At first glance, you might not think the debt crisis and the energy crisis have much in common. But they’ve got two big similarities, either of which can come back to bite us.

As we write this, it looks like Republicans and Democrats have reached a deal allowing the United States to raise its arbitrary debt ceiling before Tuesday and avoid a historic default on its obligations. There’s been a lot of concern in the environmental world that a default, or even the austerity plans proposed to avoid default, would gut clean energy programs. That’s legitimate. But fiscal policy and energy policy are also alike in two fundamental ways:

All of the federal government’s budget agencies — the independent