WASHINGTON -- Congress will likely break for the summer without passing legislation designed to curb high gasoline prices. But Americans are fashioning their own energy policy, founded on conservation and support for more production, reported The Wall Street Journal. A new Journal/NBC news poll finds that energy—including gasoline and utility costs—ranks as the economic issue that voters say affects them the most personally.
And polls of likely voters in four battleground states, conducted this month by Quinnipiac University in partnership with the Journal and Washingtonpost.[image-nocss] com, show voters in each state say energy policy is more important to them than the war in Iraq.
New data indicate Americans are conserving energy with fervor, said the report. The Energy Information Administration (EIA) reported Wednesday that gasoline stocks posted a 2.8 million-barrel increase in the week ended July 18, exceeding the 200,000-barrel rise forecast by analysts. In the past two weeks, the price of crude oil has fallen 14% from its New York Mercantile Exchange record close of $145.29 reached July 3, in part due to weakening demand. Thursday on the Nymex, crude oil for September delivery rose $1.05 per barrel, or 0.8%, to settle at $125.49.
The prolonged stalemate over energy policy raises the stakes for both parties heading into the fall election. Republicans, emboldened by polls indicating rising support among Americans for increased domestic drilling for oil and natural gas, are trying to cast Congress's Democratic leaders and the party's presidential candidate, Barack Obama, as obstructionists responsible for the country's energy crisis.
Polls indicate voters trust Democrats over Republicans, by substantial margins, to do a better job on energy. The Journal/NBC News poll found that 42% of respondents preferred Democrats for dealing with energy policy, versus 22% favoring Republicans. The poll indicated that Democrats' edge on the issue may be slipping; the July poll gave Democrats a 20-point advantage on the issue, versus a 28-point lead in a January poll.
In the Journal and Washingtonpost.com poll, by margins of 22 to 31 percentage points, voters in each of the states—Michigan, Colorado, Minnesota and Wisconsin—said they support offshore oil drilling.
Both candidates face political tradeoffs in addressing offshore drilling. Exploring off the coasts is more politically popular in industrial Midwest states, where voters worry mostly about high gasoline costs. But in key coastal states, voters worry more about the environmental risks. The shift in voter sentiment in the Midwest toward favoring offshore drilling could give a boost to Senator John McCain, as it is one of the primary issues that sets his energy plan apart from Sen. Barack Obama's.
"These numbers point to an opening for Sen. McCain to redefine the economic issue as being about energy," Peter Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute, told the newspaper.
In recent days, McCain's campaign has sought to highlight Obama's opposition to overturning a federal ban on offshore drilling, with a TV ad that shows a picture of a smiling Obama on the screen next to a gasoline pump while a voice blames "some in Washington" for "still saying 'no' to drilling in America."
The Obama campaign has fired back by pointing out McCain's far longer record of serving in Washington. Environmental groups also note that a 2007 analysis by the EIA concluded that opening drilling in the areas covered by the federal moratorium "would not have a significant impact on domestic crude-oil and natural-gas production or prices before 2030."
Prospects look dim for major changes in U.S. energy policy before Election Day, said the report.
Congress remained stuck Thursday in a partisan stalemate over whether to open more of the U.S. to drilling, as the Bush administration and many congressional Republicans favor, or to tap the emergency's petroleum stockpile and limit speculative oil trading, as Democrats prefer.
Thursday, House Republicans thwarted a Democratic measure that would have increased supply by releasing 70 million barrels of crude oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR).
Federal legislation to rein in excessive energy speculation failed a key procedural vote on Friday to move forward in the U.S. Senate, and now lawmakers will set aside the bill to consider other legislation, added a Reuters report. The U.S. House of Representatives may take up its own anti-speculation bill next week, and then lawmakers will get ready to leave for their month-long recess in August.
Sixty "yes" votes were required in the 100-member Senate for the bill to move forward, but the measure received only 50 "yes" votes, and 43 lawmakers were opposed.
Senate Democrats said the legislation was needed to give the government new powers to curb speculators, whom many lawmakers accused of being behind the run-up in crude oil and gasoline prices. Senate Republicans strongly opposed the speculation bill, arguing the legislation should be modified to also boost U.S. oil production by allowing more offshore drilling and developing vast oil shale fields in the West.
Republicans said tight petroleum supplies that were unable to keep up with demand were the cause of high energy prices. Democrats wanted to protect offshore areas closed to energy exploration and pointed out that oil companies already held millions of acres they leased from the government that were not being drilled.
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