Who are the real energy visionaries? (Part 1) — VOICES for REASON

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.