The Great Derangement - Matt Taibbi [18]
Barton’s party had taken several swipes at new source review, all unsuccessful, in the past few years alone. In the spring of 2001, the now-notorious Cheney energy task force issued a report recommending that the attorney general take a look at new source review to see if it was consistent with the law.
The AG never took up that fight, but that might have been because the administration by then had found a new avenue of attack. The hilariously named “Clear Skies” bill of 2002, sent to the Hill by the Bush administration for the consideration of Congress, included a provision that would have exempted all existing plants from new source review requirements.
When that bill was blocked in Congress, the administration went another route, taking aim at the bill via executive branch regulation. In December 2002, the Environmental Protection Agency under Bush came up with a series of loopholes aimed at helping factories and power plants avoid requirements to modernize. The provisions were challenged and mostly defeated in the District of Columbia Circuit Court, but this was no deterrent to the EPA; under a year later, in August 2003, it came out with yet another new rule designed to circumvent new source review, which the court again struck down. New source review, despite repeated attacks, remained a heavy rope around the neck of industry.
Therefore it was with some desperation that Barton decided to apply the non sequitur trick to Hurricane Katrina while bodies still floated in the Ninth Ward. New Orleans is underwater! Quick, repeal those tough air-pollution emissions standards!
Even within the logically discordant parameters of non sequitur politics, this particular piece of legislation was unusually ridiculous and transparent. The ostensible justification for the bill was still about six logical steps removed from the Katrina disaster it was designed to provide an emergency remedy for.
The silliest aspect of the bill was its very status as an “emergency” measure. It would be hard to imagine anything more absurd than the idea of combating a current, immediate national fuel-cost crisis—taking on high fuel and gas prices affecting citizens right now, this week—by passing a deregulation bill that at best provides an oblique and indirect incentive for oil companies to build new refineries years from now at the earliest. Yet the bill was rushed through Congress with all the alacrity of an emergency relief package, as though industry simply could not wait to hurry up and maybe build new plants.
Beyond that, what little logic there was in the bill was based upon the assumption that oil companies even want to build new refineries. As Barton surely knew—he had heard plenty of testimony on the matter in the Energy and Commerce Committee debates over this bill—it had been more than three decades since a major American energy company had evinced any interest at all in building a new oil refinery. In fact, in a thirty-year period dating back to 1975, the federal government had received just one application to build a new refinery.
In truth, the trend in the industry had been exactly the opposite: oil companies had steadily reduced the number of functioning refineries over the years, closing down nearly half of all America’s refineries in the course of three decades.
The reason for this was obvious and freely admitted to by industry leaders who met with members of Congress in anticipation of this bill. Fewer refineries meant a reduced supply, which in turn meant higher prices—and higher prices were, for obvious reasons, desirable. The idea of providing subsidies to build new refineries was as absurd as giving away farmland to grow wheat during a grain glut.
Higher prices also meant larger profits for the oil and gas industry. In fact, at the time Barton was writing his relief bill—which was designed, remember, to help struggling oil and gas companies bear the burden of high regulatory costs—the oil and gas multinationals were experiencing record