Politicians Promise Quick Climate Action. That's Not The Most Effective Solution.

The Current Reality:

As the Presidential campaigns evolve, candidates’ promises on how they will address the future of energy will inevitably include their solutions for climate change. That articulation is expressed as their public policy mandates.

They will abbreviate complex issues and provide sound-bite solutions, regardless of the implications for our wider economic, social, political or cultural systems. The momentum of popularity and crowd applause, along with endorsements by narrow special interests and the potential campaign funding from both, will drive them to simplicity and clarity for the sake of convenience and communication, not explanation. Their comments about the current system are generally framed in pejoratives.

We hear rhetorical threats and promises: We have but 12 years to reverse course on energy to save the earth; I will ban fracking; the obscene profits of oil companies will pay for the pollution they’ve caused; fossil energy must remain where it is, in the ground; on Day One by executive order, I will do ‘whatever it takes.’ In short, candidates are promising public policy mandates regardless of their personal knowledge or experience in energy or their willful lack of understanding of what they are promising.

Candidates are fundamentally misleading voters about climate change and potential solutions in order to win support . They are also pledging, perhaps without knowing it, economic harm and quality-of-life hardships on the very populations that can least afford to bear them. They discredit a century of sustained, dense, affordable energy supply to reconstruct the world’s largest energy system. They promise to rapidly replace it with the uncertainties of the least dense, alternative and intermittent energy sources regardless of cost, disruption or inefficiency.

And yet climate change must be addressed if the nation will pass along to future generations as livable and productive and safe a world as past and current generations have enjoyed. There is consensus among scientists, environmentalists and energy companies, as well as a majority of the general population, that climate issues are the top public policy priority of our time. But we need to be rational, pragmatic and successful, not just promiscuously political, in order to solve the complex issues surrounding the future of energy and the environment. Public policy mandates made in the heat of campaign competition and implemented when elected could lead to the worst, least successful and devastatingly harmful transformation imaginable.

Here’s why:

The Risk:

Political fiats by politicians can destroy energy, but they can’t produce it. The nation needs molecules and electrons to power the economy and the American way of life. These are the sources of all economic well-being in contemporary life.

Radical mandates will impoverish those closest to the poverty level, create massive unemployment and economic recession across the economy, deliver extraordinary increases in the costs of energy, and limit available supplies resulting in life-threatening outages, blackouts and fuel lines.

And what will those mandates do to solve climate change? Absolutely nothing. The United States acting unilaterally to restructure the energy we use, absent a coordinated and similar effort globally, cannot overcome the unremitting impacts of current energy supplies elsewhere. Political mandates destroy what they intend to achieve, as well as the careers of the political leaders making them.

Political time is defined as the time between the present and the next election. Like the fools’ gold of crash diets, promises made in political time don’t deliver. Candidates for office choose which policies to promote based on intent and expedience. Democracy has many attributes. Its rights and freedoms beat all other governance alternatives. It can also be messy, nasty, unpredictable and untruthful as the electoral process unfolds. And lying is not a crime.

But political-time promises damage the integrity of elections. And two years later we’re right back at it, reversing course on the recent past, correcting the conditions the last candidates created. Government mandates cannot be the source of solutions to climate change.

Enablers and the Power Markets:

In time, carrots win over sticks. Mandating the destruction of the current energy system is the stick. Carrots will enable a complete energy transition over a realistic, adaptive timeframe, delivering permanent and lasting change. The power of markets to change behaviors and preferences, consumer choices and technological solutions is paramount. Such power overwhelms government. Witness the overtaking of communications and information management by the market preferences Silicon Valley has created.

We are forever changed over the course of a few decades, not by political mandate but by the force of markets. We need to provide the enablers of energy change in order to create the market forces that will transition the current system to low- or no-carbon systems over the coming decades. Appropriate enablers will attract investors, innovators and entrepreneurs as well as current companies to pursue technologies that move us from the dominant fossil fuel energy system to low- and no-carbon energy. A price on carbon is the starting point. Additional incentives of tax policies, investment write-offs, government-assisted research and development, enabling regulations and fair market competition would add force and speed to the transformation.

It is inexcusable that political leaders have until now failed to enable a more rapid build out of new energy alternatives and redefined nuclear solutions to produce more zero-carbon energy. They have also not incentivized the re-use of the carbon dioxide waste stream to enable new products that prevent CO₂ release. Most significantly, they have done nothing to enable the direct removal of carbon from the atmosphere. Environmentalists, energy companies and citizens have been requesting help in all these areas for the better part of two decades.

In other words, the failure to create market enablers while we are fighting over government mandates have failed the nation’s energy transition. Where is the shared responsibility and accountability for leadership? Energy is not provided by criminal technologies, practices, companies or people. It has been provided by hard working, intelligent, technically competent people and companies.

Those people and companies enabled building the world’s largest economy and highest quality-of-life on earth. Instead of mandating their demise, let’s enable them and the nation’s future to deliver a low- and no-carbon energy future.

John Hofmeister is the former president of Shell Oil Company, the founding CEO of Citizens for Affordable Energy, and the author of Why We Hate the Oil Companies: Straight Talk from an Energy Insider (2010). He is currently a key member of the United States Energy Security Council, a bipartisan group that includes former Secretary of State George P. Shultz and two former secretaries of defense, as well as three former national security advisers, a former CIA director, two former senators, a Nobel laureate, a former Federal Reserve chairman, and several Fortune-50 CEOs. Hofmeister earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in political science from Kansas State University. In May 2010 he was awarded an honorary doctorate of letters from the University of Houston.

UH Energy is the University of Houston’s hub for energy education, research and technology incubation, working to shape the energy future and forge new business approaches in the energy industry.