Discussion on:

Why energy journalism is so bad

So much of what passes for "journalism" today is just material "churned" from press releases by people with little inclination or ability to be critical of what they're being fed. If it fits the proper narrative, it's good enough to print. I used to call it "press release journalism", but someone recently came up with the term "churnalism", which I think is apt.

Let me compliment you Chris, as you are one of the few here at SmartPlanet that I would not apply that derogatory term to. Although I don't always agree with you, your pieces here that I've read are not the kind of rehashed press releases or talking points memo-derived drivel that makes up so much of technical journalism these days.

Your suggestions for skepticism are excellent.

And I'd say those are good guidelines for reading ANY journalism (or for listening to any politician, or advertisement, or professor, or preacher, or businessman, or know-it-all.) Critical thinking is CRITICAL. (Pun intended.)

This is good information to better understand the information coming out of the energy sector. It is useful to be able to tell if the report is propaganda or if there is valid information.

Great article, Chris. You cover well the factual data problems that lead to the horribly inadequate energy reporting that exists in the MSM. I wrote my Master's thesis on this very topic, and I give you high marks for the piece of it that you tackle. There's also the "political editorial agendas" and related problems, but I won't go into those here. I just want to point out one additional detail on data interpretation that actually manifests itself in your article. I refer to changes in units. In your early paragraphs, you talk about the confusion over global supply projections using the convention of millions of barrels per day or MBD. Then in the graph of US historical production, the units are in thousands of barrels per year, which is more often expressed as billions of barrels per year. So even I, as one who is well versed in this issue, had to study the graph a bit to figure out why it wasn't showing the 9.5 MBD peak I'm used to seeing. There seems to be little hope that on top of all the other problems of ignorance and bias in energy reporting that we'll ever get a plurality of journalists to note and clarify such unit differences. They are all too happy to report x billion barrels discovered as a panacea, with no thought to how that fits into the overall context of current & future supply/demand equations. Again, kudos for a great treatment of this.

Thanks cliffman. You are right - it would have been better if I'd found or made a graph of production rates in mbpd instead, for consistency. But that might have been a bigger task than I wanted to get into, because I wanted to show the long term perspective (going back to 1860) to make that point, and that graph was handy.

But I feel your pain about units. I've been complaining about it since 2005 in my public work, and before that too. I want all the hours of my life back that I've spent laboriously converting one data set in millions of tonnes per year to barrels per day, and so on, especially for the pieces where I had to merge multiple data sets that were all in different units. It's really a pain. I have cajoled and pleaded with other energy analysts to switch to a common unit, like quads or EJs, but I haven't gotten too far with it, and I don't see any relief so long as EIA, IEA, BP, and other major data sources continue to insist on their preferred units. That said, I have noticed a gradual drift toward EJs in the last few years, so maybe there's hope for guys like us after all. (And that's just the data; how about mbpd vs. MBD vs. mb/d vs. MMB/D, etc.? Not to mention the ridiculous "MMBtu"...awful.)

Terrific article - except it's pessimistic, so maybe it's an editorial?

A problem, Yergin is *not* an economist. His undergraduate degree was in English, and his PhD is in International Relations:
"EDUCATION: Bachelor's degree in English from Yale University, 1968; Master's degree from Cambridge University, 1970, with a focus on economic history; and a Ph.D. in International Relations, 1974, from Cambridge University, where he was a Marshall Scholar." www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D9QK3I500.htm

That's right, he's even less qualified to be the go-to man on the topic.

I stopped paying attention to the NYTimes when I realized their journalism in both energy and the housing bubble had the problems you describe here. We all found out later that their main housing/finance writer was in the thick of the housing bubble himself and a hopeless optimist at the time.

http://www.consumerenergyreport.com/2011/11/28/pipelines-and-tar-sands-cure-the-disease-not-the-symptoms/

I'd direct you to this blog. RR tends to have balanced well thought out discussion and reporting of energy technology.