PROJECT EASY GREEN

Jackson Browne, Bonnie Raitt and Crosby, Stills and Nash welcomed Jason Mraz, Jonathan Wilson and an amazing array of talent to the cause Sunday at an all-star Musicians United for Safe Energy (M.U.S.E.) concert to raise awareness about the dangers of nuclear power and the readiness of renewable energy to replace it.

The crowd loved it and the players loved the crowd. M.U.S.E. is now talking about taking the show on the road.

“Many of us who were activists 30 years ago thought we had driven a stake through the heart of the nuclear industry,” Jackson Browne had said at the previous day’s press conference. “Plus the fact that it’s a really basket-case industry and cannot really survive on its own, unlike the alternative clean and safe types of energy.” This time, Browne added, “We want to popularize the idea that you have in your own hands the ability to make a change that makes a difference.”

“We realize that the event in Fukushima is an incredible focus point and an opportunity, unfortunately, to regenerate the energy that we had 30 years ago,” Graham Nash said. “And get younger bands involved.”

“Last year, for the first time, renewables generated more gigawatts than nuclear. It was a milestone,” John Hall, who wrote “The Power of Song,” said. “Without the notice of many people, solar, wind, geothermal and all the other renewables together passed nuclear.”

“Take all your atomic poison power away,” which is the chorus to Hall’s anti-nuclear anthem, brought an early ovation from an audience that may have come for the music but responded deeply to the message.

In Fukushima, “They’ve been trying to cool the reactors with water, thousands and thousands of tons of water,” Nash had said to the press. “And they say that they’re storing it. Where do you store thousands of tons of irradiated water? We know it’s going into the ocean. They have found whales 400 kilometers from Fukushima with irradiated flesh.”

Some people came for the stars. Some came for an afternoon in the sun. Some came to rock. Others came in response to Fukushima and to take a stand against nuclear power or to advocate for renewables and efficiency. There were a lot of vintage No Nukes t-shirts and there were a lot of admirably-worn tank tops. There was plenty of middle-age spread and a surprising abundance of wide-eyed, rock 'n' roll loving innocence.

They danced and clapped and listened raptly to the music and, between sets, they studied the booths of the eco-energy village set up in the amphitheater’s wings. They learned about solar energy at SunPower and BrightSource booths and about wind power from WindTronics. And they were signed up at booths manned by Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, CalPirg, and many more dedicated activist groups.

“The big change today is that we can address a lot of the issues,” Alan Salzman, CEO of event sponsor VantagePoint Capital Partners said. “Thirty years ago, you couldn’t make an electric car that was practical. But companies like Tesla have demonstrated it’s now doable. And right now in the Mojave Desert, BrightSource Energy is building gigawatt quantities of clean, safe, reliable energy using mirror farms and solar capability.” Because, Salzman said smiling, “We already have safe nuclear power and it’s conveniently located 93 million miles away.” The concert was in Silicon Valley, he said, “Where the future is present today” and concluded, “We need to find the political and social will to get on with it.”    

Renewable energy is so well established now, Graham Nash added, that “If you only care about making money, you will put your money in it.”

Bonnie Raitt’s performance brought audience members to their feet. She played a caustic piece called “Hell to Pay” that she said expressed her rage over Fukushima. “The way it looks from here, you won’t have to wait for hell to pay,” she sang, and then said, “You know who that’s for.” They did.

Browne sang “After the Deluge,” his dirge that refers to the direst consequences of climate change, and then rocked them some more. They were soothed by Sweet Honey in the Rock, enchanted by Jason Mraz, taunted by Tom Morello and roused by the Doobie Brothers before Crosby, Stills and Nash came on to bring the house down.

“We’re up against people with a whole lot of money,” David Crosby told the audience. “They got it from you.”

“You’ve got to look at it through the eyes of your children and grandchildren,” Graham Nash added.

All the rockers came on stage for the night’s grand finale. It brought the concert-goers to their feet.

