The making of energy and environmental policy has become a contest of numbers. Governments set measurable targets to boost consumption of fuels they like and to cut use of fuels they don’t. They mandate reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases. They set goals for energy efficiency, variously defined. If based on careful analysis, the numbers to which governments commit their countries might yield sound policy. Usually, however, they just ooze out of politics.
Policy-making by the numbers comes naturally in the age of modern management, fundamental to which are the careful setting and vigorous pursuit of quantitative goals. The managerial perspective so strongly affects industrial-world thinking, in fact, that government programs tend not to be taken seriously unless latticed with numerical targets and deadlines. Governments, inclined as they are to govern, relish the business-school maxim at the core of systematic goal-setting: Whatever can be measured can be managed. With minor variation, this becomes a license for activism: What a government measures it inevitably tries to manage.
Pick a number
There’s nothing inherently wrong with governmental goal-setting. The technique can be as effective in governance as it is in the management of businesses. But it has to be used effectively. It’s not enough to just pick a number and call it law.
Yet arbitrary goal-setting has reemerged as a standard feature of energy and environmental policy-making. In politics, moreover, goals have become bargaining chips.
The US ethanol mandate is an example. The Energy Policy Act of 2005 mandated that 7.5 billion gal/year of ethanol be sold as fuel by 2012. This year President George W. Bush proposed that the requirement climb to 35 billion gal/year by 2017. This, he said, would serve his ambition to reduce gasoline use by 20% in 10 years in order to increase energy security and reduce emissions of greenhouse gases.
Can the US produce that much ethanol at reasonable cost? Would achieving the ethanol targets really deliver the supposed gasoline savings? What is special about a 20% reduction in gasoline consumption? How much economic growth might the country have to forgo to hit the target? How, in a free-market economy, does the government enforce volumetric sales mandates? Policy-making by the numbers evades questions like these.
In any event, final US ethanol targets will be determined by political deals in an election season. Enforcement will fall to federal agencies able to do little more than prorate mandated volumes over fuel suppliers against best guesses about future consumption. Grain and fuel prices will continue to climb.
This process is not uniquely American. The European Union seeks to replace 10% of the gasoline used in its member countries with biofuels by 2020. While the target isn’t as aggressive as Bush’s, it forces governments to act. And that, of course, is the point: action for the sake of governmental action, even if it’s ill-considered and compelled by baseless numbers.
Responses to climate change slog through similar mire. That most early supporters of the Kyoto Protocol won’t achieve their initial goals for greenhouse-gas emissions says something about validity of the goals if not about the whole approach. Yet Kyoto fans already are pushing for tougher standards in the next round of targets.
Before last week’s meeting of the G8 nations in Germany, Bush proposed that the world’s 15 largest sources of greenhouse gases set long-term targets for emission reductions. His step toward goal-setting in this area represented a major change of position. But to leaders of several European countries, it wasn’t enough. It didn’t arrive with numbers and deadlines already in place. And it strayed from the United Nations framework that bred the foundering Kyoto treaty. A fresh approach, whatever its merits, thus might die untried in deference to a scheme already shown not to work.
Managing the unmanageable
In too many energy and environmental issues, political goal-setting has displaced informed debate. Masquerading as seriousness of purpose, it makes governments try to manage unmanageable systems like markets and the climate. There are better ways to pursue energy and environmental values. They all begin with governmental self-restraint.
