What’s your take on how Boone and his Pickens Plan are coming along?
The fact that you have someone who made his fortune in the oil and gas business looking at where the country needs to be 30 years from now and concluding that we can’t drill our way out of this problem and concluding that shipping $700 billion a year abroad to countries that don’t have our best interests at heart is not in our national interest, that’s when you get what I call American nationalists like Boone Pickens stepping across the aisle. That really gets a lot of people’s attention.
What do you think about his New Energy Army marching on Washington when President-elect Obama and the new Congress are sworn in?
I think he’s on the right track.
Why do you say that?
How did we get civil rights changes in this country? It happened basically when people took to the streets and politicians saw them, understood there was an aggrieved community there that wanted action, and the politicians decided that the cost of inaction on their part was greater than the cost of action.
The same thing has to happen on energy. There is only going to be real legislative change and support of renewable energy when enough politicians decide that the cost of inaction is greater than the cost of action. And bringing lots of people, and I don’t mean five, ten, twenty, but hundreds of thousands of people to bear on Capitol Hill to drive that point home is really essential.
Congress also plays a critical role in incentivizing research and development, which brings to mind an anecdote from your book Hot, Flat, and Crowded. You were talking with Jeffrey Immelt, GE’s chairman and CEO, and he pointed out that the political climate in Europe was far more conducive for developing clean energy solutions.
I think what appeals to the big energy players about the European market is that you have national renewable portfolio standards that cover the entire European market. Over there I think it’s 20 percent by 2020, whereas in the States we have about half the states having renewable portfolio standards for clean energy, and every one of them is different. And so you’re very, very divided and chopped up in a complex market over here. And I think that very much affects where companies like a GE are investing.
The present state of the American economy also has a role to play, doesn’t it?
Yeah, I don’t want to say a lot, but there are some very exciting venture capital projects working and the question is how much are they going to be starved for capital in the current environment? I’m very worried about that because a lot of them got their first or second round of venture capital investing and now they are thinking about IPO money or whatnot to go to the next level and it’s becoming very hard for them.
How closely do you think the major oil-exporting countries are watching us to see whether or not America develops a sustainable energy policy?
I think they’re watching, but I think so far they’re not afraid because they’ve seen this play before. They know when global oil prices go down, it tends to kill the renewable energy industry. Happened in the ‘70s and ‘80s. And so I don’t think they’re exactly quaking in their boots yet. But I think they’re watching very closely especially when they see the politics shift and they see people like Boone or Wal-Mart, people from the corporate sector or even from the traditional energy business such as General Electric adopting new positions that gets their attention. They haven’t seen yet any really scale alternative to oil. Until they do, I don’t think they’ll be all that worried.
REMARKS CONDENSED AND EDITED BY ERIC O’KEEFE