Читать книгу American Energy - Walter A. Rosenbaum - Страница 18

The federal government dominates the institutional governance of energy. In addition to the White House, Congress, and the federal courts, at least eighteen other federal agencies are directly involved in more than 160 energy-related programs. These activities span the entire range of energy-related activities and often involve institutions that might seem unrelated to energy issues (such as the US Patent and Trademark Office, and the US Fish and Wildlife Service). The federal government in 2012 collected about $12 billion from energy-related programs including, especially, fees and royalties from development of federal energy resources and more than $35 billion in excise taxes on gasoline and other fuels.¹⁹

The White House. Since 1976, every president has included special advisors on energy and related policies within the White House staff. Beginning with George W. Bush in 2000, a rising sense of urgency about energy affairs has prompted the White House to initiate more aggressive efforts to coordinate energy policy within the executive branch with new White House staff arrangements. President Obama attempted the most ambitious of these innovations by initially creating, then abolishing, within the White House staff the White House Office of Energy and Climate Change Policy directed by an “Energy Czar,” former EPA administrator Carol Browner, who reported directly to the President.^a

^a Browner’s job was to promote “integration among different agencies; cooperation between federal, state, and local governments; and partnership with the private sector” in energy-related issues. In January 2011, however, Browner resigned as energy czarina, and the position was eliminated, suggesting that Obama, like his predecessors, had found energy planning too contentious politically to sustain a White House priority.

Regardless of who is president and what priority may be given to energy policy, the president quickly discovers that, despite his lofty title as “chief executive,” leading the large, persistently contentious, and extremely competitive federal energy departments and agencies, each preoccupied with its own mission and constituency, is a formidable and often frustrating task. The last comprehensive national energy plan, proposed by President George W. Bush in 2003, would have required coordination among twenty-nine different program activities, implemented by eleven different agencies—six agencies, for instance, were involved in programs relating to the impact of energy development and use of the environment.²⁰ Such coordination is always difficult and contentious.

Congress. In formulating national energy policy, the president may propose and, within bounds usually dictated by Congress, may mandate energy programs, but ultimately, it is Congress that legislates energy policy, raises the revenue to underwrite, and oversees its implementation in the executive branch. The president’s freedom to act independently of Congress on energy matters is always limited severely by law, custom, and political circumstance. Even when judges and administrators eventually formulate, interpret, and implement presidential directives, their policymaking is always constrained by congressional guidelines and oversight.

A multitude of committees. The most important centers of power within Congress are its numerous committees and subcommittees, the “little legislatures” inside the big one. The number of congressional committees and subcommittees with energy in their title or their jurisdiction is legion. In the 112th Congress (2011–2013), eleven House committees and four Senate committees exercised some authority over energy matters explicitly in their titles. However, numerous other committees, easily exceeding a dozen in each chamber, were also deeply implicated in energy policymaking by virtue of their comprehensive authority in related matters, such as the budget, foreign affairs, conservation, and environmental management.

The vigorous conflict over energy policy produced by each chamber’s own squabbling, competitive committees is intensified by rivalries between House and Senate energy-related committees. Energy committees, within and between the chambers, often respond to different energy interests. This dispersion of authority among so many legislative entities can sometimes improve the quality of energy policy. But the bargaining and negotiating imposed by diverse congressional interests with leverage in the energy policy process often yields vague, complicated, and inconsistent legislation. Often, no legislative reconciliation of divergent interests is possible, producing the sort of deadlock that frustrated Obama’s efforts in his first term to secure congressional approval of his climate warming proposals.

Five hundred and thirty-five ambassadors. The fragmentation of power in Congress is further advanced by the 535 geographical constituencies represented in both congressional chambers, a vast array of diverse parochial local interests with a powerful influence in the legislative process. Constituents regard their senators and representatives as ambassadors to Washington from their home districts, sent there to energetically promote and protect “the folks back home.” It is hard for any member to resist pressures to act as local agents for their electorate.

