When oil prices punched through $75 a barrel and gasoline topped $3 a gallon five months ago, members of Congress offered a raft of proposals, ranging from more U.S. drilling to windfall profits taxes to antitrust investigations. They railed against oil executives’ pay packages, and some called for higher gasoline mileage standards.
Five months later, long after “Energy Week” came and went in the House of Representatives, Congress is heading home without adopting any significant legislation on energy.
Most notably, the Senate and House failed to bridge differences over how much offshore oil and gas drilling to allow on the Outer Continental Shelf, with angry negotiators blaming each other for the collapse of talks early yesterday.
Offshore drilling made it further than other energy proposals that came up during the long, hot summer of high gasoline prices. Among the ideas that failed to gain traction in Congress: a bipartisan move to raise mileage standards led by Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), Sen. Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.) and others, and a White House request for clearer authority to set fuel efficiency targets under the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) program. The CAFE fuel economy standard hasn’t changed since 1985. About half of U.S. oil consumption goes to automobiles.
“The president started the year by saying we’re ‘addicted’ to oil in the State of the Union address, and yet another year passed without any action on U.S. oil use and specifically on improving U.S. fuel economy,” said Paul W. Bledsoe, director of communications and strategy at the National Commission on Energy Policy.
Efforts to open up U.S. coastal areas for drilling held out the most promise for legislation. Both chambers voted over the summer to add acreage for drilling — and give states a big share of federal royalties. But the Senate limited itself to a single major lease area in the Gulf of Mexico; the House voted to open up the entire Atlantic and Pacific coasts at least 100 miles from shore and to let states choose to allow drilling as close as three miles from shore. Those coasts were closed to new oil and gas drilling after the Santa Barbara, Calif. oil spill a generation ago.
House negotiators, led by Resources Committee Chairman Richard Pombo (R-Calif.), held out for offshore drilling outside the Gulf of Mexico, while Senate leaders bluntly declared that they could not muster enough votes for that.
“He keeps asking us to do something that is politically impossible for us to do,” Sen. Mary L. Landrieu (D-La.) said during the week. She played a key role in forging a compromise in the Senate, and her state stands to gain hundreds of millions of dollars of royalties from new drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. “I frankly wish there were more support for drilling off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts,” she said, “but the political reality is that there is not. Period. The end.”
House leaders said that the Senate version, which would have opened up 8.3 million acres in Gulf of Mexico federal lease 181 and adjacent deeper water to the south, didn’t go far enough. They wanted a state to set a precedent outside the Gulf to generate broader support for offshore drilling when other states saw how much revenue could be earned. House leaders proposed opening up areas off the coasts of five states considered most friendly to drilling — Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia and Alaska. Later they discussed making it Virginia alone.
But talks broke down in the end over maps of the offshore state boundaries in what are now federal waters. A deal involving Virginia also would have injected new controversy into the closely contested Senate race there.
Lobbyists for more offshore drilling had earlier urged lawmakers to work things out. “For the first time in 20 years, the Congress has taken action. I’d hate to get three-quarters of the way around the bases and be left standing on third base,” said Jack Gerard, president of the American Chemistry Council, an association of chemical companies.
Rep. John E. Peterson (R-Pa.), a leader of the push for wider offshore drilling, said yesterday that House leaders decided to wait for lawmakers to return after the elections. “We’re hoping when we get back we can move the ball,” he said. “There will be more vehicles in the lame duck than now.”
That’s a gamble though, especially if Democrats win back the House in November. ” ‘Wait for the lame duck’ always strikes me as a desperate rallying cry,” said Bledsoe.
Not everyone was disappointed about the sinking prospect of an offshore drilling bill. “The gridlock,” said Athan Manuel, lands protection director at the Sierra Club, which opposes both versions of the bill, “from the environmental perspective is good.”
The House can blame the Senate for another part of the gridlock. It adopted another energy measure that failed to get Senate support: one that would open part of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil exploration.
Peterson said that the recent easing of oil and gas prices was a factor in blunting the impetus for energy legislation. “That always hurts,” he said. But he warned, “We’re just another storm away, another pipeline problem away, from high prices.”
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