From the RFF Connection:
Energy has been a dominant topic of national policy debate for the past several years. Three Congresses considered comprehensive energy legislation, culminating in the massive Energy Bill that the president signed into law on August 8. Has all this activity produced national energy policy worthy of the name? Not quite. But, as RFF Visiting Scholar Robert Fri outlines, four key elements of the overall shape of an emerging U.S. energy policy -- not all of them reflected in Congress's recent bill -- do seem fairly clear at this point.
The four key elements are:
... national security and climate change have emerged as critical drivers of energy policy, changing the focus of policy in a fundamental way.
... because fossil fuels supply more than 85 percent of U.S. energy, any energy policy aimed at significantly reducing their use would face formidable challenges. For that reason alone, the president and Congress are not yet prepared directly to limit the use of fossil fuels.
... energy policy increasingly relies on the confidence that technology will find a way to ameliorate our energy problems, now and probably for some time to come. The hope is that technology can provide the energy services that consumers want without the pain of higher prices or greater inconvenience.
... reliance on technology does not mean that policy makers will wait passively for technology to mature. Rather, activist governments at all levels are pursuing a variety of initiatives that will decisively shape our emergent energy policy.
And in conclusion:
... recent Energy Bill ... lags the national debate --- as legislation often does. The bill is a measure of the distance that U.S. energy policy still must travel before it can bring the country's needs into balance with reliable resources.
Read it at http://www.rff.org/rff/News/Features/The-Energy-Marathon.cfm.
