This is part of a series of short posts in which RFF scholars will analyze the environmental plank of the Republican and Democratic Party platforms. This post looks at the Democratic platform. Previous posts analyzed the Republican platform. As with all posts on Common Resources, this and other posts in this series reflect the opinions of the authors alone, not Resources for the Future.
The Democratic Party platform advances an “all of the above” energy policy, by which it means we must make use of all the energy types to meet our needs. To an environmental economist like me, this means at least notionally (if not actually) pricing each type of energy to account for its external costs and then letting the market determine the appropriate mix of fuels. In this case, I cannot reconcile this strategy with another goal in the platform of: generating 80 percent of our electricity from clean sources by 2035. The platform also says that incentives should be extended to clean renewable energy sources. This would be acceptable if the only way to account for the damages caused by fossil energy is to lower the price of renewables rather than raising the price of fossil fuels. But the latter is preferred, say through a carbon tax.
Unsurprisingly in these economic times, government actions, to be taken by either party, are justified by the argument that they will create jobs. But there is no necessary relationship between subsidies to renewables and job creation. Such subsidies may disadvantage other fuels that are more labor-intensive, resulting in net job losses. (By the way, the same can be said for opening up new oil areas for natural gas drilling).
Unlike the Republican Party platform, the Democratic platform focuses on promoting energy efficiency. As a non-polluting "source" of energy, this is a necessary part of an all-of-the-above strategy. But it is not necessarily free unless using less energy has no side effects (say by lowering the quality of light from a compact fluorescent relative to an incandescent bulb). A lot more attention needs to be paid to why the private sector is so slow to adopt energy efficient technologies.
Finally, the Democratic Party platform calls for subsidizing the development of natural gas refueling infrastructure to promote faster and greater penetration of natural gas vehicles. The party takes this need as a given. But why is this important or even necessary? The difference in the global warming potential of gas relative to oil is a close call, even with low fugitive methane emissions. And modern conventional gasoline vehicles emit very lowlittle conventional pollutants. The hHeavy-duty trucks emit diesel particles, which can penetrate deep into the lungs causing a variety of health problems. So substituting cleaner-burning natural gas (in liquefied form to embody more energy) may deliver important air quality benefits. But are subsidies necessary or is the difference in price between fuels (currently well in favor of natural gas) enough to stimulate demand and the infrastructure needed to fill it?
It turns out that even though an LNG-fueled 18-wheeler is tens of thousands of dollars more expensive to purchase, with natural gas prices so low and oil prices (which drive diesel prices) so high, and the trucks using so much fuel (125,000 miles per year and at 5.2 miles per gallon) the economic case for LNG is pretty compelling. As for infrastructure, companies like Chesapeake Energy and Shell Oil, with a large stake in shale gas, are looking for markets in heavy-duty trucks and are planning to build the refueling stations to fill that so far latent demand. While subsidies could, of course, make this all happen faster, why is that necessary? Can the money be spent in a better way? The case has yet to be made one way or the other.
