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Sierra Club Urges Balanced Approach that's Quicker, Cleaner, Cheaper, Safer Statement of Carl Pope, Sierra Club Executive Director
President Bush is trying to hang a thin veil of energy efficiency over a cesspool of polluter giveaways. The White House is holding pretty photo-ops to distract from the harmful impacts of his policies, but it would be far more honest to unveil this plan at a polluting coal-fired power plant or at the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor. President Bush's energy plan will benefit his campaign donors in the oil, coal and utility mining industries but cost anyone who buys energy or breathes the air. President Bush's policies won't clean up our air, prevent future energy shortages or save us money. Americans rely on the Clean Air Act to protect our families from unhealthy air pollution, but the President's plan unravels these safeguards and gives giant handouts to filthy coal-fired power plants. Dressing these plants with sweet names like "clean coal" does little to stop pollution from spewing out of the smokestacks. That coal pollution leads to global warming, causes air and water pollution and harms our families' health. Plundering the tundra in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge won't change gas prices one penny, yet the President keeps pushing ahead with this key oil industry demand. Drilling the Arctic Refuge is yet another of the President's proposals that won't work. Government geologists estimate the Arctic Refuge holds only a 6-month supply of oil for the U.S., and the oil companies know it will take a decade to produce the first drop for consumers. The President pretends the oil industry will use hypodermic needles to extract oil, but surgical precision doesn't exist with oil drilling. Drilling the Arctic Refuge would take a huge industrial development sprawling across the fragile tundra in a vast web of oil rigs, pipelines, roads, landing strips, housing for workers and vast incinerators for the waste. Raising fuel economy for cars and SUVs to 40 miles per gallon is the biggest single step President Bush could have taken to cut our oil dependence and curb global warming -- but the President decided not to act. The plan suggests tax credits for high-mileage, hybrid gas-electric vehicles, but the devil's in the details, and many details are still under wraps. These cars are good for the environment, but the Bush hybrid-vehicle tax credit will likely allow auto companies to sell an additional gas guzzler for each hybrid sold. Despite spotlighting it as visionary energy savings, this proposal doesn't save fuel, doesn't cut pollution and merely walks in place. President Bush also wants to revive dangerous and expensive failed nuclear policies that could play right into the hands of terrorists. The U.S. rightly abandoned nuclear reprocessing because it was too dangerous and too expensive. No one has figured out how to prevent people from stealing the plutonium that falls out when you reprocess spent nuclear fuel. That plutonium can be used to make bombs, and the process is too expensive to be economically effective. Clearly, there are options that are quicker, cleaner, cheaper and safer than what the President's proposing. But Bush's operating plan seems to follow this motto: If it's environmentally destructive, just do it. If it's environmentally beneficial, just study it. With a stroke of his pen, the President could have saved billions of barrels of oil and save consumers billions of dollars at the gas pump by raising fuel economy standards for cars and SUVs, but instead, he calls for more delays and studies. The President's own budget erodes the environmental veneer on this plan. Hindering efforts to improve energy efficiency in homes, vehicles, businesses and industry, President Bush's budget actually cuts research in renewable energy and development programs by 37 percent and cuts energy efficient research and development by 30 percent. Photo courtesy Dept. of Energy / National Renewable Energy Laboratory. Up to Top |
The energy plan President Bush unveiled won't work, because it makes the
wrong choices. We can't drill, dig and destroy our way to energy
independence. Instead, Americans want a balanced approach that gives us
quicker, cleaner, cheaper, safer solutions like energy-efficient
technologies, renewable power like solar and wind, and responsible
additions to supply.