Tag Archive for: Gas Prices

I used to teach public policy development, while a dean at the University of Colorado. Before that, I was lucky to be involved with colleagues at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and other federal agencies in helping develop public policy. Finally, over the years I have had the good fortune to work with federal, state and local governments as well as nonprofit groups and the private sector in carrying out and evaluating programs to implement policies. And I am only 15! Just prematurely gray.

Looking back and thinking forward with Lewis Carroll’s admonition that “It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards,” I have come to the conclusion that few stated public policies come in packaging marked “this policy emanates from careful thinking and reflects a real understanding of cause and effect relationships and impact.” Most public sector policies, particularly those requiring coordination with other policies, are defined in the context of political scientist Charles Lindblom’s science of muddling through.

Many times, government policies appear guided by political intuition and not solid, pre-announcement analysis. When interagency collaboration and coordination concerning policy development is promised, it is often stated with lots of hope but few specific analyses concerning content and impact.  When analysis occurs, it, many times, is sporadic and sometimes suggests agency protectionism for their institution’s existing initiatives and sort of a “not in my back yard” department syndrome. For example, poverty programs were and remain conflicted, some focusing on fixing the environment and the physical characteristics of neighborhoods for the folks who live in them, some on thinning out neighborhoods through desegregation, mobility and income support. Linking the spatial and non-spatial policies together has been and is now difficult because of agency rivalry and claims that each agency’s policies and programs have significant value. Close coordination, they say, would rob America of program diversity and key public-interest objectives. Granting policy priority to one agency is difficult. We were and are told by involved agencies that the nation needs different approaches for the same folks or problems, even though resulting multiple programs overlapped, and often generated minimal funding for each program and an “all of the above” approach.

In a similar vein, job, health, housing and welfare policies allocated and still allocate lots of money for new facilities and services, in the belief that negative indices concerning wellness, behavior or illness would diminish significantly and pretty quickly. Among and between agencies, programs were and are now sometimes competitive, and most also appear based on a lack of a firm comprehension of what happens if and when the policy and related programs are implemented. Many observers often were, and some remain, surprised that new services could increase need-based statistics by bringing out people who required services, medical and otherwise. Surprise, low-income and or sick people, once without services, were and are now finding services and trying to secure them.  As a result of coming out, they are getting counted for the first time! Absence of careful analysis and relevant data often results in a mismatch between service and household need and policy expectations.

Now, what about energy and transportation fuel policies? The ones in place, and those seemingly desired by different political leaders, reflect the same conflicts, ambiguities and analytical weaknesses. “All of the above” is not a policy. It illustrates the failure of policy-making and the power of different constituencies, of which the most powerful is oil, to weaken the nation’s ability to make effective muddling through choices.

We have subsidized the production of oil and, in effect, its derivative gasoline, when the policy was assumedly to increase drilling and production. Yet we have retained and still retain most of the subsidies, even when we have oil surpluses and many analysts on the right and left indicate the subsidies would not be missed and skew expenditures. We restricted the export of crude oil, when supplies were scarce and security issues were front and center. Perhaps legitimately, we have retained and still retain the barriers to export when the prices are low and reserves among oil companies and the federal government appear relatively high. Maybe this is a legitimate policy because of fears concerning the future security of the U.S. Or maybe it is because of a fear of impending higher gas prices, once the Saudis and OPEC resume historical behavior concerning prices. But from a policy perspective, restrictions on exports are not likely to stand, as pressure builds in Congress to eliminate them.

Some environmental groups, aiming for the perfect and not perfectibility, lessen America’s ability to make strategic choices. Their advocacy of electric and fuel-cell cars, the exclusion of alternative fuels and their critique of natural gas-fired power plants — assuming such advocacy is politically successful — mute the nation’s ability to use alternative fuels as a transitional fuel before electric and fuel-cell cars are ready for prime time and a significant market share. Absent strategic long-term policies integrating alternative fuels with electricity, fuel cells and biofuels, Americans will lose tangible health benefits, environmental improvements, GHG emission reductions, and security options.

Let’s improve the muddle of muddling through. Getting to strategic oil and transportation strategies will involve a good deal of public and interest-group consensus-building, and some willingness to buttress the development with fresh data and analysis — knowing we will never have enough analysis and data to secure absolute wisdom about cause and effect relationships and impact.

We can begin with what we know relatively quickly: The textbooks that students read in high school and college note that America is the land of the free (or almost free) market and the home of risk-taking entrepreneurs. Nope! At least not now with respect to oil and gasoline! Oil companies, behaving like oligopolies, have convinced Congress to turn a deaf ear to policy and legislative options concerning open fuel markets and competition from alternative fuels at the pump. Not good for consumers!

Similarly, the EPA, while indicating that E85 is superior to gasoline concerning most environmental measures, including GHG emissions, has yet to simplify and shorten certification procedures of automobiles for flex-fuel vehicle status. In this context, it has certified only one conversion kit to convert older internal combustion engines to FFV status, resulting in high prices and minimal sales.

EPA has a complex agenda and has initiated many important initiatives to control and reduce GHG emissions and reduce environmental pollution. It has super leadership and bright staff. It’s facing budget constraints and conflicting external and perhaps internal debate over different alternative fuels. Hopefully, it will focus on making the certification processes more efficient, less time-consuming and less costly.

Weaning the nation off of gasoline, as the president has indicated, should be a national goal. It will require, paraphrasing the poet Robert Frost, many miles to go and explicit as well as implicit promises to keep, concerning the science and practice of creating more effective muddling in the creation of national oil and fuel policies. I wish Frost, for the purposes of this column, had used a different word than miles.  But such is life, and he remains one of my favorite poets.