Wall Street Journal front page: “U.S. redraws world oil map”
DOI: 10.1063/PT.4.0139
On 13 November three East Coast national newspapers prominently publicized news released the day before by the International Energy Agency (IEA). The Washington Post‘s front-page teaser blurb put it this way: ‘The United States will become the world’s top producer of oil within five years, a net exporter around 2030 and nearly energy self-sufficient by 2035.’
The IEA press release ‘s opening frames the news internationally:
The global energy map is changing in dramatic fashion, the International Energy Agency said as it launched the 2012 edition of the World Energy Outlook (WEO). The Agency’s flagship publication, released today in London, said these changes will recast expectations about the role of different countries, regions and fuels in the global energy system over the coming decades.
‘North America is at the forefront of a sweeping transformation in oil and gas production that will affect all regions of the world, yet the potential also exists for a similarly transformative shift in global energy efficiency,’ said IEA Executive Director Maria van der Hoeven. ‘This year’s World Energy Outlook shows that by 2035, we can achieve energy savings equivalent to nearly a fifth of global demand in 2010. In other words, energy efficiency is just as important as unconstrained energy supply, and increased action on efficiency can serve as a unifying energy policy that brings multiple benefits.’
The release’s next line points toward the three US newspapers’ framing: ‘The WEO finds that the extraordinary growth in oil and natural gas output in the United States will mean a sea-change in global energy flows.’ The Post placed a brief piece on an inside page, but the New York Times‘s ‘Report predicts U.S. as no. 1 oil producer in a few years ’ appeared above the fold on the business section’s page 1. And in the Wall Street Journal , the news dominated the top of the front page.
The WSJ opened by projecting that the ‘shift ... could transform not just energy supplies but also U.S. politics and diplomacy’ and that ‘it shows how different President Barack Obama’s second term will be from his first on energy policy.’ The article continued:
Four years ago, the perception of energy scarcity and rising concern about global warming led Mr. Obama to push for legislation capping greenhouse-gas emissions and to pump billions of federal dollars into green-energy companies. Both policies caused grief for the president, as the greenhouse-gas bill died in the Senate and Republicans attacked him over the bankruptcy of solar-panel maker Solyndra LLC.
In Mr. Obama’s second term, Republican control of the House makes any big climate-change legislation unlikely, and budget deficits will limit any effort to spend billions more on green-energy projects.
But the surge in U.S. oil production, to a projected 11.1 million barrels a day in 2020, has given the White House a chance to make peace with Republicans and energy executives, at least on some fronts. Like Republicans, Mr. Obama has said that growing energy extraction in the U.S. can create jobs and boost the economy. Also, the rising use of natural gas in place of coal to generate electricity helps reduce carbon-dioxide emissions without legislation.
The WSJ discussed the prospects for new US business opportunities and for changes in US military commitments caused by the projected energy shifts. It quoted Kevin Book, managing director at Clearview Energy Partners LLC: ‘The entire energy policy of the U.S. has been about scarcity, derived from the 1970s supply shocks. Now, we have a different reality—the age of energy adequacy.’
Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.