Axis of energy misinformation

I was between engagements as a TV station news director (in 1985, maybe) when a friend urged that I come out to Santa Monica and "help" him straighten out a struggling cable network, the Financial News Network. I volunteered that I was totally ignorant of the subject matter, but he said, "No problem."

Happily, FNN straightened me out. Knowledgeable staffers erased some of my innocence of financial markets. So did visiting economists, who also taught me – what a gift! – that their discipline isn’t science. (Among them – the genial Arthur Laffer, whose famous "curve" inspired supply side economics.)

FNN then reassigned me to its Wall Street bureau, where sophisticated stock pickers (many of them regulars on Louis Rukeyser’s popular "Wall Street Week"), business leaders and an entrepreneur or two educated me further.

Neither an economist nor financial whiz, I did learn enough at FNN (and, later, CNBC) to defend myself. It’s too bad many Americans haven’t been as lucky; maybe that’s why they’re being targeted by a powerful Axis of Energy Disinformation.

This Axis brings together the White House, the oil industry, GOP presidential hopeful John McCain and, judging from his new TV and newspaper ads, New Mexico’s own GOP Rep. Steve Pearce. They are conspiring to fool the public into believing gas prices will come down if we offer new offshore drilling leases to the oil companies. Not true. President Bush’s own Energy Information Administration says removing restrictions on offshore drilling wouldn’t lead to any additional domestic oil production until 2017. Also, that even at its peak the extra production’s impact on oil prices would be "insignificant."

But the Axis knows most Americans believe in something called "the law of supply and demand," so why not use that to manipulate us?
(Mind you, they’re hoping nobody will ask why the oil companies would want to bolster supply. For lower profits?)

The Axis makes a subtle play on our systemic ignorance in a brilliant TV commercial that’s airing in all the Sunday talk shows. A tall, cool blonde woman, professionally dressed in dark pants suit, strides across the screen while explaining that odds are – if you have stock – you "own" an oil company. Then she mentions domestic oil supplies before nudging us, gently, toward energytomorrow.com.

That site turns out to be the American Petroleum Institute, the industry lobby that pulls the strings that animate the blonde. API figures, of course, we will assume "ownership" means "control." It does not, as Adolph A. Berle and Gardiner Means explained in a 1932 classic "The Modern Corporation and Private Property". But what does the Axis care? The end justifies the manipulation.

And it’s working – polls suggest the Axis of Energy Misinformation strategy is bolstering support for drilling and for Sen. McCain. No wonder Barack Obama has just suggested we tap strategic oil reserves – a silly idea and a pander.

The Axis’ line deceives us, but what it doesn’t say is more crucial. We are addicted to fossil fuels. Oil vacuums dollars from us and showers them on dictatorships, petty and grand. The huge outgo weakens our currency. Oil addiction also fuels global climate change. The problem of $4 a gallon gas is dwarfed by the perils of our dependency on oil and coal. So, as T. Boone Pickens advises, we cannot drill our way out. We must find new, clean ways to power our society instead.