Editor’s note: Keith Rattie, Chairman, President and CEO of  Questar Corporation, headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah, gave this speech at Utah Valley University on April 2, 2009. The full version is on Questar’s website. Subtitles have been added.

Energy Myths and Realities

There may be no greater challenge facing mankind today – and your generation in particular – than figuring out how we’re going to meet the energy needs of a planet that may have 9 billion people living on it by the middle of this century. The magnitude of that challenge becomes even more daunting when you consider that of the 6.5 billion people on the planet today, nearly two billion people don’t even have electricity – never flipped a light switch.

False 1970s Consensus

Now, the “consensus” back in the mid-1970s was that America and the world were running out of oil.…

As a physicist with energy expertise and a long time environmental activist, I have grown increasingly concerned about a lack of common sense in the country’s energy debates. Even simple terms underlying our leading debates sometimes are poorly considered.

Consider the indiscriminate use of the term “renewable” energy. This is no academic annoyance, for right now the U.S. Senate is drafting a national Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS). The first version is not a good start on President Obama’s new science directive.

Some problematic issues with RPS (federal and state) are: …

One of the major problems in policy-making is wishful thinking, in particular a tendency to assume that people will act the way the policy-maker wants. (Military and even corporate planners also suffer from this weakness, and it is arguably the principle weakness in socialist economics.) This presumption is particularly evident when issues of morality—real or perceived—are involved, as in the case of many environmental policies.…

It never should have happened. Politics, magical thinking, and corporate rent-seeking tried to reverse the physics of energy density to transition away from consumer-chosen, taxpayer-neutral hydrocarbons.

After decades of waste, the politics have changed. So much for not-so-green energy in the U.S.

Renewable advocate George Lawrence reported on LinkedIn, quoting Canary Media:

Trump is killing the country’s clean-energy manufacturing momentum.” This is all about momentum indeed, + the few yrs we have to turn things around.

“In the first three months of this year, firms have already abandoned plans to build nearly $8 billion worth of clean energy projects—mostly factories that would have produced everything from grid batteries to electric vehicles, per new data from E2 [consulting engineers].”

This draconian reversal contrasts with the Biden era, where from 2022 to 2024 only a cumulative $2.1 billion in investments was canceled.…