Energy control

The NYT has an opinion on the current energy bill.

The centerpiece of the bill is the first meaningful increase in fuel efficiency standards in three decades — from today’s fleetwide average of 25 miles per gallon to 35 m.p.g. by 2020. To win necessary Republican votes, the Senate leadership agreed to drop one valuable provision contained in a measure passed earlier by the House: a requirement that all utilities provide 15 percent of their power from renewable sources by 2020.
Even so, the bill, as it now stands, contains not only the new fuel standards, which is a huge step forward, but also generous incentives for energy efficiency, for cleaner alternative fuels and for the new technologies that will be required to reduce the country’s output of greenhouse gases. By almost any measure, it is the most important energy bill that Congress has entertained in many years.
It is thus astonishing that President Bush would even think of vetoing it, especially since he called for much the same improvements in automobile mileage as those contained in the bill. In a statement Tuesday, however, the White House demanded that the bill be amended to make the industry-friendly Transportation Department solely responsible for regulating fuel economy as well as carbon dioxide emissions from automobiles.This would directly reverse the Supreme Court’s historic decision in April declaring that greenhouses gases are air pollutants under the meaning of the Clean Air Act and giving the Environmental Protection Agency the power to regulate them.

(italics are mine)

Why wouldn’t we use Homeland Security as the agency of choice?