Energy policy

Even if gasoline prices fall and heating oil next winter stays under $2 a gallon, Sens. Susan Collins, R-Maine, and Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., proposed a potentially useful idea this week in forming a presidential commission to form a comprehensive energy policy for the United States. It is only potentially a useful idea because, unless the senators build political support for the kinds of changes such a commission might produce, it would be a mere time-waster on a subject that needs serious consideration now.

Congress not only has spent a fair amount of time considering the rise in the price of oil this year, it has also regularly dealt with the pressure from the Environmental Protection Agency, which wants to do far more to limit the amount of pollution produced each year in the United States. The two problems are linked, of course, by the nearly forgotten phrase energy efficiency.

Fortunately, not everyone has forgotten it, and if Sens. Collins and Schumer are looking for a place to start a commission in looking at the efficiency component of energy use, they could far worse than to begin with a book published last year by The Union of Concerned Scientists. Called The Consumer’s Guide to Effective Environmental Choices, the book is less concerned with whether you use paper or Styrofoam coffee cups or put your baby in cloth or disposable diapers and is more concerned with the larger questions of transportation choices, food production and home heating, cooling, water use and overall construction. It outlines four areas where government could take action:

* Use the free market. Let gas prices, for instance, reflect the actual costs they produce through air pollution – health-care costs – and clean-up costs of water pollution. That would also mean that Congress would end preferential treatment of the oil industry through the tax code, which reduces its effective income tax rate well below average.

* Set high standards. Industry has pledged for a generation that whatever new standards government proposes cannot be met without extraordinary costs. The government has, in the past, approved new standards for fuel efficiency and emissions and automobile manufacturers have met them without the disasters they promised. There’s no reason to believe that further efficiencies aren’t possible.

* Invest in research and development. Government investment in energy technologies that can be cost-effectively applied on a broad scale will do nothing for the price of heating oil this December but could make a huge difference in the years to come. The federal government has filled an important role in making the funding of basic research a priority in other fields, such as medicine. It could do the same by expanding its role in energy.

* Make land use an environmental issue. Land use may not seem to have a direct effect on energy consumption, but suburban Topsy, as Maine’s State Planning Office has pointed out, produces the effect of many more people driving many more miles to do what a generation or two ago did much more efficiently.

Commissions are effective when they are given a strong mandate and when politicians understand the need for their existence. From all outward signs, Sens. Collins and Schumer have a hard sell in the Senate. But they have the right idea in restarting this debate.