alternative energy — VOICES for REASON

Next Monday I will be speaking about the destructiveness of policies aimed at cutting off fossil fuels and promoting “green energy.” I will be on a panel discussion at UCLA with Dr. Willie Soon of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Here is the description:

 It is now widely believed that man-made greenhouse gases are causing an unnatural warming of the earth that will have devastating consequences for human life. Environmentalists and politicians are pressing for severe restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions in order to prevent climate change. But what does the scientific evidence actually support regarding the causes of climate variability and the role of anthropogenic greenhouse gases? Are the predictions of catastrophic changes supported by scientific fact? Are governmental economic intervention and restrictions on emissions an appropriate policy response? Drs. Keith Lockitch and Willie Soon will address these critical issues in a lively panel discussion and afterward take your questions.

I’ve had the pleasure of appearing on several panels with Dr. Soon over the last year. He has excellent knowledge of the science at the center of the climate change debate. If you’re in Southern California, come check it out!

Whenever I make the point–in speaking and writing on climate policy–that green restrictions on carbon emissions would require a massive and economically devastating reduction in our use of energy, I am always confronted by the objection that I am ignoring “alternative energy.”

Environmentalists aren’t against energy, I am told, just fossil fuel energy; their goal is not to deprive us of energy but to replace carbon-based energy with “green energy,” to meet the world’s energy needs using “environmentally-friendly” sources such as wind and solar.

Yeah, right.

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Ordinarily, when a company has a long record of profits and a continually increasing stock price, it is recognized for its vision. But look at ExxonMobil. It just capped off the most profitable year in American business history, a year in which it hit its all-time-high stock price. And yet the company continues to be lambasted by critics as a “dinosaur.” Its product, oil, critics say, is on its way to obsolescence. These critics claim that oil is a fast-depleting, CO2-emitting, soon-to-be relic of the past. They say that Exxon and other oil companies should be investing in “alternative fuels,” the wave of the future, just like all those “visionaries” we hear about in Al Gore speeches or read about in Thomas L. Friedman columns. One particularly biting criticism of Big Oil has been waged by the Rockefeller family, which has banded together to claim that John D. Rockefeller, founder of the modern industry, would enjoin today’s oil companies to phase out this antiquated product. “ExxonMobil needs to reconnect with the forward-looking and entrepreneurial vision of my great-grandfather,” says family activist Neva Rockefeller Goodwin.

I’ve studied Rockefeller intensely over the last two years, and I can say for sure his descendants are right about one thing: he definitely was a visionary. When others in the oil industry were making kerosene using shanty refineries, Rockefeller envisioned and made real a large-scale, research-and-development, modern corporation that made kerosene more cheaply than anyone thought possible. So we should definitely look to Rockefeller to understand what real vision is. But are alternative fuels companies the visionaries we hear they are? Or is it possible that the oil companies are the real visionaries? Stay tuned.