U.S. Has Royalty Plan to Give Windfall to Oil CompaniesBush and his coconspirators are planning to give at least $7 billion to their oil and gas pals while he squeezes a billion out of working families by jacking up PNW electric bills 10%.
WASHINGTON, Feb. 13 — The federal government is on the verge of one of the biggest giveaways of oil and gas in American history, worth an estimated $7 billion over five years.
New projections, buried in the Interior Department's just-published budget plan, anticipate that the government will let companies pump about $65 billion worth of oil and natural gas from federal territory over the next five years without paying any royalties to the government. ...(more)
Federal Budget: Juicing the region
The Pacific Northwest got a jolting reminder Monday of what passes for budgeting in the Bush administration.
If the president has his way, the region will have to pay more for electricity. The proposed increase in Bonneville Power Administration rates would hit some utilities harder than others. But we would all likely feel the effects from taking nearly $1 billion from Northwest families and businesses over 10 years to make a minor difference in the federal Treasury. ...(more)
And there's more at stake than an increase in our electric bills,
there are Family Wage Jobs on the chopping block:
Future again hinges on an uncertain BPA contract
DAVE GALLAGHER
THE BELLINGHAM HERALD...Coming to an agreement may prove challenging. The region has grown and BPA has more customers sharing the once-abundant supply of cheap hydroelectric power from dams on the Columbia River.
If Intalco and BPA can't reach an agreement, the facility once again will be at a huge risk of closure. ...
...Facing a future as cloudy as Intalco's, company officials have tried to find ways to survive. That's meant trying to make the facility as efficient as possible, according to Rousseau. One effort has been a program to purchase scrap metal and re-melt it, which takes less energy than creating new metal. The scrap metal project now represents about 30 percent of all the products that come from the facility. ....Employees: About 460 people work at the facility. Before the energy crunch of 2000, the plant had about 1,100 employees when running at full capacity.
Fast facts: The plant is one of two aluminum smelter facilities left in Washington state, the other is in Wenatchee. Since 2001, the facility has used improved operational procedures to reduce greenhouse gas potential from aluminum reduction by more than 60 percent. The company pays about $1.2 million annually in property taxes.
Cantwell tells Bush she will fight BPA plan
WASHINGTON -- Sen. Maria Cantwell met with President Bush on Tuesday and told him that Northwest lawmakers strongly oppose an administration plan to change the revenue structure of the Bonneville Power Administration.
Under the president's budget, surplus revenue from the Portland, Ore.-based federal power marketing agency would no longer be used to lower electricity rates for Northwest consumers. Instead the money would be used to pay down the federal debt.
Cantwell and other Northwest lawmakers call the plan unacceptable. The Washington Democrat said she told the president as much at the White House meeting. ...
...Cantwell has called on Northwest residents to sign an online petition demanding an end to the plan, which she would said "unravel" BPA's cost-based rates. The petition is posted on Cantwell's Senate Web site at http://cantwell.senate.gov/. More than 1,000 people have signed the petition in the past three days.
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