Energy voodoo

Washington Post: Like a zombie rising from the dead, the energy bill, defeated last year in the Senate, may live to be voted on another day. Last week Senate Energy Committee Chairman Pete V. Domenici, R-N.M., announced that he intends to offer a stripped-down version of the legislation as an amendment to a larger bill.
The aim, at the moment, is to add it to the huge highway funding and transportation bill wending its way through Congress. If that doesn't work, "we'll attach it to anything with legs," a committee spokesman says.
That would be fine -- if a sensibly stripped-down version really were to be offered. Mr. Domenici might usefully rescue from the swamp of last year's bill measures to increase the reliability of the electricity grid and to strengthen electricity market rules and regional transmission organizations. We can also imagine a bill that would actually live up to President Bush's alleged goals, proclaimed in the State of the Union address, "to modernize our electricity system, promote conservation, and make America less dependent on foreign sources of energy."
That, however, would require Congress to dismantle the myriad subsidies and tax breaks that currently distort the energy market and make foreign gas and oil unnaturally cheap. Or, to put it another way, it would require both the administration and Congress to stand up to the oil and gas industries, a highly unlikely prospect.
Politics as usual
Instead, we fear that an energy amendment will reflect nothing more than politics as usual. Rightly, Mr. Domenici has suggested removing a controversial provision that would exempt the makers of MTBE, a gasoline additive that appears to poison drinking water, from liability. Already, some in the House are mobilizing to make sure it gets put back in. Another of the bill's most objectionable provisions, the egregious package of ethanol subsidies designed to buy the votes of farm-state senators, will be included, as will subsidies for an Alaska pipeline.