by Michael Whitlow

John Janoush, vice president of Jantran,a Mid-South towboat operator, told National Public Radio recently that six of his towboats are stuck on the Arkansas River, a tributary of the Mississippi River. Later in the story, when talking about the flood danger to Rosedale, Mississippi, he commented about the strength of the levees: “Our government doesn’t do a lot of things right,” he said, “but they built the levees right,” he noted.

Whew! That’s a relief. Recent Gallup research on the federal government shows 58% of us have a somewhat or very negative view of the institution. When it comes to energy policy, I wonder how folks will rank our statespeople as gasoline creeps toward $5 per gallon.

Conservatives hope the fuel prices, for instance, are hung around the neck of Obama, taking a bite out of the the post-Osama popularity rise for the president. Meanwhile, liberals hang their hats on the development of an alternative fuels industry as a way to limit our dependence on fossil fuels, claiming conservatives are as ancient in their thinking as the fossils that created the fuels they support. In most ways, this is an emblem of the “he said – she said” political bent of things these days. Political sparring while consumers are slowly burning…

What’s missing from this debate and so many others in our modern world is unassailable truth.

“Unassailable” means just that. We have a lot of half truths, semi-truths and flat out lies being perpetrated to manipulate us into believing certain things about energy. But, one thing is sure: If customers don’t buy a solution, it isn’t going to happen. Hearts and minds have to be in sync.

As Jeremy Shere put it about the debate over one famous landmark’s energy program, “It’s no surprise, after all, that the ongoing Empire State Building sustainable retrofit involves replacing most of the existing windows with more energy efficient windows but does not include solar panels or rooftop-mounted wind turbines.” The owners just weren’t buying the more technically involved approaches.

Energy (big “E” intended) has a big PR problem. We’re all customers and we just don’t know what to believe. We can get passionate pleas from one side to stick a turbine or a panel on everything. Another will tell us that caulking the windows is the only way to go. We, and our government, are stalled by politics – batted to and fro by the shouting from lobbyists for wind turbines or the caulk camp, so to speak.

So, we have to start at the beginning. Educate ourselves. Consumers have to be conscious of energy, whether it’s the “drill baby drill,” America-first variety, the logical energy efficiency argument or the shiny new object of renewable energy technologies – knowledge is power.

The first stop in solving Energy’s big PR problem is awareness. Pretty quickly we’ll learn some things that our grandparents would have called common sense. We can’t/won’t completely kick our addiction to oil in the near term, for example.

It’s complicated. Just take a gander at organization chart of a recent meeting of The National Academies on the subject to get a feel for the complexities.

If we go to an entirely electric fleet day after tomorrow, we face more challenges than our Nissan Leafs not going far enough on a charge. We’d have to generate electricity the old-fashioned ways – coal and nuclear – and in your backyard or in the backyards of the poorer people in the next county.

In the U.S. alone we use so much power that even if we placed windmills everywhere practical (and some not so practical), we’d get only a couple of trillion watts. Right now, even with a lot of progress in recent years, we’re still counting in megawatts, according to the U.S. Department of Energy (animated map).

As to biofuels, they bring their own baggage, not the least of which is the fuels vs. food debate (again clouded by advocates playing fast and loose with facts in some cases).

Biofuels Digest’s recent survey was illuminating and thought-provoking. In the survey, 24% said it was immoral to convert land used for growing human food crops to the production of energy or fuel. Also, 45% said that it was immoral ” to convert land that is used for conservation purposes, or as national park or forest preserve, to energy or fuel production.” As for drill, baby, drill, 25% of respondents indicating it was immoral “to convert land that could be used for (human) food production to oil & gas production”. (How do we get to shale gas deposits below those wheat fields?)

And, then there’s solar. Miller-McCune’s Michael Haederle’s extensive post points to some of the issues, ranging from the materials used to build solar panels to endangered species, surrounding large, utility-scale projects.

So, Energy needs good PR and a whole lot fewer “STOP” signs. Seems that everywhere we turn to address the issue, we find opposition. Most of us can’t/won’t do without Energy. What if we just agree today that it’s a good idea to do the American thing? You know: Keep exploring, keep drilling, keep processing non-food biofuels – let even the bacteria in on the possible solution array. Look to the sun. Fly with the wind. Ride our bicycles. Talk amongst ourselves.

Most of all, call BS to the politics.

No more hearings to berate oil execs. No more pretending to have policy meetings. No more calls to open up the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. No more ranting about our dependence upon “foreign” oil. The recent administration announcements on new drilling permits is a start, but this stuff is too important to be left to politics and ad hominem tu quoque (or “yo’ momma”) arguments.

Unless we as consumers demand our politicians to stop posturing and get on with it, we’ll still be having the Energy debate into the next decade.