Published Friday, March 9, 2001, in the San Jose Mercury News
Bush preparing to slash renewable-energy spending
NEW INFORMATION ON BUDGET PLAN SHOWS MOVE TOWARD INCREASING OIL, GAS PRODUCTION
BY SETH BORENSTEIN
Mercury News Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON -- Days after President Bush vowed to "promote alternative energy sources and conservation,'' details of his budget have leaked out, showing that he is pushing to slash spending on energy efficiency and renewable energy by as much as 30 percent.
Bush, who says the nation is in an energy crisis, is planning to propose cutting the Department of Energy's renewable fuels and energy-efficiency budget 30 to 40 percent, according to Energy Department officials and White House officials. That will be offset somewhat by an increase in grants to help poor people weatherproof their homes, Energy Department officials said.
While the president is weeks away from releasing his energy policy, his evolving Energy Department budget is another indication that the administration will emphasize increasing oil, natural gas and coal production more than cutting energy demand or developing alternatives to fossil fuels.
"It's all too soon to tell how we're going to allocate our little more than $19 billion budget,'' said Energy Department official Joe Davis. "We're expecting to deal with belt-tightening.''
Saying the budget is still being developed, several administration officials declined to comment on the likely cuts in the energy-conservation budget.
Office of Management and Budget Director Mitch Daniels told Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., that the cuts were necessary because the president wanted to boost spending on "clean coal'' technology to make the workhorse fossil fuel more efficient and less harmful to the environment, according to Bingaman.
However, the coal technology program that would get the money has produced few usable results and has nearly $600 million in unspent money, according to a report a year ago by the congressional General Accounting Office.
Bingaman, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Energy Committee, said the proposed cuts in energy-efficiency programs don't make sense.
"With the problems we have and the challenges we have in meeting our energy needs in the future, the most cost-effective way of closing the gap between what we produce in energy and what we consume is in efficiency,'' Bingaman said Wednesday. "Cutting these budgets does not serve us well in the long run.''
Bush's likely $19 billion energy budget would be $700 million less than the current budget. The Energy Department's $1.2 billion-a-year energy-conservation program has already saved $30 billion and 5.55 quadrillion Btus of energy over the past 15 years, according to a 2000 department report.
That's enough to power the entire country for three weeks, and is more power than California used in eight months in 1997, the most recent year for which energy-consumption figures are available. But it is still an energy savings of less than 0.5 percent of the total usage nationwide over 15 years.
An administration official who requested anonymity said the White House believes that "there hasn't been much mileage'' from federal energy-efficiency research and development. The president's energy task force, chaired by Vice President Dick Cheney, will be "taking a close look'' at energy-efficiency spending, especially in light of the budget plans, the official said.
A 1996 GAO report found that previous Energy Department claims of savings were inflated and had mathematical errors, but it acknowledged that the program had saved billions of dollars.
"I'm flabbergasted that we would be cutting this type of budget at the very moment the country is facing some of the biggest energy problems we've been seeing in decades,'' said Dan Reicher, who was assistant energy secretary for energy efficiency and renewable fuels in the last years of the Clinton administration.
Last year, Reicher's office touted 11 research and development "success stories'' for energy efficiency and renewable fuels. They included the following claims:
* New window glazing developed by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory would lower the nation's cooling costs by $1.3 billion by 2010.
* Compact fluorescent lights developed at the same lab and sold since 1998 will save $41 million over seven years.
* The Energy Department helped develop lightweight materials for automobile parts that have saved more than 6 billion gallons of gas and $7 billion since 1978.
"This is the time we should be increasing these programs, not cutting them,'' said Howard Geller, a former executive director of the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, a Washington group that pushes energy conservation, "with the power crisis in California, the steep increase in heating bills this winter, the tight world oil market, overloaded transmission lines and gas pipelines.''
Libertarians, however, argue that the market can promote energy efficiency and alternative fuels more effectively than the government.
"The fact is there are a lot of energy-efficient products out there,'' said Jerry Taylor of the libertarian Cato Institute in Washington. "People just don't buy them.''
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