Tales Of Our Times
By JOHN BARTLIT
New Mexico Citizens
for Clean Air & Water
‘Context’ Improves Policymaking
“Facts” in the news depend hugely on context. Yet, news has little time for context (i.e., how facts relate). Through the years, many have observed that, at its core, the news is designed to lack context. In the early 1900s, famed newswriter Ben Hecht put it this way: “Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock.”
Hecht reveals both the prime strength and weakness of news reporting. For quick excitement, “breaking news” sticks with events and quotes of the day. That fills a healthy public need and appetite. Yet, today our nation grows highly troubled by news whose core nature is not all that people may think. Knowing so is the best available cure.
The news style will not change; yet context is vital. Key policies stay gridlocked in rancor for years, while few alternatives appear.
America’s poignant gem of “context” is “Four score and seven years ago our fathers….” Lincoln’s 271 words set in context the agony of the Civil War with the Nation’s founding principles. Feel the force of context! Tinier examples are everywhere. Take the environment:
New policy contests arose with the Clean Air Act of 1970. Industrial air pollution controls were familiar in far-away agencies, but not yet here. Electric companies condemned the cost of clean air controls, amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars. Their publicity touted how many workers had good jobs at a power station. All to raise old fears of job loss.
Utilities omitted relevant facts (context) that would add perspective. Think a moment: Outlays for pollution controls equate to income for companies in the pollution control business. Further, these outlays create hundreds more jobs per power plant for workers who construct, operate, and maintain pollution controls. Pollution control is a healthy part of the economy too.
Then, these outlays produce cleaner air.
Leading vendors of pollution controls were soon invited by Congress and the new EPA to testify about the products they sold and their costs. The aim was to gather needed context. Worried electric companies reacted by boycotting vendors after they verified their clean-air capabilities.
The fear of data raised other roadblocks. New Mexico formally asked owners of the Four Corners Power Plant what the pollution controls at the plant would cost customers in terms of percent rise in electric bills. The company replied to the state in writing that it “was totally impossible for the participants to compute a representative cost figure.” The very words read like a ghost of the whole truth.
So, I set out to learn more. I started at the Los Alamos County Library. The data were plentiful in three reference books:
- Federal Power Commission: Steam-Electric Plant Construction Cost and Annual Production Expenses – 1974
- Moody’s Public Utility Manual 1976
- Moody’s Municipal & Government Manual 1976.
I did the calculations and gave the results in testimony at a state hearing, subject to cross-examination by industry. There was none. I wrote a peer-reviewed journal article on the results. I presented the numbers at regional conferences.
The abstract of my article reads:
“Environmental control costs can be made to appear much larger in impact than they actually are by placing costs in misleading contexts or failing to provide perspective. It is essential for continued public support of environmental health programs that this practice be countered by more meaningful presentations of economic data. As an example, analytic methods appropriate to the case of a large coal-fired power plant in northwestern New Mexico are developed and discussed. Pollution control expenditures at the Four Corners Power Plant in northwestern New Mexico were presented to the public as costing $82 (million) annually. Although this figure may be the correct one, data were collected and analyzed to show that this cost represented an increase of only 5 to 60 cents on a $100 electricity bill for the consumer of electricity.”
The full article is at https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1619281/.
Context is key to finding good policies.