Today one could look at the 3-D Act, (for Domestic Jobs, Domestic Energy and Deficit Reduction), sponsored by David Vitter of Louisiana in the Senate and by Rob Bishop of Utah in the House, as a mosaic of Republican long-term goals like drilling for fossil fuels and reining in environmental regulation (or, in environmentalists’ view, rolling back crucial protections).This is not your everyday 12 step program. The one of the past brought one to a better life - better control. This 12 step program leads to a total mess.
“Rising energy costs, unemployment and a $14 trillion dollar national debt are among the biggest challenges that our country is currently facing,” Representative Bishop said when the measures were introduced. “This legislation uniquely addresses all three by allowing for the development of domestic resources, which in turn will create thousands of well-paying jobs and begin immediately paying down our $14 trillion dollar debt.”
That said, here is an abbreviated look at the bills’ 12-step program:
1. Put oil and natural gas leasing on the Outer Continental shelf on a fast track, holding lease sales every nine months and making them dependent on commercial expressions of interest (rather than, say, ecosystem requirements) to determine what parcels should be leased. Ensure that a year after the bill becomes law, there will be three lease sales in the Gulf of Mexico and one off the coast of Virginia.
2. Open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to an “environmentally sound program for the exploration, development and production of the oil and gas resources of the Coastal Plain.” A generation of environmentalists have fought against this outcome, pitting themselves against a dogged but ultimately failed efforts of Ted Stevens, the late Alaska senator. Senator Stevens’s political heirs would like to make his dream come true.
3. Expedite lease sales for companies seeking to extract oil and natural gas from complex geologic formations like oil shale and tar sands in the West.
4. Set a nine-month deadline for the environmental review of any federal action like such leasing. Missed deadlines mean that the action is deemed acceptable — “of no significant impact,” in bureaucratic terms — and final.
5. Prohibit the Environmental Protection Agency from classifying carbon dioxide or methane from agricultural activities — like manure-waste ponds filled by livestock in confined feedlots — as a pollutant. No state (are you listening, California?) could get federal permission to regulate greenhouse-gas emissions from passenger vehicles.
6. Allow state governors to declare emergencies, which, once declared, require federal officials to ignore the provisions of the Endangered Species Act when dealing with the emergency. Examples given involve “flood control” and “water supply.” The latter was a major issue in California’s agricultural sector during recent years of drought, when supplies of fresh water for agriculture were curbed while supplies of water for endangered fish were preserved.
7. Allow mountaintop removal mining to proceed at Spruce Mine in Logan County, W. Va. It had been blocked by a decision by water regulators at the Environmental Protection Agency who were concerned about filling local stream beds with what miners call “overburden” and others call tons of soil and debris.
8. Reinstate the oil and gas leases in Utah that were purchased in the last years of George W. Bush’s administration. One of the Obama administration’s first acts was to rescind them.
9. In California’s dry central valley, ensure that no federal scientific report — the term of art is “biological opinion” — requiring water for endangered fish be allowed to interfere with farmers’ rights to their historical maximum allocations.
10. Expedite approval of construction of the Keystone XL oil pipeline from Canada to the United States. (Nebraska’s congressional delegation just asked for the opposite, a delay, to ensure they have time to examine the pipeline’s potential for contaminating the huge Ogallala Aquifer as the pipeline crosses it in Nebraska.)
11. Give Shell oil a long-delayed license to drill for oil in the Beaufort Sea above Alaska.
12. Prohibit federal agencies from paying legal fees to environmental groups that prevail in lawsuits challenging the government’s environmental stewardship if the result of their actions “prevents, terminates or reduces” access to energy, minerals, timber, land for grazing and water for farming, or “eliminates or prevents one or more jobs.”
Reading these steps it is clear that the lobbyists were very busy. Heck, Shell's lobbyist was successful enough to get the company's name mentioned.
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