Editorial: Geothermal Allies Threaten More than the Environment

posted in: Editorial, January 1991 | 0

The documents on which the reporting in this issue of Environment Hawai`i is based are part of the public record. Nonetheless, it is improbable that Environment Hawai`i on its own would have been able to obtain and review the far-ranging files DBED turned over to the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund in the discovery period of its lawsuit seeking to force preparation of a federal environmental impact statement on the development of geothermal energy in Hawai`i. To ask for records, after all, presupposes at least a suspicion that such records exist. And the records given SCLDF betray a range of activities that exceeds anything we suspected. We therefore thank SCLDF for sharing DBED’s files with us. (SCLDF’s lawsuit, on behalf of the Sierra Club, Greenpeace Hawai`i, and the Blue Ocean Preservation Society, is scheduled to go to trial in federal court February 20, 1991. The state is not a defendant in that suit.)

The Last Resort

In olden times, bearers of bad news might be killed. DBED is more enlightened than that. Its response to critics of geothermal energy has been to launch a public relations counter-offensive.

Among other things, Hill & Knowlton/Communications Pacific ghost-wrote an op-ed piece for then-DBED Director Roger A. Ulveling, which appeared in the Star-Bulletin November 16, 1989. It composed letters, signed by Ulveling, to the editors of publications carrying articles critical of geothermal energy. It rehearsed DBED’s Maurice Kaya and Hawaiian Electric Vice President Rick McQuain in advance of the October 20, 1989, television program “Dialog,” on the pros and cons of geothermal energy. It coordinated geothermal publicity with private groups set up by geothermal energy developers. It provided DBED with “intelligence” (Hill & Knowlton’s term) on writers and television reporters planning articles or programs on geothermal energy. It prepared booklets on energy (whose first press run, costing more than $50,000, we were told, was destroyed when Ulveling objected to an illustration).

When these efforts are supported by Hill & Knowlton’s nationwide network of agencies and by the Washington clout of Cassidy and Associates, DBED’s lobbyist, the emerging picture is one of a conspiracy designed to leave the public in the dark. Private corporations were permitted more intimate and accurate knowledge of the workings of government than the citizenry was intended to have, making it even more of a stretch to believe that DBED was and is performing as a public agency ought.

When one considers, finally, the personal ties linking these various players, the notion of a conspiracy gains yet more strength. Managing public relations for geothermal energy at Hill & Knowlton/Communications Pacific has been Doug Carlson, former spokesman for Hawaiian Electric. Helping to manage the Pirelli, DBED, and University of Hawai`i accounts for Cassidy and Associates, DBED’s lobbyist, is Vincent Versage, the former legislative aide to Senator Spark Matsunaga. In the 1970s, John Shupe, now the Department of Energy’s Pacific site manager, was project manager of the University of Hawai`i team that drilled the HGP-A well in Puna. No one should be surprised if soon Roger Ulveling resurfaces in the employ of one or another pro-geothermal interest. In December 1990, Governor Waihe`e announced that Ulveling would be leaving DBED to become a private consultant.

A Civics Lesson

To use taxpayer money for a public relations campaign — especially one whose beneficiaries are private parties — is not fair nor does it help the advance of democracy. Not fair, since it is being financed by taxes from, among others, people who take exception to the message and would take even greater exception if they had knowledge of this use of their money. Not democratic, since public relations campaigns make assumptions about the body politic (that it is susceptible to manipulation, that it is unable to understand complex arguments, that it must be told what it should want) that are incompatible with the philosophical pillars of representational government.

Similarly, when a government agency resorts to using a private lobbyist, democracy suffers. Congress, in recognition of this, has banned the use of federal funds for lobbying. The sensible idea behind this is that federal agencies should not have their own agendas, but should be doing the bidding of the public’s elected representatives. When the same lobbyist for public agencies represents private interests as well, the danger that the public’s interest will be subordinated to private interests becomes clear and present.

Finally, there is the evident chumminess among the state’s hired lobbyists and Hawai`i’s two senators. We are not saying that Senator Inouye or Senator Akaka would switch a vote in direct return for one or another blandishment from a Cassidy associate. But when lobbyists schmooze with politicians, take them to dinner, host parties and trips, and deliver “bundled” contributions of tens of thousands of dollars, it is hard to think this would not result in some extra courtesy extended to the lobbyist that goes well beyond the perfunctory politeness with which a less well-connected constituent is greeted.

Federal laws on lobbying and campaign financing need strengthening. Hawai`i’s congressional delegation needs to line up behind campaign finance reform efforts and proposals to require more thorough disclosure of lobbyists’ expenditures and other activities. At the state level, the Legislature should follow Congress’ lead and ban the use of state money for lobbying.

