Greater Good

In taking a class on energy policies, I've learned that very rarely do the best ideas for energy production and consumption ever so much as appear before policymakers. That is why we have politicians talking about the Kyoto Protocol and ethanol and hydrogen fuel cells instead of focusing on things that work. But why are they focusing on these? Who is the heavyweight pulling the strings that make it so that no one seems to realize that ethanol is a very poor choice for fuel, especially when it is produced from corn?

We have to understand that what we are talking about here isn't necessarily so much energy policy, but survivability. For example, I look at tax reform and I think tax reform is a good thing. We should switch to a simple tax code that taxes everyone an equal percent. This eliminates all the loopholes, hopefully a large portion of fraud, and doesn't leave people guessing as to how much of their paycheck is actually theirs. However, a simple system like that will hit the accounting market hard, meaning my father could potentially lose a significant portion of his clients, and his firm could go under. So I'm not personally eager for tax reform to go through.

See, what we would be asking here is for certain people to sacrifice their livelihoods for the greater good. Now, there is nothing wrong with the greater good, in and of itself. The greater good is what helps the most people. In a utilitarian point of view, that greater good is not just morally right, but a moral imperative as well. But we also need to understand that when a person's livelihood is at stake, the very thing he or she has worked their entire lives to build, we cannot expect them to simply roll over without a fight.

So how does this relate to energy policies? Whose livelihoods are at stake? We would think that the oil and coal companies would have the loudest voice, since things like ethanol and the Kyoto Protocol gravely threaten these industries. Why then aren't ethanol and the Kyoto Protocol quashed (as they probably should be) instead of sitting on lawmakers' desks receiving intense consideration?

The answer is this. First, the policymakers are professional at one thing: making policies that satisfy their constituents. They are not experts in fields of science, be it medicine or environment or energy or economics. Thus they have to rely on reports from advisers, who in turn receive their data from "experts." This is where survivability comes into play.

The reports that land on politician's desks are in agreement with the source of funding for the reports. In other words, if a researcher is receiving money from the coal or oil industries, their reports are bound to be biased towards the coal and oil industries. Similarly, if the research is funded by environmental groups, the research will find all kinds of horrors that the coal and oil industries are committing against the environment.

So why isn't there an equal share between competing voices? It is because there are self-feeding loops going on. The first is the politician-constituent loop, in which the politician tries to pass policies that will please his constituents. When he pleases his constituents, he gets reelected. The second loop is the politician-funding loop, in which the politician tries to pass policies that will please his or her source of funding.

Now, these loops intertwine. The politician has a hard time reaching his base if he doesn't have the funding to make his voice heard and show how he/she is better than the opposition and getting the people what they want. Therefore, he/she has to convince the people, if they are not already, that what they want is in line with the politician's source of funding. (Or the politician has to find funding from industries already in line with the people.)

Now, who's survivability are we talking about? We are talking about the people's survivability: they want lawmakers to pass laws that help them and stop bills that will hurt them. Thus the people focus on, not the greater good, but their own survivability. But we are also talking about the policymaker's survivability: through both funding and votes, the politician survives by passing legislation, not for the greater good, but for their constituents. And we are also talking about the researcher's survivability: the researcher has to report what is in line with what his/her funding desires, for otherwise they have no funding to live off of.

So, when enough public outcry demands something, policymakers scramble to satisfy, finding constituent groups that will satisfy, who in turn fund studies that will satisfy. The best ideas are lost in that mix because the best ideas focus on the greater good, not necessarily on the majority outcry of the people.