RALEIGH – The Charlotte Observer published a forum Wednesday on energy policy. Each of the six major party candidates for governor – Beverly Perdue, Richard Moore, Pat McCrory, Fred Smith, Bill Graham, and Bob Orr — outlined their ideas for now North Carolina should meet its energy needs in the coming decades, and how state policy can help or hinder solutions to the economic and environmental challenges of the future.
Zeroing in on the Democratic responses, I found a good example of how Perdue and Moore appear to agree on public policy in broad terms but diverge significantly in particulars.
Perdue’s proposals are, to put it bluntly, extreme, impractical, and draconian. She calls for an end to coal-fired power plants, a target of meeting 50 percent of our future energy needs through conservation, and state action to regulate greenhouse-gas emissions regardless of what Washington chooses to do:
“We simply cannot wait for the federal government to establish national standards and incentives; we must develop them right here in North Carolina. That’s why — as governor — I will explore creation or participation in a regional coalition such as the northeast’s 10-state Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) to trade carbon credits in a multi-state cap-and-trade program for greenhouse gas emissions.”
Understood correctly – using standard economic and accounting principles rather than the phony baloney employed by the General Assembly’s climate-change commission – Perdue’s cap-and-trade policy and other proposals would lead to massive increases in the price of energy, costing North Carolina’s households thousands of dollars a year and North Carolina’s economy tens of thousands of jobs.
In his piece, Moore also talks a lot about energy efficiency, alternative fuels, and the like, but he avoids setting implausible targets or endorsing cap-and-trade. Instead, he focuses on innovation:
“We must take action to address the issue of energy in North Carolina. The price of most imported energy sources is unlikely to come down and the need for action to protect our climate and natural beauty is clear. This situation is a challenge that also presents North Carolina with great opportunity. We should become a national leader in conservation and alternative energy, creating new businesses and an agricultural model that will ensure the prosperity of rural North Carolina for years to come.”
It’s become conventional wisdom to assert that candidates in the 2008 cycle need to embrace climate-change alarmism or else pay an electoral price. I think such analysis is superficial and in many cases little more than wishful thinking on the part of exuberant activists. In the real world, what North Carolina voters are primarily upset about is the rising price of the energy sources they tap. To promise them that if elected, you’ll compel them to purchase even more costly energy in the future, and to pay higher taxes so governments can pay higher energy bills, is unlikely to make any politician popular when the facts are clearly understood.
The question is, though, whether voters will hear the facts about such proposals, or just the soft-sounding rhetoric obscuring the facts. Given the state of environmental reporting in the mainstream media, which probably ought to be called something like “environmental-activist stenography,” the question remains open.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.