Energy, Politics, and Ecology
So now I sleep in ditches
And hide away from nosey kids
The wings rot and feather under me
The wings rot and curl right under me
A small alteration of the past turns time into space
Small touches can alter more than a mere decade*
The FT has two energy pieces. The first deals with Texas leading the states in renewable energy generation, particularly solar installations. As the piece notes this upends the notion of the idiotic red/blue split our media and political class work to keep much of American politics impotent and nihilistically destructive. I mentioned before renewables came into being at the end of New Deal Coalition and were associated with Democrats and for far too long, god save us, with hippies.
When I was first pushing my way into the energy business in the early 90s, I met in San Diego with Lori, a representative of CEERT (Center for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Technologies), who were Sacramento’s renewable advocates. Notice energy efficiency first in the name, a remnant of the 1970’s “energy transition” when there was actual talk about first being smarter concerning energy use, little of that today.
Lori needed to organize people to a regulatory meeting being held about the nuke there on the beach in northern San Diego county. She started asking me about the usual Democratic suspects. I stopped her saying, “I've been down here for a half-dozen years and I can tell you people in San Diego concerned about environmental issues are overwhelmingly Republican, and the nuke’s in their backyards.”
I gave her name of couple local Republican elected officials. She called them, they packed the meeting. That got me in good stead with Lori, she was smart. Smarter than me actually. When the whole electricity fiasco collapsed in 2000, she had already made her escape to teach the high schoolers in Sacramento.
There’s nothing partisan about energy. The harnessing of fossil fuels with industrialization equally impacted race, gender, and political affiliation. Switching away from reliance on fossil fuels is fundamentally a human concern. So, the FT's scoop is no surprise,
The polarized nature of US political discourse can make it seem as if renewables are still a divisive topic. But shift your gaze from cable news to the plains of Texas and a different story is unfolding. For those with skin in the game and an eye for a good investment, clean energy has become a no-brainer.
That said, Texas still gets 60% of its electricity from coal and natural gas, so there’s a long, long way to go, not counting if you want to electrify century old American car culture and unintelligently add innumerable AI data centers, and really, we don’t want to. We haven't figured out yet, no matter how you want to politically color yourself, renewables aren't a replacement for fossil fuels. They are new energy sources and just as America completely restructured itself around fossil fuels, we need to restructure society, reorganizing from the ground up around renewable generation. This is not simply a necessary thing, but a good one, an historical challenge. However, it is not a simplistic technological switch, though technology is certainly a component, but more fundamentally a political challenge and our politics are broken.
This gets to the second FT energy article about David Rubenstein's daughter and the Alaska Oil Fund. David Rubenstein is the personification of American political dysfunction and corruption. He went to DC with the Watergate Class of '74 as a Senate staffer, then into Carter White House in '76. Staying in DC for the Reagan glory years, he caught the wave and in 1987 started the private equity Carlyle Group. David’s adroit bipartisan manipulation of DC created a company today with $300 billion in assets and 30 offices on six continents.
Seems David's daughter is causing bit of brouhaha in Alaska where for some reason she was appointed by the Republican governor to the board of the Alaska Oil Fund:
“Marcus Frampton, APFC’s chief investment officer, told colleagues that he considered Rubenstein’s efforts to make connections to private credit managers a ‘conflict of interest’’ deeming it a ‘more serious topic and perhaps more uncomfortable to address’.”
“He said she had made ‘dozens upon dozens’ of investment manager recommendations since joining the board but his team had ‘declined to pursue all of them’.”
Like father, like daughter, though not as profitable I guess. I'm sort of amazed this is even news, after all, it's like Hunter, ask any good Democrat, this is just how things work.
If you want to fix anything at this point, whether you consider yourself red, blue, green, black, white, purple, American politics needs to be fixed. Just like environmental issues, it is all fundamentally a question of reorganization – political, social, cultural, economic, and government - from the ground up.
*In a city and time long, long gone, I was at this show with a very fine partner in crime, ended with a rollicking, driving version of Wings — Stephen Hanley, bassist of the gods
