From the WSJ Opinion Archives
FROM THE HEARTLAND
Energy in the Executive
Bush must stand up against environmentalism and for the American way of life.
At the Competitive Enterprise Institute's annual Warren Brookes Memorial Dinner recently, Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham lamented that "Americans love energy but they seem to hate energy production."
Bearing out his observation was a New York Times/CBS News poll last week in which 57% of the respondents answered in the affirmative when asked: "Should we protect the environment even if it means paying higher prices for electricity and gasoline?" An even higher proportion, 68%, agreed that conservation should have a higher priority than production of energy.
The same day, the Christian Science Monitor released a poll showing that Americans by a 5-to-1 margin support increases in automotive fuel efficiency--one reason even Republicans in Congress are now telling Detroit they may not be able to prevent a hike in mandated mileage standards this year.
Much depends on how the pollsters phrase such questions, of course. Who wouldn't prefer an "efficient" vehicle to an inefficient one? But when you start attaching a specific price tag to such goals, the response tends to be different. A CNN/Time poll last March found that only 27% of Americans would support new pollution control programs if they pushed gas prices up 25 cents a gallon. Only 38% favored controls when informed they might result in higher unemployment.
California's Gov. Gray Davis is under no illusion about the American willingness to conserve when confronted with a tangible cost. He has demanded--and apparently won--federal price controls on electricity generation in the West, though this is quite likely to retard the production of electricity needed to return his state to energy equilibrium.
"Of the 20 or so national polls I've seen recently, only one asks about costs," notes Karlyn Bowman, a survey research expert at the American Enterprise Institute. "When things begin to pinch, people get more realistic."
But the more basic problem is that "the public isn't paying any real attention to the energy issue," she says. Thus the public takes its cues from the media, which in turn take their cues from the environmentalist camp. Right on schedule, the New York Times Sunday Magazine published a pictorial essay on Sunday showing how the existing Alaska oil pipeline carves an ugly gash through the wilderness (though admitting that it doesn't seem to have bothered the caribou or the bears).
The president should be willing to expend political capital on this fight. Energy lies at the heart of the industrial--and, as we now know, the postindustrial--economy. It's not enough to issue a long, boring document called an energy policy or lecture audiences that America produces 39% less oil than it did in 1970 or that no new refineries have been built here in 25 years. What we need is a president willing to defend a way of life.
What's more, there can be an environmental cost, indeed a moral cost, to leaving those resources in the ground. Less energy means less wealth, and less wealth means a dirtier environment and less health. Anybody who doubts that should ponder the poor, brutish, nasty and short lives of those who live in countries--North Korea, for example--where electricity is still a luxury.
And to the extent forced conservation works, there can be other costs, such as death and injury caused by the lighter, less crashworthy vehicles produced by the auto industry after Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards were introduced in the 1970s. No wonder Americans took to fuel hogs like the Suburban, the Expedition and the Cherokee. CAFE is simply the political coward's way of raising taxes on energy, and it does so in a way that amounts to capital punishment for those who can't afford a bigger, safer vehicle.
The administration may have believed that a few price blips or supply disruptions on the left coast would be enough to persuade Americans of the need to reopen some of the land to exploration and development. But the reaction so far shows that command-and-control environmentalists aren't going to fold their tents and disappear. They will use ever more demagogic arguments to sustain their leverage over society--not to mention their jobs.
Unless Mr. Bush uses his bully pulpit to begin making the case that man is a part of nature, not an intruder on nature, he is likely to remain on the environmental defensive.
Mr. Bray is a staff columnist at the Detroit News. His OpinionJournal.com column appears Tuesdays.
