President Bush will sign a disastrous energy bill today that rewards Big Oil with $4 billion in new subsidies, but does nothing to protect consumers from skyrocketing prices at the pump. Big energy lobbyists may be cheering the bill’s enactment, but ordinary Americans had better hold fast to their wallets. It will not reduce America’s dependence on oil and it will not create a cleaner energy future. Instead the bill allows big oil companies to pollute water supplies, plunder the Treasury and attack our coastlines. By rewarding polluting energy industries with twice as many tax breaks as energy efficiency and renewable energy, this bill keeps the oil, coal and nuclear industry the driver’s seat. As gasoline prices careen out of control, the bill keeps America speeding down the wrong road toward more oil consumption, more drilling, and more pollution.

While both New Mexico Senators were key authors and supporters of the bill, it contains several anti-environmental provisions which threaten New Mexico’s public lands and drinking water. The bill allows oil and gas companies to pollute water supplies during construction and certain drilling activities, and makes it easier to get drilling permits over public objections.

The bill ignores the success of New Mexico’s renewable energy standard which increases clean renewable electricity generation, because it no longer includes the Senate passed renewable energy standard. Instead, the bill forces American taxpayers to subsidize the construction of six new nuclear plants and more than a dozen coal plants.

Instead of requiring reductions in global warming pollution, the bill provides more than $13.1 billion in new tax breaks for the major sources of this pollution, the oil, coal and gas industry.

The bill also paves the way for future drilling off currently protected coastlines and preempts states rights in siting dangerous Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) facilities and transmission lines.

In this bill, the big winners are Big Oil and the coal and nuclear industries, while American consumers and our environment pay the price.