Elana Schor
An unlikely alliance of environmentalists, fiscal watchdogs and conservatives today put Bureau of Reclamation spending in their sights for the latest edition of a budget-cutting blueprint that offers lawmakers nine-figure savings on energy and environmental programs.
The release of 2012's "Green Scissors" report by Friends of the Earth, Taxpayers for Common Sense and the R Street Institute -- a right-leaning think tank founded by a former vice president of the Heartland Institute who left following its controversial billboard campaign savaging belief in climate change -- comes as Congress begins to reckon with the massive impact of the estimated $50 billion in automatic domestic spending cuts that will take effect come January if last year's "sequestration" is not undone.
Green Scissors, an 18-year tradition for the groups that craft it, "can help bridge the gap between ideological perspectives and help seriously achieve deficit reduction," Taxpayers President Ryan Alexander told reporters today at its unveiling.
"Instead of whining about sequestration," she added, "lawmakers should be scrambling" to replace its $1.2 trillion in decade-long spending slashes with the $700 billion identified by the report's authors.
Many of the federal investments targeted by the trio of groups are fixtures on the cut list, such as the transfers of Treasury proceeds to a highway trust fund that is finding its coffers stretched by the fact that the gasoline tax was last raised in 1993, and nuclear loan guarantees that Green Scissors projects will cost $22.5 billion over the next 10 years.
But other programs are reaching the groups' radar for the first time, such as the White House's recent $450 million plan to encourage the construction of small modular nuclear reactors. "The costs of developing and licensing those reactors are something that should be borne by the people who are constructing them," said Friends of the Earth fiscal analyst Ben Schreiber.
The Bureau of Reclamation's irrigation spending, notably its Columbia River Basin and Yakima River Basin projects, also landed in Green Scissors for the first time this year.
The majority of Reclamation's "dam projects have been justified solely to provide water for irrigation and provide substantial indirect subsidies to the irrigated agricultural community," the report's authors wrote. "They often serve little to no national interest, are not economically justified, have serious negative environmental impacts and are based more on political power than national priority."
Spared the hypothetical ax this year is the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), an Energy Department arm focused on high-tech new fuel and power initiatives that got its first infusion in President Obama's 2009 economic stimulus law. The 2011 version of Green Scissors raised some hackles among energy stakeholders by declaring that "many of the projects that [ARPA-E] supports are bad for the environment," though its authors did not propose a specific level of spending to slash (E&E News PM, Aug. 24, 2011).
Other repeat presences in today's Green Scissors include several of the same oil and gas industry tax breaks repeatedly targeted by congressional Democrats over the past year and the DOE loan guarantee program that benefited alternative energy companies such as the failed solar firm Solyndra.
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