[sustran] "Sustainable" Transport in the US?

Chris Zegras czegras at MIT.EDU
Fri May 11 00:56:16 JST 2001


Not with this administration...

Sorry, this is long and slightly off the list's main topics.  But, useful 
to know what we're up against.

(From Slate - http://slate.msn.com/framegame/entries/01-05-09_105848.asp)

frame game
The Energy Crisis
By William Saletan
Wednesday, May 9, 2001, at 4:00 p.m. PT

The best issue Democrats developed against President Bush in
his first 100 days was the environment. It took months of
controversial decisions by Bush—cutting the Environmental
Protection Agency budget, proposing oil drilling in Alaska's
Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, burying the Kyoto global
warming treaty, renouncing his pledge to cap carbon dioxide
emissions, and suspending new limits on arsenic in drinking
water—to establish the broad pattern of behavior necessary to
give Bush a bad image on the environment in general.
Bush's surrogates point out that he has taken pro-environment
positions on preserving wetlands, restricting lead emissions,
and cleaning up urban lots. They also note that Bush may
eventually adopt tougher arsenic limits. But as long as
they're debating the question of who's more assiduous about
environmental protection, they can't win. They need to change
the question. That's why, in the Bush administration, the
environment issue is out, and the energy issue is in.
You don't need to look further than the prices at your local
gas station, or the recurring news stories about rolling
blackouts in California, to see that energy is a real
problem. But gas prices and blackouts were a problem last
year, too. The difference is, President Clinton and Vice
President Al Gore had no political incentive to describe
those events as part of an energy emergency. Gore was running
for president as an environmentalist against a former oilman
(Bush) and an oil services company CEO (Dick Cheney). The
only question Democrats wanted to debate was whether Big Oil
was gouging consumers.
By packaging their oil drilling plans and relaxed air
pollution standards together with rising gas prices, winter
heating costs, and summer blackouts in various regions of the
country, Bush and Cheney have built an issue that is stronger
than the sum of its parts. While the elements are
indisputable, the notion that they ought to be viewed as a
system, with Bush's proposals seen as an integrated solution
to an integrated problem, is in part a product of public
relations. White House principals and aides speak constantly
of an "energy strategy" to repair an "energy crisis" caused
by the absence of a Clinton "energy policy." "What people
need to hear loud and clear is that we're running out of
energy in America," Bush declared last week. Talk of an
"energy crisis" now permeates the media, and polls confirm
that most Americans believe such a crisis has arrived.
Right now, most Americans oppose drilling in ANWR. But the
more we discuss that idea in terms of energy rather than the
environment, the more the political equation changes.
Economic considerations enumerated by Bush and Cheney—"sharp
increases in fuel prices from home heating oil to gasoline,"
electrical threats to "the high-tech industry," strangled
economic growth, and layoffs—add weight to the pro-drilling
side of the equation. National security concerns—the
dependence on foreign oil that, in Cheney's words, makes it
"easy for a regime such as 
 Iraq to hold us hostage"—enter
the debate as well. Bush's and Cheney's careers in the oil
industry begin to look more like expertise than like a
conflict of interest. "It's useful to have somebody who knows
something about the energy business involved in the effort,"
Cheney argued yesterday on CNN. Eventually, the energy side
of the equation overwhelms the environmental side. As EPA
Administrator Christie Whitman explained recently in defense
of Bush's reversal on carbon dioxide: "He was right, all
things considered. We're in an energy crisis."
Environmentalists hope to head off this strategy by
distinguishing energy conservation from production. Through
conservation, they argue, we can have sufficient energy and
environmental protection without additional drilling or
burning of fossil fuels. Bush and Cheney respond in part by
dissolving the same dilemma from the opposite direction.
Through modern technology, they argue, we can have additional
drilling and fossil-fuel burning without undue environmental
harm. But the energy framework also brings into the
discussion a problem to which environmentalists have no good
answer because it's about energy, not the environment. There
isn't enough "infrastructure"—refineries, gas pipelines,
power plants, and electrical grids—to process and distribute
energy in the United States. The fact that solving this
problem poses no clear environmental threat—and that Bush and
