Friday
Editor in chief: Jack Clifford
Managing Editor: Jessica Blanchard
Newsroom: (541) 346-5511
Room 300, Erb Memorial Union
P.O. box 3159, Eugene, OR 97403
E-mail: ode@oregon.uoregon.edu
EDITORIAL EDITOR: MICHAEL J. KLECKNER opededitor@journalist.com
High Energy Prices Give Us Chills
Winter has once again
descended on Ore
gon, and the cold tem
peratures bring a
painful reminder that the United
States needs to re-examine its com
mitment to providing energy. For
students and senior citizens on
fixed budgets who use natural gas
or oil heating, turning up the ther
mostat means readjusting their
budgets. And from California’s
dangerous experiment with dereg
ulation to President-elect Bush’s
nominee to head the Department of
Energy, the outlook for national en
ergy policy is not good. Partisan
politics surrounding energy need
to stop, and a commitment must be
made to develop cheaper, renew
able sources of power.
The economic factors behind the
impending energy crisis are fairly
straightforward. Population is in
creasing, demand for power is up,
and no public bodies — cities,
counties, states or the federal gov
ernment — have done enough to
ensure that citizens’ power needs
are met. Instead, fights about who
should find answers and who
should be held accountable take
place between Democrats and Re
publicans. Much of the media
frame the issue as “extreme, radical
environmentalists versus control
ling, corrupt corporations.’’ That
outlook is too simple, and it’s not
the point. We need power.
While Oregon produces most of
its own energy, prices are still unsta
ble, and the Bonneville Power Ad
ministration, which supplies much
of Springfield’s energy, will have to
raise its wholesale rates soon. The
Springfield Utility Board has al
ready approved a rate increase to go
into effect in March, and the Eugene
Water and Electric Board is consid
ering similar increases.
California’s situation is even
worse. The state’s utilities have re
fused to invest in new power plants
in the last decade, and the lack of
power generation, coupled with the
state’s deregulation of the industry,
have brought rolling blackouts and
wholesale price increases that are
threatening to bankrupt those utili
ties. The state’s government officials,
federal agencies and the U.S. Con
i
gress are all point
ing fingers, assign
ing blame and doing
nothing to fix the sit
uation. Thankfully, \
California’s prob- '4
lems, while far from \
solved, have been a »’ .
powerful object les- » . •
son to other states
tinkering with j* .
deregulation. The \ 1'
deregulation mon- *
ster needs to put to
death. y
Electricity is a
universal public
good, something
that cannot properly
be handled by a free
market interested in
top-notch profit
margins and low
capital investment.
The interest in
cheap, reliable ener
gy is also universal
—while students
are certainly hard
hit by upward-spi
raling costs, all
Americans deserve
access to power they
can afford. We are,
after all, one of the
leading industrial
ized nations in the world, presum
ably capable of providing public
goods to our citizens.
In order to control costs in the
short term, there are things stu
dents can do. Stop taking long
showers. Turn off lights in unoccu
pied rooms. Turn off and unplug
appliances that aren’t in use. Turn
off the computer at night, do larger
loads of laundry, and most impor
tantly, turn the heat down. One
does not need to walk around the
house in a tank top in January.
Sweaters have a heat-providing
purpose, and they are substantially
cheaper than keeping the thermo
stat set at 70 degrees. These sugges
tions won’t just save money on in
dividual power meters; if Oregon’s
energy use doesn’t decrease during
the winter, rates for everyone are
going to go up, and up, and up.
There are also long-term solu
tions that students can be involved
**■ *
with. Call and write to elected offi
cials, demanding that long-term so
lutions be found. The United States
should be leading the world in ex
ploring alternative energy sources.
The technology exists, but major
power manufacturers won’t invest
in them because non-renewable
sources of power are still available.
Well, guess what? Those sources
aren’t going to last long.
In our technology-heavy society,
we need to be ahead of the curve.
Many power brokers are ahead of the
curve, at least as far as purchasing
patents on solar and wind power
technologies. That’s right: Compa
nies such as BP and Exxon currently
have working models of alternative
energy sources. They bought the
patents from individuals who devel
oped these technologies, but the
companies won’t implement them
until there’s no other alternative.
