OPINION/COMMENTARY

Burn, Baby, Burn?

While the last couple of years' death toll is tragic, the death numbers in some previous conflagrations were astonishing. In 1871, for example, more than 1,200 people died in Wisconsin and Michigan from what was known as the Great Peshtigo Fire. More than 400 died in the Hinckley, Minn., fire in 1894 and another 450 in the Cloquet-Moose Lake, Minn., fire, in 1918.

Most fires, like those in California this year and in Colorado last year, were caused by people, not lightening or other acts of God. Charles S. Sargent, as part of the 1880 census, looked at U.S. woodland fires that year. He found 1,152 originated from clearing land, 628 from hunters, 508 from locomotives, 262 from malice, 197 from improving pasturages, 72 from campfires, 56 from Indians, 35 from smokers, 10 from prospectors, 9 from coal pits, three from woodcutters, 3 from carelessness and two from travelers, and only 32 from lighting and another 12 from prairie fires...

The effort at saving our forests has worked - indeed, it's worked beyond its needs. As Alan Caruba of the National Anxiety Center has noted, U.S. forestlands that covered 732 million acres in 1920 cover 747 million acres today, including 490 million acres that can produce 20 cubic feet of wood per acre annually. Large tree standing timber has increased 30 percent since 1950...

$80 Billion Pork-Barrel Power Bill

So what's in the 1,200-page energy bill that emerged this week from months of backroom negotiations? Hundreds of pages of corporate welfare, symbolic gestures, empty promises, and pork-barrel projects. In the name of mom-and-apple pie goals such as increasing energy supplies, reducing energy prices, and curtailing oil imports, the bill does little but transfer wealth from taxpayers to well-connected energy lobbies.

Here are the highlights. The proposed legislation will cost about $80 billion over 10 years and deficits be damned. Government-funded research and development and other subsidies make up about $60 billion of that total. Turning the corporate tax code into a better approximation of Swiss cheese with a new flood of incredibly prescriptive tax credits for every energy firm with a lobbyist will cost the Treasury $16 billion. Higher prices imposed by a doubling of federal ethanol subsidies will cost motorists about $7 billion...

The Energy Policy Act of 2003 -- A Missed Opportunity

Though the bill has some good provisions it fails to adequately enhance domestic energy supplies, a major missed opportunity to ensure reliable and affordable energy for American families and businesses.

The good news: the bill includes provisions that strengthen the nation’s electricity system and, at the margins, narrows the gap between supply and demand. The bad news: it is also loaded with costly and unnecessary new program authorizations, costly pork-barrel projects, and over $23 billion in special interest tax subsidies.

Despite numerous policy flaws, Congress will likely pass this bill and get President Bush's signature...