WASHINGTON — President Bush on Monday urged Americans to drive less and embrace conservation more in the wake of hurricanes Katrina and Rita, and he said he would work with Congress to enact incentives for energy production and refinery construction.
The president also said that he was directing federal agencies to reduce energy consumption and that he would release oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve as needed to ease the shortages and price increases caused by the hurricanes.
In Congress, Republican leaders prepared to move ahead with legislation that would provide tax breaks to spur refinery construction and expansion; they also said they would consider other measures left out of a major energy bill Bush signed into law in August.
The developments underscore the extent to which Katrina and Rita have reconfigured the legislative agendas of the White House and Congress and the breadth of the storms' effect on a domestic petroleum market that is increasingly sensitive to supply disruptions.
One measure would allow companies to write off, in the first year of operation, the cost of building a refinery, rebuilding one destroyed by Katrina or installing equipment in an existing facility to increase overall output by 5% or more. Any energy legislation also was expected to include White House proposals to make former military bases available as sites for refineries and to streamline the issuing of permits for new or expanded refineries.
More immediately, the White House said the Department of Homeland Security would extend a waiver, begun after Katrina, of a federal law called the Jones Act so that foreign-flag ships could temporarily transport fuel from one U.S. port to another. And the Environmental Protection Agency was extending waivers relaxing gasoline blending rules and diesel fuel restrictions.
Environmental groups said Monday that they were gearing up to fight a possible effort to roll back protection rules. Frank O'Donnell, president of Clean Air Watch, said Republican leaders were "racing faster than a hurricane to smash through alleged environmental barriers before anyone realizes what they are up to."
In remarks reminiscent of Jimmy Carter's 1977 appeal to Americans to turn down their thermostats, Bush said Monday that everyone had a role to play in responding to the back-to-back storms, which have hampered offshore oil production, refinery operations and fuel distribution in the Gulf Coast region.
