The oil and gas industry can strengthen its political footing in the US by hitching its arguments to ideals beyond the usual pragmatics of energy security, jobs, wealth creation, and tax revenue. Those all are important goals. But they can be limp lances in an ideological joust. The industry finds itself in just such a struggle and must find comfort arguing at an appropriately elevated, however gauzier level.
That step can be difficult. In and out of an inherently pragmatic industry, pragmatists don't like to be called ideological. The characterization implies disconnection from solid reality, high-mindedness, dogmatism. In Washington, DC, it can banish a person from meetings at which deals are made.
With historic clarity, however, Americans exhibit a distinctly ideological mood, distinctly at odds with the ideology motivating their government. For the industry, this frame of collective mind represents a chance to find common cause with a usually adverse public. All it takes is political behavior reflecting belief in something important yet immeasurable, something beyond the reach of standard metrics, something some people would deem to be corny until they lost it, something like freedom.
Health-care law
Enactment of an historic health-care law that encroaches on freedom has angered Americans yet emboldened a government driven by state-centered ideology. President Barack Obama and Democratic leaders of Congress, their approval ratings plummeting in poll after poll, think they only need to sell harder what they have passed. With breathtaking condescension, they say Americans just don't understand the new law.
They're mostly right. Nobody fully understands what the new law contains or what it will do. Passage of the bill required an appalling campaign of deal-making, arm-twisting, number-bending, and rule-stretching that continued until the last Democratic—they were all Democratic—"aye" slunk into place. Congressional leaders eager to make history openly admitted that general understanding of the legislation would have to come after passage. The perversion is one reason Americans are angry.
The other, probably larger reason for a testy public mood is that Americans know their government has shoved its way into a large part of their lives, substituting its will for theirs in important decisions and taking control of a large segment of the national economy.
In addition to provoking popular anger, the intrusion and how it developed raise questions about what a prideful government will try to reform next before voters rein it in (see Editor's Perspective, p. 76). A large hint came Mar. 31, when Obama, in the company of the head of the Environmental Protection Agency and his top adviser on energy and climate change, said the administration would proceed with federal oil and gas leasing off the long off-limits East Coast.
Coming from an administration that has consistently limited oil and gas leasing and otherwise discouraged drilling on federal land, this looks like a political maneuver staged to set up the history-makers' likely next project: energy reform. The announcement lacked critical details, such as about funding. And it gushed assurances that the barebones nod toward oil and gas would be part of a broader effort to promote nonfossil energy and address climate change. Indeed, expanded offshore leasing emerged last year while Congress was debating climate-change legislation as an attempt to dissipate industry opposition. Especially if the administration envisions a climate initiative like the cap-and-trade scheme passed by the House, the trade-off would be disastrous.
Energy control
The industry shouldn't fall for the seduction. Liberals in the White House and Congress want to seize control of energy as they have done with health care. They'll propose to regulate and subsidize. They'll buy support by dispensing favors to well-placed touts for uneconomic energy. And they'll create unaffordable cost, variously disguised.
They'll also trample freedom in decisions about energy. The public, which ultimately pays the bloated price of state hyperactivity, needs to understand how reckless a self-bedazzled government can be at the junction of energy selection, economic health, and liberty. The oil and gas industry should help convey the message, even if doing so requires an appeal to ideology.
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