Long-term planning

Long-term planning
Administration needs affordable-energy plan, and Americans need to support it

July 17, 2001

Support for the president’s energy plan is waning, because consumers believe the crisis is past.

That may be true for the moment. But Vice President Cheney, as well as Cabinet members and legislators, are traveling around the country reminding Americans that what goes up can come down, and vice-versa.

Despite dire predictions of severe shortages and record-high prices for electricity in California, supply has been adequate and wholesale prices are lower than they’ve been for more than a year. Nationwide, gasoline prices have been dropping since Memorial Day, and natural gas prices have also dropped dramatically. We’ve had no shortages, no lines, few brownouts.

"Because there’s been downward movement today doesn’t preclude there from being upward movement tomorrow," White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said Monday, and he’s right. One reason for the panic of the past few months has been our failure to correctly project future energy demand and to create the supply to fill it. There’s no instant way to generate substantially more power, and other commodities, including natural gas, heating oil and gasoline, require processing and transportation.

California’s problem grew in part out of the technology boom. Server farms, which supply information to consumers across the nation and around the world, require substantial electricity to run and substantially more to cool. That industry boomed very quickly, and changes in information technology have not slowed. While it’s reasonable to assume that efficiencies will develop, it’s also logical to predict increasing demand for electricity.

The way the Internet currently functions, it’s difficult to link energy demand with information resources consumed thousands of miles away, and that difficulty allows Colorado consumers to deny they have a problem "like California." The truth is that California’s problem is ours as well, and its abatement is temporary. There’ll be another surge of demand, in California or elsewhere, caused by a product or service we utilize. Next time it might be in Colorado.

Part of the energy problem already is. The price of gasoline surely has affected our tourism revenues, and the multiplier there is steep. The cost of reaching a Colorado destination is small compared to the amount of money spent once a visitor has arrived, and yet the price at the pumps has served to deter visitation. A steady supply of fuel at an affordable price benefits us well beyond our own driving expenses.

Likewise, the price of heating is a basic component of the economy. It’s a cost of living, a cost of doing business, and a factor in how comfortable Colorado is in the winter. A reasonable gas bill is essential to the minimum-wage workers who drive so much of the tourist business, and it can also make a substantial difference in the brown cloud to which woodstoves contribute.

Right now we’re breathing a little more easily because prices are down and the supply seems stable. It would be foolish to believe those conditions are permanent. The Bush administration needs to continue its efforts to institute a sensible, long-term energy policy that benefits all Americans, not just stockholders in oil companies, and Americans need to have the good sense to support it.