Big moves in energy policy tend not to happen until longstanding predictions of crises come true. This partly explains the difficulty of implementing effective energy policy in the US. The rest of the explanation has to do with the complexity of energy subjects and a political preference for big moves in energy policy.
Crude oil from supergiant Prudhoe Bay oil field in Alaska and its satellites, crucial as it has been to US supply, is the product of crisis. The fervently contested pipeline that connects Prudhoe Bay to the warm-water port at Valdez didn't receive federal approval until the Arab oil embargo of 1973 demonstrated American need of oil. Long before then, the industry had warned about failure of discovery rates to match production and about the effects of a production decline already under way. Yet output from Prudhoe Bay had to await political action on the pipeline until crisis illuminated the need for new domestic supply.
New crisis
Another crisis of supply has now zapped its way into popular consciousness. On Aug. 14, electricity ceased to flow in eight states of the US Midwest and Northeast and much of Ontario. The disruption didn't surprise the industry experts who have been warning about failure of transmission capacity to grow as fast as demand, about the deterioration and antique insularity of the northeastern grid, and about the paralysis caused by incomplete deregulation. But it shocked everyone else.
Thanks to this new crisis of supply, comprehensive energy legislation has popular attention conspicuously absent before the blackout. Demonstration of a problem has improved chances that a conference committee meeting next month will reconcile energy bills passed by the House and Senate. Earlier, the best chance for passage of an energy law was the yearning of many lawmakers to win political favor in farm states by enacting a mandate for ethanol in gasoline.
Would it not be ironic if the Northeast states so wisely resistant to an ethanol requirement ended up losing that fight because of attention drawn by crisis to their deficient electricity grid? What are the risks that tax adjustments designed to preserve the cumulative bounty of small oil and gas wells will slide off the table as congressional titans pound their fists over intricacies of electric power? How can the conference committee effectively address questions as diverse as electricity, ethanol subsidies, production taxes, and development of federal land and at the same time satisfy new demands for a vote on efforts to comply with the Kyoto Treaty on climate change, which the Senate won't ratify?
Answer: It can't.
These are distinct, complex, and important issues. Congress should address them separately with whatever measure of technical sophistication it can extract from the political welter. Instead it has lumped wildly disparate initiatives into an indecipherable blob called comprehensive energy legislation and might now act because of the power crisis. There's no telling what sort of mischief might become law in the process. This is no way to make energy policy.
What's just as bad, passing an energy-environmental-agricultural blob because of an electricity blackout would sustain a chronic dependency on crisis for the confirmation of problems needing attention on subjects lawmakers would rather avoid. Only now, with natural gas inventories struggling to reach healthy levels before winter, is Congress acknowledging that lock-up of federal land in the US West might warrant study. Only now is it considering approvals needed for a pipeline able to tap arctic gas deposits. But what about the acknowledged gas potential of federal waters of the Atlantic and eastern Gulf of Mexico? Leasing of those areas apparently must await a crisis more severe than the price elevation possible this winter.
Sensible attention
Yes, Congress should act on electricity. It should act now. It should act because the US has problems in this area. The problems were evident before Aug. 14.
And, yes, Congress should act in other energy subjects. The US faces myriad energy challenges—distinct and complex challenges that sensible attention can keep from becoming crises.
It's no crisis that the menu of such challenges is full, technically complex, and endless. The crisis is a political habit of avoiding energy until lights go out, then addressing everything about it at once.