Spate of Bills Presages Congress Energy Fight : Legislation: Democrats seek conservation, GOP urges production. Some Republicans want to avoid issue.

The debate on Capitol Hill over a new national energy strategy was joined in earnest Thursday as Republicans and Democrats introduced bills to complement or compete with the energy package proposed by the Bush Administration last month.

In the House, a Republican energy task force led by Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-Redlands) proposed an omnibus energy bill designed to deflect some of the criticism that greeted Bush’s production-oriented energy plan by including more conservation measures.

In the Senate, Democrat Timothy E. Wirth of Colorado and Republican James M. Jeffords of Vermont threw down the environmentalists’ gauntlet with a competing bill to achieve energy independence by emphasizing conservation efforts over increased production.

The new measures join a plethora of other energy-related bills already introduced or in the drafting stage, including legislation sponsored by Reps. Leon E. Panetta (D-Carmel Valley), Barbara Boxer (D-Greenbrae) and Philip R. Sharp (D-Ind.) and Sens. J. Bennett Johnston (D-La.) and Malcolm Wallop (R-Wyo.).

But, with the Bush Administration’s National Energy Strategy at one end of the spectrum, the Wirth-Jeffords bill at the other, and the Lewis and Johnston-Wallop alternatives somewhere in the middle, the debate over energy policy has been formally framed.

“It will be a knock-down, drag-out fight,” one legislative aide predicted, “between the conservationists on the one hand and the advocates of greater production on the other.”

If the debate over clean air dominated the environmental and energy agendas of last year’s Congress, the need to lessen America’s growing dependence on foreign oil is likely to move to center stage this year--with equally bruising political battles.

Like the fight over clean air, the energy battle will pit conflicting interests and regions against one another, blurring the lines of what might otherwise have been a predominantly partisan debate.

Partisanship will still be a powerful element, however, with most Republicans embracing increased production as the best way to achieve energy independence and Democrats more inclined toward mandated conservation efforts as easier on the environment.

Given the popularity of environmental causes across the country and the fact that Congress is controlled by the Democrats, some Republicans see the whole energy issue as a Pandora’s box of political problems best left tightly locked until after the 1992 elections.

“Inevitably, this debate is going to get into a whole range of issues like fuel efficiency standards for cars, federal mandates and other regulations” that are anathema to conservative Republicans, one southern Republican House member told his colleagues recently. Arguing that it would just give the Democrats an opportunity to bash Bush’s domestic agenda before the elections, he suggested that Republicans should not be eager to join the debate by rushing in with energy proposals of their own.

Others, however, fear that, if mainstream Republicans do not take the lead, a coalition of liberal Democrats and environmentally minded Republicans will “jump into the void” with legislation that goes “far beyond rationality,” in the words of Rep. Norman F. Lent (R-N.Y.).

And, with the Persian Gulf crisis driving home the dangers of depending on foreign oil, some see an opportunity to push through legislation that otherwise would run afoul of the conflicting interests and divergent agendas that lawmakers generally bring to environmental and energy debates.

Republicans concede that Bush’s plan, presented Feb. 20, has no chance of being passed by the House or Senate. Besides its failure to incorporate conservation measures, the plan has been attacked for proposing to open parts of Alaska’s environmentally sensitive Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling.

Other provisions causing intense controversy would streamline federal regulations for the licensing of nuclear power plants and relax restrictions on electric utility companies.

The Wirth-Jeffords bill, by contrast, does not open protected areas to drilling but would cut down on fuel consumption by mandating a 40% increase in fuel economy standards for automobiles over the next decade--something strongly opposed by the automobile industry.

Improving the “corporate average fuel economy will save approximately 2.5 million barrels of oil per day by the year 2000,” Wirth said in introducing his bill.

Between these two extremes are two bills that attempt to find a middle ground--the Lent-Lewis bill in the House and, closely paralleling it, the Johnston-Wallop bill in the Senate.

Both measures would open the Alaska refuge to oil drilling but, as a trade-off with conservationists, they also adopt different forms of increased fuel economy standards. Like the Bush bill, they also encourage the development of alternative fuels by phasing in a requirement for private fleet vehicles to run on cleaner-burning alternatives to gasoline starting in 1995.

The Lent-Lewis bill, which basically restores the conservation provisions cut by the White House from the Energy Department’s original plan, “goes hand in hand with what the President has sent us . . . and does not compete with it,” Lewis said.