The Other “Energy” Crisis

Everybody’s talking about an “energy crisis” — and the media are dutifully reporting it. Whoa, Nellie!

Journalists often pride themselves on using language precisely and truthfully. Their words are supposed to illuminate reality, not obscure it.

So why should this word “energy” raise red flags?

President Bush, in his February 27 speech to Congress, used the word “energy” 11 times in the 134-word passage devoted to that subject, chanting it like a mantra. He did not talk about “gas,” “oil,” “nuclear,” “coal,” “gasoline,” “solar,” or “renewables” once.

“Energy” is not just energy. It is important to avoid lumping together things that shouldn’t be lumped. The oil and coal industries wants very much for us to lump them.

The oil industry is shopping the idea that the United States is having an “energy crisis,” and President Bush is echoing the oil industry’s line.

It’s not a partisan issue: “oil Democrats” would have done no less.

It is, however, a journalism issue. Merely by reporting Bush’s words, the media purvey the myth the oil and coal industries wants to purvey. A March 7, 2001, column by great journalist David S. Broder opens by referring to the energy crisis in San Diego. Though the rest of his column was right on the money, it is the thoughtless use of this easy term that I want to examine. Hundreds of other journalists use it the same way.

To be sure, California in particular is having an electricity supply and wholesale price problem, and that is based partly on a natural gas supply and price problem that is especially bad there. And to be sure, the United States has a number of very serious energy problems (plural). And some of those problems are even connected.

But let’s think a minute before we parrot the assumption that the United States is having “an energy crisis.” (The New York Times now uses quotes around the phrase.)

And let’s (please) not assume that “energy” is some monolithic, fungible, interchangeable commodity that flows everywhere and changes form magically. It’s not.

The oil industry, Senator Murkowski, and President Bush have suggested that one answer to California’s wholesale electricity price crisis is to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. It isn’t.

Much of California’s electricity crisis is unique to California. And it has nothing to do with oil. Only about 1 percent of California’s electricity is generated from oil, and only about 3 percent of the nation’s. A kilowatt-hour of electricity in San Diego is not interchangeable with or derivable from a barrel of oil in Alaska.

Indiscriminate use of the term “energy” fosters confusion — confusion of that barrel of oil with that kilowatt-hour in San Diego. And this advances the oil industry’s agenda.

Codgers remember 1973, when the oil industry’s drive to construct a Trans-Alaskan Pipeline seemed hopelessly stalled in Congress. It took only the declaration of a national “energy crisis” to melt opposition like morning dew. This lesson was not lost on the oil industry. They’ve been praying for an “energy crisis” ever since.

The different kinds of energy are, at best, only partially interchangeable. In important ways, they are hardly interchangeable at all.

For one thing: different sectors of our economy depend on different kinds of energy. Our cars, and the transportation sector generally, need petroleum; more cheap electricity will do our cars very little good. The electricity-generating sector depends largely on coal, natural gas, and nuclear; more cheap petroleum will do it very little good. Industry burns gas and uses electricity — but uses comparatively little coal.

For another thing: a barrel of oil or kilowatt-hour in one location is not the same as a barrel or kilowatt in another place. Energy is often difficult and expensive to transport, and location matters immensely.

A barrel of oil in Prudhoe Bay costs big bucks to move to California. A kilowatt-hour at Grand Coulee Dam is not the same as a kilowatt-hour in San Diego — huge amounts of power are lost in transmission. Electricity markets are inherently regional. Coal is another place-bound energy resource. Transport costs make up nearly one-third of the delivered price of coal. You can’t necessarily solve New England’s power problems with Wyoming coal.

Timing is also key. A kilowatt today is not the same as a kilowatt next week when the heat wave has broken, or as a contract for a guaranteed long-term flow of kilowatts over five years — and electricity prices reflect those facts. A barrel of oil from ANWR, which can’t be delivered to the lower 48 for another 10 years, is no solution to next summer’s problem with high gasoline prices.

Availability of domestic reserves also matters. The United States is running out of oil, but has centuries worth of coal supplies left in the ground. Long term, we probably have plentiful gas reserves as well. By definition, solar, wind, biomass, and other renewables are, if not infinite, then close to infinitely sustainable. Why should we rush to drill and burn the last of our dwindling oil reserves? When we have finished them off, Saudi Arabia (and worse yet Iran and Iraq) will still be sitting on crude oil oceans, and have us at their mercy. Why not burn their oil first and save ours for the real oil crisis a century hence?

Environmental impacts matter as well. All other things being equal, a kilowatt of energy from coal is not the same as a kilowatt from a photovoltaic array or a combined-cycle gas-fired cogeneration plant. That coal may leave a big ugly hole in Montana once it is produced, or bring acid rain to New York once it is burned. We can’t just switch from one energy source to another with no environmental price or consequences. And all too often it is society (e.g. air-breathers in New York) who pay the price, not the companies who produce or the consumers who use that energy.

All things are not equal. Except to a theoretical physicist, energy is not just energy. You can’t go out and buy a disembodied joule on the NY Mercantile Exchange. You can buy barrels of light, sweet crude oil for October delivery at Cushing, Oklahoma. Specifics matter.

To declare a national “energy crisis” or call for a national “energy policy” is both to misunderstand the problem and to offer no concrete or specific solutions at all. The media should demand specifics.

