One characteristic of the domestic energy economy is the interdependence of market supply, price, and demand among major energy sources. Domestic energy prices, supply, and demand characteristically fluctuate as the market status of one or another source alters.
Another potent influence upon energy development is the availability of investment capital. The domestic commercial nuclear power industry has required large infusions of capital from both private business and federal government to evolve and survive. Renewable energy sources, such as wind, solar, geothermal, and biomass, have historically depended largely for their development upon federal subsidies, tax incentives, and R&D funding. Even so, wind farms, especially, require so much space for giant wind turbines that they often depend upon banks to finance 50 percent of the project cost. And corporate planning for future energy development is usually contingent upon the availability of new capital.42
Energy policy also reacts with acute sensitivity not only to changes in existing supply but also to estimates of future energy availability. While concern over future global crude oil reserves has haunted all national energy policy discourse for many decades, a more recent, if less widely publicized event has been the discovery of significant new domestic natural gas reserves. New estimates, based upon innovations in gas recovery technology, have fortified proponents of new natural-gas fueled electric power plants likely to emit less climate changing gasses than primarily coal-fired installations.
Energy prices are also a major component in the government’s cost of living index and numerous other federal programs, such as entitlements, also indexed to consumer prices. Energy prices are considered by government policymakers to be a measure of consumer economic health and national economic vitality, thus, easily becoming a major cudgel to batter the political opposition or brandish in defense of existing policy in political debate.
Crisis
Crisis, especially when dramatic, media magnified, and ominous, is a potent driver of policy change, often the most powerful force. Over time, crises can release—at least temporarily—energy policy mired for years or decades in Washington political deadlock, creating the punctuated equilibrium characteristic of contemporary energy policymaking since the initial Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) oil embargo of 1972. The political force of crisis is not lost on policy practitioners and stakeholders, who often labor in policy venues to anoint a favored issue a “crisis” and thereby invest it with an urgency it might otherwise lack.
Political Partisanship
National energy issues since the 1970s have been characterized by a gradually increasing partisan cleavage over policy options between presidents, within Congress and among the public. Such vital energy issues as exploration for petroleum reserves in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) and the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS), the pace of future fossil fuel mining, the relative priority for renewable and conventional energy, and the credibility of global climate warming now tend to divide Democrats and Republicans in Washington and among the electorate. Proclaiming an energy issue, or a proposed solution, to be a “Democratic” or “Republican” matter, moreover, arms policymakers with an evocative symbol that may attract to policy debate certain segments of the public with strong partisan sympathies who rally partisans behind a proposed solution.43
In general, Republicans in the White House and Congress have been more favorable than Democrats to relaxing environmental restraints on energy development, to accelerated petroleum and other fossil fuel exploration and utilization, to decreased taxation of energy production and, generally, to less governmental involvement in energy markets. Even before Obama’s presidential commission investigating the Gulf disaster submitted its report to Congress in 2011, combative partisanship surfaced. In the House of Representatives, Republicans alleged, and Democrats denied, that the commission’s secret agenda was to promote Democratic efforts to limit, if not prohibit, future offshore energy exploration.44 When the commission subsequently submitted its recommendations to Congress, Democrats and Republicans on the House committee reviewing the report renewed that debate.
Partisanship has, in many instances, also polarized public opinions about the scientific and technical information supporting one energy policy option or another. This partisan politicization has been especially conspicuous in recent years over the credibility of global climate warming and its scientific basis. For example, Republican voters have been considerably more likely than Democrats to disbelieve in the existence of global climate warming, to attribute climate warming (if it occurred) to nonhuman sources, and to question the credibility of climate warming science and scientists.45 When energy science becomes politicized, the resulting debate may be powerfully polarizing, placing scientists and other technical experts under intense pressure to shape their professional opinions in favor of one side or another and thus to compromise their scientific objectivity. The inherent tension between the objectivity essential to scientific inquiry and the partisanship deeply rooted in contemporary conflict over national energy policy now predictably invests conflict over policy options with assertions that one side or another has compromised the integrity of scientific information to its advantage.
Environmentalism
The environmental movement created a political fusion in which energy and environmental issues are now tightly and durably bonded. A political symmetry emerges: energy policy is now environmental policy; environmental policy is energy policy. The presence of environmentalism in all public discourse about energy policy has become an elemental force in shaping energy regulatory policies and public attitudes about energy regulation.
A recurrent theme in subsequent chapters on specific energy resources is their environmental implications. A few preliminary statistics can suggest the pervasive scope of environmental effects at every stage of energy use—extraction, refining, transportation, and consumption:
Electric utilities produce about 66 percent of the sulfur oxides air emissions in the United States.46
More than 33,000 abandoned hard rock mines, primarily associated with coal extraction, created serious environmental degradation in the twelve western states and Alaska.47
Fossil fuel mining is a major source of surface and groundwater contamination by acid mine drainage; heavy metal contamination; and leaching, soil erosion, and sedimentation.
Environmental standards also influence the market price and competitiveness of different energy sources. Safety standards, for example, raise the capital cost of commercial nuclear power facilities and diminish the competitiveness of nuclear power in many markets where it competes with fossil fuels for electric power generation.
The compounding of environmentalism with energy production defines contemporary public debate about national energy management in several important respects. Current public discussion about energy policy is often framed as a “trade-off” between the various benefits of energy development and environmental protection—or, more fundamentally, as a debate about whether such a trade-off even exists. Public opinion polls, for example, frequently suggest that most of the public perceives, or can be persuaded to perceive, that energy and environmental protection are competing priorities.
Coupling environmental values with energy production has also become a defining framework in policy debate over the future of the public domain that constitutes one-fourth of America’s continental land, the greatest natural inheritance still held by the federal government in trust for the American people. The western