The long-awaited and much-discounted National Energy Policy report, issued on 16 May by a task force headed by Vice President Dick Cheney, was not the one-dimensional document critics and adversaries of the Bush administration eagerly awaited. Much of the criticism since release of the report would seem, in fact, to reflect more what people expected to read than what is actually in the report.

For this reason alone, IEEE Spectrum sees fit to excerpt the report ["A National Energy Policy"], so that readers may judge for themselves. In addition, for a contrasting view, Spectrum is excerpting a report prepared by researchers at several national laboratories and released last November, which presents quite a different outlook on the role fossil fuels need play in the country's energy future [" Clean Energy Scenarios "].

Prior to the release of the Cheney task force's report, environmentalists expected to hear nothing but "drill, drill, drill." But the report acknowledges the savings produced by improved energy technologies over the last three decades, which, with rising incomes, have resulted in U.S. residents paying a smaller proportion of their income for energy than they did before the 1973 oil crisis [see figure].

The report recognizes that big gains in efficiency will continue to be achieved. Accordingly, it recommends sizable tax credits for hybrid-electric vehicles, purchase of solar panels, and use of biomass and sundry other renewable energy and conservation technologies.

It also faces head-on the critical state of the nation's energy infrastructure, especially the yawning gap between the growing demands made on its transmission system and money spent to improve it [see figure]. The report urges broadening the federal government's authority to exercise eminent domain to get new transmission lines built, to the discomfiture of states' rights Republicans.

Yet if the Cheney task force shows some willingness to stand up to close allies, it does not toss out proposals willy-nilly, careless of their real political prospects. On hugely controversial questions such as disposal or recycling of nuclear wastes or tightening costly fuel-efficiency standards for cars, it asks only for reconsideration or further study.

As for development of oil and gas resources, universally expected to be the heart of the report, it does indeed call for opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to exploration and for making public lands generally more available for drilling. But the report recommends no new tax breaks or incentives for the administration's oil industry friends. So, while natural gas developers may be making out like gangbusters in Cheney's native Wyoming, they are benefiting from credits enacted in the late 1980s, and cannot expect further giveaways.