Congress may pass an energy and climate bill this fall.  Or just an energy bill.  Or just the natural gas vehicles bill that Senator Reid supported within the past few weeks.  Or maybe nothing. 

There is no doubt, however, that the issue will be the subject of much debate this fall.

Moreover, this may be the last chance to get something right for a decade.  Major energy legislation happens once a decade (the late 1970s, 1992′s Energy Act and the 2005 Energy Policy Act).  EISA 2007 was an exception to the rule driven by the inconvenience of entering an election year with oil heading past $100 per barrel on its way to $147.  If we do something this year or next, it will be because of a change in Administration in the midst of a period of great turmoil in the energy world, and, perhaps, the desire to finally address climate change.  We cannot waste this opportunity.

Yet, one can only wonder how we can get it right if we remain energy illiterate. 

Today, on NPR, a reporter discussing Secretary Clinton’s upcoming trip to Africa noted that she was stopping in Angola, a major exporter to the US of oil and natural gas.  While we do import oil from Angola, according to EIA we have never imported a molecule of natural gas from Angola, although there are plans to import Angolan gas to the United States in the future. 

In 2001, President Bush argued that we should drill in ANWR to help resolve the California electricity crisis even though virtually no power is generated in California from oil. 

In the 2008 campaign, Senator Obama pledged to eliminate the need for oil from the entire Middle East and Venezuela, and Senator McCain pledged to end our dependence from oil in the Middle East to prevent us from having to send men and women into conflict in that region. Yet, as we know and have explained elsewhere, we rely on a world market for oil, a market with a single price. There is no such thing as eliminating our reliance from any particular supplier, including those from whom we actually obtain no oil. 

And we regularly hear claims that increasing power generation from renewable energy will improve our energy security.  But since our energy security is a function of our reliance on oil, which is used for transport, it is unclear how generating clean power will improve our energy security unless and until we use that clean power to displace oil, which cannot occur until we have electric cars operating at scale, a critical goal but one which likely lies decades away. 

I only hope that as we get more deeply into the energy policy debate, we make sure that we get the facts right, because if the facts are wrong there is little chance that the policy will be right.

E.M.

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