OPINION/COMMENTARY

No End to Energy Stalemate

In December 2004, the National Commission on Energy Policy (NCEP) released a report titled "Ending the Energy Stalemate: A Bipartisan Strategy to Meet America's Energy Challenges." The group claims to have established "a constructive center in the often polarized debate over national energy policy," and indeed its report contains ideas and recommendations often found in reports produced by industry groups or by environmental advocacy groups but rarely in both. The report contains some good ideas, and the studies prepared by subcontractors to the commission, listed in an appendix to the report, may contain valuable original research. (This writer has not read them.) However, the report's recommendations often seem to combine the worst, rather than the best, of what these two sides in the debate have to offer. Rather than setting their private interests and agendas aside, corporate members of the commission call on taxpayers and consumers to subsidize and bear the financial risk of programs that would benefit them, while the commission's professional environmental advocates make little effort to temper their alarmist agenda with sound science or common sense....