Given the Supreme Court that we have, the United States’ transition to authoritarianism can only be stopped at the ballot box. But inside ideological media bubbles there is a disconnect between how people vote and how they feel about our descent into a more authoritarian style of government. Persuading people to vote differently requires interrupting their media messaging with face-to-face engagement, talking to voters across partisan and ideological divides. Toward that end, I have recently added new links here to resources that can help people have more productive learning conversations across those boundaries — online or offline. (Explore the “Improving Civic Dialogue” page in the dropdown menu above.)
As modern media amplify our political frustrations, we become less interested in the complexity and moral ambiguity of the full truth. Conversations that would have been about the exchange of ideas and information instead become attempts to win some rhetorical battle about policy fights that will be decided elsewhere. And so, learning suffers.
Generally speaking, face-to-face conversation between people of differing views are much more likely to yield real learning than online exchanges. But in those online platforms that eschew both anonymity and space limitations, more productive conversations are at least possible. The two examples in Appendix F of my book come from an electricity policy email list to which I belong in which posters use real names and emails can be as long as the poster needs to make their point.
Productive conversation is virtually impossible on Twitter/X and other space-constrained platforms (Threads, Bluesky, etc.), Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and the like. I now look only at LinkedIn and Substack for energy policy substance online. And while discussion norms on those platforms are more civil and substantive than elsewhere, they also feature more subtle lobbying behavior – selective sharing of new studies or other information, ideological following/unfollowing, etc.
But email lists and subject-specific discussion boards may be the last online places where learning conversations can compete somewhat effectively with lobbying conversation. So, I thought I’d share part of another, more recent example of the way participants and observers can deepen their understanding of energy issues on a non-anonymous email list. This one occurred a little over a month ago on the same list referenced in Appendix F, and involves a wonky energy topic: fuel adjustment clauses in regulated utility rates. (The discussion is mostly inapplicable to rates paid by customers in competitive power markets like Texas or most of the northeast.)
The conversation began with a post about the effect of such clauses on the energy transition:
POSTER A: … [A] Fuel Adjustment Clause … allows utilities to take all the operating fuel costs and pass them through to customers. It became the default practice to pass 100% of fuel related costs to customers after the 1973 “Energy Crisis”. It’s still the practice in most states today and some have gone as far as to codify it into law. My background is in finance and this practice represents a massive risk reduction subsidy for fossil fuel generation technologies and is one the largest financial obstacles for renewables, conservation, and demand response adoption. My background is in finance … [and] the term “Moral Hazard” would describe this situation where the party with all the control and decision making authority has no financial repercussions on the outcome so is naturally motivated to spend their time and resources on other aspects and to never worry about the price or cost of fuel (which for a natural gas plant is the largest operating cost with extreme price volatility).
Poster A’s position seemed intuitive enough, but it was challenged shortly thereafter by Poster B.
POSTER B: I am not an economist but I have worked in thermal power plants for 25+ years and have visited power plants in every continent (except Antarctica 😊) and in most states here in the US. Every thermal power plant I have ever visited is keenly interested in fuel costs and efficiency. Regardless of fuel cost pass through. Power plants are ranked and stacked based on their ability to cost effectively produce electricity. If your sister plant is more cost effective it dispatches ahead of you and receives more capital investment and is valued more. If your electricity rates go up due to fuel costs your ratepayers and regulators take notice.
I very much doubt the notion that fuel pass through leads to any company not caring deeply about fuel costs and efficiency. This is just based on my experience. …
What I found persuasive about Poster B’s rejoinder is that it fit my own prior experience working with investor-owned utilities, who did indeed worry about their public service obligations, including the need to keep rates as low as possible. (And as an academic I had written previously about the many ways economic theory misleads us by abstracting away the social component of human behavior in the context of environmental compliance and energy regulation.)
But not long after Poster B’s post, Poster C advocated a middle position that also seems eminently reasonable.
POSTER C: I too worked for about 25 years in thermal generation, visited thermal generating facilities on 6 of the 7 continents, and I actually developed, built and operated thermal plants on 4 of the 7 continents. I agree that the vast majority of utility managements … do care about the fuel costs and fuel risks they pass through to their customers – it’s why I was always opposed to the idea (prevalent among clean energy advocates in the early days) that renewables obligations had to be production-based because they were sure utilities faced with a capacity-based obligation would just build the capacity and not run it. That belied a basic ignorance about how utilities operate their resources – if you have access to cheaper energy, you grab it.
But caring and wearing at least some of the risks of getting it wrong are two different things, and while utilities tend to be excellent at minimizing short-run costs they have little reason to develop the sort of expertise in long-term fuel risk optimization that is typical among the more successful competitive generators. Furthermore, they have little (ok, no) stake in choosing a resource portfolio that may be more complex to operate in the short run (one, for instance, that optimizes its reliance on things like distributed resources, IBRs [inverter-based resources, like solar power], variable resources, demand response, inter-regional exchanges), but with less risk of fuel-cost volatility and structural cost increases in the long run….
The discussion continued after these three posts, with some posters urging one or the other of the more extreme views. But it left room for the notion that investor-owned utilities are neither indifferent to ratepayer interests nor as sensitive to them as they might be if subjected to the full consequences of their inefficiencies.
Here, none of the posters called each other names. There were no passive-aggressive implications that others are naïve or misinformed. No one treated anyone else with disdain. Instead, the lack of anonymity, small audience (consisting of list members), and availability of space to fully articulate a position created an environment conducive to learning. There’s a lesson in that. – David Spence
