After grousing about some minor service gaffe in a late 1970s letter to his local power provider, the accomplished physicist and spirited bongo drummer Richard Feynman arrived at a seemingly gracious conclusion in which he praised "the consistently fine quality of your electricity."
When Feynman, who died in 1988, began sharing his letter with friends, most realized that his compliment was facetious. For in the days before energy deregulation, when power managers were still regarded as guardians of an essential public resource, the suggestion that they were actually entrepreneurial wizards capable of "adding value" to electrons would have inspired peals of laughter.
Today, however, after energy lobbyists have spent decades persuading state and federal officials that deregulation can indeed stoke such brilliant, if inexplicable, "innovations," the preposterous has become prosaic and Feynman's joke may have lost some of its punch.
Fortunately, the Senate's passage last month of what could be the most muscular energy regulations since the 1975 Clean Air Act suggests that at least some legislators are beginning to see through the industry's spin and recognize that no nation can remain powerful for long without tight reins on the industries that research, develop and produce its energy.
The Senate's most significant measure would require Detroit to boost the average fuel efficiency of its car and light truck fleets from 25 miles per gallon today to 35 mpg in 2020. "The fuel economy provision alone would cut U.S. petroleum consumption far more than any other measure now being considered by Congress," said Scott Cullen, an environmental attorney who co-authored "The Rush to Ethanol," a newly released assessment of pending energy reforms by Food & Water Watch, the Network for New Energy Choices and Vermont Law School's Institute for Energy and the Environment.
That would include the second most ambitious measure passed by the Senate, which aims to offset oil demand by increasing yearly biofuels production from 7.5 billion gallons today to 36 billion gallons in 2022.
Legislators are still a long way from atoning for their brazen disregard of deregulation's early debacles, such as the Enron energy traders who were caught on tape gleefully celebrating their plan to "take down" California by hectoring power plant managers to "get creative" and find some excuse to shut down the power plants on which the state relied.
The House leaders who are now considering the Senate's fuel economy and biofuels measures, for instance, may have already done more harm than good.
They should be working overtime to correct the Senate's failure to slap any fiscal penalties on automakers whose fleets fail to meet the 35 mpg average by 2020. Instead, House Energy and Commerce Committee chair John Dingell (D-Michigan) -- while heroically vowing to fight any attempt to weaken the bill's energy efficiency standards for toasters -- has killed the fuel-economy provision, arguing that it should be considered only in the fall, when Congress plans to consider measures to mitigate global warming.
Given that legislators have failed to reach agreement on what to do about climate change for the last 15 years, you don't have to be a cynic to suspect that Dingell's real goal is delay.
The farm bill that House Agriculture Chairman Collin C. Peterson (D-Minn.) unveiled yesterday (July 18) is no more encouraging. The bulk of its funding goes to the usual suspects: agricultural corporations in 20 Southern and Midwestern Congressional districts that Democrats are desperate to woo before the next election.
A thornier problem is that while both House and Senate leaders are quick to celebrate the long-term promise of "advanced biofuels" like cellulosic ethanol, their measures would mostly fund the least efficient biofuel of all: corn ethanol, which returns only about 11 calories of energy for the 10 calories required to produce it through technologies that deplete scarce water resources and worsen air pollution.
Late last month, Rep. Nick Lampson (D-Texas) introduced legislation aimed at mitigating some of those environmental harms. His bill, H.R. 2773, would among other things require federal officials to devote the lion's share of taxpayer dollars to the most "sustainable" biofuels: those "that are the least resource and land intensive and that pose the most negligible risks to the quality of the nation's air, water and soil."
Conventional Wisdom in Washington holds that large numbers of Americans will never be moved to back reforms as wonkish as Lampson's.
But just a few thousand emails from politically engaged Americans, such as the regular trollers of this site, would be enough to prove that condescending elitism wrong.
Dingell's efforts to delay or defeat even modest improvements in vehicle fuel efficiency may seem equally impervious to democratic challenge. But the illogic in Dingell's position could be easily exposed if voters peppered him with simple questions like this one:
Why is raising fuel economy from 25 mpg today to 35 mpg in 2020 so much more difficult today than it was in 1908, when Henry Ford reached that same standard after only minor improvements in his Model T?
The Clean Air Act and other energy reforms in 1975 were inspired by Americans' rational anxiety after the 1973 Arab oil embargo hiked gas prices fourfold in just three months.
With foreign oil imports rising from 22% in 1970 to 58% in 2005, Americans now have ore cause than ever to let fear prod them into action.
The fate of this year's proposed energy reforms may still be precarious. But if there's any truth to the adage that "fear is the greatest motivator," then it's not unreasonable to hope that 2007 will go down as the year in which Congress rediscovered the value in aggressive energy regulation.