Energy Bill Evidence Of Broken Political System - NH Union Leader (?!?)

[hatrack]

THE ENERGY BILL just passed by Congress starkly illustrates how utterly have self-serving interest groups captured Washington's political process. Short of another redefining election, like 1994 or that following Watergate, our nation is deprived of a means to effect the national interest.

After four years of effort, Congress has removed most of the good from an energy bill now designed primarily to dole out pork to the politically connected. The taxpayer goes $14.6 billion deeper in debt over 10 years. Of this, $1.5 billion in new corporate welfare goes to the oil industry, already immensely profitable.

North America has seven percent of world's petroleum reserves — and declining. The Middle East has 65 percent. In 1972, the year before the first Arab oil embargo, America imported 28 percent of our oil. Today, we import over 60 percent and rising. The scientific evidence is now overwhelming that the global climate is rapidly changing because we persist in burning dirty fossil fuels. The New Hampshire Department of Environmental Services calculates that fossil fuel pollution costs our state over one billion dollars annually in medical care and shortened lifespans. Other advanced, industrial nations have heeded the unambiguous economic and environmental warnings. Europe and Japan are leaving the U.S. behind in development of the clean, abundant energy technologies of the future — and freeing their economies from Middle East oil dependence. Today's Congress would have cozied up to the hand calculator, patent medicine and telegraph industries and stymied computers, biotechnology and the Internet.

The new energy bill forces MtBE cleanup litigation into federal court, depriving victims of state law and state courts to find restitution. The bill preempts state authority over siting of liquefied natural gas terminals and electricity transmission lines. Startlingly, the bill severely weakens export controls on highly enriched uranium, increasing risk of proliferation to rogue and hostile-state nuclear bomb-makers. The energy bill does nothing about greenhouse gas pollution and ignores the national security problems associated with America's abject dependence on Middle Eastern oil and gas.

EDIT

http://www.theunionleader.com/articles_showfast.html?article=58741

[rodeodance]

1. greed for coporations is what it is--and our Congress is slapping them-

selves on the back for passing it (for the most part). shameful.