Cheney, unlike their opponents, have been talking about it
for months—adds credibility and coherence to their way of
framing the debate.
Having enlarged the energy side of the debate, Bush and Cheney
proceed to narrow and isolate the environmentalist side. They
portray their opponents as arguing not for more conservation
but for conservation alone. Outlining the White House energy
strategy in a speech last week, Cheney accused environmental
groups of falsely suggesting that "we could simply conserve
or ration our way out of the situation we're in." Days later,
Bush took issue with "naive" critics who "say that we can be
okay from an energy perspective by only focusing on
conservation. We've got to find additional supplies of
energy." As Bush and Cheney see it, energy advocates are for
conservation, but conservationists are against energy.
The subtlest and most decisive art in any framing contest is
convincing the public that some things—those that are
politically advantageous or that you want to change—are open
to human deliberation and intervention, whereas other
things—those that are politically problematic or that you
don't want to change—are objective and immovable. In this
case, environmentalists want you to think that fossil-fuel
drilling and burning are inherently too dirty and that
nuclear energy is inherently too dangerous, whereas
technologies for alternative and renewable energy are getting
better all the time. Therefore, we should give up on the
former and commit ourselves to perfecting the latter. The
media have largely bought into
[http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/06/national/06CONS.html?searchpv=site03 ] 
this spin.
Cheney has reversed this tactic. Posing as the open-minded
optimist, he challenges Americans to consider new "clean
coal" technologies and horizontal drilling methods that could
make drilling in ANWR safe and unobtrusive. But when it comes
to boosting energy efficiency and developing alternative
energy sources, Cheney shuts down the discussion by asserting
objective limits. "For now, we must take the facts as they
are," he says. "Whatever our hopes for developing alternative
sources and for conserving energy 
 fossil fuels provide
virtually 100 percent of our transportation needs and an
overwhelming share of our electricity requirements. For years
down the road, this will continue to be true. 
 The options
left to us are fairly limited. 
 We must take the facts as
they are. 
 To try and tell ourselves otherwise is to deny
reality."
Once conservationism is stripped of its exclusive claim to
environmental protection and is pitted against the nation's
economic well-being, its moral superiority can be turned
upside down. It is reduced, in Cheney's words, to a
philosophy of "austerity," an attack on America's "standard
of living," and an implicit accusation that the country's
energy woes "represent a failing of the American people."
Against this self-loathing mentality, Bush spokesman Ari
Fleischer argues that energy use signifies health and virtue:
"The President also believes that the American people's use
of energy is a reflection of the strength of our economy, of
the way of life that the American people have come to enjoy."
On this Nietzschean view, strength and courage lie not in
conservation but in acquisition and production. "People have
used the conservation arguments in order to avoid some of the
tough issues associated with increasing supply," says Cheney.
If building more nuclear power plants or drilling in ANWR
"was easy, the Clinton administration would have done it.
They ducked it for eight years."
The final advantage of the energy framework is that it allows
Republicans to sweep conservation and environmental issues
into the path of their anti-government message. In a
traditional liberal attempt to frame the debate in terms of
big business, environmentalists depict Bush and Cheney as
tools of corporate polluters. But if the problem is
insufficient energy production, then energy producers and
consumers are on the same team, and those who want the
government to limit production and consumption are our enemy.
"Already some groups are suggesting that government should
step in to force Americans to consume less energy," Cheney
warned last week. Instead of restricting what companies can
charge for energy, Bush called for "regulatory relief to
encourage an increase in the amount of supplies available for
the consumers." Slowly but surely, the White House is pumping
a new psychology into the political environment. Whether
that's progress or pollution is up to you.


--------------------------------------------------
Christopher Zegras
MIT * Center for Environmental Initiatives * Room E40-468
1 Amherst Street * Cambridge, MA 02139
Tel: 617 258 6084 * Fax: 617 253 8013



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