Happiness and energy security seem like strange bedfellows. At the extremes it’s smiling vs. safety, gregariousness vs. geopolitics, tenderness vs. terrorism. Yet they share surprising similarities that can help happiness gain a foothold in energy policy discourse.
The current dominant paradigm when it comes to oil is energy security or its variants, oil security or energy/oil independence. America’s reliance on importing a volatile commodity raises a host of issues, including concerns about its effect on the economy, the ability to obtain supplies during crises, and how the oil wealth can empower foreign governments to pursue agendas hostile to the U.S.’s interests.
Besides the macroeconomic consequences, it’s clear that a traditional method of analyzing policy, maximizing GDP, was completely inadequate as the one central goal for energy policy. There’s willingness in the energy policy community to listen to more than energy economists because of the very diverse concerns.
Psychology and happiness can come into this mix. Papers combining energy and happiness have begun to appear, including the negative effects of commuting to work and living near airport noise. The core players in energy policy, economists and security experts, are not foreign to happiness studies either; economists have done much of the statistical work on happiness data sets, and some of these economists have looked at the negative effects of political corruption and terrorism central to discussions of energy.
Previous price shocks led to widely acknowledged psychological impacts, even if quantification seemed out of the question. The frustrations and anxiety of sitting in gas lines in the 1970s were clearly separate from the embargo’s GDP impact. Likewise the media frequently covered the anger that consumers felt during the 2008 price shock.
If happiness needs a nudge to enter a field that admittedly sounds too macho to have concerns about well-being, one could rename it “psychological security” to fit right in. Bastions of toughness are already adopting it, as the military is testing positive psychology en masse to improve the psychological readiness of its soldiers in a proactive attempt to ward off PTSD and depression. From a psychological level, looking at the immediate effects of a price shock in security terms, while tending toward being overly narrow, has strong merits, as it likely increases feelings of helplessness, vulnerability and fears of future terrorist attacks. Many who bought SUVs did so to secure themselves from the errors of other drivers – but in the face of high gasoline prices, they were completely insecure.
Finally, somewhat ironically, the fact that happiness – or “psychological security” – and energy security are fairly ill-defined concepts allows them to more freely overlap. As Michael Levi wrote recently, “We know a lot less about what energy security is than our confident rhetoric suggests.” With energy security a kind of grab-bag of good outcomes related to energy with only air pollution, climate change and energy poverty usually separate, psychology can fit right into the mix. Already behavioral economists and sociologists are trying to figure out how to encourage people to conserve energy and some ethnographic studies are looking into how vehicles that people purchase have symbolic meaning for their identity.
Issues traditionally considered central to energy security are really issues of well-being not explicitly stated, after all. The security consequences of not having energy supplies during times of war could have profound security and obviously well-being consequences if Americans are dying, fearing for their lives, or living in a state with a teetering government. And as previously mentioned, terrorism decreases well-being.
In a few decades, the question may not be whether happiness can fit into energy security, but how energy security fits in a more openly acknowledged well-being framework. Energy security as well as many of the other benefits currently cited as reasons to pursue various energy policies (encouraging sustainability, promoting economic growth) are just manifestations of an underlying concept of happiness.
