Americans would profit if President Barack Obama followed the same approach on energy that he has adopted with Syria. In a surprise move, the president on Aug. 31 asked Congress to authorize the use of force against the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Obama said he had decided the US should act against regime targets in a limited strike designed to "hold the Assad regime accountable for their use of chemical weapons, deter this kind of behavior, and degrade their capacity to carry it out."
The resort to force was not the surprise. Obama's earlier threat to respond militarily to any deployment of chemical weapons was put to dreadful test on Aug. 21, when rockets delivered toxic payloads to targets outside Damascus, killing nearly 1,500 Syrian civilians, including hundreds of children. The surprise was the president's request for congressional sanction. "Having made my decision [to strike regime targets] as commander-in-chief based on what I am convinced is our national security interests, I'm also mindful that I'm the president of the world's oldest constitutional democracy," Obama said. "I've long believed that our power is rooted not just in our military might, but in our example as a government of the people, by the people, and for the people."
Americans may one day wish the president had shown similar sensitivity to the democratic contexts of energy policy. If many of his initiatives survive legislative and judicial challenges, electricity and vehicle fuel in a few years will be very expensive.
Overhauling energy
In a June 25 speech at Georgetown University, Obama recommitted his administration to the overhaul of American energy via regulation in the absence of congressional assent. Calling yet again for "changing the way we use energy—using less dirty energy, using more clean energy, wasting less energy throughout our economy," he gave the core motivation a new name: "cutting carbon pollution." Otherwise, the policy elements were familiar: ending "tax breaks for big oil companies," subsidizing renewable energy, controlling emissions of carbon dioxide from new and existing power plants, and toughening energy-efficiency standards.
Economically, the president's program amounts to more cost and less work. The supposedly "dirty energy" he wants to suppress happens to be cheaper than the "clean energy" he supports. Requiring less use of cheap energy and more use of expensive energy is sure way to lower energy use overall: The strategy guarantees elevated cost of an essential economic input. It also guarantees lower economic activity.
Americans came to understand this early in Obama's first term in office, when Congress failed to pass legislation that wwould have created a cap-and-trade scheme for lowering emissions of greenhouse gases. The high costs of the proposal became evident to growing numbers of the people asked to bear them. The people balked. Democracy works that way.
'Bipartisan' solution
Apparently, that's not how Obama remembers things. At Georgetown he recalled the appeal in his state-of-the-union speech this year for "a bipartisan, market-based solution to climate change, like the one that Republican and Democratic senators worked on together a few years ago." That would be the cap-and-trade proposal Congress wouldn't pass when the president's party controlled both houses. Now that Republicans control one of those houses and prospects are nil for passage of legislation addressing climate change—carbon pollution, in the new vernacular—the reason isn't, according to the president, that a majority of Americans don't want higher energy bills. "This is a challenge that does not pause for partisan gridlock," Obama told his Georgetown audience. So he'll put the Environmental Protection Agency and Interior Department to work on it.
Whether Congress would authorize US military action in Syria was unknown at this writing. But Obama's high-handed treatment of energy suggested a related question: If Congress rejected his request, would he see the vote as a genuine expression of the people's will or blame it on "partisan gridlock" and put the Defense Department to work on it anyway?