Guest Blog: EnergyTradeoffs.com

• David Spence is here to announce the launch of a new website, EnergyTradeoffs.com, that he is launching with Sharon Jacobs, Shelley Welton, & me.

By David Spence

EnergyTradeoffs.com is a new web site aimed at a specific audience—those who produce or read law and policy scholarship about the transition to a greener energy mix. It is dedicated to promoting a more thorough understanding of the tradeoffs associated with that transition, particularly the impacts on energy costs (and distribution of costs) and supply reliability. EnergyTradeoffs.com will feature conversations with authors of scholarly articles whose work grapples with transition tradeoffs issues, and avoids the temptation to treat tradeoffs as easy or painless, or to assume them away. We also plan to host a moderated discussion board for energy policy professionals and academics focused on these tradeoff issues.

Since this web site was my brainchild, I thought I would explain why I think its creation is a good idea. I don’t speak for other organizers here, so I hope my friends and colleagues will weigh in on this question as well.

The case for this web site in a nutshell.

We are working from four basic premises:

1. The enormous costs of climate change necessitate a transition to an energy mix characterized by drastically-reduced (or net zero) carbon emissions.
2. Despite technological advancements that make the transition more affordable than ever, the energy system is still characterized by difficult tradeoffs between affordability, reliability, and environmental performance.
3. Reasonable people can disagree about how to balance those tradeoffs.  They are not simple or easy or “win-win,” at least not in every important sense.
4. We should explore those disagreements, because if we don’t understand them we are likely to choose a policy path that turns out to be less effective or more expensive than need be.

So EnergyTradeoffs.com is intended to be a place for people who want to explore and think critically about these issues. It is not intended to be a place to debate whether climate change is real, human driven, or worth addressing (through policy change) now. Nor is it a place aimed at inspiration or political mobilization, or a place to denigrate those who ask difficult questions about the transition. There are lots of other places online to engage the green transition in those ways.

But what about the politics?

There are strategic political reasons why one might not want to talk openly about tradeoffs. Discussing the devil-in-the-details can undermine the task of building support for a policy goal. “Have your cake and eat it” narratives are attractive and easier to sell—for politicians seeking votes, businesses seeking clients, or web sites seeking clicks. This may have been part of what former New York Governor Mario Cuomo meant when he said that “you campaign in poetry [but] govern in prose.” So political strategists advise candidates to focus on ends rather than means, to adopt simpler, positive narratives, and to avoid uncomfortable truths. That idea may be part of the plan to develop and sell the Green New Deal, which articulates a vision of a desirable future state in which these energy tradeoffs have (somehow) been addressed or resolved.

Regardless of whether the political logic of avoiding discussion of tradeoffs is correct, the question of how best to reach the shared goal of a greener energy mix ought to be debatable.  A full, public exposition of the problem ought to promote a better response to it in the end. One of the quotations featured on our web site comes from Steven Spielberg’s (and screenwriter Tony Kushner’s) version of Abraham Lincoln. When radical Republicans tell a politically-cautious Lincoln that he lacks ambition and a moral compass, he responds that a compass can “show you true north,” but it cannot show you the swamps and chasms between you and your destination. In other words, simpler narratives may build support for a path to change that ultimately proves ineffective or unacceptably expensive to a critical mass of voters. Brexit, for example, was sold successfully as a “have your cake and eat it” idea, but few would argue that the UK is now better off for having bought that sales pitch. 

Those of us involved in this site are academics. Our first obligation is to help people understand all the dimensions of a problem. If we are advocates at all, we are educators first and advocates second. We should work to avoid framing these issues in ways that make our preferred outcome seem more attractive by downplaying or ignoring features of the problem. To the contrary, we should think most critically about our preferred alternatives.

Ideally, this web site will help people think about, and develop a fuller understanding of, the practical realities (including the difficulties) associated with a green transition, not to derail it but rather to make it more sustainable and durable.

Grappling honestly with these tradeoffs is uncomfortable

When the politics of a policy discussion are fraught or emotionally-charged, facing the inconvenient truths associated with the issue is difficult for everyone, including academics. But we should do it anyway.

Productive exchanges of views about tradeoffs require both intellectual humility and respectful dialogue, which are in short supply in today’s fractured, polarized and emotional political environment, particularly in semi-anonymous online platforms.

It is well-understood that caring intensely about something triggers motivated reasoning, in all of us. This manifests in all sorts of ways. We care about climate change and its effects, which makes discussing the costs of addressing it uncomfortable (cognitive dissonance). We value our own prior conclusions about and analyses of the issues (confirmation bias). We care about and value agreement with our friends and members of our social networks (cultural cognition and groupthink). These natural human tendencies sometimes lead us to suspend critical thinking about the ideas we want to champion. Since it is much easier to accept (and to recognize) that problem in others than in ourselves, we have to work at it by subjecting our ideas to challenge. 

I have disagreements with some of my very best friends in academia about some of these tradeoffs issues. Exploring how and why we disagree—making those differences explicit and discussing them—is much more valuable to our own understanding, and to the understandings of others who read our work, than burying them in our assumptions or ignoring them altogether. The kinds of insulated, parallel narratives that arise in online communities may persuade community members, but they only educate those audiences when competing narratives intersect in ways that engage the other’s assumptions and arguments fairly.

Framing and reportage

Changes in the media environment also contribute to misunderstanding tradeoffs. For the first few decades of the modern regulatory era, the three broadcast networks and local newspapers fed viewers and readers carefully-curated news, and that curation was based upon journalistic standards that emphasized verifying and re-verifying facts, and aspiring to objectivity.

Today, the very idea of objectivity is rejected by many; and those traditional sources must compete for readers and clicks with outlets that emphasize the sensational or promote a particular political ideology. Moreover, information is transmitted online through news aggregators, or links sent to friends via online social communities. This way of acquiring and digesting (socially) new information tends to skew our understanding of the world, as algorithms feed us more of what we like and less of what we dislike. 

So as political polarization increases the emotional component of policy debates, and online filter bubbles skew the set of energy information to which we are each exposed, it becomes more and more difficult to develop a complete understanding of the tradeoffs associated with a green transition.  We form and harden our beliefs much more quickly in the digital environment. In the debate about the green transition, it becomes more difficult to respectfully debate questions associated with tradeoffs, and much easier to ascribe malicious or otherwise nefarious motives to those whose policy preferences or understanding of the issues differs from ours. No doubt these trend are amplified during the ever-lengthening political campaign season.

Ideally, all of the talented writers and editors on the energy transition beat would regularly frame their stories in ways that are attentive to the seriousness and difficulty of distributional issues, and of cost and reliability tradeoffs. Sometimes writers choose a narrow angle for a story as a response to the perception that that particular angle is under-reported. But to the extent that writers and editors rely on readers to seek out a representative sample of information about energy issues, that reliance is misplaced. Indeed, in the digital environment even the most avid reader would be hard pressed to develop a complete or balanced perspective on the tradeoffs associated with the green transition. So our hope is that people will come to this site to develop a fuller appreciation for the value choices and tradeoffs that will be an unavoidable part of the green transition.

Going forward

This web site is a purely educational, non-commercial effort, one that is only just getting underway, and is operating on a shoestring budget.  We will be adding work by law and policy scholars to the site as our time and resources allow. As noted above, we also plan to roll out a moderated discussion board dedicated to the civil exchange of expert views on these tradeoffs issues, sometime in the fall of 2019. We organizers of the site hope people find it useful.