Sen. Lisa Murkowski wants to bring back the era of big, sweeping energy bills.
The Alaska Republican, firmly planted in her new seat as chairwoman of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, said she’s working with colleagues to draft a broad energy package that she hopes to release in the spring.
“This is going to be good work. This is going to be substantive,” Murkowski said at a Thursday committee hearing.
The details were scarce, but she said the bill would cover four main categories: Accountability of current policies and agencies, increasing energy supply, infrastructure, and energy efficiency.
“I think it’s important to focus on some of these areas that we can build out a form based on infrastructure, based on efficiency and really see if we can’t come together as a committee to build a refreshed, re-imagined policy,” Murkowski told reporters after the hearing.
Wide-ranging energy legislation hasn’t been attempted in a significant way since 2007, when Congress passed the Energy Independence and Security Act. Before that, Congress also gave the thumbs up to the Energy Policy Act in 2005.
Those massive bills were a triumph of regional concerns about energy over partisan politics. But discourse on Capitol Hill has devolved into Democratic and Republican sniping in recent years, especially after cap-and-trade legislation passed the House but fizzled in the Senate in 2010.
Energy, though, doesn’t fall into neat Republican and Democratic categories, even in the current political atmosphere.
Coal-state Democrats are just as likely to oppose propose Environmental Protection Agency regulations on emissions from power plants as their GOP colleagues. Many Democrats favor expediting exports of natural gas. Republicans in rural districts and states have joined the majority of Democrats who support maintaining a federal biofuel mandate. Some GOP lawmakers in breezy states also back a federal subsidy for wind electricity that Democrats have sought to keep in place.
As for what the bill might include, Murkowski has touted energy efficiency and speeding exports of natural gas, voiced concerns about how the EPA carbon rule might affect energy supplies, advocated for ending the nearly four-decade ban on exporting crude oil, and proposed legislation to move nuclear waste to permanent sites other than the controversial Yucca Mountain repository in Nevada.
