Bush signs $14.5 billion energy bill

WASHINGTON -- President Bush signed a sweeping energy package yesterday that provides $14.5 billion to step up the production of oil, gas, and other fuels the president said would eventually lessen the nation's dependence on foreign energy sources.

The law, the result of years of work on Capitol Hill and hundreds of millions of dollars in lobbying by special-interest groups, offers tax breaks or subsidies to an array of industries, from coal companies to farmers of corn and sugar beets. It also includes tax incentives to develop hybrid vehicles that run on gas and electricity, to encourage exploration to find new sources of oil, and to build more natural gas pipelines.

The package will ''help every American who drives to work, every family that pays a power bill," Bush said before signing the bill at the Department of Energy's Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque.

Critics called the law a giveaway to wealthy corporations and said the package would do little to ease the country's reliance on foreign oil supplies. The law doesn't tighten the federal rules for car emissions standards, which environmentalists say would ease global warming and reduce the amount of oil the country consumes daily.

Gas prices nationwide averaged $2.37 a gallon yesterday, a record high, according to the federal Energy Information Administration. The law Bush signed yesterday has some incentives for developing alternative fuels, but most of the benefits are directed at older energy sources such as coal, oil, and nuclear power.

''It's a backward-looking bill, not one that's focused on the 21st century. It doesn't make investments in new energy," said Tiernan Sittenfeld, legislative director of the League of Conservation Voters. ''Why would we be subsidizing older, mature energies when we could be promoting alternatives?"

But the president said the package lays the groundwork for a long-term energy strategy that will enable the United States to produce more of its own energy and sell some of it overseas.

''This bill is not going to solve our energy challenges overnight. Most of the serious problems, such as high gasoline costs or the rising dependence on foreign oil, have developed over decades. It's going to take years of focused effort to alleviate those problems," Bush said. The law, he said, ''will help us do that."

The law also promises to resurrect the stagnant nuclear power industry, which has not commissioned a new plant in more than 30 years. With newly extended limits on liability in accidents, the industry is free to develop plans for new plants, said Steve Kerekes, a spokesman for the Nuclear Energy Institute.

The president said yesterday that the law will lead to the construction of nuclear plants before the end of the decade, giving a big boost to an industry that has run aground because of local opposition to reactors, lingering doubts after the Three Mile Island nuclear plant accident in 1979, and the uncertainty of regulatory delays and potentially costly litigation.

''This is a big moment," Kerekes said. ''We may be in a position of being able to look back 20 to 25 years from now at this event today as a momentous event that really helped ensure a new era of prosperity and growth."

Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonpartisan fiscal watchdog group, came up with a total of $6.4 billion in tax breaks and authorized spending to aid the nuclear industry, including subsidies for designing reactors, building facilities, reprocessing spent fuel, and decommissioning nuclear power plants. One of the plants has been designated for Idaho, the home of Senator Larry Craig, a Republican and senior member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.

The law also provides the nuclear industry with government money if a plant's construction is delayed by litigation or regulatory red tape and extends special insurance liability limits for the industry. While nuclear operators still have to buy insurance in case of a nuclear accident, the entire industry shares the burden if claims are filed, and the overall amount of the liability is limited.

''Nuclear power is the only power source that is subsidized from cradle to grave, and this bill will make nuclear power even more dependent on government handouts," said Keith Ashdown, vice president of policy for Taxpayers for Common Sense.

Without new power plants on the horizon, the environmentalist movement has been focused more recently on global warming and has sought to limit carbon dioxide and other emissions from fossil fuels, which scientists have linked to the climate change. Nuclear proponents say atomic power would help alleviate global warming because the plants do not produce emissions, but opponents are worried about radiation poisoning if there is an accident or the plant is targeted in a terrorist attack.

Harvey Wasserman, one of the founding members of the Clamshell Alliance, a New England antinuclear group formed in 1976 to fight the Seabrook Nuclear Power Station in New Hampshire, said nuclear plants can't compete financially or environmentally with solar and wind power.

The antinuclear movement may not be as active as it was in the 1980s, but ''it'll be ready the minute they start unloading a new nuclear power plant," said Wasserman, now an author living in Columbus, Ohio.