Energy strategy, as opposed to energy policy, is being transformed in the US by stealth. Policy changes are visible. They’re manifest in mandates and subsidies for uneconomic energy forms supported by well-placed politicians and political donors. They’re manifest in a regulatory siege against work essential to the supply of oil, natural gas, and coal. With energy policy, change usually follows some measure of public deliberation.
The strategy shift is different. It progresses via a series of regulatory steps taken not in direct relation to national energy interests but rather as reactions to global warming. And it occurs in response not to the will of voters but rather to Executive Branch assertions of national priority. The change is profound. The process tests constitutional boundaries. Yet public deliberation about the strategic ramifications of both dimensions of the strategic transformation has been thunderously subdued.
Regulating methane
Typical of the process and lately in the news is the Environmental Protection Agency’s plan to regulate emissions of methane and ozone precursors from oil and gas facilities. On June 11, six Republican senators wrote President Barack Obama a letter challenging the need for the regulation and asking for clarification of several aspects of the proposal. "The evidence is clear that these mandatory reductions are unnecessary and will be less effective than a voluntary, cooperative effort," they wrote.
They’re right. But evidence won’t stop an administration ideologically disposed to manipulating the climate. When this EPA identifies a source of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, it regulates. Then it finds another source of emissions and regulates again. The approach is reflexive, heedless of proportion and broader contexts.
When EPA in January announced plans to cut methane from oil and gas work by 40-45% from 2012 levels by 2025, for example, it pointed out the gas has warming potential 25 times that of carbon dioxide, the main target for GHG reduction. Then it noted that methane emissions represented nearly 10% of US GHG emissions in 2012 on a CO2-equivalent basis and that nearly 30% of that came from production, transmission, and distribution of oil and natural gas.
This program thus aims to cut by 40-45% a source of GHG emissions representing only 3% of the US total. This amounts to nibbling at nebulous edges. Somewhere in its rationale for this bold incrementalism, EPA probably was obliged to estimate the effect on globally averaged temperature. Sensible observers have a word for such attempts to impose numerical precision on chaotic systems: guesswork.
What the EPA describes as "part of the Obama administration’s commitment to addressing climate change" will not influence temperature. Even if climate sensitivity to GHG concentrations is high, the methane program won’t limit emissions enough to matter. It only will satisfy an overly pressurized urge to do something at every opportunity about climate change. In fact, the extra regulation will raise the cost of developing gas supplies and might therefore impede a development with much greater potential for lowering GHG emissions: substitution of coal by natural gas in the generation of electrical power.
It’s a step
But the new regulation will, if EPA succeeds, have been a step. The government will have done something about climate change. It then will find another source of GHG emissions to regulate so it can do something about climate change again. And again. In terms of observed warming, most of the steps, even combined, will have no or even reverse consequences. What matters is that the government takes them, regardless of cost. This, in the Obama administration, is how energy policy is made.
The human contribution to climate change is a legitimate concern and worthy focus of regulation. It is not a reason to make the supply of affordable energy a subordinate matter of policy. The US needs an informed discussion, which so far hasn’t occurred, about how these interests balance strategically. At stake is nothing less than national security, about which more will appear here next week.
