What Good Are Energy Statistics?

A would-be humorist once said, “Statistics are a like a bikini bathing suit. What they reveal is interesting, but what they conceal is vital.”

If this is a truth for statistics in general, then it is a lot truer for statistics dealing with all the forms of energy we use on this plant – as well as the energy we use to travel away from it.

Thinking about it – we have crude oil, gasoline, diesel fuel, propane, jet fuel, natural gas, coal, peat and geothermal heat – just to name a few categories.

And promoters of each energy form will present statistics that will attempt to prove that their particular energy form is getting cleaner and cheaper than any other and is the one that should be chosen for universal use.

While of course their opponents will argue, quite forcefully, that the opposite is true.

And thereby lays the problem – those vital facts that are concealed.

However in the case of energy – the vital concealed facts are much more important to human health and even survival than, say, the dominant color of newborn babies eyes in Saskatchewan.

For example, while working one’s way through the “smoke and mirrors” of the current Clean Coal Campaign one should be told how many people died in the past year from breathing or lung diseases caused by polluted air. Or what percentage of the water consumed in the United States for drinking did not conform to the requirements of the clean water act of 1972 that caused what number of deaths or illnesses?

We are not going to get this disturbing information from the fossil energy people on a voluntary basis. So once again it falls to the elected representatives of the people to establish and maintain a constant watch for the concealed facts that we need to have for our health and welfare – the common welfare our founding fathers knew needed protection.

The common welfare and common sense should go hand in hand and our need for the facts is a requirement of both. We must continually remind our Congress, State and Local governments of their responsibility to ensure that we get the facts. And we must be ever on guard to make sure they do so.

Oh, and our founding fathers also provided automatic “term limits”. They’re called elections.