Common Sense Environmental/Energy Policy

OK, first a confession...I used to lobby for the energy industry. I left that job, and I have at times tried without success to work for the environmental community. I have often wondered why they would not jump at the chance to hire someone who is intimately familiar with their enemy. I guessed it was because I was not pure of heart.

The environmental community in America has been responsible for a lot of public policy good over the years -- the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts among them, but they have also stopped many incremental environmental improvements. The environmental activists and their leaders have often demanded that they get the "whole pie" or they didn't want anything -- a petulant child's attitude towards public policy. It is disturbing watching the environment slowly be destroyed because the community most active in trying to protect it does not understand the importance of small victories.

There are numerous examples, and one I have personal experience with is the Three Gorges Dam in southern China. Several heavy industry companies based here in the US wanted to see if the US government would support their involvement in the construction of the world's largest hydro-electric project. Unfortunately, the environmental community here in America successfully blocked US involvement in the project with the naive hope that without US involvement the project would fall by the wayside. Fortunately for China and my fellow asthma sufferers in that nation the Chinese government went ahead with their project, and I believe it is now slated to "come on line" in 2009, and become the second man-made object that can be viewed from space (the Great Wall being the other).

Now, why the environmental community was right to object to the project was due to the vast numbers of Chinese needed to be relocated due to the lake the dam would build, and the potential devastation to three forms of wildlife dependent upon the river. However, they did not examine the possible alternative nor realize the political realities of the project. The Chinese government is not popularly elected, and certainly would never bow to the pressure brought by the global environmental community. The Chinese government also steadfastly maintained that the dam would also serve as a much needed flood control on the river, as floods annually took the lives of hundreds of thousands of Chinese living in the lower river basin (though I do not know if this assertion is true, I never heard anyone try to counter the claim). And finally the vast amount of electricity produced by the dam could only be replaced by building 250 average size coal-fired power plants, and the long-term environmental damage caused by such a decision certainly would have been significantly worse. The most disturbing item was not any of these facts, but simply that the environmental community thought the Chinese people did not need the power.

This is only an example, and should serve as a reminder that not every thing the energy industry does is bad, just like everything the environmental community supports is necessarily good. We all need to remember that the best place for public policy to succeed is for all sides to meet in the middle, find a common ground and a workable solution for all sides. When one side demands complete victory we all lose.