There's No Accounting: The Economy's Apples and Oranges
By Neela Banerjee
Dick Cheney laid down the framework of the Bush administration's energy policy last week, saying the nation needs 1,000 new electricity-generating plants and relegating conservation to the realm of "personal virtue."
But while debates will rage over the vice president's approach — and over the increasing reliance on nuclear power, domestic drilling and other elements it would entail — what the energy policy is really meant to protect and preserve will probably go unquestioned: growth.
A nation is by definition thriving if its major indices say people are making more things and spending more money on them, as reflected in the sweeping economic measure of the gross domestic product and the detailed portraits provided by housing starts, car sales and retail sales. The Clinton administration saw to it that the economy's health became a bipartisan priority. And energy is one of the economy's most essential ingredients.
Environmentalists have repeatedly pointed out that what Americans really consume, in a staggering variety of ways, shapes and paint jobs, is a diminishing store of natural resources. But that message has been obscured by a simple problem, one that is increasingly on the minds of economists: the absence of a common, objective measure of the cost of growth. ...
Omer Yonel, the chief executive of North Coast Energy, a small Ohio natural gas company owned by the Dutch utility NUON, would welcome new areas in the United States where his company could drill. A European, Mr. Yonel notes that America has so far avoided the difficult choices Europe has made about consumption, including, for example, paying higher taxes on gasoline.
Without objective instruments to mark the toll of economic growth, people rely on the subjective: the stifling heat of successive summers, the forests and fields turned over to homes and shopping malls, the thickening air above cities, their sympathy toward various environmental protests. But unlike many Western Europeans, Americans have moved farther from conservation and restraint in the last 20 years.
"When you pollute here, the sky still stays so blue," Mr. Yonel said. "The pollution just goes somewhere else, your country is so huge."
[Meanwhile, the excerpt below is from the NYT "Automobiles" section, lauding "the sheer moronic fun" of outsized vehicles.]
Reaching Critical Mass in the Civilian Arms Race
By Dan Neil
America is the land of the very, very big. Big hair, big malls, big cities, big hotels in Las Vegas that look like big cities, big movies starring big ships that sink in a big way.
Big is practically a good unto itself, not to be confused with the wimpy and relativistic notion of "scale," to which some old-fashioned students of design still cling.
If the roads seem smaller, it is only because you are sharing them with a new breed of giants. Heavy-duty pickup trucks — loosely defined as trucks with gross vehicle weight, or G.V.W., of more than 8,500 pounds (including the vehicle and the maximum cargo capacity) — account for about a third of the two million full-size pickup trucks bought annually in the United States. Once these trucks were merely heavily girded versions of full-size, light-duty trucks. Then, in 1999, Ford brought out its Super Duty series, a group of Sumo-sized pickups several inches larger in every dimension than comparable F-150 series trucks. ...
What is not to like? Well, obviously, fuel mileage is something Ford may have to answer for in The Hague. Our tester got about 10 miles to the gallon in mixed driving, but I feel sure I could have coaxed single digit mileage out of it. Visibility through the side windows is fairly limited; regular-sized vehicles - like Cadillacs - can ride along unseen below window-sill height. Use those mirrors!
But, over all, I cannot help but be seduced by the Super Duty's charms - the first of which is the sheer, moronic fun of driving a wicked monster truck. And beyond the high-altitude gnarliness of it all, I liked the opportunity to act like a burly blue-collar guy. Here I come, Big Daddy Contractor. Look at the hourly workers run.
[Full text: http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/06/automobiles/06AUTO.html?searchpv=nytToday&pagewanted=print]
Carl
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