EDITORIAL Pena as Energy Secretary

The biggest drawback to Federico Pena's nomination as U.S. Secretary of Energy is that President Clinton selected him mainly because he is Hispanic. Saying he wanted a cabinet that "looks like America," Clinton based his selections for the upper officers of government largely on gender and ethnicity.

The oil and gas industry thus must resist the tendency to assume that Pena holds office to fill a quota and that his lack of industry experience makes him otherwise unqualified for the job. Such assumptions, although natural responses to the superficial politics of diversity, would be both unfair to Pena and disrespectful of history.

Pena's ethnic background has nothing to do with his ability to perform successfully as Energy Secretary. And neither does his background-or lack of one-in oil and gas.

A professional-level familiarity with energy has never been a requirement of the Energy Secretary's job. Early in the position's nearly 2 decades of existence, functional knowledge about the oil and gas business was taken to be a conflict of interest. In terms of background, Pena distinguishes himself from some past nominees for the job by simple virtue of his ties to an oil-and-gas-producing state, Colorado. And a term as Transportation Secretary could not have hurt his appreciation for secure energy supply.

If confirmed, which he likely will be, Pena will oversee a knowledgeable staff able to teach him whatever he cares to learn about oil and gas. And most of his managerial challenge will relate to nuclear programs, not energy. The government doesn't regulate energy much any more. When it does, it seldom works through DOE.

An Energy Secretary can, however, exert significant persuasion within government and with the public. Energy is a national interest, after all. It falls to the Energy Secretary to pursue those interests against conflicting agendas both within and outside of government. An ambitious and well-informed Energy Secretary might even undertake to show that energy nowadays can be economically produced and consumed without wrecking the environment-although in the Clinton administration such a crusade might be treated as a palace revolt.

So there are a few rudimentary things that an incoming Energy Secretary should learn about energy. If he doesn't already, for example, Pena should know that:

The nation's principal energy interest is security of supply, two thirds of which comes from oil and gas and which derives from a combination of domestic production and trade. The U.S. needs to promote both.

Domestic production requires development of natural resources, a wealth-creating activity that serves another national interest, economic growth.

Efforts to curb energy consumption without relation to economic activity are self-destructive. Energy is the ability to perform work. Blind cuts in energy use reduce the amount of work that can be performed in an economy.

Even in the mature producing theaters of the U.S., mechanics and economics usually constrain production more than resource limits do. Technological advances mitigate the effects of these limits on production.

Technological advances also allow oil and gas to be found, produced, transported, refined, and consumed with diminishing environmental consequence.

The oil and gas industry will never speak with one political voice. Variation in the sizes and activities of companies within the industry preclude a united view, and it is a mistake for policy-makers to expect one.

Free markets always allocate energy supplies, manage energy consumption, and determine energy prices better than government officials do.

An Energy Secretary who understands and accepts these simple premises, and who acts unwaveringly in service to U.S. interests, will succeed. It is against that standard, not his ethnicity, that Pena should be judged if he wins the job.