by Cheryl Rofer
I've been trying to write a post on energy policy for some time now. Usually when a post takes me a lot of time to write, it gets more boring as I go. This one was no exception, and, of necessity, it would entail a lot of numbers, or if's, and's and but's about why I didn't have the numbers.
So let me start again, off the top of my head.
I can't find anyone doing energy policy these days. For that post, I googled around to the think tanks and other places that one might expect to be doing energy policy. Nada. I found a speech by someone at Shell Oil that seemed to indicate that somewhere in the bowels of that giant, someone is doing something that might look like energy policy. At one time, Shell was well known for doing a rather thorough job looking at energy policy; it made at lease some of its results available to the public. I'm not seeing that now.
The campaigns? Don't ask. There are words on their websites, sometimes with the heading of "Energy Policy," but not much there, and it's impossible to tell how much thought has gone into them. General indications are not much.
What is it I'm looking for? An overview of costs of the various kinds of energy, woven with the regulatory and societal limitations on them. That's not trivial. You have to define what goes into the cost (mining, distribution, building plants to generate electricity, mitigation of carbon dioxide and other pollutants, cleanup of old sites, future cleanup of sites after they've outlived their usefulness, diseases caused by mining and use, much more) and then evaluate each kind of energy on the same variables. Everyone who does a study seems to include a different set of variables, particularly if they're selling something. Regulatory and societal limitations (no drilling or wind machines in my backyard! to tax policy) are another long tome.
But someone has to do something like this to come up with rational policies. "Drill Baby Drill!" is not a policy. Neither is "No Nukes" nor is "Energy independence Now." The candidates' statements appear to be based on focus-grouping of balances of various interests rather than anything that had to do with mathematical calculations.
There are some very general considerations, which I may try to collect into a later post. These include that we must find alternatives to petroleum, for many reasons. Costs will go up, at least temporarily. New technologies can mean a fundamental renewal of the US's ability to build its economy and compete in the world.
Michael Dobbs did a small bit of the kind of research I was doing for that boring post. He fact-checked Sarah Palin's claims on Alaska's contribution to US energy supplies. By now, nobody should be surprised that she inflated her numbers. Here is what she said:
My job has been to oversee nearly 20 percent of the U.S. domestic supply of oil and gas.Here are the numbers from Dobbs:
New Mexico has a bigger share of the US oil supply!
This is why I was trying to check numbers. If you're going to do energy policy, you need to know what you are actually using, what it costs, and all sorts of other, admittedly boring, stuff.
Update (Already, less than an hour later!): The American Physical Society took a run at it. I haven't checked out the report yet, but it looks like it might have some of that boring stuff in it!