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| The history of energy consumption in the United States shows how new fuels typically add to an expanding energy supply, rather than displacing other fuels. The historical pattern of adding to the fuel supply underscores the challenge of cutting back on carbon dioxide emission levels solely by increasing alternative energy production. This graph draws on data from the Energy Information Administration's Annual Energy Review 2008 (Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 2009). |
Paul Sabin and Richard Morin/Solutions
Current climate and energy policy debates in the United States rarely involve historians. If you search the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2007 synthesis report, you will not find the wordshistory or historical. Even so, history pervades climate and energy policy discussions. History guides policy choices, inspires proposals for action, and structures institutional development.
Historical interpretations have already played a powerful role in guiding public choices between different national regulatory and tax strategies, even if that role has not been explicitly recognized. Interpretations of the politics of the early 1990s deeply shaped the national debate over whether to reduce carbon dioxide emissions through a cap-and-trade program or through carbon taxes. Many political observers believed that voters harshly punished Democrats in Congress in 1994 after they voted to impose a new energy tax in 1993. At the same time, the sulfur dioxide trading program under the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments seemed to reduce power-plant emissions with comparatively minor political or financial consequences. In theory, a similar cap-and-trade program for carbon dioxide emissions could set an economy-wide cap and allow industries to trade pollution credits, thereby steadily improving efficiency and cutting emissions. Many economists and policy makers believed that a carbon tax would be more transparent, easily administered, and economically efficient than a cap-and-trade program. Yet the competing historical analogies from the 1990s persuaded most Washington politicians and many environmental advocates that a carbon tax would be political suicide. In the end, the cap-and-trade bill also died on the Senate floor, a casualty of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and the political dynamics of the United States Senate.
Proponents of alternative energy likewise have turned to history to find stories that might inspire forceful government action to counter climate change. Proposals that the federal government invest billions of dollars in renewable energy embrace the legacy of the Manhattan Project for the atomic bomb and President John F. Kennedy’s call to put a man on the moon within ten years. The Apollo Alliance, an advocacy group, makes these space program connections explicit in pushing for a multibillion-dollar investment in clean energy. Narrowly focused public projects provide only an imperfect model for humanity’s planet-wide struggle against climate change. But the historical stories factor prominently in the public policy debate.
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