Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski thinks Congress will have more
success taking a “graduated” approach to energy legislation while
keeping up the pressure to respond to last year’s Gulf of Mexico spill.
While the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, in
which Murkowski is the top Republican, approved separate strategies last
Congress addressing the historic oil spill and broader energy problems, the
full Senate and Congress more generally did not follow suit.
“So more of a graduated approach to an energy policy,
and I happen to believe that we will have greater likelihood of success in
advancing something like that through the committee and getting it through the
floor of the Senate and the House as well,” Murkowski told POLITICO in the
video series “Powering America’s Future.”
Murkowski cited legislation increasing hydropower and
addressing small-modular nuclear reactors as examples. There is “probably
much greater likelihood” of something like the latter bill moving
“than a full-on expanded nuclear piece, particularly in view of just the
uncertainty that we’re seeing after the earthquake in Japan.”
Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee Chairman Jeff
Bingaman (D-N.M.) will start marking up energy measures Tuesday, with
additional measures coming before Memorial Day.
In order to spur floor action in this Congress, Bingaman has
said he hopes to pass everything out of committee by early summer, including
legislation designed to ensure the Interior Department “has the authority
and resources they need to maintain proper regulation of oil and gas drilling
on the outer continental shelf,” he said at a March 30 POLITICO Pro event.
As the first anniversary of the April 20 explosion of the
Deepwater Horizon rig that led to the biggest oil spill in history approaches,
lawmakers also face a public both skittish on nuclear power after the damage to
Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi reactor and frustrated by the rise of gas prices.
Some of the ideas Murkowski thinks the energy panel will
take up may not sound like headline-grabbing proposals that would restore
public confidence in how Capitol Hill is responding to their concerns.
“I wouldn’t suggest it’s kind of nibbling around the
edges,” Murkowski said. “I would suggest to you that what we’re doing
is being more focused in terms of those areas where we feel that we can reach
consensus on some energy issues, work to utilize the committee process to build
good, solid legislation in these areas, advance them through.”
She added, “It is a broader, more comprehensive”
plan than just focusing on something like hydropower specifically. “But we
haven’t gone about it in the same manner that we did in the last Congress. We
took the ‘full-meal deal’ approach, and we weren’t able to sell it.”
The panel also wasn’t able to fully sell the strategy it
passed last June to quickly respond to the Gulf spill, getting caught in the politics
in the broader Senate on raising the per-spill liability limit for companies
and cutting tax incentives for the oil industry.
At the time, “the explosion, the deaths, just the real
tragedy that went on with that, the nation was fixated on what was happening in
the Gulf of Mexico as we watched on our TVs, as we read about the efforts to
plug that hole,” Murkowski said. “And then they find success and they
plug the well and the cleanup continues, and no longer is this incident in the
news. And then, it seems like the pressure is off of us here in the Congress to
act legislatively.
“We shouldn’t allow the timing and the circumstances of
what has happened down there to remove us from the responsibility of addressing
the reforms that need to be made,” she added.
Last year’s failure of Congress to produce a spill-response
bill showed “even if we were successful in building a bipartisan product,
there’s no guarantee that it then becomes a priority,” she said, adding
that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid should make it a priority as well.
“It needs to be made a priority by the administration, to say we need to
have these structural reforms.”
The Interior Department has started separating safety and
environmental oversight from approval of offshore drilling leases and
collection of royalty relief.
Interior Secretary Ken Salazar “has done some things
internally. But quite honestly, a lot of the fixes require a legislative
fix,” Murkowski said.
One of those is largely out of the hands of Murkowski and
the Senate energy panel.
Sens. Mary Landrieu (D-La.), Mark Begich (D-Alaska) and Bob
Menendez (D-N.J.) are trying to find a compromise to raising the two-decade-old
$75 million-per-spill liability cap for companies.
Landrieu and Begich are meeting first to develop an idea
that would need to pass muster with those like Menendez, who is one of the
leading offshore drilling critics. “We’ve told our staffs to get back at
it,” Begich told POLITICO. He met briefly with Landrieu to talk about it.
“We both feel it’s time to re-engage.”
Murkowski said that’s going to have to happen.
“One of the things that held us up … was what happens
with the liability issue and the cap,” she said. “And so, maybe what
you do [is] take people like Bob Menendez, who was leading on that issue,
[Sen.] Frank Lautenberg [D-N.J.], and team them up with Mary Landrieu, myself,
some of the others to make sure the commitment to fixing the systems is made
while at the same time we can address the liability issue.”
Meanwhile, Murkowski and Bingaman are also working on
President Barack Obama’s “clean energy standard,” which promotes
renewable power, nuclear sources and cleaner use of coal. She and Bingaman last
month solicited public input on what a standard should entail. Responses are
due Monday.
“There are those who suggested that a clean energy
standard, in fact, may be nothing more than, you know, cap and trade under a
different name,” Murkowski said. “I don’t think that that is the
case, but if that is the case, then CES is not going to happen if that’s how it
is viewed. So … we’re looking to see just what is the temperature out there
for an approach that would mandate a clean standard.”
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