Environment:

Energy Policy

Federal policy over the past century has largely failed to promote an energy system based on safe, secure, economically affordable, and environmentally benign energy sources. The tax code, budget appropriations, and regulatory processes overwhelmingly have been used to subsidize dependence on fossil fuels and nuclear power. The result: increased sickness and premature deaths, depleted family budgets, acid rain destruction of lakes, forests, and crops, oil spill contamination, polluted rivers and loss of aquatic species and the long-term peril of climate change and radioactive waste dumps–not to mention a dependency on external energy supplies.

There is an alternative. Three decades of detailed assessments, on-the-ground results, and a flood of research and development innovations in the energy-consuming devices used in our buildings, vehicles and industries, undeniably show that energy efficiency, renewable energy technologies, and natural gas as a bridging fuel are superior energy options for society. They offer a present and future path that is economically attractive, safe and secure from large-scale or long-term risks or threats to public health, future generations, and the environment.

Under the thumb of the dirty fuel industries, Congress and the Executive branch refuse to take even the most modest, common sense measures. For example, when the President's Committee of Advisors on Science and Technology concluded in a 1997 report that doubling the Department of Energyís efficiency R&D funding would produce a 40 to 1 return on the investment for the nation, Congress responded by proposing deep cuts in the efficiency and renewables R&D budgets.

Energy Innovations: A Prosperous Path to a Clean Environment, a joint study recently prepared by half a dozen of the nation's prominent energy and environmental research and advocacy groups, shows that a simple and straightforward list of policy measures implemented in the next few years could produce:

a 64 percent reduction in sulfur dioxide (SO2) emissions (prime cause of acid rain) by 2010, compared to 1990 levels;

a 27 percent reduction in nitrogen oxide (NOx) emissions (a key precursor of ground-level ozone, smog);

deep cuts in emissions of other damaging pollutants, including fine particles, toxic metals like mercury, and hydrocarbons;

reduction in U.S. carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions to 10 percent below 1990 levels by 2010, compared to a 21 percent increase under business as usual;

consumer net savings reaching $58 billion per year, equivalent to $530 per household by 2010; and

oil use reductions totaling 4.5 million barrels of oil per day (mb/d), reducing the U.S. oil import bill by $12 billion a year (oil use would be 16 mb/d instead of 20.5 projected for 2010).

These are the minimum goals the United States must set and achieve. Key policies to reach and exceed these savings include:

an end to fossil fuel and nuclear corporate welfare supports, including numerous special tax preferences;

a robust federal research and development program in sustainable renewable energy sources, so that the energy-independence promises of wind, solar and other forms of renewable energy are finally realized;

much higher fuel efficiency (CAFE) standards (at least to 45 miles per gallon for cars and 35 miles per gallon for light trucks, to be phased in over five years) during a transition period to zero-emissions cars;

stronger efficiency standards for appliances and mandatory energy performance building codes;

ensuring electricity policies which promote efficient use of electricity through a range of measures including "net metering"–requirements that companies pay market prices for electricity generated by consumers and passed back to the utility–and elimination of clean air exemptions for "grandfathered" fossil fuel facilities; and

the establishment of a well-funded employee transition assistance fund and job-retraining program for displaced coal miners–easily affordable with the savings from greater energy efficiency.