The Swinging Compass: Why Energy Policies Fail, and How to Make Them Persist

“A compass, I learned when I was surveying,.. it’ll point you true north from where you’re standing, but it’s got no advice about the swamps, deserts and chasms that you’ll encounter along the way. If in pursuit of your destination, you plunge ahead heedless of obstacles, and achieve nothing more than to sink in a swamp… what’s the use of knowing true north?” Abraham Lincoln, in the film Lincoln (2012).

The US Secretary of Energy, Chris Wright, met with the members of the Senate Budget Committee recently on the Administration’s goals. He remarked:

My priorities for the Department are clear— to unleash a golden era of American energy dominance, strengthen our national security, and lead the world in innovation. A reliable and abundant energy supply is the foundation of a strong and prosperous nation. When America leads in energy, we lead in prosperity, security and human flourishing.

Some practical steps flowing from those priorities are ruffling feathers — especially among clean energy advocates, such as the Carbon Capture Coalition — who saw nearly $4 billion in Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations (OCED) awards abruptly canceled. And the chickens are squawking over the paltry proposed budget for the Department of Energy this year.

Shifting from what to why

Today, I’d like to shift focus from what this administration is doing to ask a broader question: why do some policies endure while others vanish with the stroke of a pen? What determines whether a program weathers partisan transition — or gets erased by the next budget cycle?

Too often, we chase treasure maps — short-term gains, political wins, a flood of funding before the next election. And we trust the compass to point us in the right direction. But the compass, as Lincoln warns, gives no advice about the terrain.

Why Are Treasure Maps a Bad Idea? Because a treasure map leads to something finite. It assumes stability — that the goal doesn’t move, erode, or rot. It invites short-term behavior: chase the bounty, burn the boat.

Why Are Persistence Maps a Good Idea? Because they don’t promise wealth — they show where things survive. They don’t tell you “where to go” — they tell you where you can go and come back again. It doesn’t glorify movement — it honors endurance.

Measuring Persistence

That’s where GTESI comes in — the General Theory of Evolutionary Systems & Information, more about GTESI here. It offers a framework not just for asking whether a policy is smart or popular, but whether it can survive pressure, adapt across time, and persist beyond the cycle that birthed it. GTESI tracks four core vectors: IPR (Information Persistence Rate), SCD (Structural Continuity Density), TRFI (Thermodynamic-Response Friction Index), and EED (Entropy Export Delta).

You see, GTESI does not just point to systems that align with persistence. It reveals the obstacles on the way. Systems with low SCD are like rope bridges across chasms. Systems with poor IPR are travelers with no memory of the road behind them. High TRFI? That’s the swamp. You enter at your peril unless prepared to adapt. Poor EED? You carry your garbage with you. You’ll collapse from the load. Because the goal isn’t to avoid all obstacles — it’s to persist through them, learn from them, and grow stronger in the crossing.

Let’s apply the four GTESI vectors to this DOE moment:

GTESI Vectors in Action

Policy Persistence: Why Clean Energy Struggled to Stick

1. Misalignment Between Symbol and Structure
   Clean energy awards were framed as “demonstrations” but operationalized as “deployments” — large-scale, fast-moving, semi-commercial efforts. That mismatch made them vulnerable to claims of fraud, waste, or overreach, especially when issued late in the term.
2. Low IPR Encoding
   Many projects lacked mechanisms for persistent knowledge capture. Without built-in evaluative feedback loops or shared metrics across projects, memory did not compound across the ecosystem.
3. Fragile SCD
   The policy scaffolding relied on discretionary funding and partisan EOs, not on regulations with bipartisan traction, industry mandates, or market-pull dynamics.
4. TRFI Vulnerability
   Clean energy projects depended heavily on favorable capital, political, and regulatory conditions. When those changed, systems couldn’t adapt. By contrast, fossil and nuclear policies have higher TRFI tolerance: they’re sold as essential even under stress.

Strategic Lessons for Policy Persistence — Ranked by Feasibility

Let’s revisit the five GTESI lessons and rank them by ease of execution vs. difficulty in today’s political and structural environment, while layering in your insights.

GTESI Guide to Embedding Policy in Law

1. Encode shared interest, not partisan identity
   RFS succeeded because it linked agriculture, fuel independence, and climate across red-blue lines. Same with fracking: a Texas oil play that helped a Democrat-led DOE prove peak oil wrong.
2. Institutional SCD matters more than agency headlines
   Many durable programs live inside dull acronyms: USDA Rural Dev, Section 45Q, Title 17 Loan Programs. They last because they’re bureaucratically boring but functionally powerful.
3. Build cross-TRFI coalitions
   A good coalition includes high-friction actors (e.g. transmission builders, utilities) and low-friction innovators (e.g. synthetic biology startups). That mix keeps entropy export high and adapts across shocks.

Case Study: Rebuilding an OCED Project for GTESI Persistence

Let’s choose a representative cancelled OCED project — say, a Carbon Capture Retrofit for a Gas-Fired Power Plant (based on the pattern in the DOE announcement).

What Went Wrong (GTESI View)

Roadmap for Future Viable Carbon Capture Demo

Coalitions That Persist — and the GTESI of Long Timeline Trust

Is there simply an energy-industrial complex where the same old big companies chase government project awards for non-dilutive capital and to align with government-of-the-day priorities? Do large coalitions simply exist to tap funds, rather than build broad coalitions? Opinions differ. Yet, today’s energy coalitions can learn much from what fracking, RFS, and other energy coalitions did to persist, transform, and endure.

GTESI Profile of Transformative Coalitions

GTESI Notes on Coalition Design

1. Avoid grant-dependent identity groups.
   Build around value chains, not funding chains. Focus on what connects across cycles (e.g., grid stability, rural jobs, materials sovereignty).
2. Lengthen the timeline.
   Coalitions built for 10+ year returns (like semiconductors or DARPA) endure longer. Avoid pitch decks chasing the next 18-month RFP cycle.
3. Anchor Symbol in Structure.
   Don’t just say “AI for good” — build a GPU farm and invite regional universities. Don’t just say “carbon removal” — build salt dome permitting reform. The action creates the trust.

The Bottom Line

The opposite of GTESI persistence is the entropy of the instant: a press release, a ribbon-cutting, a headline that fades. But persistence lives where information becomes structure, structure adapts to stress, and coalitions outlive their creators.

We can rebuild DOE to be that. Weather-vane energy policy is useless. Compass energy policy (it must be so!) is not much better. Yes, a compass gives orientation. But orientation without topology is delusion. Knowing “true north” is only valuable if you also understand the terrain between you and your destination — swamps, deserts, chasms.

In GTESI terms: True north is telos — the long vector of persistence. The swamp is entropy — the mire of misalignment, fragility, and loss. The chasm is TRFI — the friction index, the cost of ignoring adaptation. The desert is symbolic drift — where meaning fails to refresh, and systems dry up.

The good news? We are not lost. But we must stop following weather vanes — chasing whichever way the wind is blowing this quarter. The compass can help — if we pair it with a map of persistence. That map doesn’t lead to treasure. It leads to trust. And trust, when earned, is more valuable than gold — because it endures. We must build structures that adapt, encode memory, offload disorder, and span the divides. We can do this. We’ve done it before.

We just have to look up, align on true north — and map the terrain together.