New York Times Green blogger Matthew Wald offered his
thoughts this week on “Obama’s Wish List for Energy,” President Obama’s proposed energy budget for
2013. The column was (sort of) tongue-in-cheek,
but Wald raises a serious point. The Administration’s goal, as described in the
budget proposal’s cover letter from Steven Chu, is to help the US compete “in a
global race for the clean energy jobs of the future.” Why, then, is it that “the $27.2 billion budget request itself is mostly about
nuclear energy”?
The more significant observation
about the proposed energy budget—and one that Wald doesn’t make—is that the
Department of Energy has never really lived up to its name. It’s the energy
sector’s little secret. Thanks to its name, DOE occupies the energy policy
space within the public imagination, but it is not and has never been the
nation’s lead agency on energy policy. Indeed, arguably, the Department of
Interior and Department of Defense have far more policy influence over the
development of non-nuclear energy initiatives in the United States than DOE.
It’s useful to remember the
history of DOE. The agency was created at the end of World War II, as the
Atomic Energy Commission, for the purpose of continuing the wartime work of the
Manhattan Project: developing and producing nuclear weapons. The only reason
the agency existed at all was because of a Congressional decision to insist
that nuclear weapons remain under civilian rather than military control.
DOE got its current name in
1977, in response to the oil crises of the 1970s and a desire under President
Carter to centralize federal energy policy. Even then, however, the new agency
didn’t live up to its own billing. It’s budget remained dominated by nuclear
weapons and by the national laboratories created to design, build, and maintain
them.
Not much has changed, today.
DOE never really acquired a strong energy policy presence. Internal to DOE, the
perception of the agency is that it develops technology. And the agency remains
heavily focused, as Wald observes, on nuclear weapons. Non-nuclear energy
research and development activities remain the fourth and smallest of four major
budget lines held by DOE. Maintaining a secure stockpile of nuclear weapons,
countering nuclear weapons proliferation, and cleaning up the environmental
waste created by the production of nuclear weapons alone account for 60% of
DOE’s budget.
But the shortcomings of DOE
are only part of the point. The deeper issue is that, in the face of a pressing
need to fundamentally transform the largest and most thoroughly socially embedded
industrial enterprise on the planet, neither the United States government, nor
most states in the Union, have a major department in charge of developing and
coordinating that effort. It’s not really an accident that we aren’t making
much progress.