But will the current generation respond to this No Nukes movement like their parents did in the 1980s?

Joining the concert “was an easy ‘yes’ for me,” relative newcomer Mraz said. “For my own selfish reason: I love going outside.”

“Songs carry the most fundamental human concerns,” Jackson Browne said. “There are a lot of ways music can be used to represent this issue.” Young people, he said, “want to know, ‘How does it affect me?' And the next thing is, ‘What can I do about it?’ And they don’t have all day long to listen to a lot of doom.” But the music of young rockers Mraz and Jonathan Wilson, he said, “carry questions that stay with people.”

“Nothing sticks around like a song,” Jonathan Wilson added.

There is more renewable energy potential in the Tehachapi-Mojave region than anyplace else in California. Developing that potential is crucial because California is committed to doubling its renewable capacity by 2020.

But development will not happen until the people of the Antelope Valley — who will have to live with what developers build — have their say.

To do so, an overflow crowd of stakeholders turned out for a Los Angeles County Planning Commission meeting at the Lancaster Public Library Saturday. Two hundred were admitted; as many more were turned away. It was a display of grassroots democracy that did the Antelope Valley proud.

After the history, goals and process of utility-scale renewables development were explained by the Planning Commission’s Thuy Hua, the meeting broke into groups. Attending stakeholders immediately set to work recording their concerns onto forms provided by the Commission until group discussions led by Commission facilitators began.

Passions and ideas were expressed, though too often with the logic of a person who interprets the heat from his burning house as a sign he must conserve water.

Renewable energy was not unpopular. In at least two groups, coal and nuclear met a unanimity of rejection otherwise reserved only for anything preceded by the word big, as in big turbines, big solar, big utilities or big transmission projects. The populist disenchantment with big government and big spending clearly infected anything utility-scale. Global, as in global climate change, mostly went unmentioned.

Several groups talked enthusiastically about distributed renewables. Apparently unaware of the state’s many renewables initiatives, many said California’s investment in utility-scale development should go to taxpayers for rooftop solar, solar water heating and other distributed generation. “Don’t give money to utilities,” one man said, “give it to us. It’s our money.”

There were proponents of building-integrated photovoltaics and space-based solar power plants. Unmentioned was the fact that Antelope Valley utility-scale renewables are ready to scale now, while the alternatives proposed are not.

Lack of knowledge is a predisposing factor to fear. A woman told another that backyard-scale wind is not like big turbines. “But how do you get the electricity to come to your house?” the listener replied, worried the electricity would go to the big utilities. A contractor said the dangers of big turbines are associated with huge underground vaults at the towers’ bases (though, in fact, turbine towers are planted in solid concrete foundations).

Several people talked about the potential dangers of turbine malfunctions. One attendee described the breaking apart of a test turbine in 2004. “Had anybody been near it,” he said, “they would have been dead.” Seven years is about three lifetimes in turbine technology yet there was no mention of newer, safer machines, nor were the words 'Fukushima disaster' or 'BP oil spill' heard in answer.

Someone insisted that land cleared for utility-scale solar would cause dust as problematic as smoke from the region’s chronic wildfires, but there was no mention of how renewables will mitigate the climate change that is worsening the wildfires.

For almost every group, a priority was protecting the Antelope Valley’s world-famous poppy reserve, home to California’s state flower. NextEra Energy and Element Power want to build turbines that will interfere with views of the poppies. One resident said she does not want a turbine between her and the flowers. Someone answered there might be a compromise. “Have you been to the poppy reserve?” was the heated reply.

Most groups were also passionately concerned for the region’s birds and its avian habitat. An attempt to explain how contemporary wind farms and modern turbines minimize avian harm was answered only with a very skeptical look.

At its heart, the message was that Antelope Valley’s people see the world they know changing too fast and they are going to do everything they can to slow the change. “We’re not willing to sacrifice our way of life,” someone said.

