The way Dick Cheney tells it, energy tycoons are timid souls, reluctant to give opinions and terrified someone might find out they have been at the White House. Only when the shades are drawn and the tape recorder is off will they confide that they are against regulation of the energy market. It takes a threat of the rack to make them even mention a tax break for their companies or suggest names for big jobs in government. That's the profile Cheney draws for us. Kenneth Lay doesn't fit it very well.
Nothing in his copious correspondence with either Bill Clinton, who was in the White House, or George W. Bush, who was on his way there, suggests the almost crippling diffidence that Cheney thinks engulfs big oilmen. Lay was upfront about his feeling that government should be serving the interests of America's corporations, especially his. In his Christmas greetings, he didn't write, exactly, "Merry Christmas, and what have you done lately on deregulation?" -- but you get the idea.
This week the vice president emerged blinking from his capital cave into the bright California sunshine and went on Jay Leno's show to explain once again why it is none of the public's business how he arrived at the energy policy that is about to be taken up by the Senate. He is not just protecting the shy moguls -- who require a pledge of confidentiality, without which they would not open their mouths in his office. Cheney is protecting the presidency itself. It will be weakened if ordinary citizens are allowed to know how come the country has an energy policy that sounds as if it were written in the executive suite of Enron.
The General Accounting Office is taking him to court to find out who was in the room when such matters as drilling in Alaska and subsidizing dirty fuels were decided. The Sierra Club -- pesky environmentalists that they are -- has already filed a lawsuit aimed at finding out not just who was there but what was said.
If people were to be told such things, apparently, George Bush wouldn't be able to send the bombers out anymore or even summon a White House butler to bring him a pretzel or his latest polls.
Sierra Club Executive Director Carl Pope notes that when he and representatives of the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Union of Concerned Scientists finally got to see Cheney, he had already released his energy policy. (At a previous environmental encounter, in May, there was such a crush of tree-huggers that they were still introducing themselves when it was time to go. Nothing of substance was discussed.)
They wonder -- they never know their place -- why Lay or his representatives got into Cheney's office a total of six secret times, while they were granted an audience only once, and then too late. After the meeting, they were taken out the front door and found themselves surrounded by cameras and notebooks.
"They were not ashamed of seeing us," Pope muses. "But they were of seeing Enron." Cheney nonetheless took to bragging on television that he had incorporated 11 of 12 environmental recommendations in his energy program. "It was more like one," says Pope, who adds: "Arthur Andersen must be doing their counting."
Enron will doubtless figure in the debate over a Democratic bill bearing the name of Majority Leader Tom Daschle, which takes issue with the all-drilling-all-the-time philosophy of the administration bill that passed the House. Sen. James Jeffords, whom the Republicans will never forgive for becoming chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee, will introduce a bill on a subject uncongenial to Enron and the White House: renewable energy.
The Bush administration cut funds for renewables -- wind, solar, geothermal and biomass -- by nearly 50 percent. U.S. PIRG is distributing a report written by staff attorney Katherine Morrison, called "Generating Solutions." In it Morrison, a person who cannot expect to be invited to White House councils, details the activities of 21 states that apparently wearied of waiting for the federal government to lead the way in reducing dependence on foreign oil.
George Bush's Texas, for instance, in a program signed into law by him, has installed 800 megawatts of wind energy. Low-tech windmills generate electrical power for some 200,000 homes.
Environmentalists say that there is enough wind and solar energy to be caught in Kansas and North Dakota to meet the region's electrical power needs. To hear them talk, you would think that the country could keep itself warm in winter and cool in summer if we just accepted the resources lying all around us. What they say sounds good, but not to Wall Street and the buddies of the two oilmen who run the country: the president and the vice president.
That's why they don't want us to know whom they talked to before they fashioned the love letter to the oil, coal and nuclear interests that they call an energy policy.
© 2002 The Washington Post Company
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