May 2012

The House and Senate conference committee on re-authorizing the highway bill met for the first time on Tuesday, 8th May.  One of the most contentious issues is House language that would require permitting of the 1700-mile Keystone XL pipeline from Alberta’s oil sands to Gulf refineries. Initial reactions were that the Keystone provision has little chance of being included in the final conference report.  However, there are signs that the ground is shifting.

Representative John Mica (R-Fla.), Chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, said last Thursday that he thought the Keystone provision was making great progress toward being included in the final bill. Mica noted that eleven Democratic Senators and 69 Democratic House members (out of 190) have recently voted for permitting the pipeline.

Perhaps more importantly, billionaire investor Warren Buffett told Fox Business News last week that he supports building the Keystone XL Pipeline. Buffett is a close supporter of President Barack Obama.  It has been speculated that Buffett was one of those advising Obama to deny the Keystone permit last fall out of self interest.  Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway owns the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad, which because of the lack of pipeline capacity has become a major shipper of crude oil from the Bakken Formation in North Dakota and Montana to refineries.  The Keystone XL would transport oil from the Bakken Formation as well as from Alberta’s oil sands.

Buffett may well have been offering his own opinion without consulting the White House first.  On the other hand, his comments may be a sign that the White House is maneuvering to save face and let the Keystone permit go through.  President Obama’s political advisers clearly understand that the President is on the wrong side of public opinion on Keystone.  Letting the Congress overrule the President this summer would largely take away a campaign issue in the fall.

In the new movie The Avengers (which is excellent: see my review for National Review Online here), Iron man’s alter-ego Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.) perfects a renewable, clean energy source, and uses it to light up his company’s new Manhattan skyscraper.

In spite of this green street-cred, Stark is a hero designed—literally—to drive liberals crazy.  Stan Lee, who co-created Iron Man in the 1960’s, has often reminisced to interviewers about his motives for creating Stark.  After helping to create a string of popular heroes for Marvel Comics, including Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four, Lee had decided to give himself a challenge, and asked himself:  Who do young people (read: liberals) hate?  The military, Lee thought right away (it was the 60’s, after all), and the wealthy.  So for his next hero, Lee decided to create a millionaire industrialist who made weapons for the army, and then make him likable.  Iron Man was born.

Now, Filmmakers who have brought Tony Stark to the big screen in a string of recent blockbusters—Iron Man (2008), Iron Man 2 (2010), The Avengers (2012)—have made him even more unpalatable to liberals.  After all, what other super-hero is regularly shown blasting terrorists out of their caves in Afghanistan, or working side-by-side with the United States Military?

Imagine how queasy greens must feel to see that this arch-capitalist be the one to invent renewable energy in the Marvel universe.  And worse, he didn’t do it for the good of Mankind.  He did for entirely selfish reasons, indeed, the most selfish reason:  He built the first, miniature version of his energy source in the first Iron Man film in order to power his wounded heart, which had been shredded by enemy shrapnel.
More unforgivable from the environmentalists’ perspective, however, is that Stark did all of this without a Department of Energy grant.  Unlike Solyndra, he needed no government incentives or funding.  Unlike Solyndra, he succeeded.   Now, in The Avengers, Stark uses this technology to power a gigantic monument to himself, a gleaming tower with “Stark” emblazoned in bright letters at its apex.

True, Stark and his exploits are fiction.  But can there be any doubt that, if and when an actual, viable green tech is invented, that it will be by someone like Stark, a self-reliant, independent genius, as opposed to a pasty-faced D.O.E. bureaucrat?  Can there be any doubt that it will be a capitalist, working for his or her own selfish ends, that will provide the breakthroughs that environmentalists insist the government must provide and/or subsidize?

And won’t that drive them crazy?

National Journal’s Amy Harder reported last week that the Sierra Club is re-branding its anti-natural gas efforts as “Beyond Natural Gas.”  Beyond Natural Gas joins the Sierra Club’s other two anti-energy campaigns, Beyond Coal and Beyond Oil (Beyond Nuclear is a separate organization founded in 2007 and headquartered in Takoma Park, Maryland, which has been an official nuclear-free zone since 1983).

Here’s how the Sierra Club introduces its Beyond Natural Gas web page: “The natural gas industry is dirty, dangerous, and running amok. Government loopholes exempt natural gas drillers from the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Safe Drinking Water Act — and at the same time, don’t require them to disclose the frequently toxic chemicals they use in hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” the violent process they employ to dislodge gas deposits from shalerock formations. The closer we look at natural gas, the dirtier it appears; and the less of it we burn, the better off we will be.”

The Sierra Club’s timing, whether intentionally or not, kicks Aubrey McClendon, their former patron, when he is down.  Time Magazine reported earlier this year that McClendon gave the Sierra Club $26 million between 2007 and 2010 for their Beyond Coal campaign.  This week McClendon was relieved of his duties as chairman of one of the U. S.’s largest natural gas producers, Chesapeake Energy, although he remains CEO.  It also became public knowledge last week that the Securities and Exchange Commission has launched an investigation into McClendon and Chesapeake.

The SEC investigation and the decision by Chesapeake’s board to replace McClendon as chairman are the result of revelations by Reuters on 18th April that McClendon, the founder of Chesapeake, had a sweetheart deal with the company to borrow over $1 billion and use it to buy personal shares in Chesapeake gas wells.