Doug Rosen on the Politics of Renewable Energy
Doug Rosen works hard to promote Miles EV’s neighborhood electric vehicles around the globe. The company is very much in the news; it company recently spun of its highway-speed EV sedan division, Coda , effectively making two companies where there was once one.
The company was founded by Miles Rubin, noted businessman and philanthropist. Rubin’s interest in environmentalism is not at all recent; during the 1970s, along with Paul Newman and others, he helped to create Energy Action, an advocacy group dedicated to American energy independence, and he continues to be active in organizations working for energy conservation.
I’m interested in telling Doug’s story because I think his background is particularly germane to the challenge facing environmentalists everywhere. One does not need to be a conspiracy theorist to see that entrenched interests are working very hard to ensure that the migration to renewable energy and electric transportation fails. I heard today that the moneyed interests that sell bunker fuel to the power generation plants in the Caribbean are in the process of making it impossible for those who are working to introduce clean energy. And this, of course, if very small potatoes indeed as compared to the dirty tricks and misinformation campaign that the oil companies are orchestrating doing in the United States.
Doug’s background, in fact, is politics. Disgusted with the inherent treachery, he walked away from the field some years ago, but it’s clear to me that he’ll never forgot the lessons that he learned before he left, and so I publish what he told me, largely unedited:
I was in a small group of people having dinner with Al Gore in 1997 when I heard the term “global warming” for the first time. Here was the vice president of the Unites States, passionately trying to address a huge environmental issue, where the administration had no interest in fuel economy or environmentalism at all. It just wasn’t on the table. And Lord know it wasn’t anywhere near the table in Bush administration. It wasn’t that Bush and his people had no interest; they were the oil people themselves; they had a counter interest.
And don’t forget about Enron. Ken Lay ran George Bush’s first campaign. We’re trying to sell EVs in a climate in which big oil and big government have come together to form enormously powerful forces that work against us. Do you thing you would see the whipsaw of inflation and deflation of oil prices if there were no outside agenda to make this happen?
Fortunately, this has left Americans with a huge distrust for and hatred of the oil companies. When they hear Chevron say ‘Imagine an oil company being part of the solution,’ they say, ‘No, I really can’t imagine that at all; you’re a $%^& liar.’ Most Americans have not forgotten the deceit, and they can’t wait to buy a car that enables them to thumb their noses at the oil companies.
Now, however, you have a clear twist. The Obama administration has committed $14.1 billion to EV development, and the former oil people like Mack McCarty and Hank Paulson have both invested heavily in EVs. So I have to think this is a seachange in which it will no longer be as easy to suppress EV and renewable energy as it was for so long.
