Energy advice for President-elect Barack Obama

In a post election article from Bloomberg.com, Kateri Callahan is quoted as saying President-elect Obama “will put forward an energy bill ahead of a climate bill.'' Callahan, president of the Alliance to Save Energy, an energy advocacy group in Washington that represents 3M Co., Areva SA and Dow Chemical Co went on to say the “ bill will stimulate the economy toward development and use of energy efficiency and clean energy sources and technology.''

I’ve been covering energy related issues for a long time and I know most of the immediate problems we have no are solely political. We shouldn’t be having an energy crisis, failing economy, or facing severe climate problems. In fact the solutions to all three are connected to a hand full of simple solutions that could be implemented by simply drawing attention to them. We don’t have to actually pass any new laws or create expensive governmental institutions to force them out of the dark closets on Capitol Hill they’re hidden in. All we need is to know what they are so the people who stand between our understanding the truth about their possibilities become transparent and vulnerable to the winds of change our new President promises.

These are solutions that do not require subsidies or mandates but simply for the American consumer to know what kinds of fuel products we’re being forced to buy over better choices that we aren’t being told about. Educated consumers are the best regulators of a free market. That’s how a free market economy supported by a democratically elected government is supposed to really work, the government tells us the truth and we act on it. The outgoing administration thinks capitalism means people with lots of money should be able to make more of it by selling us anything they want without the government standing in their way by honestly informing us about what our choices are. Democrats think the government should administer every aspect of our daily lives which only leads to corruption and tyranny.

Conservatives think they should be able to sell us whatever they want without bribing the government to be allowed to do so. Democrats think the government should be paid off first. But a real free market is controlled best by the consumer as supported by an open an honest government. It’s how our economy got so strong over the last two centuries under this American experiment we call freedom. The opposite is true for why it came apart so fast.

It seems that ever since 40K retirement funds were invested as a way to make sure Wall Street has enough money to guarantee all the graduates of Harvard and Yale they’ll be able to become rich without working for a living where we’ve all become investors in the other teams game-plan for us, we don’t like to question what we consume for fear of hurting a market our future depends on. It seems we’ve taught ourselves as a society to allow the basic principles of a free market economy to fall by the wayside in favor of supporting conflicting interests in our investments in the stock market. We now accept that it’s OK to be ripped off without question by the people we’re supposed to demand quality products and services from while holding back our hard earned dollars from them when they don’t live up to our expectations. But with the economy failing, we’re forced to look at the true cost of what we’re paying for while most of us are losing what we thought they had in our 401K plans.  

This is the same kind of conflicting interests the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has with administering our renewable ethanol fuels program while at the same time it is suppose to provide regulatory outsight to the same programs that are supposed to be run by the United States Department of Energy. I remember back to the first months of the ethanol program beginning in May of 2006 when the EPA waived ethanol refinery emission regulations allowing them to pollute twice as much. It wasn’t something they had to do. China builds ethanol production plants that don’t pollute. It was only done as an matter of convenience for an industry that the EPA has partnered with while at the same time is also supposed to be an environmental regulatory agency it as well.

There are a lot of other problems with ethanol with regard to how bad it is for the environment and human health that are being systematically ignored because the EPA’s mission has changed from insuring we have safe air to breath to being our new energy providers. So now they use their authority over the environment to allow their pet projects to be successful at any cost. It’s no different than if we allowed EXXON/Mobile to police refineries to decide what’s safe for our environment.

But bad news is not what this article is about. It’s about how Barack Obama can show what he’s truly made of, that he is a leader and not a follower of big money donors that he abstained from taking money from while setting records for the amount of campaign money he raised. This story might help him steer clear of a few dips and bad turns in the road that he might not know about which could throw him off his balance if he blindly runs into them.

The Clean Air Act of 1990

In 1989, the environmentalist movement reached its peak of success before its popularity started to dwindle later as left wing liberal politics took too much control of their issues. What drove their success was smog that hung over most of the nation, especially around metropolitan areas where it clouded the skies even on sunny days with brown and grey smoke screens. This caused average Americans to overlook the more nonsensical political stances that came out of the environmentalist community in hopes they could get the smog issue dealt with.

About the time they had the Bush administration pushed to the wall on the smog issue, an idea was floated around Washington about an additive to gasoline that increases emissions of formaldehyde that would mix with the smog and dissolve it in the suns rays. Then it would become low level ozone and be carried out over the Atlantic Ocean by the jet stream to be dumped mixed with rain. I wasn’t surprised when I didn’t hear anything more about it. It sounded like a horrible idea and I was surprised anyone would even bring up such a thing. But since I lived so close to a heavily trafficked highway, I hoped other ideas would come up for how to clean up the air I breathed.

Sure enough a few months later, an article in the Washington Times came out talking about a gasoline additive called polyisobutylene (PIB) that would make gasoline burn more efficiently giving 20% more mileage with 70% less pollution. I was very pleased with this idea and wasn’t surprised at all to see the Clean Air Act debate that had been evolving on a political back burner become an issue of central importance after pressure from the environmentalist community was put on the Bush administration to force the oil industry use this additive.

The oil industry however wasn’t about to start producing gasoline that gave more mileage. That would have been like taking a 20% cut in sales. But with Bush wanting to be elected for a second term, he decided he was going to makeover his image to become an environmentalist president and force the oil companies to add PIB to gasoline anyway. After a lot of wrangling around Washington that concluded with the oil companies acknowledging they were not going to use this additive without being forced to, they hinted they would agree to use another additive called MTBE which was said to be almost as good as PIB and even had PIB in it.

At that time, gasoline was so cheap that the only concern for wanting a gasoline additive was air quality. So the increase in mileage wasn’t considered important. These days, having 20 percent more mileage would be heaven sent even if it happened to pollute more. But since pollution is simply unburned fuel, getting more miles means less pollution.

It should have sent up red flags when it came out that MTBE causes a loss of mileage. In fact it did raise deep concerns for the scientific community weighing in on the Clean Air Act debate. About the time the legislation was heading to the congressional waste basket, Bush announced he would appoint a special task force to the EPA to look into scientists concerns about MTBE. He promised if the scientists concerns turned out to be valid, he would support forcing the oil industry to use PIB instead.  So scientist gave the Clean Air Act their blessing in hopes it would lead to PIB being added to gasoline. But the EPA never conducted the studies. Instead the MTBE program was given a full head of steam and now has polluted much of the groundwater in the US. It was replaced with ethanol in May of 2006 which is how the EPA began administering fuel programs instead of making sure they work without polluting.

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