Perhaps the most important energy development of the week had to do with healthcare. What? Yeah, reports that the healthcare debate on the Hill is being postponed has a major bearing on energy, because when the topic du jour is slated to be the topic du jour for another 2 months, that means everything else slides back even further. The only thing that energy can really do about it is perhaps a price spike, but that hasn’t occurred, and the lack of consensus and climate legislation isn’t doing energy any favors at this point. It might be that an impasse on climate policy opens a door for energy security, but the current legislative logjam on healthcare and climate haven’t forced a moment of truth quite yet.

It will be interesting to see how the August recess affects the fall agenda, because constituent anxieties always factor into member anxieties. Right now, observers are expecting members to get a critical earful on both climate and healthcare initiatives.

In other news, the House approved the Department of Energy authorization bill with $150 million included for natural gas vehicles. While there may be promise for NGVs in America’s future, there are unavoidable obstacles that must be overcome for them to have the desired impact. There is considerable concern that we’d be trading dependence on one fossil fuel for another. And then there is the matter of getting cars up to NGV standards, which is more challenging and expensive than retrofitting for E85, which had the opposite problem, lack of infrastructure. SAFE is still making the case for electrification of short-haul transportation, which allows for diversity of energy sources and relies on infrastructure that at least partially exists.

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