In My Time - Dick Cheney [167]
On January 29, 2001, President Bush announced that he had asked me to chair a task force on the nation’s energy situation. In a little more than three months—lightning speed by government standards—we released “Reliable, Affordable, and Environmentally Sound Energy for America’s Future,” a report that made recommendations to “modernize conservation, modernize our energy infrastructure, increase energy supplies, accelerate the protection and improvement of our environment, and increase our nation’s energy security.” The report is one I am very proud of. I commend it to anyone looking to understand America’s energy challenges still today. The report had its critics, but I’ve long suspected them of not reading it. They certainly seem to have missed chapters 3 and 4 on the importance of protecting the environment and improving conservation.
The environmental groups that criticized the report are all too often, in my experience, opposed to any increase in the production of conventional sources of energy. They don’t want to drill anyplace. They don’t want to mine coal anyplace. They seem to believe that we can depend on alternative sources of energy, such as solar or wind. It’s my view—and it’s the view reflected in the report—that while we should develop alternative sources, in the final analysis, we can’t effectively address our energy problems in the near term nor can we remain competitive in the global economy unless we also produce more energy from conventional, domestic sources.
Right now, none of the alternative sources of energy can compete economically with petroleum and coal and other conventional sources. It’s also the case that time and again we have found that developing alternative sources has undesirable, unanticipated consequences. The push for ethanol fuel produced from corn, for example, resulted in driving the price of a bushel of corn up significantly. This had a huge impact on people who used corn for purposes other than fuel—purposes that weren’t subsidized. Cattlemen, for example, were suddenly faced with significantly higher feed prices. We also saw deforestation in places such as Malaysia as farmers cut down trees in order to plant crops that would bring higher prices during the biofuels craze.
Those who are opposed to producing more energy here at home sometimes point to conservation as an alternative. As the energy report made clear, conservation is important, but it is nowhere near sufficient to address our energy challenges. In a speech in Toronto in April 2001, I made this point:
Now, conservation is an important part of the total effort. But to speak exclusively of conservation is to duck the tough issues. Conservation may be a sign of personal virtue, but it is not a sufficient basis all by itself for sound, comprehensive energy policy. We also have to produce more.
Critics jumped on this statement, and without ever fully quoting what I’d said, alleged that I was ignoring the importance of conservation. As I look back on the statement now, ten years later, I stand by it 100 percent.
Although all of the formal members of our energy task force were government officials, we sought advice from thousands of outsiders, and it wasn’t long after the report was released that several groups, including the Sierra Club and Judicial Watch, filed suit demanding we release the lists of everyone we met with during the course of our work. Democrat Henry Waxman, the ranking member of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, also began demanding the lists. Then the General Accounting Office got involved and demanded the lists. We said no, not because we had anything to hide. Every recommendation we made was publicly available, as was the legislation we put forward based on the report. But I believed, and