With the advent of e-mail, cell phones, and mobile Internet access, legislators are now only a few keystrokes away from constituency voices. It’s small wonder that many legislators consider their constituencies as an extension of their own personalities. Many congressional veterans can understand the late Alaskan Senator Ted Steven’s angry warning to colleagues who voted against opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to new energy exploration: “People who vote against this today are voting against me, and I will not forget it.”²¹

Thus, when the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources’ Democratic majority proposed in 2009 a measure to expand the scope of offshore oil and gas exploration in the Gulf of Mexico, state loyalty trumped party for five of the committee’s thirteen Democrats. Senator Mary Landrieu from Louisiana, for example, ordinarily a strong supporter of expansive drilling in the Gulf, opposed the measure because none of the potential federal royalties would come to Louisiana, while Senator Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) opposed the measure because it might encourage drilling off the New Jersey coast.²²

The executive branch. The executive branch of the federal government is a constitutional fiction, even when organization charts confine the welter of administrative agencies called “the bureaucracy” within the boundary of the president’s executive authority. Within the executive branch are thirteen cabinet departments, fifty-two independent agencies, five regulatory commissions, and numerous lesser entities. More than 2.7 million federal employees divide their loyalties among these institutions.

Congress and the courts often limit presidential authority. Political obstacles constantly confound White House designs for administrative management. The president must contend with agency self-interest, Congressional involvement in agency affairs, and the claims of an agency’s own clientele. The president may be a poor administrator or bored with the job.

The impact of this bureaucratic pluralism is pervasive in energy policy. Congress and the White House personnel rarely formulate major policy without consulting with the affected energy agencies. Moreover, agencies have strong and conflicting preferences about energy management that often grow from their differing constituencies. For example, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), responsible under the 1935 Federal Power Act for promoting abundant, reliable energy supply, is more congenial to expansive energy production than the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) with its legislative mandate to control the environmental degradation from fossil fuel energy production.

Bureaucracy’s influence in energy policymaking is rooted in the delegated authority and discretionary judgment inherent in the programs implemented by federal agencies. Congress must often grant to agencies very broad, general authority to implement programs, leaving administrators to decide when to apply the law in specific cases and how to interpret vague or inconsistent provisions. When the secretary of the interior decides that a segment of a national forest should qualify as wilderness to be forever free of mineral exploration and mining or when EPA’s administrator determines that a coal-fired utility must install new pollution controls to meet air quality standards, policy is being made. Delegated and discretionary authority in energy policymaking also ensures that all major interests with a stake in federal energy programs will gravitate toward the agencies implementing those programs in an effort to sway the exercise of this authority.

Among the 16 federal departments and independent agencies most often concerned with some aspect of energy policy, four cabinet-level departments and four nondepartmental agencies assume particular importance because of their size, the scope of their energy-related authority, and the variety of programs that they implement.

The Department of Energy (DOE). Created in 1977 as a cabinet department, DOE’s responsibilities now sprawl across the entire range of energy-related federal government activities.²³ In 2013, the DOE had a budget of $27.2 billion and about 16,000 employees. Currently, the DOE implements policies involving nuclear power, fossil fuels, and alternative energy resources, and it assumes responsibility for advancing the national, economic, and energy security of the United States, for supervising the national laboratories initially created for the development of nuclear weapons, and implementing the White House’s National Energy Policy Development Group. DOE also inherited a double dose of hugely expensive and contentious nuclear regulatory responsibility: the agency administers the enormously costly, technically difficult, and politically volatile environmental cleanup of the nation’s former nuclear weapons facilities and also assumes responsibility for the safe disposal of nuclear waste from the nation’s commercial and military weapons facilities.²⁴

From its inception, the DOE has had too much to do, too few friends, and too little authority. Much of the authority for domestic energy planning remains with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the EPA, the Department of Agriculture, and other agencies beyond DOE’s statutory reach or political influence.

Notwithstanding these handicaps, the DOE has still improved energy management in significant ways. For the first time, all energy research and development (R&D) planning and implementation is organized through a single agency. The creation of the Energy Information Administration (EIA) within DOE has provided the federal government an increasingly large and richly diversified source of energy data independent of energy producers, the largest independent source of credible energy data within the United States, and the most commonly cited of all domestic energy information sources.

The Department of the Interior. The US Department of the Interior, is the nation’s largest public land manager, the steward and trustee of America’s vast public domain and all its energy resources. The secretary of the DOI heads a department that in 2012 employed 70,000 people, including expert scientists and resource-management professionals, in eight different bureaus and offices.²⁵

Several of these bureaus and offices are especially important to federal energy management. The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is responsible for leasing and oversight of energy exploration and production on more than 256 million acres of public domain, most of this land west of the Mississippi River, and 1.7 billion acres of the Outer Continental Shelf. These public lands are a primary source of current domestic energy production, a bountiful source of federal revenue, and a huge reserve for potential future energy development. The bureau has historically been the epicenter of controversy and competition between conservationists and energy developers over access to the energy reserves on these vast federal lands.

