Some Action at Last on MEOW

After months of squabbling, a deal takes shape on natural gas pricing

One of Jimmy Carter's more memorable phrases was his description of his energy bill as "the moral equivalent of war." But the Administration has stumbled so badly in trying to get the program through Congress that the campaign has come to be known by the biting acronym MEOW. A major roadblock during the past five months has been a bitter and largely nonpartisan free-for-all on Capitol Hill over the removal or retention of Government price controls for natural gas. Last week, just a year after Carter first invited the nation into the trenches, the gas deadlock finally appeared to have been broken and the energy program to have been given an urgently needed boost.

Pressure to get the gas issue settled has been building for weeks on the joint congressional conference committee that is wrestling with Carter's bill. Amazed and frustrated that a full year had passed with no energy legislation, Carter on Thursday afternoon told a White House press briefing: "We have wasted twelve months of precious time. We must have energy legislation without further delay." The same day, mock birthday parties for the bill were being celebrated by members of both the House and the Senate. On the House side, Minority Leader John Rhodes of Arizona and fellow Republicans carved up a large doughnut that was meant to symbolize a birthday cake for a bill with a hole in it. A mixed group of Democratic and Republican Senators had their own party, complete with a cake adorned by a turkey. Said South Dakota's James Abourezk: "We are meeting in thanksgiving that the various turkeys trotted out by the natural gas conferees have not yet been stuffed down the throats of Congress."

Even as the partying proceeded, a 14-man caucus of the committee's natural gas conferees was struggling furiously to come up with a deal. After dining on takeout orders of pizza and fried chicken, the conferees emerged bleary-eyed at 2:30 a.m. from the conference room of the House Administration Committee and gave waiting reporters the news: this time, after many false alarms, a gas solution was really at hand. The key features: 1) the phased decontrol of domestically produced newly discovered natural gas, with the price ceiling rising by about 10% annually and being eliminated altogether by Jan. 1, 1985; 2) the extension in the meantime of federal price controls to cover gas that does not leave the state where it is produced, which until now has been exempt from federal regulation; and 3) a formula whereby industrial users of gas will have to pick up most of the increased costs in the beginning, thereby removing a portion of the burden from consumers.

The cost to consumers will not, in any case, be cheap. Michigan Democrat John Dingell, a leading House negotiator on the committee, estimates that homeowners who use natural gas could well find their heating bills jumping by $40 to $50 annually.

The gas agreement could still break apart if, as some conferees fear, committee Republicans as well as a few Democratic hard-line supporters of continued price controls try to scuttle the whole scheme when the full 42-member committee votes on it, perhaps as early as this week. For all that, the apparent breakthrough on gas pricing is the first sign of real legislative momentum on the energy front since last summer, when the bill sailed through the House almost unchanged. It is thus highly welcome news for Carter, who has been repeatedly criticized for rushing his hastily prepared energy bill to Congress without asking either the oil or gas industries or even Congress itself to take part in its preparation, then compounding the damage by insisting that the entire bill be enacted as is. It is also good news for Washington Senator Henry (Scoop) Jackson, who led the committee drive to come up with a compromise, as well as for Energy Secretary James Schlesinger, the bill's chief architect.

Euphoria could fade quickly. If the natural gas question is out of the way, the conference committee will have to turn to an even more controversial feature of the bill. That is Carter's plan to discourage energy consumption by using a phased-in federal tax to raise domestic crude oil prices by 1980 to the world level set by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries. The Senate found the so-called crude oil equalization tax (COET) so worthless that it scissored the scheme entirely out of its version of the bill. Now the conferees must figure out a compromise solution to this problem as well. If natural gas was a nightmare, COET will be just as bad.

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