Ted Turner on the Future of Energy
by Charles Stillman, February 2007
“The day of fossil fuels as a fuel are over. It’s just a matter of how soon everybody recognizes it,” Ted Turner asserted to a crowd of over 800 Houstonians assembled at the Intercontinental Hotel last week. Turner, along with Timothy Wirth, president of the United Nations Foundation and former U.S. senator from Colorado, were in town to deliver a talk titled “Alternative Energy & Houston: Working for a Sustainable Future.”
Turner and Wirth answered questions about climate change and the promise of alternative energy posed to them by moderator Matthew Simmons, an expert on peak oil and chairman and founder of the energy investment bank, Simmons & Co.
Turner, who founded CNN and was also the former vice chairman of Time Warner, Inc., said he has been an environmentalist since the 1970s and first became aware of global warming in the early 1980s. He believes climate change is going to be the largest challenge humanity has ever faced. Virtually every kind of alternative energy- including solar, wind, wave, and biofuels, he said, would need to be utilized to help limit our effects on the climate. Turner has severe reservations about coal, saying he’d prefer to see nuclear plants built before any more coal plants are constructed. He does support efforts to make coal a cleaner energy through gasification and sequestration of the CO2 emissions.
Adding to the discussion, Simmons pointed out that energy conservation and efficiency represent the quickest, most affordable and cleanest forms of energy. Turner agreed saying there are technologies available today, like hybrid cars (Turner himself has owned a Prius for five years) and compact fluorescent light bulbs that can drastically cut energy use.
Houston is taking steps toward energy conservation. Last month, in his State of the City Address, Mayor White challenged area business leaders to reduce the city’s power and fuel use by five percent over the next five years.
Efficiency Texas, a broad based coalition of electricity consumers, recently announced that if Texas invested $3 billion over the next decade to increase efficiency (four times what it spends currently), the state could avoid spending as much as $12 billion for new power plants, electricity infrastructure and fuel during that same time. It would also mean that 50,000 metric tons less of nitrogen oxide, 125,000 metric tons less of sulfur dioxide and 57 million metric tons less of CO2 (the equivalent of removing 1.1 million vehicles from Texas roads over a decade) would be emitted into the atmosphere.
“There’s so much we can do just with conservation alone, that we don’t need to build any plants for the foreseeable future while we’re getting this clean, alternative, locally produced energy,” remarked Turner.
Although the private energy sector has presented low-carbon alternatives, the federal government has done little to combat climate change since deciding not to sign the Kyoto Protocol in 1997. “We lost a decade, essentially from 1997 until today,” Wirth says. As head of the United Nations Foundation, Wirth helps to facilitate public-private partnerships in support of the world’s major problems. In 1988, he introduced the first major legislation on global warming into Congress.
Wirth believes we have reached a tipping point. “The sharp increase in oil prices, the war in Iraq … and the unstable nature of the Middle East, certainly all of the attention given to climate change, … the engagement of the Christian evangelical community and their involvement and focus on the preservation of God’s creation: I think all of these have combined to give the whole energy question a momentum that I have not seen since I was first in Congress in the mid-seventies.” Non-governmental Organizations (NGOs), governments and businesses need to organize themselves to take advantage of the window of opportunity that is presenting itself now, says Wirth. Major companies like GE, DuPont and Duke Energy have joined together to form the United States Climate Action Partnership (USCAP). This alliance, which also includes environmental organizations like the National Resources Defense Council and Environmental Defense, is calling upon the Federal government to enact legislation to address greenhouse gas emissions.
BP, an energy company that has its U.S. headquarters in Houston, is also a member of USCAP. Prior to the lunch-time discussion, Turner and Wirth met with BP executives and other local energy representatives from traditional petroleum companies including BP, Royal Dutch Shell, Marathon Oil, and ConocoPhillips, as well as alternative energy start-ups to discuss the future of energy in Houston. Wirth was impressed by the companies’ enlightened outlook and realization that by working together they “could all have a piece of this future.”
Wirth would not venture a guess as to whether renewable energy would be dominated in the future by traditional oil companies or if small start ups would become the next generation energy companies. He did however say that he has been watching the behavior of the big oil companies and has found that, “They are moving in the right direction.” Companies like BP, Shell and more recently Chevron, have made investments in the alternative energy sector.
Wirth believes that it is only a matter of time before the federal government sets up a carbon cap and trading system similar to the one enacted in 1992 to decrease the sulfur dioxide emissions causing acid rain. “The minute you put a cap on it,” Wirth explains, “you put a value on the carbon … You’re really changing the dynamics of everything from carbon capture and sequestration, to coal, to energy efficiency. Everything assumes a greater opportunity and you really have a greater equity between various energy resources. It’s the direction that we must go and will go.”
Just before the discussion wrapped up, Turner warned the crowd, “If we fail … [to address] global climate change - I don’t know how many of you saw (years ago) that movie with Mel Gibson … where they are fighting over tins of gasoline in the desert - “Road Warrior.” I don’t want that kind of future for my grandchildren. It’s not fair to use up all the world’s resources in one or two generations.”