The public lands currently produce more than 30 percent of the nation’s energy production, including 39 percent of natural gas, 35 percent of oil, 42 percent of coal, 17 percent of hydropower, and half the nation’s geothermal energy.²⁶ In 2013, the Department of the Interior collected more than $11 billion from energy production on public lands and offshore areas.²⁷ Additionally, the federal lands provide rights of way for energy transmission lines, rail systems, pipelines, and other energy development infrastructure. Federal lands are also estimated to contain approximately 68 percent of all undiscovered US oil reserves and 74 percent of undiscovered natural gas.²⁸

Rising concern over domestic energy supply now casts the public lands as an “energy frontier” where potentially vast new sources of renewable energy await development. The DOE estimates, for example, that federal lands can potentially generate 350,000 megawatts of electric power (a megawatt will produce enough energy to power as many as 900 average homes), provide 23 million acres for solar energy production, and produce significant new geothermal electric energy.²⁹ Currently, for example, almost three thousand wind turbines on California’s public lands are producing electric power for 300,000 people.

The Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement is responsible for implementing the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act (1977), the federal regulatory program to control the adverse environmental impacts of surface coal mining and to restore abandoned surface mine sites to ecological vitality. An estimated 5,200 abandoned mine sites, many extremely hazardous environmentally currently require remediation.³⁰ The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation, and Enforcement (BOEMRE) regulates the development of energy resources, administers leasing of energy exploration, and enforces environmental protection laws related to energy production on the Outer Continental Shelf. The Deepwater Horizon accident underscored the growing importance of the BOEMRE and the Outer Continental Shelf, which is estimated to contain about 60 percent of oil and 40 percent of natural gas reserves still undeveloped in the United States.

Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) exercises its important energy development and regulatory authority, like BOEMRE, largely beyond the scope of public attention and interest. Nevertheless, the FERC, an independent regulatory agency composed of five commissioners appointed by the president, exercises critically important energy management authority, including jurisdiction over interstate electricity sales, wholesale electric rates, hydroelectric licensing, natural gas pricing, and oil pipeline rates. It also reviews and authorizes liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminals, pipelines, and nonfederal hydropower projects. The Energy Policy Act (2005) significantly enlarged FERC’s authority by investing it with responsibility for tracking federal government progress on the act’s mandated energy developments including liquefied natural gas projects, electric supply, the Alaska natural gas pipeline, requirements for new energy market transparency, pipeline land planning, and much else.

Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) is responsible for ensuring the safe use and environmental security of radioactive materials for nonmilitary purposes. The NRC, composed of five commissioners appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate for five-year terms, is primarily responsible for regulating all nonmilitary reactors, nuclear materials, and the transportation, storage, and disposal of all nuclear waste.

These responsibilities produce a high political profile and predictably thrust the commission into public controversy over the management of the nation’s commercial nuclear power sector, as chapter 5 illustrates. Critics of the nuclear power industry almost ritually indict the NRC for regulatory failures, and proponents of commercial nuclear power just as often complain that the NRC is insufficiently energetic in protecting and promoting the industry.

Environmental Protection Agency. The EPA, created by an executive order of President Nixon in 1970, is the largest federal regulatory agency in terms of budget and personnel. Its responsibilities embrace an extraordinarily large and technically complex array of programs ranging across the whole domain of energy-related environmental management. These programs include regulation of energy-related air and water pollutants, hazardous and toxic wastes, and chemical substances, including radioactive waste. The agency presently has about 18,000 employees and an annual budget exceeding $7 billion.

The agency, whose administrator is appointed by the president, consists of a Washington, DC, headquarters and ten regional offices, each headed by a regional administrator. Political controversy is the daily bread of the EPA’s leadership. Almost all its significant energy-related regulatory decisions, such as rules for the disposal of coal ash from coal-fired electric power plants or limits of toxic air emissions from industrial boilers, are predestined to conflict, often enduring for years or decades, among regulators, the regulated, and their respective allies. Thus, EPA’s mission is bound to create problems for the White House. “The White House—any White House—doesn’t want to hear an awful lot from the E.P.A,” observed former EPA Administrator William Reilly. “It’s not an agency that ever makes friends for a president. In the cabinet room, many of the secretaries got along with each other, but they all had an argument with me. It’s the nature of the job.”³¹ Nonetheless, the EPA is a major, inevitable participant in almost all the significant energy-related White House policymaking.