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A Not-So-Bad Ending to a Sputtering Congress

December 14, 2006

Just when you thought the 109th Congress was beyond redemption … as it gasped toward adjournment on December 9, the 109'ers managed to adopt some decent environmental legislation.

As the clock ran down, Congress:

FISHERIES & OCEANS
Re-authorized and updated the Magnuson-Stevens ocean fisheries management law. Rip tides of political pressures and countercurrents of efforts to weaken the law pulled at the update throughout the congressional session. Senator Ted Stevens, one of the law’s namesakes, threw the bill a lifesaver at the last minute.

Stevens usually doesn’t rate praise from conservationists, but in this instance, his legislation strengthened the law through provisions requiring regional fishery management councils to base catch limits on scientific advice and to end overfishing beginning in 2010. It wasn’t all that conservationists wanted, but it was a notable improvement over the old law.

PUBLIC LANDS
Adopted a number of public lands protections, including withdrawal of Montana’s Rocky Mountain Front and New Mexico’s Valle Vidal from new oil leasing, and designation of more than half a million acres in eastern Nevada as wilderness. Also getting through the gate was legislation designating the Captain John Smith Chesapeake National Historic Trail, which commemorates Smith’s 17th century voyages in America’s largest estuary.

ENERGY
Extended a series of energy tax credits that provide households and businesses with incentives to invest in energy efficiency and renewable energy resources. The incentives that won extensions included a production tax credit for wind and other renewable power generation sources. Also extended were tax credits for residential solar water heat and photovoltaic arrays, and for construction of energy-efficient homes and commercial buildings.

Congress sullied the last-minute energy achievement with legislation that opens 8.3 million acres in the Gulf of Mexico to oil and gas drilling. As offshore drilling bills go, it was rather modest, since part of the acreage is not under a moratorium and could have been opened anyway at the Interior Department’s discretion. More importantly, the House had passed legislation that would have opened vast swaths of the Gulf, Atlantic, and Pacific coasts to drilling. Fortunately, the House bill was a non-starter in the Senate.

Still, Congress can’t seem to get the idea that the U.S. cannot begin shaking its dangerous overdependence on oil through more domestic drilling. The area opened by Congress contains an estimated 1.26 billion barrels of oil and about 5.8 trillion cubic feet of gas. That works out to about two months worth of present domestic oil consumption and about three months worth of gas.