn't enough electricity to make a big difference, and it comes with a price -- dirty air that threatens health and the quality of life.

If President Bush wants to be taken seriously in the debate over the need for increased domestic oil exploration and decreased pollution regulation, he should stop insulting the public's intelligence and get to the real issues.

Exploiting a crisis in an attempt to manipulate energy and environmental policy will only add to our problems in the long run.

© Copyright 2000 St. Petersburg Times. All rights reserved.

-- Swissrose (cellier@azstarnet.com), February 06, 2001

Answers

TANSTAAFL. What isn't paid for in cleaning up the effluent will be paid for in increased medical bills, or by some other industry, e.g. fishing. Or both.

-- L. Hunter Cassells (mellyrn@nist.gov), February 06, 2001.