Shailene Woodley and Rosario Dawson recently made headlines by attending a rally against energy at Union Square in NYC.
Their efforts followed those last month by Karenna Gore, daughter of former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, who was arrested during a protest of a Boston area natural gas pipeline.
All three are backing a “Keep It in the Ground” movement supported by a small but loud minority that claims all energy production and infrastructure on public and private lands is bad, regardless of any safety or regulatory stringency.
But study after study after study suggests otherwise. Facts and logic do too.
In fact, according to one study by IHS Global Insight on behalf of the National Association of Manufacturers, U.S. shale gas production contributed $156 billion to real disposable income in 2015. That means the average American family had an extra $1,337 in their pocket.
Another analysis, from the Energy Information Administration (EIA), said that fracking improved the average cost of living for Americans by nearly $750 per year since 2008.
Both analyses were followed by a report from the U.S. Department of Energy, which said carbon emissions from electricity generation in 2015 totaled its lowest amount since 1993.
These are the fruits of the U.S. energy revolution. Increased production has led to reduced fuel costs and lower utility bills, which, in turn, have led to big savings — for everyone, especially low-income families who spend a larger percentage of their disposable income on electricity, heating costs and transportation fuels than those in other income brackets.
Even Woodley, Dawson, and Gore have saved. And, despite their recent efforts, a majority of Americans are better off because of this energy revolution.
By all accounts, advancements in fossil fuel energy production transported by pipelines have been a win-win for Americans. Yet no one is talking about it.
Instead, it’s the same endless anti-energy “just-say-no-to-everything” rhetoric, however inaccurate or outdated it may be. And its purpose is to kill any and all projects connected with affordable, reliable energy, including new pipelines and their upgrades or repairs, processing plants, oil and gas exploration, export terminals, electricity generation – you name it. If it creates jobs and improves our economic prospects, chances are someone is going to launch a protest.
In fact, “more than a dozen projects, worth about $33 billion, have been either rejected by regulators or withdrawn by developers since 2012, with billions more tied up in projects still in regulatory limbo,” the Wall Street Journal says. This “trend,” the paper reports, is leaving “communities without access to lower-cost fuel and higher-paying jobs.”
That’s bad news, especially when global energy demand is expected to swell 25 percent by 2040, with 80 percent of that demand coming from fossil fuels.
Where will all that much-needed energy come from? And how will we go about transporting it safely and reliably?
The “Keep It in the Ground” effort doesn’t answer these questions. It doesn’t answer a lot of questions. It’s just an unrealistic notion that threatens to harm consumers, jobs, families and even the environmental strides industry has made.
Shouldn’t there be a campaign that promotes the need to ensure that we effectively balance our energy needs while safeguarding the environment? Our organization certainly thinks so, and we believe most American’s agree that we can and must have BOTH environmental protection and responsible access to energy.
That’s why Consumer Energy Alliance (CEA) has launched a new “Pipelines for America” campaign that aims to better educate families, households and small businesses across the nation about the increasing importance of U.S. energy infrastructure — to their health and their wallets.
Energy is a critical ingredient that powers literally every American industry – everything from agriculture and automotive to chemicals and steel. When energy costs increase, it’s a direct hit on various sectors’ bottom lines. Price spikes in energy also act as a regressive tax for families, seniors living on fixed incomes, and those with incomes below the poverty level.
That means that the last thing consumers need is an unproven, unrealistic, illogical anti-energy game led by extremists who have no real understanding of how hard it is for many of us to make ends meet. Who simply, out of hand, oppose every energy project because it’s the flavor of the week, but offer no solutions for the unintended consequences their opposition brings. These efforts only threaten to disrupt America’s electrical grid reliability, reduce our country’s energy security, drive up prices for fuel and consumer goods, as well as cut jobs.
Let’s hope our policymakers, with election season nearing a climax, strive for a well-balanced energy mix that centers on environmental protection, affordability, energy security, job growth, and power reliability – an energy policy like the one “Pipelines for America” is encouraging.
It can be done. It has been done. And in the right regulatory environment, we’ll continue to do better, on both accounts.
David Holt is president of Consumer Energy Alliance.