Energy company policy.

George Bush's idea of an energy policy is to dish out goodies to his buddies in the oil, gas, coal, and nuclear power industries, hold hands with Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah, and send the U.S. Army to Iraq. He pays lip service to energy independence but provides no way to get there. He slights conservation. He starves research into safe and renewable alternative energies. Meanwhile, he despoils our pristine places and contaminates our air and water.

The House energy bill, which the Administration shepherded through on April 15, reveals the Bush approach in all its shabby details. And his energy speech almost two weeks later, while more high-minded in its rhetoric, reinforces this retrograde path.

Bush has a seemingly unquenchable desire to dole out favors to the oil giants, which have amassed enormous profits as petroleum sells at $50 a barrel. In the first quarter alone, the four biggest companies--ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch/Shell, BE and Chevron-Texaco--earned $97 billion in profits combined. Yet the House rewarded energy companies with at least $12 billion in tax breaks and subsidies. Even Republicans admitted that these wouldn't do much to lower prices at the pumps.

But it's Christmastime year round for big business. Bush and Tom DeLay piled high the presents in the House bill. And these go way beyond drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, a foolish proposal that will amount to just a drop in the global bucket.

Here are some of the hidden goodies:

The House bill "allows corporations drilling for oil on public land to forgo paying cash royalties to taxpayers," Public Citizen notes in a detailed analysis. Instead, the companies will self-report the amount of oil they are producing and then provide in-kind contributions to the government--a recipe for cheating.

It "allows energy companies to be reimbursed by taxpayers for part of the costs of complying with federal environmental laws," says Public Citizen.

It caps the liability that the nuclear industry would face in case of a serious accident.

And it gives special dispensation to some pals of DeLay, providing up to $2 billion "in direct payments to oil and natural gas corporations to drill in deepwater wells." The bill designates one company, Texas Energy Center, based in DeLay's hometown of Sugar Land, to be responsible for dispensing the money to the companies. Six executives of the Texas Energy Center have given $8,000 to DeLay's campaign in the last year, Public Citizen notes.

But more than just slopping out the pork in a frenzy of crony capitalism, Bush and DeLay set about the task of dismantling the system of energy regulation that has been in place since the end of the Great Depression. Nowhere is this clearer than in the field of liquefied natural gas.

The House bill strips states of almost all of their rights to regulate this field. "It radically limits the ability of states to have adequate jurisdiction over the permitting and siting" of liquefied natural gas facilities inside their own borders, Public Citizen warns. States now would be able only to "consult" with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which would have the final say, So if a state wanted to have tighter regulations than the reds, as California sued to do in 2004, it would no longer have legal grounds to prevail.

Similarly, the bill would give the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission the authority to overrule local and state governments in deciding where to locate electrical transmission and distribution lines.

And it would repeal the Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935 so that any company could buy into the utility business. This would put up for possible sale "approximately $1 trillion worth of electric generation, transmission, and distribution assets," Public Citizen says. Such a freewheeling auction could easily lead to a situation where ExxonMobil or Wall Street investment houses would gobble up the utility companies. These new utility owners would be beyond the reach of state regulators, and Bush's commission is not likely to guard the consumer's interest.

"What the big rollers want is the New Deal structural regulations gone," says Tyson Slocum, the research director for Public Citizen's Critical Mass Energy and Environment Program. "They've gotten their way in banking, for instance, and now they're after the utilities."

Part of the impetus behind deregulation is allowing corporations to pollute with impunity. The House bill does just that. This "pollution solution," as the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) puts it, "threatens public health and the environment."

The bill would be "exempting from regulation under the Safe Drinking Water Act the underground injection of chemicals during oil and gas development," the NRDC notes.

It would be "extending deadlines for cleanup of ground-level ozone air pollution in areas that violate the federal clean air standard," the group adds.

The bill would open up not just the Arctic refuge. It would also expand oil and gas development in New Mexico's Villa Vidal and Otero Mesa, as well as the Padre Island National Seashore, the NRDC says.

It "reclassifies radioactive waste from a former uranium extraction plant in Fernald, Ohio, as 'by-product material,' which would allow it to be disposed in a dump not equipped to properly contain the waste's radioactivity," according to Public Citizen.

It "provides liability protections to producers of the gasoline-additive MTBE," the consumer group says. MTBE has contaminated the water systems in more than 1,800 communities in twenty-nine states, Representative Lois Capps, Democrat of California, told AP.

And on top of that, the government would give companies $2 billion to come up with alternatives to MTBE. "That adds insult to outrage," says Slocum.

Guess which company stands to gain a tremendous amount from this? Halliburton, which has exclusive North American licensing rights to just such an alternative that Norway's Fortrum Oil has developed.

