Energy Battles: From Chickens, Pigs, Cows, Fish to Wind, Solar, Hydro, Gas, Coal, Nuclear Competition

Energy is big business, and so is food for human energy. Students can gain insights into energy policy and politics by looking at the competing supply ecosystems of the food industry. Ranchers, pig farmers, chicken producers, and commercial fisheries compete, much as natural gas, oil, coal, nuclear, hydro, wind, and solar industries compete.

An astonishing variety of articles and studies are published each month on new wind, solar, hydro, nuclear, geothermal, and natural gas power technologies. Advances and research findings are reported regularly on battery, hydrogen, and other energy storage and carbon capture technologies.

Press releases regularly claim “game changing” breakthroughs, amazing cost advantages, and often predict the “end of coal.” Fossil fuel investors are advised to head for the exits. Other articles complain about (or endorse) wind and solar subsidies or fossil fuel subsidies. Other articles debate utility monopolies and micro-grid regulations.

Competition and cooperation are central to market economies. Across energy companies large and small, entrepreneurs and engineers cooperate and compete as do communications and public relations departments. Each energy source features networks of companies, suppliers, employees, investors, production and delivery infrastructure, plus business associations, lobbyists, and legislator advocates (bought critics claim, or at least rented).

Students researching energy policy read conflicting studies and claims about wind, solar, natural gas, hydro, geothermal, and nuclear energy. These academic, media, and political duals show the competing public relations efforts from energy industry ecosystems and environmental organizations battling each other.

One way to think about energy technology ecosystems is to compare them to food, the energy for the body.

So maybe pigs are coal, beef is oil, chickens are natural gas, turkeys hydro, and wind can be vegetarian and solar vegan. It should be no surprise that pig farmers and processors prefer pork as food energy, while cattle ranchers promote beef and chicken farmers see chicken as superior.

Each food energy source is big, big business, creating value for consumers, jobs for producers, income for suppliers, and profit (or loss) for investors. And each industry generates pollution and other externalities.

Each issue of “Beef Weekly” or “Pork Digest” is replete with articles praising beef and pork, and industry associations fund research on the benefits of what they produce, plus research to counter the claims of food competitors.

And just as entrepreneurs across the food chain develop new technologies to increase efficiencies to lower costs, so do entrepreneurs in the energy world.

All food sources and energy sources involve tradeoffs. Each has benefits and costs, with supporters and critics. Ideally federal policies toward food production would be minimal and offer a level playing field for food companies. Politicians and state bureaucracies can be enlisted to subsidize research and production of food (farm subsidies, for example), or can protect or hurt via state and federal regulations (pollution from factory pig, chicken, cattle operations, and fish farming, for example).

Similar subsidy and regulatory conflicts surround energy production, distribution, and consumption. So students debating energy policy shouldn’t be surprised there are so many conflicting news stories and studies that disagree about wind, solar, hydro, nuclear, natural gas, oil, and coal benefits and dangers.

Environmental and climate research, studies, and news stories add complexity to the competition. Not everything is at is seems. Articles citing research critical of solar energy is sometimes funded by wind energy associations. The natural gas industry doesn’t mind, and sometimes funds, research and articles critical of coal energy. As “big coal” declines, natural gas companies expand market share.

Who opposed electricity from hydro? Natural gas companies form PAC to fight CMP’s transmission corridor (Bangor Daily News, December 19, 2019):

Two national companies that operate natural gas plants in Maine are stepping into the fight over Central Maine Power’s power line proposal for western Maine. They’ve created a political action committee supporting a potential ballot question aimed at killing the CMP [Central Maine Power] project.

Flumerfelt acknowledged that the injection of electricity from Hydro-Quebec’s dam system into this region via the CMP transmission line would suppress electricity prices enough to hurt the company’s bottom line.

Natural gas companies opposing transmission lines from distant hydropower shouldn’t be surprising. A broader public relations strategy has been to fund “grassroots” and environmental opponents of major energy projects like the CMP. Similar stories are common across the food and energy industries. A 2016 Forbes article asks Are Fossil Fuel Interests Bankrolling The Anti-Nuclear Energy Movement? and a 2012 article in Time reports: Exclusive: How the Sierra Club Took Millions From the Natural Gas Industry—and Why They Stopped [UPDATE].

[And for those wanting to pursue the food fights, see: THE BIG FAT SURPRISE Why Butter, Meat & Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet. A Conversation with Nina Teicholz (The Epoch Times, May 20, 2014), and 50 Years Ago, Sugar Industry Quietly Paid Scientists To Point Blame At Fat (NPR, September 13, 2016). Fighting back is: Researchers challenge claims that sugar industry shifted blame to fat (ScienceDaily, February 15, 2018)] Many nutrition posts on Normal Nutrition.

The widening gyre of energy research and advocacy encompass deeper and distant disputes: Why Renewables Advocates Protect Fossil Fuel Interests, Not The Climate (Forbes, March 28, 2019) asks:

But if solar and wind are substitutes for fossil fuels, why are the world’s biggest oil and gas firms promoting them?

Over the last three years, the five largest publicly-traded oil and gas companies, ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch Shell, Chevron, BP, and Total invested a whopping one billion dollars into advertising and lobbying for renewables and other climate-related ventures.

The Forbes author, a nuclear energy advocate, makes the case that fossil fuel companies promote renewables as part of a long campaign to devalue and discredit nuclear energy. See also Why Renewables Can’t Save the Planet (Quillette, February 27, 2019).

Roger Pielke tells of a research and public relations campaign funded by billionaires to shift climate science research and journalism to “Representation Concentration Pathway 8.5 or RCP8.5.” How Billionaires Tom Steyer and Michael Bloomberg Corrupted Climate Science (Forbes, January 2, 2020) makes the case that:

Over the past decade this particular scenario has moved from an extreme outlier to the center of climate policy discussions. You can read more about how that happened and its consequences in my previous columns here and  here.

Before Pelke begins his climate corruption story, he notes:

Before proceeding, let’s make a few things absolutely clear. There is no doubt that climate change is real, and is significantly influenced by our activities, particularly through the emissions of carbon dioxide.  I have long advocated for aggressive action on carbon dioxide emissions as well as to improve adaptation to climate variability and change. At the same time, I have also long argued that maintaining scientific integrity should go hand-in-hand with effective climate action.

And…

Today, I will add further details to this incredible story by explaining the important roles played by Tom Steyer and Michael Bloomberg, both billionaires and current Democratic presidential candidates. (Disclosure: I have endorsed publicly one of their Democratic opponents, Amy Klobuchar, but I will vote for whomever the Democrats select this November, including Steyer or Bloomberg.)

A glimpse of the story:

At the kitchen table meeting, Steyer was focused on the question: “How do you make climate change feel real and immediate for people?” He was convinced by attendees that the best way to answer this question was through people’s pocketbooks, through economics.

Following this meeting, Steyer invited two collaborators and co-funders to join him, to give the appearance of being non-partisan. One was Michael Bloomberg, then a political independent who was completing 12 years as the mayor of New York. The other was Hank Paulson, a Republican who was a former CEO of Goldman Sachs and who had also served as Secretary of the Treasury under George W. Bush.

How Billionaires Tom Steyer and Michael Bloomberg Corrupted Climate Science (Forbes, January 2, 2020)

So, debaters have: food for thought, electricity for light, and politics for heat. Follow the money to help untangle the story.