Amigos and NA Energy

In the wake of the North American Leaders' Summit in Toluca, Mexico last week, Monica Gattinger of the University of Ottawa had a great post on energy issues on the CIPS blog (linked here).  It's hard to think of anyone doing better work on these issues over the last 5 or 6 years. This post is spot on. In addition to the link, I've copied the text of her post below:


By Monica Gattinger

Shale Gale or Shale Fail? Will North America’s Leaders Miss the Boat on Energy?
At the North American Leaders Summit in Mexico this week, Prime Minister Harper, President Obama and President Pena Nieto committed to tasking their respective energy ministers to meet in 2014 to “discuss opportunities to promote common strategies on energy.” Observers and practitioners of things energy in North America would say it’s about time. We haven’t had trilateral talks on energy in years.

But is this too little, too late? North America is in the midst of an energy revolution. The twin technologies of hydraulic fracturing (‘fracking’) and horizontal drilling have unlocked the potential to profitably produce oil and gas from the continent’s vast shale resources.
For the moment, the ‘shale gale’ is mainly filling America’s sails, with U.S. oil and gas production surging to heights mainstream forecasters weren’t predicting a few short years ago. Then, concerns over the country’s energy security and mounting dependence on foreign imports dominated policy debates.

Three Amigos and Pipelines that Keep Giving

Wednesday was the latest edition of the North American Leaders' Summit (NALS). Didn't know there was such a process? You wouldn't be alone. The NALS was created as part of the ill-fated Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) in 2005. In addition to all the other agenda items the three bureacracies agreed to work on at the time, the NALS was supposed to have given all that bureaucratic dirty work some political backing. In short, the annual meeting would signal that the North American agenda mattered to them.

Whether North America matters is a subject worthy of debate, and something I've addressed in earlier posts. The first few meetings of the NALS were relatively successful, partly because the "Three Amigos" that created the summit in the first place continued to attend. However, the NALS is not something that President Obama, President Nieto, or Prime Minster Harper created; it's not their baby, so why do it? The 2010 edition of the NALS actually never happened. Prime Minister Harper was busy doing things like hosting the G20 in Toronto and the NALS got set aside. Moreover, each meeting since 2005 has gotten shorter, and shorter. Some might say this is a sign of how great things are going in North America. Nonsense.

Relevance of Academia?

This past weekend, Nicolas Kristof reignited a debate over the role of academia in public life (link to NYT Piece). He was particularly scornful of political science for having allowed the discipline's practices to marginalize it from public life. The reaction to Kristof's piece suggests he struck a nerve.

See:
Monkey Cage
politicalviolenceataglance
saideman semi-spew
tompepinsky
coreyrobin

(Thanks to Bob Murray of the Frontier Center for Public Policy for all of these)
 
My broad reaction to all of this is something along the lines of "thou dost protest too much." Kristof's piece struck a nerve with me as well, but mainly because I am in broad agreement with his basic point. As I wrote in my very first blog post (link), the entire point of the IPE Soap Box is driven by the issues raised by the Stephen Walt article I reference there, some of which are touched on by Kristof. Newspaper columns necessarily simplify issues, so I again recommend you check out the Walt piece (link).

However, the nerve touched by Kristof has me thinking about a few things (three) raised by both Kristof and my disciplinary colleagues who have taken him to task.

COOL not so cool?

 Canada has once again been stiffed by the U.S. Congress (see Globe and Mail). On Tuesday last week, the US Congress finally passed the so-called Farm Bill (Text at Library of Congress), one of the more contentious (the latest has been debated for several years) pieces of legislation regularly considered by Congress, but structured in a way that it ultimately wins bi-partisan support. For obvious reasons, the Farm Bill's provisions appeal to legislators from rural agricultural states, but also appeals to urban members because of provision for low-income food stamp programing (nearly 80% of the funds go to these programs) (See analysis in Washington Post here). The remaining 20% of the Farm Bill continues to fund various agricultural support programs, many of which are the subject of vigorous discussion in the context of the Doha Round of WTO negotiations (a subject for a later blog post).

Canadians were interested in this year's Farm Bill for several reasons, among them language regarding so-called Country of Origin Labeling (COOL) that would impose new consumer labeling for a variety of agricultural product entering the U.S., notably beef, pork, and poultry. Ottawa was hoping that some last minute lobbying in Washington would modify the requirements or perhaps eliminate them altogether (see story). Canada may have had a point. Requiring U.S. importers and retailers to apply more consumer information about where beef, pork, and poultry was born, raised, and slaughtered is likely to raise consumer prices. Moreover, the market for these products in North America is so integrated that tracing the travels of cattle, hogs, and chickens as they cross borders at different stages could be challenging. More importantly, Canadian producers are worried that new labeling requirements will be inherently discriminatory. For example, rather than deal with the hassles of labeling compliance for Canadian or Mexican products, American importers and retailers will simply opt to source more of their products from American producers because it will be easier to demonstrate where it came from.

More Keystone....

On Friday, the U.S. Department of State issued it's long-awaited Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) on the proposed Keystone XL pipeline. The EIS basically concluded that the Keystone XL pipeline would have little discernible impact on greenhouse gas emissions. Predictably, proponents of the pipeline hailed the EIS findings as yet more proof that Keystone is in everyone's interests and that the project should move rapidly toward final approval. Opponents of the project pointed to the fact that the EIS merely triggers the next phase of a process that includes a comment period wherein interested federal agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), can weigh in.

EPA is important for several reasons. Firstly, it has been reported the EPA is not on side with the findings of the EIS and may challenge some of the assumptions made by State. Secondly, the EPA is poised to become an extremely powerful entity in the Obama Administration's climate change mitigation efforts in the remainder of his second term. The US Supreme Court (Massachusetts v. EPA, 2007) has already ruled that the EPA is obligated to regulate the emission of greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act (1963). Anyone that thinks EPA isn't going to get the green light to do so wasn't watching the President's State of the Union Address. Moreover, President Obama made it very clear that he was prepared to spend the remainder of his second term in pursuit of his agenda with or without the help of Congress. In other words, there will be plenty of executive authority exercised in the next couple of years, some of it undoubtedly controversial. Based on his SOTU (linked here) address touting the virtues of renewables, efficiency, and natural gas as a bridge fuel to those things, I expect climate change to be one of the more contentious areas.