After much writing and talking, each group’s facilitator summarized what had been said on a poster-sized list of complaints and recommendations. Often a group member would try to add the spice back as the passionate rants were listed and neutralized, but a list can ultimately only place-hold the passion.

At the end of the group sessions, the ten facilitators each read their list to the entire room. The two-hour meeting was 40 minutes behind schedule. The facilitators were asked to read quickly. More passion dissipated.

There was a lot of NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) and even some BANANA (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything), but the sincerest sentiment was that there must be a better way to build renewables.

There is. They were taking part in it. It is a process in which the public’s will and the public good are reconciled in the most practical way possible. It foregoes the ideal, but hopefully avoids the taking up of arms.

To the county’s admission that development permits are being processed under the old rules, even as new ones are being drafted, one passionate man declared that something is being “lost forever” and called for a permitting moratorium. “They said they don’t have the answers,” he said. “Don’t move until we do.” Developers and renewables advocates, however, say progress is too slow to meet the state’s renewable energy goals.

The County’s final plan will likely not satisfy all of the people who attended the meeting, nor will it allow every developer to build, but with luck, the public good will be served.

R. James Woolsey, the CIA Director under President Clinton, has said it would be hard to intentionally design an electricity delivery system more vulnerable and fragile than the one on which the U.S. presently relies.

Few in government or grid-related work disagree with Woolsey — not even the Republicans and Democrats on the House Subcommittee on Energy and Power that met for testimony on The Grid Reliability and Infrastructure Defense (GRID) Act (H.R. 5026). The grid must really be in trouble.

The GRID Act would give the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) emergency authority to respond to imminent physical and cyber-threats to the bulk-power transmission system and electric infrastructure critical to homeland security (on being so directed by the President).  

The Act also instructs FERC to identify where the U.S. grid is vulnerable to cyber-attack, Electromagnetic Pulses (EMPs) and solar activity-driven geomagnetic storms and to develop standards to rectify these vulnerabilities.

Astonishingly in this stridently partisan time, the GRID Act was passed by voice vote in the House last year, though it succumbed in the Senate to election-year grandstanding.

“We must be more vigilant in securing the nation’s critical infrastructure, including the electrical grid,” said Subcommittee Chair Ed Whitfield (R-KY), opening the hearing. 

“This bill represents the type of legislation that advances the security interests of all Americans and shows what can be accomplished when we choose to work together in a bipartisan manner,” added Ranking Member Bobby Rush (D-Il).

The GRID Act “is as bipartisan as they come,” said Representative Henry Waxman (D-CA), who added, “It is also budget neutral.”

Representative Ed Markey (D-MA), Representative Lee Terry (R-NE) and many others in the hearing talked about the recent, real and known cyber-attacks on the U.S. grid that had necessitated the bill.

Even in offering his alternative SHIELD Act, Representative Trent Franks (R-AZ) commended the committee for the GRID Act but said that “catalyzed by a major solar storm, a high-altitude nuclear blast, or a non-nuclear, device-induced intentional electromagnetic interference, this invisible force of ionized particles” could “overwhelm and destroy our present electrical power grids and electrical equipment, including electronic communication networks, radio equipment, integrated circuits and computers.”

An EMP could come, Franks said, with virtually no warning, and may be “the greatest short-term threat to peace and security in the world today.” We have, he concluded, “pictures of New York City and Washington, D.C., but we still want to keep them around for a while.”

Patricia Hoffman, Assistant Energy Secretary for Electricity Delivery & Energy Reliability, said the Department of Energy “supports the Administration’s strategic comprehensive approach to cybersecurity,” represented by the Act. It only wants further focus on “public-private partnerships to accelerate smart grid cybersecurity efforts; research and development of advanced technology” as well as “cybersecurity standards to provide a baseline to protect against known vulnerabilities” and several other data management and data sharing measures and procedures.

“The Department of Defense relies on commercial electric power for nearly 99% of its power needs at military installations,” testified Paul Stockton, Assistant Defense Secretary for Homeland Defense & America’s Security Affairs.

