One Nation, One Energy Plan -- but It's the Wrong One

Some common sense has emerged from the compromised mess that presents itself as a national energy policy.

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Stephen L. Johnson wisely has overruled the unanimous recommendations of the agency's legal and technical staffs to deny California's petition to limit greenhouse gas emissions from cars and trucks.

Johnson's action in the face of staff and congressional opposition took guts -- the kind of guts clearly lacking in the hapless, congressionally blessed energy bill aimed at forcing automobile companies to raise their average new-vehicle-fleet mileage ratings to 35 miles per gallon by 2020.

That bill, designed to increase current corporate average fuel economy (CAFE) standards by 40 percent, was signed into law last week by President Bush. Both Democrats and Republicans are happy yet again to escape public umbrage by crafting a measure that does little to reduce our consumption of oil while appearing to have made great strides in that endeavor. It's a ruse. It will have the same effect on the nation's wanton consumption of oil as did the predecessor bill in 1975. It will do nothing.

There is a simple explanation for the bill's predicted failure: Like the 1975 measure, the 2007 law does absolutely nothing to account for, let alone to attempt to control, consumptive consumer behavior that has contributed mightily to our dependence on burning oil and the resultant creation of greenhouse gases.

That legislative failure by design lets consumers off the hook. As a result, it also lets politicians off the hook. All of the measure's supporters, Democrats and Republicans, can now face the 2008 elections without worrying about being accused of raising federal gasoline taxes or otherwise inconveniencing American consumers in pursuit of fuel conservation. Their green campaigns can thrive on the flow of truly green campaign dollars from oil companies that were allowed to keep billions of dollars in federal tax breaks in the same legislation.

Simultaneously, the politicians can chortle -- with background applause from the nation's environmental establishment, America's ersatz "Green Party" -- that their work will do much to curb our thirst for petroleum in a world that is demanding more of the stuff when oil is becoming increasingly difficult to find.

It's baloney, the political variant of bologna. Both smell good and seem appetizing before they rot. But both stink to high heaven when putridity sets in. The new energy bill is a stinker in waiting -- one that will do little to abate rapid increases in gasoline pump prices when they begin rising in earnest, probably after the 2008 elections.

Thus, it came as a surprise to me that anyone in the federal power structure -- perhaps with the exception of Rep. Roscoe G. Bartlett (R-Md.), a man who repeatedly has warned us about our refusal to take peak oil theories seriously and who voted against the bill for that and other reasons -- had the temerity to stand up and do something gutsy about the matter.

But that is what EPA Administrator Johnson did. I had expected him to roll over and give up in the face of so much support for what I call the "California Above All" approach to fuel conservation and the reduction of climate-warming greenhouse gas emissions.

But Johnson, much to my surprise and delight, just said "No." Good for him, and here's why:

We need one national policy affecting fuel conservation and tailpipe emissions. There are two simple reasons for this, both of which are painfully and expensively evident in the U.S. automobile industry. That same expense and pain, much of it unwittingly borne by consumers, exists in the global automobile business, where competing fuel-conservation and emission-control rules collide.