Regulators’ Responsibilitie
Branko Terzic is a managing director at Berkeley Research Group, and a nonresident senior fellow of Atlantic Council’s Global Energy Center. He served as a commissioner at FERC and on the Wisconsin Public Service Commission. He also served as CEO of Yankee Energy System, Inc.
“Public Opinion” is the name of Walter Lippmann’s 1922 book on democracy, citizenship and the role of media in forming what he describes as public perception, expectation and actions.
I recommend you buy a copy.
The reason has to do with regulators’ perceptions of the role of public opinion in reaching the next generation of crucial decisions in energy and climate change policy. Lippmann wrote about the difficulty of reporting on complex issues, as in the case of labor disagreements, and concluded that “News which requires so much trouble as that to obtain is beyond the resources of the daily press.”
As regulators deal with complex issues of fuel choices (nuclear, renewables, coal), transmission line approvals and new complex metering and tariffing provisions (time-of-day, demand-side management, net metering), they frequently meet with opposition from individuals and groups, each claiming to represent all or a segment of the public. How is a regulator to process or value this information?
Perhaps Lippmann’s writings may help us here; he observes: “The hypothesis which seems to me the most fertile, is that news and truth are not the same thing, and must be clearly distinguished.”
“The function of news is to signalize an event, the function of truth is to bring to light the hidden facts, to set them into relation with each other, and make a picture of reality on which men can act.”