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Environmental News Sevice
"The Bush energy plan is an all-you-can-eat buffet for big oil, gas, mining, nuclear, and timber. Industry executives are salivating over this plan more than a Texan at a rib roast," said Brian Vincent, California organizer for the national conservation group American Lands. President Bush's energy policy fails to meet the test of conservative leadership, REP America, the national grassroots organization of Republicans for environmental protection, said today. "The plan doesn't go far enough to improve our energy efficiency," said REP America executive director Jim Scarantino. "It perpetuates our dangerous dependence on oil, a national security risk. The plan would pick the taxpayers' pockets to continue giving handouts to the coal and nuclear industries. It threatens America's natural heritage by throwing our wild lands wide open to drilling. And it does little to address global warming, irresponsibly dumping a costly burden on our descendants."
"We are literally in a war with energy companies, many of which reside in Texas," Davis said. Texas is Bush's home state where he served as governor since 1996 during the time when deregulation of California's electricity industry forced California power suppliers to purchase electricity out of state. Sensitive to the storm of complaints, President George W. Bush, out selling the plan to the American public, is stressing the parts of his energy plan that deal with conservation and renewables.
Mark Van Putten, president of the National Wildlife Federation, America's largest environmental organization said, "The nation's need for a stable energy supply must not be satisfied at the expense of people, wildlife and wild places. We must not surrender our natural treasures to a short sighted drilling frenzy, as this plan threatens. The administration proposes to rush ahead with increased energy production, invading some of the nation's wildest and most sensitive public lands by side-stepping the very safeguards established to protect them." "The Bush-Cheney administration's promotion of nuclear energy is distressingly short-sighted and potentially dangerous," said Kyle Rabin, Nuclear Energy Policy Project Director for the Albany, New York based Environmental Advocates. "It's all about denial and fantasy: Denying the nuclear meltdowns and near disasters; fantasizing that Yucca Mountain will solve the country's radioactive waste problems. Nuclear power must be phased out."
"Bush's dirty, unbalanced, irresponsible energy policy has placed the special oil and coal interests that funded his campaign over the public's interest in a clean, reliable, safe, and affordable energy supply," said Deb Callahan, League of Conservation Voters president.
In the European Parliament, Green Members yesterday launched a petition calling for a consumer boycott of U.S. oil giant ExxonMobil. The Green party is claiming that representatives from four of the assembly's five major parties have already backed its call and says it expects well over 100 of the parliament's 626 members to sign the petition.
Bush established an interagency task force to be chaired by the head of the White House Council on Environmental Quality. It will monitor and assist the agencies in their efforts to expedite their review of permits or similar actions, as necessary, to accelerate the completion of energy related projects, increase energy production and conservation, and improve transmission of energy. The task force will monitor and assist agencies in setting up mechanisms
to coordinate federal, state, tribal, and local permitting in geographic
areas "where increased permitting activity is expected." The
task force will be housed at the Department of Energy for administrative
purposes. "The statement of energy impact is not a red light, preventing any agency from taking any action," Bush explained. "It is a yellow light that says, pause and think before you make decisions that squeeze consumer's pocketbooks, that may cause energy shortages or that may make us more dependent on foreign energy." |