Via
Bush Greenwatch, I see that I've missed this unsettling--dare I say Cheney-esque?--piece of the
energy bill:
Establish an "Office of Federal Project Coordination" within the White House to expedite the permitting and completion of energy projects on federal lands and override environmental safeguards. Title III Sec. 341
In other words, whenever anyone with connections is having trouble with those pesky regulators, all they have to do is call up their pal Dick and he'll straighten things out.
What the legislation actually says is this:
(a) ESTABLISHMENT- The President shall establish the Office of Federal Energy Project Coordination (referred to in this section as the `Office') within the Executive Office of the President in the same manner and with the same mission as the White House Energy Projects Task Force established by Executive Order No. 13212 (42 U.S.C. 13201 note).
(b) STAFFING- The Office shall be staffed by functional experts from relevant Federal agencies on a nonreimbursable basis to carry out the mission of the Office.
(c) REPORT- The Office shall transmit an annual report to Congress that describes the activities put in place to coordinate and expedite Federal decisions on energy projects. The report shall list accomplishments in improving the Federal decisionmaking process and shall include any additional recommendations or systemic changes needed to establish a more effective and efficient Federal permitting process. (emphasis mine)
...which makes it quite clear that this is, indeed, the Cheney clause.
No. 13212, issued on May 18, 2001, was called the "Executive Order to Expedite Energy-Related Projects," and it contained the following whopper:
There is established an interagency task force (Task Force) to monitor and assist the agencies in their efforts to expidite their review of permits or similar actions, as necessary, to accelerate the completion of energy-related projects, increase energy production and conservation, and improve transmission of energy (emphasis mine)
Note that the language here is quite broad--how do you define an energy-related project? Is that anything like WMDRPA?
And allow me to state with great confidence that it is physically impossible to increase both energy production and conservation at the same time.
According to the first law of thermodynamics, matter (and energy) can neither be created nor destroyed; the second teaches us that "in all physical processes energy is degraded from an available to an unavailable state." (in Harris, J.M. Environmental and Natural Resource Economics, 160.)
Now that I've picked that nit, let me remind us, courtesy of p. 145 of The Price of Loyalty, what this Task Force was all about:
O’Neill thought Cheney’s task force was oddly constructed: made up solely of government officials. Most task forces go in the other direction: their strength is in creating a structure for government officials to mix in with leading experts, former top public officials, or respected businessmen. Such entities are covered under the Federal Advisory Committee Act, or FACA, which mandates that the activities of groups that combine governmental and nongovernmental officials be fully disclosed to the public; lists of members, advisors, agendas, and minutes of meetings must be available.
Because this was a task force with only government employees, there were no reporting requirements. O’Neill knew Cheney liked it that way–he had often groused about prying questions and transparency and how information released under the claim of right-to-know became ammunition for a host of political enemies. This task force, Cheney’s, would operate in utmost privacy.
Not that other voices didn’t join in the conversation. Industry representatives–in bureaucratic language, the “nonfederal stakeholders"–were just outside the door. Before and after the formal task force meetings, principals and staff, often moving in small, interdepartmental groups, would meet with lobbyists from all the major energy concerns. For the most part, environmentalists were nowhere to be seen.
According to documents in O’Neill’s files, along with those obtained in various disclosure actions filed against the Cheney task force, Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham met with corporations and trade groups, including Chevron, the National Mining Association, and the National Petrochemical and Refiners Association, each of which delivered policy recommendations in detailed reports. On the meeting roster for Secretary of the Interior Gail Norton were Rocky-Mountain-based petroleum companies looking to lease federal land and an Indian tribe from Nevada interested in building a power plant. Cheney met with Enron chairman Kenneth Lay and received detailed policy recommendations from one industry group whose central concern was not allowing carbon dioxide to be regulated as a pollutant, as well as from another–called the Coal-Based Generation Stakeholders–whose central position was lifting pollution controls on coal-fueled electric generators.
Here's a
snapshot of one of these meetings, also from the book.
The NRDC has a whole lot more.