FedEx Chairman Fred Smith on Energy, Environment, World Trade

Here’s a recently recorded hour-long interview with Fred Smith, CEO and Chairman of FedEx.  He’s always impressed me with his extremely astute viewpoints on world trade.

Obviously, I’m not as appreciative of his anti-regulation position as it applies to environmental issues.  He says, “Unfortunately when you talk about environmental regulation, that’s where the emotions come in, in addition to the pure quantitative data.”  Personally, I don’t think of that as “unfortunate” at all; in fact, I think that in the absence of people getting worked up about this stuff, we’re dooming ourselves to near-certain disaster by way of climate change, ocean acidification, lung disease, deforestation, plummeting biodiversity, etc.  If you can’t get emotional about that, I don’t know what to tell you.

Having said that, there is no denying that he’s doing a very good job with alternative fuel vehicles; there’s a good discussion on this subject in the course of the interview.