SOME accuse President George Bush of being beholden to the oil tycoons of Texas. But Bush appears to be broadening his horizons, and last year he announced a $1.2-billion research project to develop hydrogen as a fuel.
Touted as the world鈥檚 cleanest fuel, hydrogen is one of the darlings of alternative energy enthusiasts. It turns out that among the first to line up for this research largesse are the nuclear and coal industries. Nuclear power plants can make the electricity to extract hydrogen from water, and they don鈥檛 emit greenhouse gases. But that won鈥檛 wash with the green lobby.
So what鈥檚 the alternative? How about鈥� fossil fuels? Much of the hydrogen now created comes from natural gas. But making it this way emits lots of carbon dioxide. Moreover, natural gas is getting expensive. The coal industry says it can make hydrogen, though it too acknowledges that greenhouse gases are part of the deal.
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The Bush administration says not to worry about all that extra CO2, and there is a flurry of activity in Washington dedicated to finding ways to bury or otherwise 鈥渟equester鈥� the gas and keep it out of the atmosphere 鈥� for example, . The oil and gas and coal people are starting to look forward to a bright future for themselves in a hydrogen fuel economy. Exactly where all the CO2 would go, and how long it would stay there, no one knows yet.
THE Federal Register does not make for light reading. Every single business day it contains announcements of upcoming meetings, notices of proposed rule-making, advance notices of proposed rule-making, and eventually the rules themselves. The rules are the way the executive branch of government interprets and implements the laws passed by Congress. Before the president and the various cabinet agencies can do anything, they have to put their plans into the Federal Register.
Now one thing Republicans like to rail about is the size of government, and the complicated rules the government is always imposing on people. Certainly, that mantra is frequently intoned by the current occupants of the White House. Given their government-off-our-backs attitude, you might think that the Federal Register would be shrinking. Fewer rules to promulgate means fewer pages to print, yes?
You might think that. But according to a study by the Cato Institute 鈥� a rather conservative Washington think tank 鈥� in 2002 the Register swelled to 75,606 pages, which is 1000 pages fatter than it was in 2000, when the big-government Democrats were still in charge. The Cato report doesn鈥檛 rule out the possibility that the rules themselves are shrinking, and the verbiage is just there to explain them. But what president wants to be remembered for increasing bombast in government?
