This morning, the Washington Post joins House Government Reform Committee Chairman Henry Waxman in being nonplussed over a Bush Administration task force having met with industry representatives when formulating policy.
“Waxman said he was not surprised to see the prevalence of energy industry groups on the list of meetings.”
Indeed. The issue at hand after all was, of all things, energy. So you certainly can see how some parties would object to having input from those with expertise in the matter. After all, these particular experts support the idea of providing more of it.
Mr. Waxman’s premier complaint is that this means the administration clearly skipped “an opportunity to become less dependent on importing oil.” Now, as it happens, my experience informs me that energy industry representatives are the ones pushing to break down the barriers to domestic production that have created our current dependence on foreign sources of oil (and gas); and that environmentalist pressure groups are the ones who have brought us this dependence, up from about one-quarter of our consumption on the first “Earth Day” in 1970 to about 60% today, their campaigns having ensured the U.S. is the only nation in the world sitting on massive reserves of hydrocarbons that it refuses, on a formal policy basis, to access.
Possibly Waxman is upset because none of these particular representatives – but most and likely all of the many environmentalist groups the Task force met with, as we have been saying for years in the face of their now demonstrably false claims of having been excluded from consultation – would support amending an “energy bill” with some crazy measure like assigning liability to the U.S. taxpayer to “aggrieved parties” who wish to claim that the government has harmed them by causing global warming.