Most Republicans and a couple handfuls of Democrats voted against the House Democratic leadership Thursday. Blocking a piece of legislation the majority approved. So what else is new? Just this: The Dems lost the legislative skirmish but they won the narrative fight. If they make use of it and exercise some patience, a solid overall victory can be theirs - and ours - in the long run. All they have to do is hold off until January. Simply wait for the new Congress.
Given that the issue at hand is oil and gas leasing, such a victory would be no small matter.
But it would be sooooo easy to screw it up. All the leadership would have to do is follow Massachusetts Rep. Edward Markey’s lead and continue to pursue this. No, no, no. Just stop for six months. And, on the campaign trail, use the hypocritical Republican stance on the issue to pound every GOP candidate who claims Democrats are the obstacle to more domestic energy production.
The back story here includes a lot of numbers. Thanks to oil spills, particularly the devastating one in the Santa Barbara Channel in 1969, most of the Outer Continental Shelf has been off-limits to drilling since 1981. Not all, however. Private corporations have leases on about 2.4% of this taxpayer-owned land. That’s 44 million acres mostly in the central and western Gulf of Mexico and part of the offshore area in Alaska.
These leases produce around 15 percent of domestic natural gas production and 27 percent of domestic oil. After being granted by the Bureau of Land Management, the leases, as well as 47.2 million acres of on-shore leases of federal and Indian trust lands, are managed by the Minerals Management Service. Both BLM and MMS are bureaus of the Department of the Interior, which collects about $8 billion in revenue from oil and gas leases every year.
MMS estimates that beneath the 1.3 billion OCS acres currently barred from leasing are tucked 86 billion barrels of oil and 420 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. That’s almost exactly how much oil the whole world consumes in one year, and four years’ supply of natural gas at current rates of consumption.
Nothing to sneeze at. Particularly not when oil is priced at plus or minus $130 a barrel and the U.S. imports 65%-70% of the barrels it consumes each year from ... uh ... unstable and otherwise problematic places. And maybe there’s more. Survey techniques are better than when the areas in question were last evaluated.
From the standpoint of the oil companies, their puppets and allies, what all those numbers have combined to do is create the perfect storm. They’re making record profits. The occupation of Iraq and relentless talk about war with Iran have made people edgy. Environmentalists are under pressure because polls indicate the majority of price-shocked American consumers favor more off-shore drilling in the belief their paychecks will stretch further and the U.S. will gain the separation from foreign oil producers that’s been talked about ever since Richard Nixon launched Project Independence 35 years ago.
What better time than now, it being an election year and all, to press for an end to the OCS ban?
So, here we are, less than four months away from what could be a watershed at the polls, and the cry is drill for independence, drill for cheaper pump prices, drill for American pride. Could they have more propaganda value on their side? National security, economic populism and a dab of patriotism all wrapped up in one appealing package. Just let us drill, we’ll be careful, our newest technology is practically foolproof, and don’t you all hate leaning on the Saudis and Hugo Chávez anyway?
All but a few Republicans back lifting the ban. The shifty McCain backs it. Mister Bush has already lifted the presidential ban on further OCS leasing that was established in 1990. What yet stands in the way is the 27-year-old legislative ban passed just before a global recession caused a plunge in oil prices that were, until two years ago, the highest that modern American consumers had ever faced.
The problem is that a lot of people, including most congressional Democrats, see this sweet come-on for exactly what it is, a land grab which will further fatten oil company wallets, harm the environment, reduce prices marginally if at all and do next to nothing for that vaunted energy independence. Because the oil companies already lease 91.5 million acres of federal land, but they’re not drilling or producing on three-fourths of them.
Here’s a map showing in gray the 229 million acres of federal land that were leased or offered for lease from 1982-2004. In the past four years, the Cheney-Bush administration has issued new leases at a faster pace than ever in the history of the program. From 1999-2007, the issuing of drilling permits rose 361%. Permits have doubled what they were in 2002.
