What Works?

The issues of conservation, the environment, and energy have enormous implications not only in terms of those issues specifically, but also for regional conflict in the United States. If we are to have any kind of resolution of these issues, there must be a sense of equity, that everyone is sacrificing equally. If there is a perception of inequity, then all of the ingredients are there for social unrest.

Resource reality

I think a major generator of regional problems is that oil is a finite diminishing resource. That is a reality around which everything else revolves. Politically, the Republicans would argue production, production, production—that the way out of the dilemma of a finite diminishing resource is to produce it faster. My understanding of resource management is that when you have something that is diminishing, you try to husband it and rely more on things that are inexhaustible. A production scenario is a drain-America-first approach. That may be all right for us, but can we defend that point with our grandchildren?

The Democrats, on the other hand, will tell you that the energy crisis is a function of the oil companies—that somehow if you could put Mary Poppins at the head of Exxon, the problems would go away.

Both of these approaches are equally absurd, equally rhetorical, and equally successful. When talking to the convinced, they are very powerful. And that is basically how most people address the issue: we are awash in rhetoric, not to mention hypocrisy, when what we need is a careful sorting and weighing of the facts and values involved in making—or not making—a decision.

For example, a contentious issue in the Northeast is offshore drilling on Georges Bank. Oil does exist there, but apparently only in limited amounts, and its development has serious implications both for the fishery resource and for tourism. The exploration and production of that oil therefore must be done in a way that recognizes the regional needs for tourism and fishery development to remain intact.

Let me use an example of how this plays itself out in the real political world. The 1980 Alaska lands bill offered a classic example of confrontation between regional interests and what is perceived to be the national good. Those who wanted a more development-oriented Alaska lands bill argued, in effect, that "This is our land, and we'll do what we want with it." Those on the other side argued that much of Alaska was federal land—national parks, wildlife refuges, and wilderness—that basically belongs to everybody, and that this national interest had to be considered.

The debate came down to a question of where national interest overrides regional interest, and I chose the national side. Of course, in this instance I had the luxury of representing an area far from that under contention. To be truthful, had I been a senator from Alaska, I might well have voted the other way. Parochial voting patterns aside, however, I think it does make a difference what form an assertion of national interest takes. In the case of Georges Bank, the purported national interest might well be destructive. For the Alaska lands, it is conserving. The former could be irreversible, while the latter preserves both land and options for the future.

An era of conflict

The United States is well into another one of those times characterized by complex issues that involve a potential for conflict between, for example, coal-producing states that want to impose a severance tax and those of us who are going to have to pay that tax, between areas that bear the brunt of strip-mining for coal and states that want to convert it into electricity, between oil-producing states and oil-consuming states. In good times, when everybody is doing well and the economic pie is expanding, these kinds of regional differences do not have much impact. But in a time such as we have now—when the pie is not expanding but indeed is contracting—there is a much more heightened sensitivity to perceived inequity, that someone else may be getting away with something that hurts us when we are already hurting.

This creates a political climate for taking advantage of that situation and exploiting it. Granted, dealing with this is very difficult, but the way that we are dealing with it in Washington is exactly the opposite of what we should be doing. I believe that the only practical way to solve a conflict between regions is to come over it from the top, which means a federal solution, and that is not the way we are heading. If the Ohio River Valley burns a great deal of coal and one result is increased acid rain in Canada, in New England, and in upstate New York, who is to resolve that? When it is not the economic interest of Ohio to do it, but it is in the interest of everyone else downwind, who but the federal government can come in and resolve that problem?

The current notion that there is little or no role for the federal government is simply a swing of the pendulum, the country having rejected as unworkable—and, I think, rightly so—the prior notion the government should be in everything. The pendulum has gone past center and is going up the other side, but in time that also will peak and we will come down to an era where the issue is, How do we do it, how will it work?

Let us forget the rhetoric on both sides, and try to ignore whether problems—or solutions—are labeled Democratic or Republican. I hope for a coming together of both parties in a much more pragmatic, realistic sense.

There are no easy answers, but indeed there are answers. What RFF brings to the debate is some rationality and an approach free of ideology in which the question is, What works? Not what should work, not what would we like to see work but, indeed, what works?