A House vote on H.R. 4480, the Strategic Energy Production Act of 2012, also being cited as the Domestic Energy and Jobs Act, has brought a veto threat from the White House and the introduction of 27 amendments from Representatives.
The Congressional Research Service reports that the bill would direct the Secretary of Energy to develop a plan to increase the percentage of federal lands leased for oil and gas exploration, development, and production, and would require that additional federal land be put under production if the Strategic Petroleum Reserve is tapped. The bill also calls for a streamlining of the drill permitting process, and would require the creation of a “Federal Permit Streamlining Project” in every Bureau of Land Management office, as well as language stipulating the advancement of exploration, development, production and transportation of oil and natural gas in the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska.
What impacts would this bill have on America’s energy sector? On the environment, economy, and national security?
What a piece of work! This bill neatly encapsulates all that is wrong with the country’s political process in general and its energy dialogue in particular. It’s not so much an attempt to develop an effective energy policy as it is a direct political attack on the Executive Branch’s handling of energy issues.
In that attack its drafters have set themselves up, given passage, for a very tough slog in the matter of constitutional viability. The bill massively impinges on what has always been taken as the purview of the EB, up to and including specific orders to the Secretary of the Interior. It treads on the the Judicial Branch by restricting the right to relief in the courts. It even takes a potshot at the Legislative Branch by declaring itself superordinate to existing laws. Not content to merely attack all three arms of the balance of powers, its Full Monty against the Environmental Protection Agency challenges a number of surveys that suggest We the People basically hold that agency in warm regard. Less a piece of legislation than a political statement, it’s difficult to take HR 4480 seriously.
It should be noted the Executive Branch has brought this upon itself, most particularly by foot dragging on oil & gas leasing, particularly since the BP Macondo disaster. Furthermore, the Administration has been slow on the uptake regarding shale oil and gas and hydraulic fracturing, the enabler of our currently bounteous domestic energy production. There does appear to have been a proliferation of regulations, some contradictory, not a few ridiculous. Rather than attempt to repair the obviously dysfunctional regulatory bodies at Interior and EPA, the President’s team have allowed the dysfunction to spread like a fungus. While giving lip service to “All of the above” as a policy strategy, they have been unable to resist parsing the word “All”.
When this piece of legislation fails, as it inevitably must in Congress or by veto or in the courts, perhaps the less partisan among us can berate our political all-of-the-above regarding how fatuous and failed such pieces of work make them appear.
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