Arizona State University’s Global Institute of Sustainability partnered with the Arizona Science Center Thursday to host a discussion about the future of energy.
The discussion, held at the Arizona Science Center, began with opening remarks from ASU President Michael Crow and Arizona Science Center President and CEO Chevy Humphrey.
They were followed by a panel moderated by Eve Troeh, senior sustainability reporter for American Public Media’s Marketplace. The panelists included former Shell Oil Company President John Hofmeister; Peter Byck, director of the documentary “Carbon Nation;” and Mark Jacobson, director of the atmosphere/energy program at Stanford University.
“We’re on our eighth president promising energy independence without a plan,” said Hofmeister, who is now an executive-in-residence at ASU’s School of Sustainability.
The panelists agreed that the lack of national energy policy left too many states, corporations, courts and municipalities responsible for identifying energy practices and solutions.
“We need a national grid and a national policy,” Byck said.
Slow political progress can be partly attributed to the controversy that has surrounded global warming, Byck said. He said the misinformation campaigns waged by oil companies about climate change, allegedly clean coal and clean natural gas were untrue.
“Oil companies are, I think, the best storytellers since Shakespeare,” Byck said. “Clean coal does not exist; it’s just good marketing. Clean natural gas is just good story-telling.”
Byck said Americans have a strong appetite for energy independence, but advocates and politicians have used the wrong narrative storyline to make progress with alternative fuels in Washington.
“The well of ‘climate change’ is poisoned,” Byck said. “The story needs to be about economics, health, patriotism and national security.”
Switching to alternative energy is not the far-off fantasy some might envision, Jacobson said. Using a combination of wind, solar, geo-thermal and tidal capture energy and only one percent of the world’s land, the world could realistically kick its fossil-fuel habit entirely by 2050.
Hofmeister agreed with that timeline, but said existing economic investments would not be so readily abandoned by corporations or individual consumers.
“Moving to a carbon-free energy system would take 50 years,” Hofmeister said. “But there are 250 million cars in the United States. The owners are not about to write them off until they feel they get the economic value of their car.”
There are 9 million jobs in the oil and gas industry at stake, Hofmeister said. Without a solid timeline for energy policy to replenish jobs and burdensome regulations for energy companies relying on oil, he said he believes there will be little progress.
“We’ve given up representative democracy for special interest democracy,” Hofmeister said. “We need the equivalent of the Federal Reserve for alternative energy.”
Jacobson said that in the short term, the most effective and realistic goal is to shy away from gasoline and traditional combustion processes in favor of electric cars and electricity, despite the source.
“It turns out, just by converting everything to electricity, you reduce the world’s power demand by 32 percent,” said Jacobson. “If you’re worried about the price of gasoline, buy an electric car.”
Contact the reporter at dbryan3@asu.edu
