Is Fracking Dangerous? Is Climate Change a Real Threat?
When some left-leaning sociology professor at NYU who looks like Jerry Garcia tells us that fracking is dangerous and climate change is a real threat, I’m sure some people discount those opinions. But what happens when they come from a retired Executive Vice President at Mobil? Here’s an interview with Louis W. Allstadt, who, per the article, “ran the company’s exploration and production operations in the western hemisphere before he retired in 2000. In 31 years with the company he also was in charge of its marketing and refining in Japan, and managed its worldwide supply, trading and transportation operations. Just before retiring, he oversaw Mobil’s side of its merger with Exxon, creating the world’s largest corporation.”
Here’s one of a few important takeaways from that interview:
EC: “So what’s the solution?”
LA: “I think we have wasted a lot of time that should have gone into seriously looking into and developing alternative energies. And we need to stop wasting that time and get going on it. But the difficult part is that the industry talks about, well, this is a bridge fuel [that] will carry us until alternatives [are developed] but nobody is building them. It’s not a bridge unless you build the foundations for a bridge on the other side, and nobody’s building it.”
EC: “Have corporations like Mobil considered developing alternative energies?”
LA: “Yes. Back after the first [1973] and second [1980] oil crises, when we had the spikes in prices and the lines and rationing, there was a lot of talk and substantial investments in alternative energies. Mobil invested in solar, and so did Exxon, and kept it going for quite a number of years. They abandoned it as just not coming up to the technical promises [because] solar cells weren’t converting enough sun to electricity to be economically viable. There was also at that time a fair amount of work done on shale oil in the Western states, and that was not fracking for shale. It was mining the shale and trying to extract oil from it. It just never came through. More recently there’ve been attempts at biofuels and some attempts to use algae.”
Obama and the future
EC: “What are your thoughts about President Obama’s national address on climate change?”
LA: “Well, when he talked about the XL pipeline he said he wanted to be sure it didn’t increase carbon emissions. When he talks about natural gas, he kind of broad-brushes it and implies it’s better than coal.
“The whole speech is feeding into [Exxon-Mobil CEO] Rex Tillerson’s comments at a recent Exxon-Mobil shareholders’ meeting where he said there’s nothing we can do to switch to alternative fuels [and still] allow economies to continue the way they are. Society has to solve the problems by dealing with global warming – building levees around the cities, things like that. Obama is feeding into that, saying we have to strengthen the infrastructure. Basically what the industry is doing is unloading all the costs of what it’s been doing onto the public. Just go out and build miles and miles of levees around New York City and build drainage systems and things like that. Obama is saying the same thing. We’ll go on producing natural gas and keep the cost low by having the taxpayers pick up the cost of dealing with the consequences of global warming. Obama proposed some very positive steps toward developing alternative energies but he is not addressing the impact that methane has on global warming.”
However, I think that all the people who realize these things need to be a lot more active and organized, because the industry forces benefitting from the status quo are very definitely organized and active. They know the damage they’re doing, and the externalization of the fiscal impact of that damage – climate and otherwise – is crucial to the success of their business model.
That’s exactly right. That’s what makes all this so difficult. They own the process by which that business model gets regulated — and guess what? They like is just the way it is.