So, I was poking around on ecoRI and came across this article by Tim Faulkner:

Left out of the talking points that support expanding pipelines in New England are the efforts by energy companies to deliver that natural gas to Canada for export overseas.

Documents show that developers are already moving forward with this concept. Last October, Pieridae Energy filed a federal application to send domestic natural gas from Massachusetts to Nova Scotia, where it would be converted to liquefied natural gas (LNG) and exported. According to Peiridae, a company in Germany has already agreed to buy the exported LNG.

I’m no expert on this topic, but it seems to me that Faulkner uses a whole bunch of plural nouns when he appears to be talking about one company that may have a single prospect with another company.  It’s clear, moreover, that the concern of the activists quoted later in the article is not that the export business will pull increased supplies of natural gas out from under the New England consumer, but that it will encourage continued development of the natural gas industry in America, which would soften demand for very expensive renewable energy.

According to the application at the link, Pieridae is requesting a two-decade window during which it can explore these options, which would start either on the date of the first sale or seven years after its request is approved.  As the article makes clear, environmental activists have already applied to prolong the application process.  In other words, this is pretty long-term planning.

But what’s the concern?  The company won’t sell gas overseas unless it is more profitable to do so.  In other words, unless people in these other countries are willing to pay so much that the profit margin is better if Pieridae chooses to ship the gas additional hundreds of miles, then liquefy it, then ship it, and then unliquefy it, rather than simply direct it to energy plants and consumers closer-by on the pipeline.  And then there are other possibilities, like the flow being reversed to ship the natural gas from Canada or elsewhere to domestic consumers.  What’s scary in this mix… other than the very existence of a fossil fuel industry?

Then we turn to another article, by the ecoRI News staff:

A common algae commercially grown to make fish food holds promise as a source for both biodiesel and jet fuel, according to a new study published in the journal Energy & Fuels.

Why, in contrast to the pipeline story, is this not scary?  Similar to ethanol’s effects on food prices, wouldn’t increasing the demand for this algae increase its price, thus driving up the cost of farm-grown fish, thus pricing out lower-income consumers and making the depletion of wild fish stock that much more attractive?

There’s a wave of specifics to consider before worrying about such a thing, but it doesn’t strike me as much less plausible than the dark insinuations made in the pipeline case.

Thanks to John Loughlin for having me on his special-edition, day-after-Christmas WPRO radio show, this morning.  Between a late night of wrapping, a baby coming down with a cold, and older children who began trying to sneak downstairs at 2:00 a.m. on Christmas Eve, the past few nights have been light on sleep, so my mind was not prepared to continue making a subtle point on energy policy at the same time that it occurred to me that a tuxedo-wearing doll sitting on the host’s microphone looked a bit like Cool Keith, the producer.

Apart from that one lost train of thought, though, and with a huge assist from well-informed callers, the hour and a half passed enjoyably and brought us to three core points about the cost of energy in New England:

• If you let the market create energy to supply our massive demand, people may do it in ways that progressives, environmentalists, and politicians don’t like, so those groups insist that the market demand be filtered through the government.
• The only way to drive down costs, reliably, is competition.  When government attempts to do it — whether through too-clever schemes or simple brute force of law — the money has to come from somewhere.  The industry has the clear incentive to game the political system so that it isn’t the one with no chair when the economic music stops, so the entire regulatory system becomes a means of hiding costs.  (If the product ceases to be profitable, then the companies will let infrastructure wane or simply stop providing the service.)
• By contrast, with competition in a free-market environment, businesses and consumers have incentive to find ways to innovate or restructure for real savings in the system.

To address a couple of loose ends, I didn’t have the information ready at hand when one caller asked, but according to the RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity’s Competitiveness Report Card, Rhode Island’s cost of energy is generally in line with its neighbors in New England.  It depends what how the comparison is made whether we’re toward the front or the back in the region, but New England tends to be toward the back of the nationwide pack when it comes to energy.  As I told the caller, the area simply needs a greater supply of energy.

I also didn’t manage to put the final touch on a point about the relative costs of different energy sources.  The interest groups ultimately don’t mind driving up the cost of energy, because the higher traditional sources become, the less outrageous “green” “renewable” energy seems.  But that isn’t the whole story.  It may one day become preferable for a business to put in solar panels and wind turbines, versus gas or other energy sources, but it may also become economically preferable for the business just to locate elsewhere — in or out of the United States.

A lot of these sorts of conversations about policy in Rhode Island come back to that option.

It’s almost difficult to believe this article was reprinted in the Providence Journal:

The electrical system’s duress was a direct result of the polar vortex, the cold air mass that settled over the nation. But it exposed a more fundamental problem. There is a growing fragility in the U.S. electricity system, experts warn, the result of the shutdown of coal-fired plants, reductions in nuclear power, constraints on natural-gas pipelines and a shift to more expensive renewable energy. The result is likely to be future price shocks. And they may not be temporary. …

The problems confronting the electricity system are the result of a wide range of forces: new federal regulations on toxic emissions, rules on greenhouse gases, state mandates for renewable power, technical problems at nuclear power plants and unpredictable price trends for natural gas.

We’re dealing, here, with the predictable effects of regulation.  Another passage provides a good illustration of government’s inability to predict the reactions of the private sector to its tape:

The federal government appears to have underestimated the impact as well. An Environmental Protection Agency analysis in 2011 had asserted that new regulations would cause few coal plant retirements. The forecast on coal plants turned out wrong almost immediately.

One suspects this factor wasn’t considered to be a very important a part of the regulatory decision-making process.  After all, models show dramatic climate effects happening a century from now; why should it matter whether the government can predict economic factors a year or two out?

I wonder, too, whether there isn’t another factor, which one sees in progressive, big-government thinking more broadly: a simple inability to understand that people will change economic behavior.  Energy companies — or any other companies — aren’t typically in business out of an innate drive to provide the services that they provide.

Business is a way of making money and supporting families.  If the government makes it easier to do so by some other means, people will find those other means.  And when the entire economy leans on what they used to do, everybody suffers.

These effects aren’t simple dollars and cents.  They’re lost opportunities and damaged lives.

Well, this raises some interesting questions:

China approved the construction of more than 100 million tonnes of new coal production capacity in 2013 – six times more than a year earlier and equal to 10 percent of U.S. annual usage – flying in the face of plans to tackle choking air pollution. The scale of the increase, which only includes major mines, reflects Beijing’s aim to put 860 million tonnes of new coal production capacity into operation over the five years to 2015, more than the entire annual output of India. While efforts to curb pollution mean coal’s share of the country’s energy mix is set to dip, the total amount of the cheap and plentiful fuel burned will still rise.

Just brainstorming, here, but it seems to me that the moral urgency of fighting global warming climate change should lead us to deregulate our industries and slash taxes in order kick-start a massive economic boom to enable the United States to better compete with China, thus leading to a shift of economic growth from Asia to the United States.

Then, our heavier reliance on natural gas and overall tendency to be more environmentally conscientious would reduce the amount of pollution from what it otherwise would have been.

At the same time, the smaller government coupled with economic growth would bring the federal budget into balance, and reduce our need to keep seeking loans from the Chinese government, reducing a source of regular revenue that it can use to bankroll dirty coal and military expansion.