Sen. Murkowski's energy plan a stepped-up version of the same old, same old

Lisa Murkowski's new energy plan would boost fossil fuel extraction on public and Indian lands
and deregulation production while all but ignoring the impacts of climate change. If there are extraterrestrials hovering just outside the Oort Cloud waiting for Earth to warm up enough for them to be comfortable living here, they must have broken out the interstellar bubbly with the Monday release of Sen. Lisa Murkowski's Energy20/20: A Vision for America's Energy Future. A nightmare vision. The Alaska Republican's proposal would boost production and exports of coal as well as oil from conventional sources and non-conventional, extra-dirty ones like tar sands, shale oil and oil shale. This, we are told, can free the United States from dependence on OPEC oil by 2020, the "energy independence" goal that was first vaulted into public discussion 40 years ago.

Deregulation is a big theme in the plan. This would include turning over more energy regulation to the states, accelerating the permitting of drilling and other fossil fuel extraction from taxpayer- and Indian-owned lands, opening a portion of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and granting additional leases for drilling on the Outer Continental Shelf. And, of course, the senator urges immediate approval of the Keystone XL pipeline to transport tar sands oil across the heartland.

It is not until page 108 of the 115-page plan that "climate change" finally makes an appearance. And when it does, Murkowski talks about uncertainties and competing theories while complaining that unelected bureaucrats at the Environmental Protection Agency are overstepping their bounds by enforcing rules "with costs that vastly outweigh their potential bene't." Her colleague, Sen. Jim "Global warming is a hoax" Inhofe, must be dancing a jig.

Renewable resources, conservation and efficiency get extensive lip service. Murkowski is a fan of expanding hydropower, already the largest producer of renewable power, by adding small turbines to many of the thousands of unelectrified dams throughout the nation. That's a good idea which has been proposed, with limited success, since the 1970s. Her plan also pays attention to the need for battery research and other means of storage for electricity produced by solar and wind resources.

But the language in which her perspective on the promise of such resources is couched betrays her poor understanding of renewables.

(Read more about Murkowski's myopic energy proposal below the fold ...)