Copyright 2000 The Buffalo News
The Buffalo News
October 1, 2000, Sunday, FINAL EDITION
SECTION: NEWS, Pg. 14A
LENGTH: 1389 words
HEADLINE:
HOPES FOR NATIONAL ENERGY POLICY DON'T LIE WITH EITHER;
CANDIDATE
BYLINE: JERRY ZREMSKI; News Washington Bureau
DATELINE: WASHINGTON
BODY:
With the nation facing its worst energy crunch since the 1970s,
voters face a stark choice in the presidential race: a Democrat who would rather
hug trees than dig oil wells or the Republican big-oil ticket.
That's
what the campaign rhetoric says, and it may not be too far from reality.
With gasoline prices nudging toward $ 2 a gallon, experts fear that Al
Gore and George W. Bush are playing out the same standoff that has prevented the
United States from having an energy policy for the past two decades.
Gore, like most Democrats, advocates conservation.
Bush, like
most Republicans, advocates new oil production.
And neither seems
willing to compromise.
On top of that, critics say neither candidate
addresses one of the root causes of the current energy crunch: the gas-guzzling
sport utility vehicles that are so dear to the hearts of middle-class voters.
Add it all up, and those who know the energy industry best aren't
impressed.
"To be brutally honest, I don't think either one of them
knows very much about this issue," said Reginald B. Newman, president of Noco
Energy Corp., a Town of Tonawanda-based oil distributor.
Americans are
about to learn more and more about it, though. While no shortages are expected
locally, home heating fuel costs are expected to be 30 percent higher this
winter than last.
And National Fuel, a natural gas company that provides
heat to a vast number of the homes in the Buffalo area, expects its gas prices
to be at least 25 percent higher this year.
"A lot of people are going
to be taken to the edge," said Kevin Duggan, who runs Erie County's Low Income
Home Energy Assistance Program, which subsidizes energy bills for about 45,000
households in the county.
In the face of such fears, both presidential
candidates have released comprehensive but conflicting energy policy proposals.
Gore's $ 125 billion energy plan aims to reduce the United States'
dependence on oil. At the core of Gore's plan is a $ 68 billion investment in
new power plant technology, but the proposal also includes tax incentives aimed
at luring Americans to energy-efficient vehicles and homes.
Bush says
Gore's plan ignores the fact that the United States still gets most of its
energy out of the ground. Bush's much narrower $ 7.1 billion plan, unveiled
Friday, relies on the private sector to spend billions on new oil exploration.
Most notably, unlike Gore, Bush would open the Alaska National Wildlife
Refuge to oil drilling. While Gore says this would deface one of America's most
pristine natural landscapes, Bush argues that it could eventually produce as
much oil as the United States now imports from Iraq.
Both plans would
increase funding for home weatherization, and both provide $ 1 billion more for
the Home Energy Assistance Program.
In general, though, the plans
reflect different philosophies.
"Basically the Republicans say, 'Let's
see what we can do to increase the energy supply,' and the Democrats say, 'We
have to decrease demand,' " said Robert Ebel, director of energy and national
security at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "The truth is we
probably have to do both."
That's because the United States faces both a
short-term and a long-term energy crunch.
Prices are rising now largely
because the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries cut back on new
production facilities about three years ago. OPEC expected that the Asian
economic crisis would produce a worldwide slowdown, but that didn't happen,
leaving oil producers shorthanded in coping with increasing demand.
Similarly, low natural gas prices a few years ago discouraged drilling
for new natural gas in the Gulf of Mexico, said Jon T. Gallinger, manager of
government affairs at National Fuel.
The resulting supply-and-demand
problems aren't likely to go away any time soon, and that's just as much the
United States' fault as it is OPEC's.
Last year, the United States got
60 percent of its oil from overseas. That's more than double the amount it got
from foreign nations in 1973, the year of the legendary U.S. energy crisis.
Since then, too, the amount of energy used for transportation has
increased by about 40 percent, as has the amount used in homes. That's nearly
double the rate of the U.S. population increase over that period.
While
the oil conservation efforts of the late 1970s reduced residential and
transportation energy use for several years in the early 1980s, they also drove
down energy prices. And that apparently made Americans forget all about the gas
lines of the 1970s and begin buying more appliances and bigger vehicles.
"We have all become complacent -- Democrats and Republicans, the
administration and Congress, everybody," said Sen. Charles E. Schumer, a New
York Democrat. "We had this false sense of security."
Now, though, the
nation is left with some tough choices.
Bumping up the energy supply
might be the more difficult and expensive option. Most of the United States'
remaining oil is buried beneath the Gulf of Mexico or the Pacific Coast or in
Alaska, according to Pietro Nivola, an energy scholar at the Brookings
Institution. Drilling there poses huge environmental concerns and would probably
be more costly than importing oil from the Middle East.
Conservation and
alternative fuels can be expensive solutions, too, but they might just work if
combined with increasing supply. The last time such policies were combined, "we
basically destroyed OPEC for 15 years," said David Hamilton, policy director at
the Alliance to Save Energy.
That being the case, many experts were
disappointed that neither Gore nor Bush suggested lowering fuel-economy
standards on light trucks, including SUVs.
The nation's fuel-economy
standards have been frozen for five years, with light trucks allowed to get an
average of nearly 7 miles per gallon less than cars. That's a huge issue,
experts say, because of the SUV boom.
Light trucks, which accounted for
one-third of all vehicle sales a decade ago, now account for nearly half. As a
result, the Energy Department says that next year, the nation's light-truck
fleet will use more gasoline than cars for the first time in history.
Noting that Ford and General Motors are undertaking voluntary efforts to
make their SUVs more fuel-efficient, experts wonder why the government doesn't
press all manufacturers to do the same.
"The kinds of things the
candidates are proposing are excellent starting points, but we also need to be
looking at the (fuel-efficiency) standards," said Amy Myers
Jaffe, senior energy adviser at the Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice
University. ""We have to look at anything that keeps us from wasting energy."
Politics makes that difficult. Several sources say politicians, fearing
a backlash from SUV-driving suburban residents or ardent environmentalists,
appear reluctant to put this issue front and center.
For proof, just
look at the New York Senate race. Democratic candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton
offers energy proposals that largely mirror Gore's, but she hasn't given the
issue the same attention that she has given others, such as the upstate economy.
And the staff of Clinton's Republican opponent, Rep. Rick A. Lazio,
never responded to a request for information on the congressman's stand on
energy issues.
Legislators who are focusing on the energy crunch, such
as Schumer, face obstacles of their own -- most notably the intransigence of
both political parties.
To get beyond that, Schumer has proposed
legislation that would create an independent commission to propose a national
energy policy, but that bill is unlikely to pass the House this year.
So
far, then, the only real change in energy policy was President Clinton's recent
release of 30 million barrels of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.
Schumer first advocated such a release a year ago, and Gore suggested it last
month, but Bush derided it as a politicized misuse of a stockpile intended for
times of national emergency.
That oil release prompted about a $ 5 drop
in the price of a barrel of oil, but Schumer said that alone won't solve the
problem.
"We're in deadlock because people don't realize the crisis that
will come upon us," Schumer said. "This winter will be bad. Next winter will be
worse."
GRAPHIC: Graphic-Those who forget history;
Graphic-Drilling for oil -- and votes
LOAD-DATE:
October 3, 2000 
