“Government” is a dirty word these days. As the election cycle ramps up, so does the anti-government rhetoric from the Republican candidates for President. Not to be outdone, President Obama’s re-election strategy seems to be to run against congress. The message from both sides is that things in Washington are shortsighted, corrupt, petty, and hopelessly divided, and so it’s not at all surprising that this negative attitude is trickling down to the voters. In a recent New York Times/CBS News poll, only 10% of Americans trusted government to do the right thing most of the time. State governments get a little more slack than the Fed, but the rope is short. People are cynical, jaded, and in a really foul mood.
The cause of government wasn’t helped this week by a couple of whopper news stories that showed up in my inbox. This one from Maine, reports that the state spent millions of dollars to prop up the Old Town pulp mill while steadily fining the mill’s owner for ongoing pollution – which is sort of like giving your kid $10 to spend at the arcade, then promptly docking his allowance for spending time at the arcade.
This one reports that the federal government is fining motor fuel companies for not using biofuel in their gas and diesel mixes. The catch? The biofuel doesn’t exist. Oh, and they’re raising the biofuel quota in 2012. (In an interesting twist, the stories relate to each other: The Old Town mill is trying to produce biobutanol, a biofuel, in addition to the pulp and the excess electricity they create and sell on the New England grid.)
There’s plenty to pick on here, and it wouldn’t be surprising at all to have one of these stories make their way into a candidate’s stump speech as an example of government incompetence. But in spite of the simple answers and red meat sound bites coming off of the stump, and the cynical mood that makes us all really receptive to “they’re all a bunch of bums” logic, I find myself feeling sorry for government in these two stories. And I feel compelled to say: Yeah, but...
In the case of the Maine mills, we’re seeing perfectly predictable growing pains as a traditional, rural wood economy transforms itself into something else – and we don’t even know what the something else is yet. There’s no template for success when you take a shrinking (some would say dying) industry, throw in the fate of hundreds of mill workers, their families, their community, mix in the fact that a company has to profit to survive, add one aging, polluting biomass boiler and a site with a poor environmental track record, sprinkle with activists who promote the unarguable idea that clean air is good, add a University mandated with building a fuel that will revolutionize the world (oh, and we needed it last week), and then drop this unholy amalgamation on the desk of the Maine legislature and say: make me a delicious soufflé.
This is not to say our empathy should absolve government of responsibility for inefficiency, mismanagement, or incompetence. It’s just to say that after reading this news story, I didn’t want to shrug my shoulders condescendingly and say “there you go again, government,” I wanted to hear ideas about how government and taxpayer dollars can be wielded and allocated more efficiently. After all, government is just trying to give us what we want. We want jobs and economically healthy communities, so they’re propping up the mill. We want clean air, so they’re fining the mill as a means of trying to make it cleaner. Their convolutions reflect our own. I’d love to learn that the environmentalist quoted in the piece was concerned about the fate of the workers here, and had the vision to see what this facility could become as the biobutanol technology progresses; and I’d love to learn that the mill spokesman quoted in the piece had a long-term plan to replace that outdated boiler and a sense of environmental responsibility, because if this were the case, you’d be left with the sense that despite the speed bumps, we were at least on the way to finding a common ground (and more commonsensical) solution. You Mainers are more familiar with this story than I am, so please weigh in and tell us what you see.
As for the biofuel story, it’s the easiest thing in the world to see this as the intrusive hand of government unfairly messing with industry, and yes, it is unfair, and yes, those in charge ought to be asked to explain how something that’s patently unfair can be good policy. If I was the head of the National Petrochemicals Association, I’d be pissed too. But if we all agree that our fossil fuel addiction is a bad thing – and whether you’re an environmentalist concerned about carbon emissions or a defense hawk concerned about national security or a conservationist working to promote the working landscape and sustainably managed forests, we probably all agree that diversifying our energy portfolio is a good idea – there’s a great opportunity here to use local wood resources in a way that betters society. So how do up-and-coming biomass/pellet/cellulosic ethanol producers gain a foothold in a marketplace where fossil fuel production – i.e. the competition – is being subsidized by the government? If subsidizing a fuel source that doesn’t exist is as stupid as it sounds, what’s a smarter alternative considering this reality?
These are the question I’m interested in learning more about, in debating. And so my exasperation comes not from the headline, or in the government’s contortions, but in the fact that in this election season it’s hard to find an intelligent discussion that examines any issue in much depth.
Discussion *