“The Department’s ability to perform its national security functions is largely dependent upon the reliability and resilience of the commercial electric power grid,” Stockton said, and is increasingly threatened by “disruptive or deliberate attacks, either physical and cyber in nature; natural hazards such  as geomagnetic storms, and natural disasters with cascading regional and national impacts” as well as other procedural matters addressed by the GRID Act, including  the “transition to automated control systems and other smart grid technologies.”

A National Academies of Science report, Stockton said, found “that if solar storms occurred today comparable to those that took place in the United States in 1921, more than 350 transformers could suffer permanent damage, leaving as many as 130 million people without power.” Such an event, Stockton said, “would significantly affect the Department of Defense’s execution of key missions.”

There were objections to the GRID Act. Gerry Cauley, President/CEO of North American Electric Reliability Corp. (NERC) said the Act was unnecessary. “NERC has consistently supported comprehensive legislation authorizing a government entity to address cyber emergencies. Which agency is a policy decision for Congress to make.”

In other words, it would be better if NERC had more responsibility instead of FERC. But several voices indicated that it was to some extent NERC’s failure to get standards in place that warranted the GRID Act.

“Each day, the electric power industry overcomes some level of threat, ranging from those posed by inclement weather or other natural events, to vandalism, equipment failures and cyber events,” testified Barry Lawson,  Associate Director for Power Delivery & Reliability, National Rural Electric Cooperative Association (NRECA).   

In other words, NRECA, another notorious turf protector, believes things are pretty much fine the way they are. The Obama Administration, both parties in the House, and the Departments of Energy and Defense don’t think so. That is why Washington watchers believe the GRID Act could be that rare thing this year: legislation with legs.

“It doesn’t seem like much of anything worthwhile can get through the House or Senate these days,” said Dan Watkiss, a partner with powerful D.C. law firm Bracewell and Giuliani and a 30-year veteran of the energy sector, “but if Congress can’t rise above peoples’ little turf battles for something as important as protecting the high voltage grid against cybersecurity risks, that’s sad.”

Former Chair of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) Joseph Kelliher is now Executive Vice President for Federal Regulatory Affairs at renewable energy giant NextEra Energy Inc. and free to speak his mind. In a recent interview, he offered some insider insights on what to expect in energy policy between now and the 2012 election.

1. The reason Congress has only provided the wind industry’s Production Tax Credit (PTC) (and the solar industry’s Investment Tax Credit, ITC) for one-year durations and has allowed them to lapse over the years, creating uncertainty and retarding growth, Kelliher said, is that the credits require hard-to-find large budget offsets for scoring by the Congressional Budget Office. Longer-term credits require larger offsets.

2. The 2009 three-year extension of the PTC (and the six-year extension of the ITC) reflect, he believes, new recognition on the part of legislators of renewables’ maturity and increasing importance in the economy.

3. The PTC is unlikely to be allowed to lapse when it expires in 2012 because there is a growing awareness in Congress that it would put tens of thousands of wind industry jobs at risk.

“The deficit is now of great concern to a lot of people in Congress,” Kelliher said. “But jobs are an equal, if not a greater, concern.”

4. Legislators are aware that while the PTC would cost U.S. jobs, removing incentives from the oil and gas industry is unlikely to do so.

“[Cutting oil and gas incentives won’t result in] a loss of jobs in the industry because of the profit margins. I think it would be hard to argue that if the PTCs weren’t extended, there would be no job impacts. I think there would be. There would be a loss of green jobs.”

5. The political base for renewables differs from that of the fossil fuel industries, but that is changing.

“Renewable energy has bipartisan support. The oil and gas industry has strong support in certain states. In Congress, it’s better to have a handful of really strongly motivated people than a lot of more tepid support,” Kelliher said, but “in North Dakota, Republican or Democrat, they know the wind industry is important to the state,” he added. “We’re starting to see some of that same kind of regional support that’s strongly motivated and that’s really important in Congress.”

