In Texas, green power is American power
- 13 Mar 09, 23:25 GMT
Dallas, Texas - The idea that the world is warming as a result of man's activities is not something that most Texans worry about.
"We don't mention climate change in Texas," Trevor Lovell, a young Texan climate activist, told me at the green rally I covered in Washington.
The Lone Star State is the most polluting state in the Union. The world's large-scale oil industry began here and Texas still styles itself as the powerhouse of America.
Texas' petrochemical past is why, according to Trevor, so many Texans simply don't believe that the climate is changing, despite a long drought in the state. Even those who do believe, he says, don't think it has anything to do with man. But Trevor says he still manages to get a hearing for his arguments for developing an alternative energy industry in his home state.
Indeed, Texas has been quietly building a world-beating green energy industry right alongside its pump jacks and pipelines, as I explained in my last blog. One reason is the potential profits from low-carbon energy. But cash is not the only motivation.
The argument Trevor finds most persuasive in his home state is national security: here in Texas, green power is American power.
If any single person epitomises that it is the billionaire oil tycoon T Boone Pickens. He made his fortune as the Oracle of Oil, profiting from colossal bets on oil price movements, but has become one of the most vocal advocates of wind power in all America.
Now in his eighties, Boone is a man with a mission. He wants to transform America's entire energy economy. He plans to build vast fields of wind turbines across the central plains of the country and wants to convert the nation's entire vehicle fleet to run on American natural gas.
His Pickens Plan would dramatically reduce America's greenhouse gas emissions but for Boone, climate change hardly rates on the radar.
"It's not about green," Boone told me in his Dallas headquarters, "it's about America becoming independent."
What Boone is worried about is America's fuel security and the fact the country is now so dependent on foreign oil: "most of which," he says, "comes from countries that don't like us".
When he started out in the oil industry back in the '50s, America was a net exporter of oil. By the 1970s demand had increased massively, but the rich fields around places like Sweetwater were becoming depleted and new strikes proved more expensive to exploit.
For the first time, America began to import oil and soon discovered just how vulnerable it made the country.
In 1973, OPEC (Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries) and in 1973 imposed the first oil embargo on America.
This first "oil shock" was political dynamite. Energy security became a major political issue. President Carter even put solar panels on the roof of the White House. But oil prices fell back and, over the years that followed, the security issue was sapped of its urgency.
Then, last year, that changed. Oil prices reached an all time high. Americans found themselves paying an unheard of $4 a gallon. During the first oil shock America imported 24% of its oil. Now it imports 70%.
Energy security is back on the agenda, and how!
Traditionally, Republicans have opposed subsidies for the wind and solar industries. One of Reagan's first acts on entering the White House was to strip Carter's solar panels from the roof.
Energy security has presented many Republicans, who have not been persuaded by the green arguments, with a powerful reason to support the development of new energy technologies and a key reason Trevor and his fellow climate activists are now finding receptive audiences in republican states like Texas.
Boone, himself a life-long republican, has spent $58m raising the profile of the security issue and promoting wind power.
"America is addicted to foreign oil", he tells the hundreds of thousands of people who have come to hear the "town Hall" meetings he has organised around the country.
America is, in effect, funding both sides of the "war on terror", he argues.
Watch Boone Pickens at the National Clean Energy Summit on 23, February, 2009.
"Green is the new red, white and blue", says the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman.
"That is why," he writes in his book Hot, Flat and Crowded, "going green is no longer simply a hobby for high-minded environmentalists or some "personal virtue," as Vice President Dick Cheney once sneered. It is now a national security imperative."
This change is very significant. The green arguments and the energy security issue, two completely separate channels of thought, have dovetailed here in America. What it means is that a consensus on the need for investment in alternative energy may actually be possible.
- bbc
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