Ranking Republican Proposes End to Clean Energy Subsidies
WASHINGTON — Lisa Murkowski, the ranking Republican on the U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, recently released a series of energy policy recommendations. In general, the plan rends to fall squarely on the traditional Republican side of the aisle in most of its recommendations.
The proposal renews the age-old call for energy independence, aiming to cut the 8.7 million barrels of oil imported into the United States each day down to zero by the year 2020. This is not the first time a politician on either side of the aisle has made such an aggressive target for weaning the country off of foreign oil and it also seems very unlikely to be the last.
Murkowski’s primary suggested means of attaining this goal was to increase oil and gas drilling, particularly in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, commonly known as ANWR, and the Outer Continental Shelf off the coast of Virginia. In addition to opening up more areas for drilling, the senator suggested that the process for approving permits for drilling on federally owned land and water should be sped up.
The senator proposed that tax revenues from the new drilling project would be held in a new Advanced Energy Trust Fund, which could be used to pay for “the most promising and cost‐effective proposals in many technology-neutral categories, including renewable energy, energy efficiency, alternative fuels and advanced vehicles.”
Murkowski also proposed that some of the funds could be used to pay down the national debt.
In reality, opening up those areas would make a very small dent in the national debt, even if 100 percent of the funding were allocated for that cause. The Congressional Budget Office recently reported that the total government revenue from opening up all of those federally owned locations for drilling would total approximately $7 billion over the next decade, compared to the $148.9 billion in total revenue the government anticipates receiving from its current leases over the same time period.
Most important to the green building industry, Murkowski called upon her peers in the senate to rewrite the definition of “clean energy.” The new meaning would define anything “less intensive in global life-cycle impacts on human health and the environment than its likeliest alternative” as clean energy. Clearly such a change would greatly affect the amount of resources dedicated to solar panels and wind farms, as they would suddenly find themselves in the same category as oil refineries and coal plants in many cases. This proposal dovetailed with the senator’s suggestion to phase out “most of the government’s current subsidies” for renewable power sources by 2020.