The Energy Saboteurs Are In the White House : Policy: The Administration perpetuates our dependence on gulf oil, instead of profitably eliminating the need.

Three times in the past 17 years, the oil dependence that keeps us over a barrel in the gulf has enabled fanatics halfway around the world to scramble America’s economic and political life.

As long as that dependence continues, we’ll be subject to similar disruptions. But it’s not fate. We don’t need to continue to depend on oil from the gulf--and it’s cheaper not to, for us and for our allies.

Shaking the gulf oil habit isn’t fanciful. For nine years through 1985, the United States was making such rapid progress in saving oil that, if we’d just kept up the same pace, we’d have needed no Persian Gulf oil from 1986 onward. But instead, the Reagan Administration’s 1986 rollback of light-vehicle efficiency standards immediately doubled oil imports from the gulf: It wasted oil as fast as the government hopes to extract oil from beneath the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Specifically, we could have put our kids in cars that got 23 miles per gallon (3 mpg better than today’s fleet, and enough to displace all the oil we got from Iraq and Kuwait), or even in 32-mpg cars (enough to displace the whole gulf). Because we did neither, we’re now putting them in 0.56-mpg tanks--part of a military force that could end up using more oil than we get from Saudi Arabia.

White House officials insist that efficient cars are inevitably small, uncomfortable, costly, and dangerous. Wrong on all counts, as the Department of Energy’s own studies show and a dozen auto-makers have empirically proven. Some of their prototype cars in the 67-mpg to 138-mpg range--3 to 7 times as efficient as today’s fleet--can carry four to five adults in comfort, be peppier and safer than today’s models and even cost no more to build.

California’s Legislature recognized the importance of getting such cars on the road when it passed last year’s pioneering “Drive +” bill by a 7-1 margin. Under this “feebate” law, when buying a new car you’d either pay a fee or get a rebate; which and how big would depend on how efficient and pollution-free the car was. The fees would pay for the rebates. Gov. George Deukmejian vetoed the bill at Ford’s urging (GM was neutral), but Gov. Wilson should soon have a chance to sign a repassed version.

Feebates could similarly reward truckers, bus lines and airlines for buying more efficient fleets; help industrialists and developers finance energy-and pollution-savings; offer business incentives to bring the best technology to market quickly; and encourage early scrapping of the dirtiest, least efficient cars. Feebates should work better than prescriptive regulation, and might even replace it.

Today’s best techniques in transport, buildings and industry could save 80% of all oil used in the United States, cheaper than we could drill for more. To unhook from the gulf, we’d need to capture only 15% of that potential--to use only one-eighth less oil than now. That would cost less than the U.S. share of Desert Shield from last August through December.

Our gulf dependence is no accident. It was deliberately caused by dimwitted federal energy policies that persist to this day. For a decade, public information, research and action on efficiency have been stalled, suppressed or eliminated. The pattern persists--from a decade ago, when the Reaganauts destroyed offending federal publications (like the Department of Agriculture Yearbook on how farmers can cut their energy bills) to a few weeks ago, when a federal bureaucrat 2,000 miles from Washington got a memo ordering a halt to all energy-efficiency efforts. Such actions may not be the reason we’re in the gulf, but they’re the main cause.

After the 1973 and 1979 gulf crises, these were the federal energy responses: Ignore demand, raise supply, command from the top down, raid the Treasury for old buddies. These supply expansions, such as synfuels, were costly flops--while the market quietly produced a gush of efficiency.

So how is the Bush Administration moving to respond to this third gulf crisis? The same way its predecessors botched the first two. This time, a more open-minded secretary of energy actually sought public advice first, but the White House thought the people gave the wrong answers (chiefly efficiency), so it hijacked the new National Energy Strategy on the way from the people to the President.

That strategy now apparently contains practically nothing to promote efficiency--because, aides say, that would violate free-market principles. But it proposes billions in new subsidies and tax goodies, regulatory grease for uncompetitive fossil and nuclear fuels, drilling in the last great wildlands, weaker environmental controls, less political and legal accountability for energy projects, more federal preemption of state and local decisions, privatization of nuclear waste management and vigorous boosting of such proven losers as nuclear energy and urban trash-burners. Lest this abrogation of market principles become too obvious, White House staff removed the comparative-cost analyses.

Don’t wait for the feds, California. Be glad you’re not that dumb. You understand how 32-mile-a-gallon cars can displace 17-feet-per-gallon aircraft carriers. No matter how Washington bungles energy policy, you’re getting it right by taking economics seriously. Other states are following your example. Those who wait too long will end up buying their new energy technologies from California industries. Washington will be the last to know.