6. When the Renewable Energy Standard (RES) got crowded off the legislative agenda by health insurance reform and the 2010 election, it may have lost its best chance for the foreseeable future.

“That was a missed opportunity,” Kelliher said. “We should have had a federal RES enacted in the last Congress. Now, it would be a lot harder.”

7. There will be no RES before the 2012 election without a broader energy bill.

“If there’s going to be an energy bill, I think there’s a good chance of an RES or a Clean Energy Standard,” Kelliher said. “But I don’t think an RES or a Clean Energy Standard is strong enough to pull a bill by itself. If there is going to be an energy bill, it will be bipartisan, and I don’t see how the votes could be assembled unless it had something like an RES or a Clean Energy Standard in it.”

8. A broad energy bill is possible but not likely.

“It’s common wisdom that Congress can’t enact important bills in an election year and Congress can’t pass an energy bill in an election year, but actually, if you look back, Congress does that a lot, because if something is bipartisan, it can be done in an election year,” Kelliher said. “There are more unknowns than knowns, but you can see it is in the world of the possible because it is the kind of thing that can be done by a divided government.”

Senate Energy Committee Chair Jeff Bingaman (D-NM) and Ranking Member Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) “are very knowledgeable on energy issues” and “collaborated on a really important bill in the last Congress that would have been a good law and had a federal RES in it,” Kelliher said. But now, “their desire is to move single-issue bills, send them over to the House, hopefully the House will tend to approve them, and they’ll develop an energy law in chapters, rather than one big bill.”

9. The House, full of new members with Tea Party affiliations, is unpredictable.

The Bingaman-Murkowski “strategy might be successful and a series of stand-alone bills might go to the House — and we will see how the House reacts,” Kelliher said. “Right now, the House is in Republican control and doesn’t seem to have a lot of interest in energy legislation.”

10. The wild card is the pump price of gas.

“If the gasoline price is seen politically as too high for too long, I think that might make Republicans in the House reconsider whether they are comfortable with not acting on energy legislation,” Kelliher said.

“The House position seems to be they don’t want to act on energy legislation. The Senate position is ‘we’re not going to do a big bill,’” Kelliher summed up. “And the variable is [the question]: are those two strategies tenable if gasoline prices remain too high for too long? Does that mean the House suddenly wants to move some kind of bill that is seen as addressing public concerns about gasoline prices? And then, maybe the Senate starts to think that if the House has more interest, maybe we should move a more comprehensive bill.”

Natural gas is the pivot point around which the energy debate revolves today: Cheap gas means renewables struggle, but no gas means more coal.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Al Gore and other big thinkers say cleaner burning natural gas is a bridge from the harms of coal to mid-century, when the cost and scale of renewables will be adequate to meet demand.

New, more accurate hydrofracturing (fracking) drilling techniques have opened up enormous, previously inaccessible shale deposits, providing abundant, irresistibly low-cost supplies. T. Boone Pickens insisted during a panel on energy security at The Milken Institute Global Conference: Shaping the Future that there is “twice as much oil as the Saudis have” in U.S. shale deposits. Even the accepted estimate of 2,000 trillion cubic feet of shale gas reserves (only half of Pickens’ own estimate) means, he said, “more than 300 billion barrels” of oil equivalent, whereas “the Saudis claim 255 billion.”

Gasland, the Academy Award-nominated documentary film, portrayed the serious harms done by drilling for natural gas. Those unconventional supplies could play a significant role as a heavy transport fuel and in electricity generation. Still, environmentalists remain deeply suspicious.

“When we have made an effort to cooperate and advocated for the use of natural gas,” said Joanne Spalding, the Sierra Club’s Managing Attorney, “we have been called out, legitimately, by our members.” People who live with what they see as the byproducts of fracking oppose it. “We should be focusing on efficiency and renewables,” Spalding said her rank-and-file members often declaim. “In order for us to do this work,” she said, the Sierra Club needs the industry to acknowledge its problems and show a willingness to address them.

