Politicians are playing word games on energy
By: Dan Kish, OpEd Contributor
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February 26, 2009
Forget about cost. The most maddening part of the government’s effort to direct and delimit the way Americans use their energy is the word-games politicians and interest groups play to push the plan on the public.
“Green jobs” sounds better than “low-paying jobs whose exclusive means of survival are tied to your pocketbook.”
Investing in a national “smart-grid” has a better timbre to it than “spending billions of dollars to re-draw our electric grid so that it delivers less power to fewer people at higher cost.”
And have you heard of “decoupling” yet? It’s right there in the trillion-dollar debt bill Congress passed this month. You’ll find it’s exceedingly effective at decoupling you from your hard-earned money.
So what’s next? Try the “Renewable Portfolio Standard” (RPS) on for size, coming soon to a Senate chamber near you. It sounds good. It’s not. That’s because RPS isn’t a standard at all – it’s a mandate from Washington to your utility that forces it to either generate more expensive power itself or buy it from somebody else.
Then they’ll sell it to you at a marked-up price. So, instead of allowing your power company to sell you the most electricity for the least money, the government is going to use the RPS to force utilities to purchase more expensive energy from wind farms, solar panels, or hamsters running around in a cage. Naturally, you’ll be stuck with the tab.
Unlike traditional energy sources, the politicians’ preferred bundle of energy options only works when it feels like it. Sailboats are RPS – they work great unless you have to depend on the direction and force of the wind to get to work, school, or the grocery store.
That’s why most regular ferries run on fuel rather than the wind. Don’t worry, says the government: We’ll build a fleet of helicopters to swoop in and rescue stranded sailboat-ferry riders whenever the wind stops. Meet the new “smart grid.”
The government wordsmiths tell us that RPS is all about investing in clean forms of energy. Again, it sounds good, but it isn’t exactly accurate. RPS backers have flatly rejected calls to include existing hydropower and nuclear plants in their definition of what’s “renewable,” the first of which is truly renewable and the second, with reprocessing, is as close to renewable as a product gets, not to mention that it emits no carbon dioxide.
If the Renewable Portfolio Standard was truly a “standard,” it wouldn’t be mandatory. But since most people probably wouldn’t willingly replace a good product for an inferior one – and pay for the privilege to do so – the government came up with a great name for a plan to force you, through your utility, to do just that.
It’s no secret that politicians often take circuitous legislative routes in the name of political self-preservation. Sure, they could pass a new tax on affordable energy that would accomplish the same thing as an RPS.
But, then politicians’ names would be on the bill. With RPS, the only names you’ll see are the ones from your power company. On your invoice.
Of course, this isn’t the first time the government has employed “standard” code-speak to force people to do things they would never do freely. In 2007, it mandated that we blend ethanol into our nation’s fuel stock. That was called the “Renewable Fuel Standard” (RFS).
Congress set this “standard” at 11 billion gallons for 2008. Somehow, by 2022, that number is supposed to grow to 36 billion – more than half of which has to come from “advanced” biofuels, such as cellulosic ethanol. I guess we better get cracking: commercial-grade cellulosic ethanol doesn’t even exist yet.
But at least on RFS, not everyone has taken the bait. Earlier this month, The New York Times posted a front-page story under the headline: “Ethanol, recently a savior, Is struggling.”
The Times used the word “mandate” to describe RFS no fewer than six times. The renewable fuel standard, now that it has lost its support from green groups in the United States, is now truthfully described as the mandate that it always was.
They don’t just sound alike: RFS is very similar to RPS in at least one more critical respect. Even though the government heaps your tax money on subsidies to support so-called “renewable” energy, it still can’t seem to make it in the market.
Thankfully for its proponents, it doesn’t have to. That’s the beauty of the mandate – and precisely what distinguishes it from a standard.
Plus, it sounds a heck of a lot better.
Dan Kish is senior vice president for policy at the Institute for Energy Research.