Joseph A. Davis

Bad information was reported as gospel the weekend of February 9-11, when a number of major media failed to check an important statement from the White House.

Spokesman Ari Fleischer told reporters that President Bush had received a letter from California Gov. Gray Davis asking him to relax federal environmental requirements to help California deal with its electricity crisis. It was a great story. The only thing wrong with it was that it wasn’t true.

The Financial Times (FT.com) jumped on this hot story. Not questioning whether pollution rules had much to do with California’s crisis, and not questioning whether Gov. Davis had indeed asked Bush to relax them, FT.com confidently led with the assertion that the White House energy task force headed by Vice President Dick Cheney would approve the rule-relaxation soon.

FT was hardly alone. Reuters and the Dow Jones Newswires moved the story of Fleischer’s statement immediately — apparently without seeing the letter or checking with California. Reuters simply said Davis had asked Bush to “waive environmental protections.” Likewise, the National Journal Group’s Congress Daily moved the simple White-House-said story. Ditto Agence France Press-Extel (AFX), who made it into a “waiver on federal air quality standards.”

Fleischer made the statement about a February 8 letter from Davis at a regular White House press briefing on Friday, February 9. The wires reported it by late Friday afternoon, and it stood largely unchallenged over the weekend until Monday, February 12.

That was when Davis’ spokesman Roger Salazar told reporters, “The interpretation of the president’s press secretary was incorrect. ... There was nothing in the letter that in any way, shape or form asks the president to lift environmental regulations.”

While Fleischer’s error may have been unintentional and merely ill-informed, it was not in the deepest sense an “innocent mistake.” It was an untruth that advanced the anti-regulatory policy agenda of Bush administration clients in Congress and in the oil, coal, and utility industries. The bogus request seemed to validate the assertion — made by key House subcommittee chair Joe Barton (R-TX), among others — that California’s electricity problems were caused by that state’s stringent air rules. Barton, for that matter, is pressing for relaxing the Clean Air Act nationwide.

Bush himself had blamed California’s woes on environmental regulations as early as January 18, in a CNN interview. That earlier assertion of the linkage had sparked stiff objections from California officials and environmental groups. Reporters who had been covering energy or environment beats routinely would likely have spotted the buried premise.

There was, to be sure, just enough truth in the California air quality-energy connection to make it dangerously decep-tive. By any competent analysis, there are at least half a dozen major causes far more responsible for California’s electricity crisis than air regs. Of all the states, California already has one of the cleanest energy mixes — heavy on hydro, nuclear, natural gas, and renewables. Any rules that might have delayed powerplant construction were state rules, not federally imposed ones, and California had already eased those itself.

The air issue could only arise because of the tissue-thin margin between California’s electricity demand and its available supply. Most utilities and states never get that close to the edge. But in a Stage 3 alert, those oil-fired peaker plants and older, marginal coal plants whose hours had been restricted for air-quality reasons suddenly became critical. Californians, who suffer most from the air pollution there, had already worked out a deal extending the operating hours of those plants in exchange for quicker installation of pollution-control equipment on them. But those few marginal plants were only the tiniest part of California’s total generating capacity — and running them longer was only the tiniest and most temporary bandage, when the real solution Davis sought was at least 5,000-20,000 megawatts of new, clean generating capacity.

The incident may have offered a lesson in how a story can go wrong. Probably newswires who cycle out everything they get almost immediately were most prone to error. Perhaps some of the problem was inherent in the nature of the White House beat — where many, maybe too many, stories consist simply of dumb-terminal displays: “The president said X today.” But it may also be a lesson in the value of specialists — environment and energy reporters — in an area where slow swimmers and generalists tend to get eaten by sharks.

Some news media came out of the water with limbs intact, and even looking pretty buff. An AP story June 9 included a lead referring to “sharp disagreement over whether the request amounts to rolling back environmental rules.” The AP managed to get comment the same day from Salazar and even Winston Hickox, head of CalEPA. That story was carried by a number of dailies, including the Deseret News, (2/10) and the Cincinnati Post (2/10) — and even, to its credit, Dow Jones Newswires (2/9).

Even more on point was a February 10 story in the Washington Post by William Booth. The headline read: “Calif. Pollution Laws Blamed in Crisis” — but the story focused squarely on whether that blame was justified. Booth, too, managed to get a Davis spokesman and other California officials on the phone before filing his story.

“In California, however, there is wide disagreement with the premise that somehow strict environmental and air quality regulations have either stopped producers from generating electricity or kept companies from building new power plants in the state,” read the Booth’s second paragraph.

Another pointedly skeptical story came out in USA Today the same day as Fleischer’s statement. That story, by Jonathan Weisman, was a response to the release of Senate Energy Committee Chairman Frank Murkowski’s energy bill the day before. The point of Weisman’s article was that all sides in the debate were eagerly exploiting the California crisis as a way of pushing their agendas.

Weisman bluntly asserted in his lead, for example, that the California crisis had “virtually nothing” to do with drilling the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge — a linkage made often by the oil lobby. He later cited sources saying the crisis had nothing to do with federal air standards either. But he also noted that environmental groups were using the crisis to argue for tighter fuel-efficiency standards and new tax credits for efficient vehicles.

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Note: Formerly published by the National Safety Council. Reprinted with permission.