Krugman: The Unrefined Truth

Michael Pollak mpollak at panix.com
Tue May 8 21:28:59 PDT 2001


The New York Times

May 9, 2001

The Unrefined Truth

By PAUL KRUGMAN

G asoline prices are rising again, and the administration is rushing

to turn this into another argument for its drill-and-burn energy

strategy. But a look at the causes of the current gasoline shortage

actually suggests a quite different moral: namely, that conservation

ought to be a major element in our energy strategy, and that lack of

conservation is a large part of what we've been doing wrong.

First things first: This year's gasoline price spike has nothing to do

with a shortage of crude oil. Even if we had already punched the

Alaskan tundra and the ocean floor off Florida full of holes, we'd

still be in the same fix. The binding constraint right now is the

nation's limited capacity to refine crude oil into gasoline.

Why is refining capacity inadequate? No new refineries have been built

in this country for 20 years, a point emphasized with obvious relish

by Dick Cheney. His implicit subtext, of course, is that it's the

fault of environmentalist types who stood in the oil industry's way.

That must be the story, right?

Wrong. It's true that environmental rules have somewhat crimped the

production of our existing refineries. The problem is not so much the

strictness of the regulations as their lack of consistency: each

region has its own rules like the insistence of Midwestern states that

gasoline include corn-derived ethanol fragmenting the nation's

production. But the reason the oil industry didn't build any new

refineries for two decades was that they weren't needed. In fact,

right up until last year oil refining was a persistently depressed

business, plagued by overcapacity.

Here's what happened: In the wake of the energy crisis in the 1970's,

ordinary people in the United States began conserving energy not as a

"sign of personal virtue," as Mr. Cheney sneeringly puts it, but

because they wanted to save money. Cars, in particular, became much

more fuel-efficient. Meanwhile the oil industry was subject to

"refinery creep," the tendency of refining capacity to grow through

incremental improvements even when no new refineries are built. The

result was excess capacity and squeezed margins, right up to the late

1990's.

What finally brought us up against capacity constraints was a surge in

demand that was partly due to the economic boom of the later Clinton

years, but mainly due to the renewed enthusiasm of Americans for huge,

gas-guzzling vehicles an enthusiasm, er, fueled by cheap gas. In 1998

gasoline was cheaper compared with overall consumer prices than ever

before in U.S. history 60 percent cheaper than it was in 1981. The

nation rushed out to buy ever-bigger S.U.V.'s and then suddenly

discovered that we had run out of refining capacity. Refiners weren't

frustrated by rules that prevented them from building new facilities;

they were simply caught by surprise.

You have to bear this history in mind when parsing Mr. Cheney's recent

speeches. To listen to him, you would imagine that we live in a

country in which powerful political forces oppose energy production

and preach a return to the dark ages. "To speak exclusively of

conservation," Mr. Cheney declared in one speech, "is to duck the

tough issues . . . it is not a sufficient basis all by itself for a

sound, comprehensive energy policy." In another speech he ridiculed

unspecified types for "saying to the American people that you have to

live in the dark, turn out all of the lights." The story according to

Mr. Cheney, in other words, is that we have an energy shortage because

extreme conservationists prevented us from developing the supply

capacity that serious people knew we needed.

Need I point out that this, like so much of what one hears from this

administration, is a cynical misrepresentation? I defy Mr. Cheney to

come up with examples of influential people who "speak exclusively of

conservation," let alone anyone who says to the American people that

they have to live in the dark. In fact, hardly any important

politicians have spoken about conservation at all never mind

exclusively this past decade.

We will need to build more refineries and more power plants, and

pipelines, and so on. But it is ludicrous to suggest that our current

energy woes are the result of too much emphasis on conservation. It

would be closer to the truth to say that we are in trouble now because

our politicians haven't dared even use the word.

Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company



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