Posted: 05/31/2005
Energy Negotiators Should Focus on Consumers
NCPA E-Team Scholar Says the Key Is More Energy for Continued Economic Growth
DALLAS (May 24, 2005) – As Senate committee staffers begin negotiations on a national energy bill, scholars at the NCPA’s E-Team project say their focus should be on supplying affordable, abundant energy for the future.
“Neither the President nor Congress should pick and choose the technologies that will fuel America’s future,” said NCPA Senior Fellow H. Sterling Burnett. “This bill is too important to load down with special interest-driven pork barrel projects like ethanol mandates, or unconnected environmental schemes like demands for reduced greenhouse gas emissions, none of which will do anything to deliver more energy or reduce costs.”
Dr. Burnett emphasized that the U.S. needs a comprehensive, energy-neutral plan that puts consumers and taxpayers first and removes barriers to expansion of the production, supply and delivery of energy:
- Ending all energy subsidies, which should please both ecological conservatives who decry tax breaks for what they consider to be wasteful spending on renewable energy boondoogles and environmentalists who think the fossil fuel industry receives unnecessary and unmerited public subsidies.
- Removing federal, state and local barriers to interstate and intrastate oil, gas and electricity infrastructure expansions.
- Repealing regulations in the Public Utility Holding Company Act that are 40 years out of date. The repeal has bipartisan support in early negotiations.
- Increasing domestic energy production. America’s remaining large deposits of oil and natural gas lie offshore or on public lands but are off-limits to oil production due to environmental concerns.
“The fossil fuel industry doesn’t need our help and neither do the renewable energy projects,” Dr. Burnett said. “Thirty years of subsidies haven’t worked. Let the market do it.”