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The Great Gray Lady of American journalism has been doing a great job this year covering energy and climate issues, with Andrew Revkin’s reports on how the Bush administration tainted climate science with ideology, and Tom Friedman’s columns and reports on the clean energy tech boom in Silicon Valley. But yesterday the New York Times showed a real lapse in editorial judgment when it printed an op-ed piece called “How to Win the Energy War” by Frank G. Zarb, disclosing only that Mr. Zarb was Gerald Ford’s assistant on energy affairs and is “the managing director of a private equity firm.” The issue, of course, is transparency—giving readers as much information as possible in order to help them understand and evaluate facts and opinions in context.
Going back to the 1973 Arab Oil Embargo and his time working in the Ford White House, Mr. Zarb argues that we’ve always had the ability to achieve energy independence, but not the political will. Ford announced a transformative 10-year plan to get us off foreign oil that included 200 new nuclear power plants, 250 new coal mines, thousands of new oil wells, new synthetic fuel plants, a crash home insulation program, etc. But as soon as the embargo ended, the price of oil went down, and the crisis passed, the plan was shelved and the nation went back to business as usual, using the American military to keep the oil flowing.
So 30 years later, wrote Zarb, we still need to reduce oil consumption and increase other energy supplies. Reducing oil consumption will require sending a strong price signal to change Americans’ driving and car-buying behavior. His other suggestion is to go nuclear big-time, and he called on Washington to streamline site permitting and new plant licensing.
Now I’m somewhat open-minded to recent arguments in favor of nuclear power, which are zero emissions. But I also know the nuclear industry has had the worst public relations since Attila the Hun. Specifically, it has never understood the simple premise that corporations have to listen to popular concerns like safety and radioactive waste disposal, not just go to Washington and throw money around, saying, “ ignore those idiots, they don’t know what they’re talking about.”
That was the way the Long Island Lighting Company handled the Shoreham Nuclear Plant fiasco, when billions of investors’ dollars went down the tubes because the company ignored its critics. Then, after the critics forced the State of New York to deny Shoreham an operating license, the power company found a financial wizard to get the ratepayers and taxpayers to pay back the investors. His name was Frank G. Zarb.
I’m not saying Mr. Zarb doesn’t have the right to advocate for the nuclear power industry. But the Times should disclose whether Zarb stands to profit from his advocacy. Obviously he has worked for them before in the Shoreham case. Does he have any personal financial ties to the nuclear industry now?
Would it kill the Times to let its readers know?
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