And when solar and wind power are
implemented on a large-scale basis,
r
consumers will be forced to pay top
dollar for them. That may be good
corporate strategy, but it isn’t fair,
and it isn’t right. Our elected officials
need pressure to make these tech
nologies happen now, and cheaply.
Unfortunately, putting pressure
on the president-elect and Spencer
Abraham, Bush’s nominee for the
Department of Energy, may not be
terribly successful. A senator from
Michigan from 1994-2000, Abra
ham proved himself very sympa
thetic to the interests of the reign
ing corporate power kings, and
very unsympathetic to the energy
concerns of average citizens. While
in the Senate, Abraham voted
against increasing automobile fuel
efficiency standards, sponsored a
proposal in 1999 to dismantle the
Department of Energy, and worked
very hard to build a nuclear waste
repository in Nevada, despite the
concerns of many environmental
ists, Nevada elected officials and
Giovanni Salimena Emerald
Nevada residents. The Nevada
repository is still high on his list of
priorities.
The energy kingpins must be
upset that Abraham lost his re
election bid to the Senate, be
cause they poured more than
$350,000 into his campaign, ac
cording to the Center for Respon
sive Politics. But then, thanks to
Bush, maybe the industry will
have all the access it needs to U.S.
energy policy. So turn down the
thermostat and send a letter off to
Washington, asking that the parti
san game of squabbling-while-do
ing-nothing be stopped in favor of
immediately moving forward on
energy conservation and develop
ment. That may be the only way
we’ll all be able to make it through
another cold winter.
This editorial represents the opinion of the
Emerald editorial board. Responses can be
sent to ode@oregon.uoregon.edu.
Lack of investment in schools may leave labor pool dry
Our state universities get
more money when
more students attend
them. Each institution
competes in what can be com
pared to a market system, and if
you look at the Oregon Universi
ty System in this manner, the
customers in the market are the
students. In this scheme, one
could argue students are what
drive our state universities and
their success.
Knowing this, campuses enter
prise to attract students by providing
access to what we hope is a quality
post-secondary education. If the ed
ucation provided is not perceived to
be of high quality, institutions have a
more difficult time attracting stu
dents. Students know this, too, and
search for the right high-quality edu
cation to suit their needs, both finan
cially and academically. That is, stu
dents weigh the financial access
opportunities as well as considera
tions of the academic reputation of
institutions before choosing a partic
ular school.
Reputations are developed over
long sustained investments in edu
cation and, once achieved, dramat
ically increase the ability of a uni
versity to prosper both
academically and financially
through fundraising. So there is a
relationship between the success of
a university and its ability to attract
good students. What contributes to
each of these factors is related just
the same, in that providing an ac
cessible high quality education de
pends on sustained investments.
Currently, what has been pro
posed for our universities is a $94
million cut and an 8 percent in
crease in tuition over the next two
years. We are being asked to pay
more for less and more for money
Commentary
Tim
Young_
we will never see. That 8 percent
increase will generate $25 million
in student money, often hard
earned or borrowed dollars, that
will essentially be funneled out
side higher education into some
other place in the government,
such as corrections or the Oregon
Department of Transportation.
That is the trouble we face as
Oregonians, and in light of our eco
nomic transition from agriculture
to high tech, this is a trouble that
could haunt us. Without a commit
ment to our universities, we will
never get what we want out of
them. Without sustained invest
ments, we will never realize our
universities’ full potential, and
those students most capable in this
state will simply follow the market
trend — out of the state.
As consumers this is our reality,
but as citizens this is our respon
sibility to change. Private sector
giants such as Intel understand
this and are going to bat for stu
dents, not necessarily out of the
goodness of their hearts — al
though one could argue that —
but because this is their labor pool
we are talking about. In a more
broad sense, this is the labor pool
for the whole state, and the capa
bility of those in this pool to suc
ceed and prosper has a relation
ship with the prosperity of the
state. In fact, one could argue that
they are one and the same.
The well-being of the educated
workforce of tomorro w starts to
day. What Oregon will be like in 20
years is being crafted now, and if
we ignore the importance of that,
we are ignoring the future.
Tim Young is a junior political science ma
jor at the University of Oregon and a stu
dent on the State Board of Higher Educa
tion.