Those 97 Quadrillion BTUs 

Editorial / Wall Street Journal 18may01

In 1999, America's men, women, children, cats and dogs, PCs, family cars, Discmen and DVDs, WalMarts, hair dryers, faxes, airplanes, kidney machines, tractors, hi-fi's and all the rest used about 97 quadrillion British thermal units of energy. Like it or not, that's us -- 97 quadrillion BTUs. Now it's the morning after the release of President Bush's energy plan, and from the shape of the "debate" so far, we're tempted to say, who needs it?

Democrats and green groups are calling down acid rain on the heads of Messrs. Bush and Cheney. "A cesspool of polluter giveaways" -- the Sierra Club. Bush and Cheney "received millions from old friends in the energy industry" -- the Natural Resources Defense Council. "The same tired old Republican playbook: cast blame, insist on extreme anti-environmental proposals" -- Dick Gephardt

It is the position of this newspaper, unreservedly, that the conscious purpose of George Bush's energy plan cannot conceivably be to rape the Alaskan tundra, pillage the Dakotas' wilderness, fill the Gulf of Mexico with leaking oil or unloose clouds of radiation across New England. The plan's purpose is modest.

It is to ensure that the American people will be able to lead their daily lives next year essentially as they did last year, with some margin for the needs of upward economic growth that the U.S. has achieved, without complaint, since the energy miracles of the Industrial Revolution. Once the essential goal of supplying 100 quadrillion BTUs of energy for daily life is underway, a sensible nation should be able, at the margin, to take steps to also protect their environment from a "cesspool of pollution."

Doing both will require a degree of common sense. Electric cars might well be better than gas guzzlers. But you can't simultaneously champion electric cars and then oppose the construction of more power plants to supply the cars' electricity. That of course is what California did, and now the whole world equates "California" with the consequences of nonsense.

By any measure electricity is astonishingly clean. But a sensible environmentalist can't oppose coal-fired generation because of greenhouse gases and also oppose the Bush proposal to revive nuclear power. This is nihilism. Renewable energy? It accounts for 10% of U.S. energy production; solar heating is 1% of that 10% and nearly all solar devices are sold to heat swimming pools.

Conservation is fine, but the best way to make 97 quadrillion BTUs cleaner is by making them more efficient. Efficiency is a product of better technology, which is found and then spread via reinvested capital, or profits. To oppose this process is to favor an entirely different economic system than the one we've had since Columbus landed.

Ironically, just as the debate over the Bush plan begins, higher energy prices are already causing huge amounts of capital to flow into new infrastructure projects, both power plants and refineries. In energy production, without question, the market works.

But we still need a federal energy policy, by Mr. Bush or someone. That's because Congress and the bureaucracies say where, when and how you can discover, ship and generate energy. If you talk to people in the energy business, they'll tell you the Clinton Administration suppressed energy production by creating an ultimately incoherent patchwork of energy decisions, and nondecisions.

Energy production obviously requires massive inputs of capital over long time frames, and no company will do it without predictability from regulators. Bill Clinton's late-term burst of "monument" creation was the antithesis of rational policy-making; better had he done it in year one, so energy producers could plan, than in year eight. Those late Clinton environmental decisions were wholly about Campaign 2000's politics. Much of the Bush proposal -- on getting approvals for pipelines, exploration and construction -- is an effort to rationalize U.S. energy production, surely a worthy goal.

We believe, though, that rather than sell the plan by merely invoking "crisis," Mr. Bush would have better served our politics by defending his energy policy as simply the basis for the way Americans have chosen to live.

Extreme greens are at least honest enough to admit they want a more primitive, austere, less populated America. They want the past 150 years' steady upward growth stopped. Unfortunately the politicians who claim to speak for the greens -- a Tom Daschle, Dick Gephardt or Al "Fate of the Earth" Gore -- will never directly tell John Sweeney's unionists that the goal is to stop their purchase of a Ford Explorer for family vacations or a centrally air-conditioned home. This would require the polls and the press to produce a more complicated political discussion, weighing benefits against costs.

Instead, you are about to watch U.S. energy policy become a death struggle over oil and caribou in the Arctic north. The debate would sound the same if we were drilling on the moon.

That unimaginable one-year number -- 97 quadrillion BTUs of energy -- simply describes the daily life of the American people in the 21st century. It is who and what we are. A real debate over the Bush energy plan would answer this: Do we want more of what we are, or less? There is enough content in the Bush energy plan to begin to answer those questions. First, someone in Washington has to have the courage to pose them.