Although happy to extol the new reserves’ potential in electricity generation and transportation, an inclination to acknowledge shortcomings was not displayed by President and CEO of Milagro Exploration James Ivey, President and CEO of Clean Energy Andrew Littlefair, or Senior Vice President of Corporate Development for Chesapeake Energy Corp Tom Price, Spalding’s Global Conference panel colleagues.

Price several times referred to his company’s efforts to join with the Sierra Club in its heroic efforts to stop the coal industry. Ivey noted he would welcome clearly defined fracking regulations. But these were more pro forma than self-critical.

“I thought it was somewhat over the top,” Spalding said of Price’s refusal to acknowledge the problems shown in the film. “I think Gasland has huge value and raised some important issues,” Spalding said, adding, “There are a host of environmental issues that need to be addressed.”

The natural gas industry has resisted a federal regulatory standard and dealt with the issues on a state-by-state basis. The benefits are obvious. “There are some states where if the natural gas industry doesn’t want to be regulated, they’re not going to get regulated,” Spalding said, 

Pennsylvania moved ahead on development without adequate regulation or infrastructure and created serious problems in the process. Colorado was different. “They were having a lot of problems and they put in a strong regulatory structure,” Spalding said. Gas developers like Chesapeake had seen how Colorado’s environmentalists had stopped coal and chose not to create obstacles. Though not perfect, “Colorado probably has the best regulation of any state,” Spalding said. “That gives you the space to then go and advocate for greater use of natural gas.”

To achieve regulation, “we are working with them,” Spalding said. But “it’s an uncomfortable alliance.” Some companies are better than others. Spalding noted Chesapeake Energy and Southwestern Energy had shown cooperation. But the industry as a whole has been recalcitrant "on this whole question of disclosing fracking fluids," she said. “And by the industry not being willing to disclose what’s in those fracking fluids, they have created the environmental activism that they so dislike.”

Sierra Club, Spalding said, is “willing to talk with anyone in the industry who wants to talk about improving environmental regulation.” And, she added, “we don’t expect to come to complete agreement.” What is necessary, she explained, is for the industry to be “willing to accept regulation to ensure that all natural gas production is done in a responsible way, because now it’s hit or miss.”

That is not achievable wherever the gas industry might want to drill. But “you can do a lot to reduce the environmental impacts,” Spalding said. Examples include New Mexico’s pit regulations and the orphan well rules in Texas. “It would be a lot easier if the industry would come along.”

Former Clinton CIA Director and pioneering electric car advocate R. James Woolsey spoke on the same panel as T. Boone and afterwards talked about the tension. “The complexity is the fracking water,” he said. “There are good ways to do it and there are technologies. But the companies haven’t done a decent job of educating the public or the environmentalists,” which threatens, he said, natural gas’s potential as “a great transitional fuel for moving toward renewables.”

Woolsey believes a resolution is possible. “They have to do something very much like what the timber companies and the environmentalists did in California,” he said. “They were absolutely at one another’s throats” until they met in a library “so they wouldn’t shout at each other.” They found common ground. “I think something like that could be done with hydrofracturing. But the companies have to put out what they’re doing, what the chemicals are, and the environmentalists need to be able to see it.”

With a barrel of oil now above $112 and rising, the five major oil companies are announcing Q1 2011 numbers this week and reports put profits at 40 percent above Q1 2010, despite a slowing of the economy.

Commentators from Saudi oil barons to Goldman Sachs to the AARP agree, according to Professor of Law Michael Greenberger, a former director of the Division of Trading and Markets, Commodity Futures and Trading Commission (CFTC), that oil market speculation is sending a false demand signal to the market, driving the per-barrel price far beyond the supply-demand-driven $75-to-$85 range and wreaking havoc with gasoline’s per-gallon price, as well.

