OIL ALTERNATIVES

Despite their pique at having not been invited to the party, do members of environmental groups really think that if Vice President Dick Cheney had spent hours listening to their ideas on energy, he would have changed his more-oil policy? Probably they don’t, and are shouting now out of sheer righteousness about the entirely unsurprising documentation of the vice president’s relationship with like-minded more-oil representatives.

That’s fine as a demonstration of public outrage, but for those environmentalists who hope to get something done, the action is in the Senate. As they return from their current break, senators should be encouraged to think about some possibilities, such as requiring the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration – the agency to be charged with suggesting improvements to the auto industry over the next couple of years – to devise a plan for saving oil. It might try again to pass a bill that simply ends the fiction that SUVs are somehow not cars. Or the Senate might get creative and start tying industry tax breaks to finding clean renewable sources or otherwise lessening dependence on fossil fuels. That is, it might make energy independence a priority.

The vice president is likely to be forced to release many more memos, meeting minutes, e-mails and other bits of paper evidence that his concern was, first and last, to keep secure the oil investments of acquaintances and other donors. The only surprising issue about the vice president’s energy meetings was how little he thought about conservation. A Washington environmentalist recently reported that he has stopped going to meetings between Interior Secretary Gale Norton and the enviro groups because he concluded that she was just punching her ticket – she just wanted to be able to say she met with the environmentalists. The vice president barely even bothered to fake it.

Maine Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins have been among those in the lead of looking for alternatives to more and more oil. Both have opposed drilling in the Arctic Wildlife Refuge and both have supported raising vehicle and renewable energy standards. Their efforts, however, have been only partly successful.

It may be too much to hope that the embarrassment of the Cheney documents influences energy legislation the way Enron affected campaign finance reform, but the fight to require auto manufacturers to meet new health standards and reduce the U.S. dependence on oil is not entirely over. The Senate expects to complete its version of an energy bill next week. It is one more chance for it to demonstrate that it too has not simply been faking it.