disappointed with the energy bill

Well, the energy bill passed yesterday in the Senate. Sort of. Once they got rid of several of the most important provisions. It's expected to be approved by the House now and signed by the president. But I'm disappointed.

Actually, disappointed is a bit too weak of a word.

It's not so much that they cut out the repeal of tax credits to oil and gas industries, although of course that's a problem. So far, most of the news covering it has focused on that as the real loss for environmentalists, but I'm much more concerned that the renewable electricity requirement--slight though it was (15% by 2020)--was dropped.

Worst of all, however, are the provisions that were passed. The biggest one being touted as a victory is the increase in CAFE standards to 35 mpg by 2020, which, um, I guess is nice as far as it goes. Unfortunately, that isn't very far, and if we're not all using almost entirely electric transportation by 2020, then we'll be in really bad shape. But the really awful part of the bill is the biofuels mandate.

The "Renewable Fuels Standard" passed in this bill requires that ethanol use go up to 36 billions a years by 2022, six times what we're using now. We're already depleting our soil at an unprecedented rate, driving up the price of food at a skyrocketing pace, and lining up with axes to chop down old-growth forests to use their cellulosic mass in a technology that barely even exists yet--and we want to multiply this by six in the next fourteen years? Bad idea.

And this is being described as a victory for the environment. It's enough to make me give up on political involvement altogether.

And yet, a big piece of my disappointment is connected to the fact that I didn't call my Senator yesterday to urge him to pass the bill as it was. Not that it was that great to begin with. But maybe we could have gotten the renewable electricity through. Maybe I could have educated my representative. They only needed one more vote to get it past a filibuster. And I meant to call yesterday, but I just never got around to it.

As a Christian, I've often been frustrated by the tension between individual and communal faith and action. It seems to be one of the most difficult places for the church to find balance: we always emphasize one at the expense of the other. Either we focus exclusively on faith as an individual decision granting us a "personal" relationship with Christ, or we focus so much on our connection to the "community of faith" that individual actions cease to matter very much. But I think that true Christianity is very much a balance of both, and both to the extreme: it is the actions and choices of individuals that make up the community of faith, and yet the individual cannot exist apart from the community. We are one body, but each part has to do its work. And by not calling my Senator yesterday, I feel like I failed in my work. It probably wouldn't have made a difference...but it might have. And just one vote could have passed the renewable electricity standard...!

It's eerie how often I find myself thinking of Easter Island as I watch American energy and environmental decisions. What did the Easter Islander say as he cut down the last tree, dooming himself and his people to starvation and destruction? Maybe something along the lines of what President Bush said in reference to the recent changes in the energy bill: "We're moving in the right direction."