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What a surprise! Cheney, Full of EnergyBy Rick Horowitz Color me stunned -- but isn't that the way it always is with government and politics? Just when you think you've got it all figured out, somebody goes and throws you a curve ball. "Somebody," this time, being the Vice President of the United States, Mr. Dick Cheney. It wasn't merely that Mr. Cheney finally ventured outside of Washington on official business for the first time since he became President Bush's No. 2. (A perfectly understandable delay -- even in Washington, it's hard to find good babysitters...) And it wasn't even that he went all the way to Toronto, which is technically in another country, to give his speech to some newspaper editors and publishers. That's where they were meeting, so that's where he went. No, the stunning part was what he said to them when he got there. He said that the Bush administration's new energy policy would focus on increasing energy supplies: more oil, more natural gas, more nuclear. More power plants. More drilling, even in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. As opposed to, say, more conserving, or more relying on alternative fuels. I would never have expected it -- not from Dick Cheney. But there he was, saying those very things, offering an advance peek at the recommendations his energy task force will be making to the president in the next few weeks. And his words were front-page news pretty much everywhere, which means that lots of other people (probably even those editors and publishers) were every bit as surprised as I was. Every bit as surprised as you were. I mean, didn't you figure Dick Cheney for a solar kind of guy? Or wind power? Didn't you always figure that under that tough Western hide of his, his soul was green? I know I did. I figured the longer those task-force folks sat there in secret weighing their options, the more the veep would be able to bring them around to his point of view, and that his point of view would be exactly the same as the Sierra Club's point of view. Boy, was I wrong! "Conservation may be a sign of personal virtue," he told the media heavyweights, "but it is not a sufficient basis for a sound, comprehensive energy policy." Am I just imagining things, or did he sound almost disdainful of his fellow environmentalists? Practically condescending? And when he said that "to speak exclusively of conservation is to duck the tough issues," or that he's against any policies that are based on the idea that people in the United States "live too well" -- well, isn't he the last person in the world you'd have expected to come up with a couple of straw men like that? Dick Cheney as an energy supply guy -- I can't get over it! OK, maybe there were some signs along the way, some little bits of evidence I could have taken into account. If I'd noticed a few of them sooner, maybe I wouldn't be feeling so totally blindsided today. After all, he did spend his entire congressional career representing Wyoming, which is not only the biggest coal-producing state in the country (he had some very nice things to say in Toronto about coal, too), but isn't far from the top in oil and natural-gas production either. And he did earn gazillions of dollars servicing the oil industry for that Halliburton firm he ran, and I guess it's only natural to have a few warm and fuzzy feelings for any industry that makes you a gazillionaire. And, of course, now he's working for a president who once was an oil man himself, so maybe he felt he had to tell the boss what the boss wanted to hear, even if it went against his own deepest feelings. Like I said, little bits of evidence here and there, but important? Who knew? That Dick Cheney -- just call him Mr. Unpredictable. Posted 5/01/01. Increase
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Rick Horowitz
