While the House and Senate each passed its own comprehensive energy bill, the same measures that got those bills through their respective chambers could end up killing a compromise measure.
For the first time since 2007, both chambers of Congress passed comprehensive energy reform packages that many say are necessary in the wake of the resurgence of U.S. energy production in the last decade. Now, the next step is for the House and Senate to negotiate a final bill to send to President Obama.
However, energy experts are concerned that the biggest obstacles to getting a bill passed and signed into law are the very things that allowed each bill to get out of its chamber.
After months of talking about a bipartisan energy bill that would pass the House, Energy and Commerce Chairman Fred Upton eventually came out with legislation that Democrats and environmentalists say places too much emphasis on Republican priorities.
Meanwhile, the Senate bill, a massive bipartisan deal that includes priorities for environmentalists and the energy industry alike, could be torpedoed by opposition from conservative groups such as Heritage Action that hold immense clout with Tea Party lawmakers in the House. The groups see the bill allowing more government interference in the energy markets through unnecessary taxpayer subsidies.
Alaska Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski, chairwoman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, said she knows the two bills have some dramatic differences.
Still, she’s hopeful a conference between House and Senate members will lead to a deal similar to the one she reached with Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., on the Senate bill.
“If we can walk people through what it is that we have done, I think some of the issues that are viewed now as obstacles and roadblocks are alleviated,” she said after the bill passed the Senate.
There is no timetable set on when a conference between the two chambers, which will be headed by Murkowski, will begin and which lawmakers will be on it. A spokesman for Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who sets the Senate timeline, has not made any announcements about the conference.
The White House signaled it would veto the House version when it went to the full chamber late last year, but in February said it could work with the Senate bill.
While the administration has concerns about certain provisions, such as those weakening Department of Energy programs to improve energy efficency at factories and the department’s ability to negotiate energy-saving contracts, it also was enthused by the renewal of the Land and Water Conservation Fund and addressing the maintenance backlog at national parks.
Getting a final comprehensive energy reform bill through a conference committee could be the same battle fought so many times in Congress during recent years: The bill must appeal to conservative lawmakers in the House and Democrats in the Senate.
Sierra Club federal policy representative Radha Adhar said the House bill in particular threatens the legislation.
Upton and New Jersey Rep. Frank Pallone, the top Democrat on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, spent months trying to work on a bipartisan comprehensive energy package, Adhar said. At the last minute, Upton replaced many of the proposals with Republican priorities that caused the bill to go through committee and the House on party lines.
If that bill is the starting point for House negotiators, it’s going to be tough sledding, Adhar said.
“The real question we have to ask ourselves is this: Can Upton and [House Speaker Paul] Ryan write a sensible bill that they can sell to the most extreme part of their party that passes the Senate?” she said.
Some key Republicans in the House, such as House Natural Resources Committee Chairman Rob Bishop, of Utah, have signaled that they are willing to block some of the key provisions in the Senate bill that allowed Democrats to vote for the package.
Perhaps the most important of these priorities is the Land and Water Conservation Fund, which uses oil and gas royalties to pay for conservation projects on public lands. For environmentalists such as Adhar, renewing the fund, which was allowed to expire last year, is a top priority. And Democrats are going to want that to be in the final package.
“That’s the heart and soul of what so many environmental policy priorities [are] and why so many Democratic members voted for the bill,” she said.
However, some places of agreement already are built into the Senate bill.
Six pieces of legislation that have passed the House are included in the Senate package, and many of them are major Republican priorities. Among them are expediting the process for exporting liquefied natural gas and exempting certain lighting and ceiling fan technology from Department of Energy regulations.
Louis Finkel, executive vice president of the American Petroleum Institute, said the final agreement must improve the oil industry’s ability to build oil and natural gas pipelines and change the Department of Energy’s process for approving liquefied natural gas export terminals.
Those provisions would allow more of the natural gas being produced to be moved to customers, and could open up new markets in the United States and abroad. For example, residents of New England and other parts of the Northeast pay more for their electricity because natural gas power isn’t accessible there, Finkel said.
While Democrats might fight proposals that make it easier for fossil fuels to be used, Finkel said the selling point in negotiations should be that natural gas burns cleaner than many fuels. That means fewer carbon emissions, which is something Democrats say they want, he said.
“For anybody that’s really serious about reducing carbon emissions, it is strikingly ironic to me that they would oppose a [liquefied natural gas] terminal,” he said.
Murkowski hopes the common starting ground will be enough.
After her bill passed the Senate, Murkowski said her biggest concern was not ideological differences between the two bills, but the amount of time left in the legislative year. Congress has eight legislative weeks in May and June and eight days in July before lawmakers adjourn for much of the summer and for fall campaigning, severely limiting the time for negotiations, she said.
“The fact is that in order to have a conference, the House and the Senate have to be in town at the same time,” she said. “We look at the calendar going forward, and we’ve got some work to do.”