Most sweepingly, the bill would allow energy companies to skirt the 1969 National Environmental Policy Act in several instances, as Grist Magazine has pointed out. That landmark law "requires all major projects on federal land ... to be reviewed for their potential environmental impact and mandates a comment period during which the public can voice related concerns," the publication explains. But the House bill would allow some drilling and exploration on our public lands to proceed without environmental impact reviews or public comment periods.

In keeping with its trashing of environmental protections, the House energy bill falls woefully short on conservation. Its chief measures in this regard are to expand daylight savings time for two months and to provide a tax credit to homeowners for sealing up windows and doors and insulating walls. But this is paltry stuff.

"The bill is severely skewed, with 95 percent of the tax incentives going to polluting industries and only 5 percent to renewable and clean technologies and energy efficiency," says Jim Presswood, an energy advocate at the Natural Resources Defense Council.

In fact, so disdainful of conservation were the Republicans that they voted down an amendment to increase fuel-efficiency standards for cars and other vehicles. If we are ever to kick the addiction to the black liquid oil, we're going to have to raise the miles per gallon requirement. But car companies and the oil giants don't want that to happen. So their servants in the House added two additional criteria for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to consider before it can raise the standard: safety and the effect on employment. That's just what Detroit wants: It can now argue that its big, gas-guzzling cars are necessary because they're safer and they preserve jobs.

"It's amazing they're opening up our special places to drilling while not doing anything to improve fuel efficiency," says Presswood.

On April 27, Bush himself made his energy pitch in a speech in front of businesspeople. (Except when he's at the United Nations, Bush refuses to deliver a speech in front of any but the most receptive audiences.) He gave his formal blessing to several of the provisions of the House bill, including drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, boosting nuclear power, and curbing state regulation of liquefied natural gas. He floated a cockamamie idea about having oil companies build new refineries on military bases. And he framed the issue primarily as one of supply.

"The fundamental problem is this," he said. "Our supply of energy is not growing fast enough to meet the demands of our growing economy."

Overconsumption is not a concept that he seemed to grasp. "A growing economy causes us to consume more energy," he said cheerily. He talked about "our dependence on foreign energy," but by not proposing ways to reduce demand significantly, he will ensure that the United States remains dependent on foreign suppliers. (The Cheney report in the spring of 2001 predicted the United States would be more dependent on Middle East oil in two decades than it is now.)

Bush said the "first essential step toward greater energy independence is to apply technology to increase domestic production from existing energy resources." This is supply-side energy policy, and it works no better than supply-side economic policy.

Bush was especially high on nuclear power. He called it "one of the safest, cleanest sources of power in the world." Safe and clean are not adjectives usually ascribed to nuclear power, since meltdowns can hardly be ruled out and the reactors remain prime terrorist targets. What's more, the government still does not know how to dispose of the nuclear waste these plants produce. But Bush's speech shows that he is unbothered by these concerns, and he wants to get more nuclear power plants up and running. In keeping with his ideology, he railed against "regulatory uncertainty" and "bureaucratic obstacles" in the way of nuclear plant construction. He ordered the Department of Energy to propose ways to make it easier for nuclear power companies to get their licenses.

He also promised that the government itself would provide risk insurance to the companies in case of construction delays beyond their control. That means "if a utility proposes an unsafe plant design and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission delays its approval, the utility would be compensated with public money," according to the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Bush did wave at the need to "get on a path away from the fossil fuel economy." But he proposed little that would take us down that path. He offered a tax incentive to those who buy hybrid vehicles, including those with diesel engines. That's a positive step. But he is spending just a little more than $1 billion over five years on hydrogen fuel, and less than $2 billion over ten years on wind and solar. Those funds pale in comparison to the cash he is lavishing on oil, gas, coal, and nuclear.

The answers to our energy problems are not obscure. "The way to protect consumers and reduce the threat to our economy is reduce our need for oil, period," said Daniel A. Lahsof, a senior scientist with the Natural Resources Defense Council. "We have the technology to reduce oil demand by 2.5 million barrels per day. But we're not getting the leadership we need to make it happen."

David Hamilton, director of the Sierra Club's Global Warming and Energy Program, agrees. "We have the technology to make all cars go forty miles per gallon within ten years, saving more oil than the U.S. currently imports from the Persian Gulf or could ever take from the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, combined," he said. "We can protect our children from the air pollution that spews from cars and power plants. We can protect our coasts and the wild lands left to us for safekeeping. All we need now is leaders who will put people ahead of corporations."

But those aren't the leaders we have today. Bush and Cheney and DeLay have a corporate allegiance, not an allegiance to the citizenry or democracy or the environment.