My Thoughts on Energy and the Environment

I want to preface this week's post by saying that energy and environmental policy is not my area of expertise. In fact, out of all the policy topics we are discussing this semester, it is the area where I have done the least substantive work. That being said, I think it is incredibly important. I will not be able to add much substantive information to what Peters, the podcast, and the documentary have presented, but I can use my expertise in the policy process to explain why policymaking in the environmental arena is so challenging.

First, I want to call us back to chapter three. In this chapter, Peters talks briefly about wicked problems as areas where the Advocacy Coalition Framework is particularly useful. A wicked problem is a problem that is impossible to solve because of a lack of information, contradictory demands, and complexity. I believe that environmental problems may be the most wicked of problems that policymakers and analysts face. It is impossible to separate the environment from energy use, the economy, and most essentially, our values and way of life. I think that the documentary  Heat makes it clear that an American way of life as an ideal for citizens of developing countries is completely unsustainable. Further, humans are very bad at long-range thinking, and even worse at making decisions that will benefit us in the long-run but cause inconvenience in the short-run. In theory, we'd all rather engage in a small inconvenience now if it means avoiding a catastrophic outcome later, but in reality that's not what we choose.  It is hard for us to cognitively accept the idea that the future will realistically be radically worse than the present. There have been many psychological and behavioral economics studies detailing this point.

Economic principles like the collective action problem are rampant in environmental policy. Business interests who have been very profitable in the context of the status quo have huge incentives to fight regulations that will immediately affect their bottom line. On the other hand, most citizens will only see diffuse benefits of environmental regulation, spread out over the whole population. Further, these benefits may not be seen immediately and may not be measurable at all. We do not take note when an environmental disaster does not occur only when it does. Measuring the success of environmental policy is nearly impossible because it so often means that something does not happen.

Environmental policy tends to be reactive. When a huge disaster like the BP oil spill, Exxon Valdez, or the failure of the nuclear plants in Japan after the earthquakes takes place we tend to try to take action immediately. Instances like these and Silver Spring lead to reactive environmental policies that try to prevent similar accidents from happening again. On the other hand, issues like global warming which do not lead to immediate and visible accidents but instead act as a contributory cause to many disperse problems become increasingly difficult to deal with from a policy standpoint. They are also easier to deny because they force us to rely on scientific expertise rather than our own experiences of the world. This becomes clear in a This American Life podcast, Act Two of Kid Politics (not assigned) where a leading scientist who studies climate change attempts to change the mind of a high-schooler who is a climate change skeptic.

Ultimately, solving our environmental problems becomes difficult for policymakers because neither of the two approaches work very well. Conservation as proposed by Jimmy Carter requires action on the part of citizens, residents and businesses. Once again we have a classic collective action problem. The benefits of conservation only accrue if substantial numbers of people engage in it. This leads to a free-rider problem where those who do not engage in conservation also see the benefits. The problem is that there are incentives for everyone to be a free-rider causing conservation to fail. Of course government could step in and create economic incentives for conservation like "cash for clunkers" which subsidized the purchase of more fuel efficient vehicles for those scrapping older less efficient vehicles. On the other hand, finding more energy sources may work in the short-run, but ultimately fossil fuels are limited, nuclear power is politically unpopular, and none of our renewable sources can come close to a substitution for fossil fuels. Here too, government can step in with more funding for research and development of new technologies and subsidize the use of hydro-power, wind power, and solar power. Of course, as the ethanol experiment has shown, subsidizing these forms of power may create undesirable unintended consequences.

One of the issues with Peters' book is that this chapter was likely written before fracking aka hydraulic fracturing became a visible problem. Peters' section on natural gas section is very short and provides little substantive information. There is a lot of information about this process from a variety of sources, but the documentary "Gasland" seems to be one of the best sources in terms of explaining the fracking risk.