By Corey Pein
After Wednesday’s OPEC meeting and in time for yesterday’s papers, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said the Iraq war could take the price of oil up to $100 a barrel. Who cares? Apparently, not a lot of editors, judging by the play his remarks got. But for a moment, entertain the notion that the leader of a major-oil producing country was even half-right: In this case, it would mean that a lot of people lose their jobs this year and next. Or, you know, freeze to death. Sounds like a campaign issue to us.
Of course, President Chavez has an agenda — up to a point, America’s loss is his gain — and just because he said it doesn’t mean it will happen. But, as the candidates know and voters feel, oil prices are higher in absolute dollars than they’ve ever been in — even though OPEC nations are producing as much as they ever have. Demand continues to outrun production, and there are no significant price decreases in sight. Journalists owe their audiences an explanation — and since we could wait until the Iraq war becomes a snowball fight for either campaign to instigate a serious discussion of energy policy, reporters shouldn’t just stand around waiting for a press release on this one.
Unfortunately, news from the energy world is usually relegated to the business section, where it is read only by people who understand what a hedge fund is. In this election season, with its $2-and-up gas prices, oil news has occasionally seeped onto the op-ed pages. But it deserves more. As the September 8 Financial Times reported, Bush and Kerry agree on encouraging development of hybrid cars that burn less gasoline and on somehow, some way, reducing dependence on oil imports, but the candidates “do have important energy policy differences.” In broad terms, Bush wants to expand the energy supply — a task that even oil executives deem a little Quixotic — while Kerry seeks to control demand, an idea with implications that the American public greets with rage, yawns, or half-hearted nods.
It doesn’t help that most energy stories on TV are framed as little more than plaints for lower gas prices. You know the routine. Interview people at gas pumps. Quote gripes. Shrug shoulders. End on bereaved gas station owner saying, “somebody’s got to do something.” We seldom hear or read that lowering gas prices is probably impossible (if for no other reason than because as a finite commodity becomes rarer, its price increases). But since both candidates are promising victory in a war on terror and evil, and the press seems to think that’s reasonable, Campaign Desk can’t say we’re surprised that the press is playing see-no-evil-hear-no-evil in the face of a clear inevitability: higher oil prices.
The most prominent coverage of the candidates’ oil policies has appeared, not surprisingly, in the Wall Street Journal (after all, there are portfolios to at stake). The lede to an August 9 story plainly summarized the Bush and Kerry policies: “President Bush’s main answer to high oil prices is more supply: promoting domestic-oil production by easing regulations and offering tax breaks. John Kerry emphasizes reducing demand and fostering alternative fuels such as solar and wind power.”
Okay so far. Unfortunately, the Journal didn’t follow up on the consequences, or the feasibility, of either plan. Had they investigated, the Journal’s reporters would’ve found that both “solutions” — domestic drilling and alternative fuels — are largely happy-talk fantasies. Without major changes in the way America runs itself, the Energy Department believes that “wind power may find itself still a marginal source of electric power supply.” A December 2002 report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, using Energy Department figures, found that for the world economy to keep up a moderate rate of growth for the next two decades, production capacity in the Middle East needs to increase by more than 75 percent, to 51 million barrels per day. Barring divine intervention, that’s just not going to happen. (The CSIS report also points out that widely-used government projections are based on the blue-sky assumption that conservation goals will be met.) Energy Department figures show that even opening the Arctic National Wildlife refuge would at best maintain Alaska’s now-declining oil production at around 6 million barrels per day. None of which is comforting. But it is where serious debate begins.
If the Wall Street Journal is designed as a capitalist’s tip sheet, television is more like a soothing salve for consumer use. So Campaign Desk was happy to find a brief NBC News report from August 6 about Bush and Kerry’s different approaches to “the oil problem.” Opening with the usual laments about gas-pump sticker shock and Kerry’s refrain that “no young American in uniform should ever be held hostage to America’s dependence on oil in the Middle East,” reporter David Gregory went on to state a simple fact that politicos are loath to note. “All the talk of energy independence is simply unrealistic because the United States consumes far more energy than it can produce.” How do you like that splash of ice water with your dinner? Someone at GE must’ve fallen asleep at the switch.
Also breaking form (or stereotype), the September 7 USA Today carried a story on the front of its Money section (that’s the one color-coded green) titled, “Canada drips with oil, but it’s tough to get at.” Turns out Canada has a single deposit of about 1.6 trillion barrels (to Saudi Arabia’s 262 million), but as the headline suggests, it’s hard to extract and expensive to refine. After a nice, readable — and at 1,700 words, long for Gannett — tour through the tribulations of global oil production, reporter James Cox ends with another reminder from energy expert Mike Rodgers: “You hear a lot of talk about gaining independence from Middle East oil. … That can’t happen as long as demand keeps growing. The only way to truly gain independence from Middle East oil is for us to do something about demand growth and develop other energy sources.”
Why? As USA Today explained, Canadian oil is difficult to get out from under all those mountains, and messy to refine, whereas in Saudi Arabia, getting good crude is “as easy as poking a straw in the ground.” Indeed, with 57 percent of the world’s proven reserves, the Persian Gulf remains the slick black thread by which the global economy swings, or hangs. Policy wonks know it, candidates know it, business people know it, Arabs know it, and voters should know it, too.
Ultimately, stories like USA Today’s are heartening only in the sense that they appear at all. When it comes to the journalism of energy policy, fact-checks are few, analysis is absent, and follow-up is well-nigh unheard-of.
Given that it’s established that the U.S. must rely on Middle Eastern oil as long as we want to maintain our current lifestyle, journalists need to keep asking questions. The first of these should be, which do we want more: a comfortable standard of living, or a foreign policy that keeps us out of regional conflicts?
That’s a tough question. If either of the candidates has an answer, he’s keeping mum about it. And so are the reporters covering them.
Corey Pein was an assistant editor at CJR.