For several years now, we've been making the case that the clean energy industry has to dramatically scale its advocacy investment to meet an aggressive disinformation campaign trained against it by the fossil lobby. We've found increasing receptiveness to that message, but we still run into people who think we've got tin foil on our heads. The refrain goes something like this: "Who'd want to do such a thing to wind, solar and geothermal power?"
Well, look no further than ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson. He just effectively admitted his massive company -- the most profitable on Earth -- has a strong financial interest in blocking clean energy scaling. According to Tillerson, his company -- which has one of the worst reputations in America -- has a lot of the farm bet on fracking-driven natural gas. The company is in the electricity business like it's never been before, and this means it needs electrons generated from burning fracked gas in order to recoup that investment.
As CNNMoney reports:
Tillerson is betting much of his company's future growth -- and a good portion of his legacy -- on the promise of fracking... To deliver the future returns that its shareholders expect, Exxon needs the XTO purchase -- which so far hasn't lived up to its promise because of falling natural-gas prices -- to pay off bigtime.
Bottom line? Tillerson can't make back his money if clean energy scales.
Set aside the arrogance of the suckers-game proposition Tillerson put in the article: "Prove to me that I need to prove my dirty practices aren't dirty." The fact is that Tillerson and other fracking backers are whistling past the graveyard of the faulty promise: The industry that brought you the Exxon Valdez and the BP Deep Water Horizon Disaster can pierce, inject below and dump over our aquifers a toxic cocktail of chemicals... and never mess up.
Cleantech executives and investors who still think that simple business execution alone will get us to scale should look at ExxonMobil's storied, extensive use of influence peddling ($4.2 M in reported lobbying in Q1 alone), disinformation and front groups to further its interests.
In order to scale clean energy to where it can and should be, you're going to need good business execution and a much greater investment in public positioning and advocacy. We're on the playing field with guys who hit pretty hard. We're threatening their profits. Don't expect them to sit there and leave you alone.
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Regardless, we need to continue to invest in improving green technology and bring down costs.
Conservation will get us much further with less capital outlay though.
Since we were so big we became self sufficient. We did not need the rest of the world.
Without this external pressure to compete in a world of traders our institution turn on each other.
Our institutions like government, manufacturing, & labor fight like it's the end of the world and will push so many things to be decided by the courts.
This has left our institutions and us poorly prepared to participate in an unrestricted free trade world!
Think about these numbers Germany with less than 1/3 of our population now has almost as many people working in manufacturing today as we here in the U.S. Don't ask about their unemployment numbers it will make you cry!
The German equivalent to our EPA employs 1,400. Our EPA has 18,000 with 6,000 of them in Washington creating more paperwork!
President Obama said all the above!
Anyone that thinks we can go green overnight is unrealistic!
Natural gas is for better or worse a desperately needed bridge fuel.
We need to plan long term and maturely for the next couple of generations!
BIG ENERGY OF ALL TYPES AND ITS GREENWASHERS, which include many off the people who pledged to help the environment like NRDC (see the John Bryson connection from NRDC to Edison to Bright Source to Commerce Secretary), like SC (see above), like TWS (got $500K from DOI to bully smaller environmental orgs to sign onto a wilderness-slaughter campaign for Big Solar in the form of the PEIS), CBD (sadly, yes, elected failed mitigation over successful litigation), etc. etc. etc.
The only thing that will truly defeat Big Energy and it's full-spectrum eco-cide is an aggressive campaign for local, democratically-owned clean power production and efficiency upgrades (including passive heating/cooling). Anything else is just a lateral move from Chevron Oil to Chevron Oil PLUS Chevron Solar, etc. and is NOT a win for the economy, the environment nor our democracy.