BUT IT’S not all doom and gloom for environmentalists. Some foresee a silver lining to the Bush plan: the potential for backlash.

That potential became real last week. In his May 24 speech announcing his defection from the Republican Party, Vermont senator James Jeffords listed “energy and the environment” as an area where his views fundamentally oppose those of the Bush administration. “Certainly the more people know about the anti-environmental provisions of Bush’s energy plan, the more alarmed they are,” says the Clean Air Trust’s O’Donnell. “Some of the outrageous environmental provisions in the plan I’m sure helped persuade Jeffords to the leave the party.”

And Jeffords’s feelings about the Bush energy plan may turn out to be shared in other parts of the nation. “If you add what’s going on in New England to pending legislation in Illinois and North Carolina, it’s starting to be not just a New England issue,” says Conrad Schneider, a Maine representative of the Clean Air Task Force, a national organization that cleans up power plants. “It’s happening in areas more coal-dependent and with dirtier plants than ours. Our view is, the momentum is building toward additional states’ implementing regulations.”

Utilities appear to have the same impression. “There’s mandatory carbon capping in the long-term future,” John Rowe, chief executive of Chicago utility Exelon Corporation, told the Wall Street Journal on May 10. With the writing on the wall, utilities are becoming concerned about the piecemeal approach of a state-by-state regulatory structure. As the Wall Street Journal reported, some utilities are working with environmental groups to fashion a multi-pollutant federal regulation that would mandate cuts in carbon dioxide emissions, despite Bush’s disavowal of such measures.

Meanwhile, the way some New England utilities are retooling their business models to focus on energy efficiency indicates that they consider conservation a sound investment rather than a mere “personal virtue,” as Vice-President Dick Cheney derisively characterized it last month.

Connecticut Light & Power, the largest utility in that state, has spent over $500 million since the 1980s on energy-efficiency programs. According to CLP’s Philip Vece, the company has reduced the peak summer load among its customers by 450 megawatts — effectively delaying the need to build another plant. CLP’s efforts demonstrate that reducing power demand through conservation offers an effective alternative to the Bush administration’s plans to increase supply by building new plants.

“Our environment has been spared thousands of tons of emissions,” says Vece. “And our customers are saving nearly $150 million annually.”

According to Conservation Law Foundation figures, combined energy-efficiency programs among New England utilities have cut 50 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions from the air and saved customers in the region about $3 billion since the 1980s.

And depending on how much stock one puts in polls, there’s reason to believe folks don’t agree with the direction of Bush’s energy policies. According to a CBS News poll from early April, 61 percent of Americans feel it’s more important to protect the environment than to produce energy, while 65 percent believe Bush puts energy production above the environment. A Sierra Club poll conducted by the Mellman Group earlier this month found that by a two-to-one margin, Americans would rather reduce demand than increase supply to solve an energy shortage.

“This isn’t a problem of public opinion,” says Representative Allen. “It’s all about the leadership. The Bush administration completely fails to understand the power of millions of Americans working together to reduce energy consumption.”

“The Bush administration has complete and utter faith in some yet-to-be-identified technology for space-based weapons,” says MassPIRG’s Sargent. “But they can’t fund technology for energy efficiency and renewables, technology that has been proven and could be viable if [it] got half the subsidies some of these others get.”

Just in research and development subsidies, the coal industry receives upwards of $100 million a year. Bush has promised about $2 billion more over the next 10 years. Instead, Allen argues, we should be funding research on alternative energy. “Can you imagine the change we could make if fuel cells were available for cars in 10 years and not 20?” he says. “We’d have cars running off water.”

“I’m encouraged that there are at least some of the governors in New England, and virtually all of the New England delegation in Congress, [who] don’t buy into the Bush plan,” says Sargent. “I don’t think the US public is buying into it. I think we’re going to see a backlash here and from the rest of the world.

“We have to believe that or it would be very depressing.”

Sam Smith is a freelance writer living in Portland, Maine. He can be reached at samssmith@hotmail.com.