The Great Derangement - Matt Taibbi [17]
For Barton’s bill is a new low, even for this Congress. A masterpiece of shameless opportunism and sheer balls, HR 3893 of the 109th Congress, the Gasoline for America’s Security Act, was conceived by Barton’s office before the bodies in New Orleans had even cooled. The storm hit New Orleans on August 29, and this bill was presented for consideration to the house in what would end up being very close to its final form just over three weeks later, on September 26.
Ostensibly, the problem the bill addresses is the damage caused by the storm to the country’s refinery capacity, a problem that came before the public eye via the skyrocketing gas prices that swept the country after the storm. The bill was written in the weepy, hands-over-the-heart, your-pain-is-our-pain language peculiar to corporate handouts disguised as altruistic public relief programs—a literary genre that saw tremendous creative innovation in the period after the historic storm. The relevant passage of HR 3893 read as follows:
(3) Hurricanes Katrina and Rita substantially disrupted petroleum production, refining, and pipeline systems in the Gulf Coast region, affecting energy prices and supply nationwide…
(4) It serves the national interest to increase refinery capacity for gasoline, heating oil, diesel fuel, and jet fuel wherever located within the United States, to bring more reliable and economic supply to the American people.
(5) According to economic analysis, households are conservatively estimated to spend an average of $1,948 this year on gasoline, up 45 percent from 3 years ago, and households with incomes under $15,000 (1/5 of all households) this year will spend, on average, more than 1/10 of their income just on gasoline.
The bill, in other words, was written with the aim of sparing less fortunate Americans the pain of spending a tenth of their income on gasoline and helping to avoid even steeper costs.
Barton’s plan for achieving this, however, included no new measures whatsoever and did nothing at all about the price of gasoline. Instead, Barton simply used the bill to trot out an ancient, oft-rehashed laundry list of energy industry wet dreams, including the reigning legislative fantasy of the combustible-fuel industry: the repeal of the new source review provision of the Clean Air Act.
The repeal of new source review is one of those things—the opening of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) for petroleum drilling and the repeal of the capital gains tax being two of the others—that Republican lawmakers ask for whenever any hideous crisis hits the newspapers. The party’s gift for this kind of abject political non sequitur has been a defining characteristic for about a dozen years now, but especially in the last five. Terrorists strike New York? We better repeal the estate tax, quick! Asian bird flu on the way? Millions will die—if the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 isn’t overturned!
The classic example of this, of course, was Alaska senator Frank Murkowski’s heartfelt plea, just two days after 9/11, to open ANWR for oil development, as a means of combating the terrorist threat. Not surprisingly, the Republicans went after ANWR again after Katrina, and also humped another old target—the prohibited offshore drilling zones of the outer continental shelf. Those measures were junked at the last minute in committee, but the gutting of the long-loathed Clean Air Act was the biggest and juiciest prize—and it appeared to have survived in the final version of Barton’s gasoline act.
New source review has been a regulatory bee in the bonnet of the energy industry since 1970, when the Clean Air Act Extension first went into effect. Essentially, the measure dictated that pre-1970 plants and refineries could continue to pollute at pre-1970 legal levels, but that new plants and old plants modified with new equipment had to reduce emissions and use state-of-the-art scrubbing technology