About
This CNN clip summarises why I think we need to accelerate the solar revolution already underway. To my amazement, the CNN programme in which it features was paid for by Shell, a company that I think is complicit in brewing the energy crisis while not trying hard enough on renewables. Shell also paid Time and Fortune magazines to carry a full page essay I wrote relaying a somewhat un-Shell-like world view.
Why listen?
The world is full of middle-aged men with bees in their bonnets. But I did research earth history for 14 years, and so know a bit about what makes up the climate system. I researched oil source rocks for several of those years, funded by BP and Shell among others, and I explored for oil and gas in the Middle East and Asia, so I have a background in the issues relevant to peak oil. I have won an award for my campaign, as you can see on the New Zealand Hillary Institute’s site. Admittedly, they are on the far side of the world from me, and Henry Kissinger did win the Nobel Peace Prize.
Oil exploration, Baluchistan, 1984
Motivation
Many of the critics who comment on my Guardian blogs urge readers to discount everything I say because I am trying to sell solar energy, and so therefore must be in it for the money, hyping concerns about climate change and peak oil in the cause of self enrichment. As you would. They have it completely the wrong way round. I left a lucrative career consulting for the oil industry, and teaching its technicians, because I was concerned about global warming and wanted to act on that concern. I joined Greenpeace (1989), on a fraction of my former income, to campaign for clean energy. I left Greenpeace (1997) to set up a non-profit organisation campaigning for clean energy. I turned it into a for-profit company (1999) because I came to the view that was the best possible way I could campaign for clean energy - by creating a commercial success that could show the way. The company I set up gives 5% of its operating profit to a charity that also campaigns for clean energy, SolarAid. All that said, I hope Solarcentury makes a lot of money. It won’t have succeeded in its mission if it doesn’t. I’m hoping fewer people will still want to discount my arguments, knowing the history. But then again, an awful lot of bile gets split in some of the comments on my Guardian blog, and I could be being naive.
Penance: the La Coruna oilspill, northern Spain, December 1992
Upcoming
- January 2010: major effort not to get depressed about the failure of Copenhagen.
- 10 February 2010: Release of second report of the UK Industry Taskforce 0n Peak Oil and Energy Security.
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