It is putting a $40 premium on every barrel the oil companies sell and, according to Daniel J. Weiss, Senior Fellow and Director of Climate Strategy at the Center for American Progress (CAP), one-half to two-thirds of that premium is likely being reinvested in oil company stock, driving the stock price up and enriching shareholders, executives and the board in a classic case of the-rich-get-richer.

And, Weiss added, it is likely no more than one percent to seven percent of the money is being invested in “clean energy sources.”

Meanwhile, American commuters simmer in traffic and tremble at the pump.  For every extra $30 per barrel, according to Weiss, drivers pay 75 cents per gallon more. For every $10 per barrel, the U.S. GDP drops 0.2 percent. With economic growth now at 1.8 percent, $40 per barrel could cost the nation a third of its expansion.

That, however, is just business as usual. The potential criminality starts with speculation.

“People with experience in these markets,” Greenberger said, referring to the oil commodities trade overseen by the CFTC, “believe that not only is the market awash with speculation that has its own impact without any criminal intent, but that there is fraud and manipulation that’s akin to the kind of conduct Enron used in 1991 to 2001 to drive up the price of electricity on the West Coast.”

The speculators’ nefarious intent, according to Greenberger, emerged on January 26, 2011. “On that date, the CFTC proposed a rule that was not only weak in terms of limiting speculation but clearly did not have the support of the majority of the commissioners.

“That’s the day oil started its dramatic increase,” Greenberger said, because the CFTC had signaled it would not support speculation limitations by exercising powers allowed by the Dodd-Frank reform bill. “That was Pearl Harbor for this market, Greenberger said. “The price took off because it was a signal to speculators that there was no cop on the beat.”

The remedy, CAP’s experts said, is oversight and enforcement.

It could begin, said Seth Hanlon, the Director of Fiscal Reform for CAP’s Doing What Works Project, with President Obama’s appointment in June of a “pro-consumer, anti-speculation” CFTC commissioner dedicated to reversing the events of January 26 by using Dodd-Frank powers.

Greenberger believes much stronger action is necessary. “Two weeks ago the Justice Department began its investigation” and, if the signal is sent that Justice is serious, “it will have an immediate impact in the price because the gamblers, just like the gamblers in the sub-prime market, will be driven away.”

Instead of the market-driven $75-to-$85 per barrel price, “we’re soon approaching another world record price,” Greenberger said. “It’s completely unjustified and could be stopped in its tracks if the Justice Department takes its investigation seriously.”

Either fix the markets in which the speculators are operating, Greenberger said, or they should be shut down. But he has, he said, “a high degree of confidence that within six months to a year, indictments can be handed down, and that would really pull the bottom out of the speculative fever and the price would go back down to the band it was in from the spring of 2009 through January of this year, that of $75 to $85.”

There are also remedies, Hanlon said, for the oil companies’ obscene profits. Besides what they are paying at the pump, he said, “American families are padding the oil companies’ profits with their tax dollars. There’s more than four billion in giveaways for the oil and gas industry embedded in the tax code.”

Such tax breaks are, Hanlon said, “relics” that are almost a century old. “If these provisions were ever needed, they certainly aren’t now when oil is not only a mature industry but the most profitable on earth.”

Doing so, Weiss said, will, according to authoritative studies, be “unlikely to have any impact” on gasoline or natural gas prices.

Hanlon highlighted three particular tax breaks he said should be reconsidered. “Oil companies will get $18 billion from the manufacturing tax deduction over the next decade. They’ll get $11 billion from percentage depletion allowances, special tax breaks only available to oil and gas. And they’ll get more than $12 billion from being able to write off so-called intangible drilling costs.”

Every indication is, the CAP experts agreed, that Congress will begin fighting over such oil and gas industry subsidies when they return from their spring recess. Even the “drill-baby-drill” side, he said, seems to recognize the public’s resentment of them.

“Last week, Speaker Boehner suggested a willingness to revisit these issues,” Hanlon said. “My interpretation is that he’s just simply tired of defending the indefensible.”