The time has come to say it’s not enough: to maximize the country’s profits, to leverage the gas and ensure that it lasts, the government needs to make the new Sheshinski law a basis for action, not a fig leaf.
By Avi Bar-Eli

1. It’s rare we have a chance to praise our elected officials for doing more than our minimum expectations. One of these opportunities came yesterday when the Knesset passed the Sheshinski bill 78 to 2. Yet despite the impressive political accomplishment that fixed a serious moral and economic distortion, it’s hard to forget the public and social price that was paid for this to happen.

We can’t forget those public officials who put their pockets before their consciences, who forgot to whom the country’s wealth belongs, whose opinions are up for hire. They’re the people who made it necessary to thank our public officials for doing their jobs, and we can only hope they won’t behave this way during the next round, which is already upon us.

2. In January 2010, a year after gas was discovered at Tamar, we argued here that the Israeli economy and its leaders still hadn’t recognized the economic, social, political and environmental meaning of all this. Indeed, it took the government another year to complete the first stage of digesting the sharp strategic change.

We shouldn’t play down the unprecedented, dramatic process taking place – amid political instability – which is supposed to bring about a change that’s hard to explain in street language or in magazines. Yet the time has come to say it’s not enough. To maximize the country’s profits, to leverage the gas and ensure that it lasts, the government needs to make the new Sheshinski law a basis for action, not a fig leaf.

3. There will be no praise for the Sheshinski law if the government lets natural gas become 60% to 70% of the country’s fuel consumption but doesn’t safeguard it for the next generation. There will be no praise if it doesn’t make sure that natural-gas companies face competition and that such a crucial resource comes from more than one supplier.

There will be no energy security if the government doesn’t immediately ensure that we have multiple supply networks, so that a single rocket strike on Ashdod can’t cut Israel off from its natural gas. And there will be no praise for the environmental implications if the government doesn’t quickly set enforcement measures for the underwater drilling.

None of these processes can be left for the next government. In fact, it may be that the current government should have addressed them even before it set up the Sheshinski Committee, because there’s no value in implementing the panel’s recommendations before these strategic issues are addressed.

http://english.themarker.com/israel-s-new-energy-law-a-watershed-but-not-far-enough-1.353204