Betting on a Loser

To spur development of clean, cheap and renewable energy sources, public subsidies should be available in amounts at least equal to subsidies for existing energy sources. Fossil fuel’s costs, for example, include the $2.5 billion a month it costs to keep U.S. troops in the Middle East; the risk of damage from oil spills; and the environmental costs attached to drilling and exploring for oil in sensitive areas.

But when public funds have been used to subsidize the development of alternative energy, the favored projects have not always been those that hold the most promise of being cheap, renewable, and clean. Over the last four decades, for example, the U.S. government has spent billions of dollars to promote and subsidize private development of nuclear energy — and still the problem of finding a safe means of storing the radioactive wastes eludes solution at any cost.

In Hawai`i, proponents of geothermal energy claim it is cheap, clean and renewable. But private development costs alone will probably exceed $4 billion and will require government help of one type or another. The inevitable venting of noxious gases; the still unsolved problems of disposal of liquid wastes; the dead certainty that non-native plants will use drilling pads and new roads as beachheads for invading predominantly native forests; the perils of drilling mile-deep wells in an area of near-constant seismic activity — to say nothing of the environmental concerns raised by the system of transmitting power from the Big Island to O`ahu — give the lie to touts of geothermal energy as environmentally benign. As for it being renewable, no evidence yet supports the belief that the Big Island can support long-term generation of 600 megawatts of electricity.

Even if geothermal energy did not flunk these tests, other considerations apply. The fact that many Native Hawaiians object to it on religious and cultural grounds cannot be cavalierly dismissed. Western culture has injured Native Hawaiians, their land and their culture. It is too late to make full amends, but at least their efforts to protect what has been left to them should be respected.

A Bone for Mother Hubbard

Over the last decade, annual federal budgets for research into energy efficiency and conservation were pared to absurdly low levels. According to a recent report by the General Accounting Office, spending (in constant 1982 dollars) fell from a peak of $350 million in 1980 to their present low of roughly $150 million. Administration requests fell even further: from a peak of roughly $340 million in 1981 to the Reagan low of around $20 million in 1983. But during the same decade, cumulative state taxpayer contributions toward geothermal development passed the $20 million mark, while the federal tab ran up to $36 million, with the promise of $15 million more to come.

Conservation is far and away the cheapest, most reliable, and cleanest way of “finding” new energy. Had the state pursued conservation with the same gusto with which it chased geothermal energy, chances are very good that by now the energy future of Hawai`i would be far more secure than it is.

However, with the development of energy resources vested in the same agency charged with business development, it was perhaps to be expected that Hawai`i’s energy dollars would have been spent in promoting a type of energy that is, at one and the same time, big business as well. Geothermal energy meshed nicely with DBED’s notion that Hawai`i’s destiny lay in the direction of glamorous, high-tech, multinational partnerships. Conservation, with its Mother Hubbard image, didn’t stand a chance.

On the mainland, conservation has received a boost through a process known as integrated resource planning. According to the state Public Utilities Commission, IRP “is an approach to utility planning that requires the assessment of all known resources for both the production of energy, i.e., the supply side, and the consumption of energy, i.e., the demand-side, against an array of broadly defined cost-benefit considerations.” Last year, the Public Utilities Commission initiated proceedings to bring integrated resource planning to Hawai`i. Those proceedings, involving more than 20 parties, are well under way now, and it would be only prudent to withhold committing any more public money to development of geothermal energy until after the IRP docket has determined what need, if any, the state has of geothermal energy. And to put an end to the mischief that results when energy and business development are housed under the same agency roof, the Legislature should divest DBED of the energy portfolio.

Our Crystal Ball

The skids are greased for accelerated activity toward commercial geothermal development. The state has the money to expand its research program. ENEL (Italy’s government-owned utility company, which is a consultant to DBED) appears ready to recommend that all future wells, whether for research or development, be sized large enough to be productive. It also favors random, scattered drilling — a shift made possible by the Legislature last year, when it permitted exploratory wells outside designated geothermal resource subzones. Finally, the regulatory hurdles needed to assure cautious and prudent development — state rules setting emissions standards, an approved environmental impact statement and master development plan; the review provided by contested case hearings — are missing, making the time for development especially propitious.

But what developers might consider green lights should be red flags for the public. Without properly adopted emissions standards in place, and without an EIS (state or federal) to define the terms under which development may proceed, any further geothermal projects should be stopped dead in their tracks. And until enough is known about geothermal energy’s potential to support the claim that it can be commercially developed, DBED — or any other state agency, for that matter — should be prohibited from spending another penny of taxpayer money in the effort to “sell” the public on such an unproved and hotly contested idea.

Amplifications and Corrections

Further to the December 1990 discussion of the grounding of the Star Connecticut: We have been informed that Captain Pouch asked the third mate for a fix of the ship’s position about the time he heard the radio message informing him that the ship was in shallow water. Also, the cargo of naphtha was stated to be 2.65 million barrels; in fact, 2.65 million gallons of naphtha were aboard the Star Connecticut.

Volume 1, Number 7 January 1991

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