US: corporate hand in energy debacle

Following the power failures that blacked out the north-eastern parts of 
the United States and Canada the Bush administration rushed to defend 
itself from accusations that its ties to the corporate energy industry were 
the cause of the debacle.

It has now been revealed that the Government's energy policy was formulated 
by petroleum, coal, gas and electricity industry representatives and 
lobbyists. An energy task force, headed by Vice-President Dick Cheney, 
excluded energy academic experts, public policy groups and environmentalist 
from the policy process.

The policy group was formed just ten days after Bush came to office. The 
group's meetings were held in private and included Kenneth Lay, the then 
chairman of the now collapsed energy company Enron.

The Government has been accused of stalling on legislation to force power 
companies to take measures guaranteeing grid reliability. Bush's Energy 
Secretary, Spencer Abraham, went on national television to insist that the 
administration was doing everything it could to update the grid that, by 
his own admission, was already obsolete at a time of tremendous growth in 
demand.

Yet just two years ago Bush and his pro-corporate energy allies in Congress 
blocked a proposal to invest US$350 million to upgrade the grid.

In California, affected by rolling blackouts a couple of years ago, public 
utility regulators went so far as to accuse private sector companies of 
artificially engineering a crisis for financial gain. That charge was 
directed at the White House because many of the companies involved had 
close ties with the Bush administration, and because federal regulators did 
little to relieve the pressure on Californian consumers.

The scandal-ridden Enron corporation, whose former chairman is a close 
friend of George W Bush, was a key player in that debacle both as an energy 
supplier and one of the architects of California's ill-conceived energy 
deregulation.