Guest editorial: The energy to say no

The House easily passed it last week, but the Senate came up two votes shy. It was a narrow escape for the taxpayers.

The bill contains $26 billion in tax cuts and subsidies for the oil and gas, coal and utility industries, mostly to reward them for what they'd do anyway, and a fat giveaway to agribiz and corn farmers in the form of ethanol, to be paid for by motorists in the form of higher gas prices, perhaps as much as $8.5 billion higher.

There's $5 billion in new spending -- running heavily to pork like underwriting shopping mall construction and an indoor rain forest in Iowa -- and $2 billion to help older coal-burning plants added at the last minute as a sweetener for lawmakers in the Midwest and Appalachia.

None of that $33 billion is offset by spending cuts or tax increases elsewhere, meaning the total cost goes straight to the fast-growing deficit.

The long-term cost is even higher -- about $80 billion over 10 years -- and even that cost could increase because Congress played games with the expiration date of various tax cuts.

The bill does have some good features, particularly some changes in how electric utilities are regulated that could result in more modern, more reliable transmission grids. But the total cost of this bill is far too steep a price to pay.

The incoming Bush administration set energy policy as one of its top priorities. The energy bill that stalled is the bloated, Frankenstein-like descendant of the energy plan Vice President Dick Cheney's industry-heavy task force drew up in secret.

The Republican leadership saw to it that much of the energy bill was drawn up in secret with many lawmakers getting their first look at the complex measure shortly before they were asked to vote on it.

Now that members of Congress have a chance to read the bill maybe they'll return to Washington next year in the mood to write a much leaner, more rational measure. The refreshingly skeptical Cato Institute called the current bill a mixture of corporate welfare, cynical politics and Soviet-style command economics. That's not far off the mark.