Are the oil companies actually drilling on this land? Yes. But only about 13 million of the on-shore and 10.5 million of the off-shore acres are in production, according to a report by the House Committee on Natural Resources, The Truth About America’s Energy: Big Oil Stockpiles Supplies and Pockets Profits. If they actually developed their other leases, on-shore and off, the report stated in an extrapolation from MMS data, it would nearly double current domestic oil production, which could cut imports by one-third and increase domestic natural gas production by 75%. On existing leases.
Seeing this, House Natural Resources Committee Chairman Nick J. Rahall introduced H.R. 6251 on June 12. Formally it was called the Responsible Federal Oil and Gas Lease Act of 2008. Nicknamed the "use it or lose it" act, it would have required oil and gas companies to actually develop their leases within a reasonable period or give them up.
Industry folks said the bill didn’t take into account the complexities of the leasing-drilling-production ratio. Plus, they said, the current system already allows the Department of Interior to end a lease if certain rules aren’t met. The Rahall bill included benchmarks requiring that leaseholders produce oil or gas from each lease within the five-year original term of the lease, and that they submit a "diligent development plan" showing how they would meet the benchmarks.
None other than House Minority Leader John Boehner called it
...nothing more than a hoax designed to provide political cover to rank-and-file Democrats caught between their constituents who strongly support more American energy production and their liberal Democratic leaders beholden to radical environmentalists who want oil and gas prices to rise even higher.
Hilarious hyperbole considering that many environmental advocates don’t want already-leased lands drilled as the bill would require.
Under normal House rules, Republicans or renegade Democrats could have amended the bill to allow additional acreage now unavailable to be leased. The Democratic leadership, having had plenty of recent examples to remind them, feared that they might be unable to maintain party discipline in this matter. So they brought it to the floor June 26 under a suspension of the rules, which require a two-thirds vote. The effort failed 223-195.
On Thursday, with a new version of the bill in hand that included a requirement for the BLM to offer annual lease sales in Alaska’s National Petroleum Reserve and speed up completion of pipelines that would carry oil and gas from the NPR and other regions of Alaska to the other states. This also failed, although the vote was far closer, with 15 Republicans and eight Democrats who rejected the original bill coming aboard for a 244-173 tally.
You know what those hold-outs are waiting for. For the Democrats to cave. With Hawai'i’s Neil Abercrombie and Texans like Charles Gonzalez and Henry Cuellar already on their side, they’re hoping to get at least a piece of the real prize: an OK for more OCS leases before November 4.
As Rahall told CongressDaily:
While Democratic leaders initially appeared poised to further modify their use-it-or-lose-it plan in the last hours before Thursday's vote to mollify oil-patch Democrats that the bill put up too much of a barrier to new leases, Pelosi did not end up making those changes.
"We were going to but didn't," Natural Resources Chairman Nick Rahall told reporters. Rahall said it would not have made a difference in the final tally. "They weren't going to vote for us if we did it," he said, referring to Democratic opponents. He said the conditions for their support were fluid. "It was always something new," Rahall said.
There it is in a nutshell. Two tries are enough. Why do it again?
Senate consideration of Russ Feingold and Chris Dodd’s similar "use-it-or-lose-it" bill is tied up with the anti-speculation bill, which could be considered next week.
If the Feingold/Dodd proposal is discussed as an amendment to that bill, then Republicans would be allowed to present amendments of their own, which would likely be focused on opening more of the Outer Continental Shelf to leasing. Given some Senate Democrats' soft-headedness on the matter, such an amendment could pass.
What is the friggin’ rush? Yes, there’s a crisis. But after more than a quarter-century of lousy energy policy, what's six measly months that remain until a new President takes office? How we go forward – and let us hope that it finally is forward – should be up to him and the 111th Congress, not Mister Bush and the 110th.
With global warming breathing its hot breath down our necks, the worst energy-efficiency ratio in the developed world, and other environmental and geopolitical concerns at issue, we stand on the brink of making decisions that will affect us for a very long time. Action should not be taken on the basis of what will happen in the next four months, but rather in the spirit of the Haudenosee (Iroquois) League, which keeps the interests of the next seven generations in mind every time it makes a major choice to do or not do something.
Congress should just wait.
