Muted as the subject has been early in a presidential political cycle, energy offers savvy candidates the raw material for attention-grabbing drama. The US approaches a politically forced choice between two energy revolutions. One of them is the overhaul of energy use that President Barack Obama is imposing to address worst-case assumptions about global warming. The other is new abundance of North American oil and gas made possible by the creative interplay of ingenuity and markets.
A candidate’s approach to these revolutions says much about his or her ideological grounding. Energy can be-should be-a fundamental way for candidates to distinguish themselves.
No compromise
The US and its presidential candidates should not have to choose one revolution and exclude the other. Compromise should be possible. The country should be able to capitalize on oil and gas supply newly available from unconventional resources while seeking, through research and experimentation, sensible routes to a future less dependent on hydrocarbon energy.
But that’s wishful thinking. Activists won’t allow compromise. They want Americans to consume specific amounts of carbon-free energy by specific dates and won’t let trivialities such as cost or constitutional prudence hamper progress toward the energy utopia they know to be both necessary and attainable. At their service are a president eager to push the agenda and his magisterial Environmental Protection Agency. The legally questionable, surely expensive, and probably impracticable Clean Power Plan is just the latest product of what has become a regulatory stampede trampling practical concerns about cost and feasibility.
Supporters of the clean-energy revolution want not only to encourage production and use of renewable energy but also to discourage development and consumption of energy from hydrocarbons. Regulators at EPA and elsewhere in the administration discredit Obama’s incantations about an “all-of-the-above” energy policy with initiatives of doubtful necessity sure to make fossil energy costlier to produce and use. Advocacy groups involved in development of the Clean Power Plan declare their intention not to stop with the regulatory strangulation of the US coal market; they want to foreclose use of all forms of fossil energy. They say at least half the world’s gas reserves and one third of oil reserves must remain unproduced. Obama’s bureaucracy navigates by this extremism.
The revolution of oil and gas supplies from unconventional resources proceeds nevertheless. It suppresses US imports, creates wealth and jobs, boosts revenues for governments, and rejuvenates petrochemical and other manufacturing industries. It replaces high-carbon coal with low-carbon natural gas for a large and growing share of electric power generation. It also receives partial credit for a global oil glut that suppresses prices, necessitating a sharp contraction of industry activity but lowering energy prices in the general economy. The revolution must adjust to commodity-price distress as it parries a regulatory siege, but it will survive.
One energy revolution is political; the other is economic. The political revolution requires that collective fear about climate change outweigh the public impatience that develops as high costs and low reliability of energy from renewable sources disprove early promises. To sustain the politics, fear must be continuously recharged. This becomes difficult when temperature observations heap doubt on doomsday model predictions.
Of the two revolutions, the economic one is the more durable. It depends not on political caprice but on the continuous and safe delivery of energy on demand, in needed amounts, at prices affordable to buyers and profitable to suppliers. Its environmental drawbacks diminish when corrected for political exaggeration and assessed in relation to benefits.
Energy and freedom
Eventually, all presidential hopefuls will have to express favor for one of the energy revolutions. Energy is too important to ignore, and the activism now dominating politics tolerates no blended position.
A final comparison: The political revolution is controlled by Washington; the economic revolution is guided by markets, through which people exercise the product of an earlier revolution: freedom. Anyone who would be president of the United States should find that topic compelling.