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| Pickens, Gore and Natural Gas |
| 10.20.08 (6:36 am) |
It always surprises me how any issue can be made to be divisive in some way. Even clean energy, despite it's universal importance to the future of our planet, can serve as a tool for the media to create controversy and to divide the people. It is interesting to look from that perspective at the treatment that has been given by the media to two men, T. Boone Pickens and Al Gore, who have both launched almost simultaneous campaigns which are aimed to focus public attention on the energy issue and to begin to draw a roadmap toward our common future.
T. Boone Pickens is often painted as a rich man looking to make himself richer and although Pickens is indeed wealthy and does have financial stakes in both the wind and natural gas industries he doesn't need to spend millions on a national campaign in order to make money. Natural gas sales are showing no signs of slowing down and he has already financed his wind farm in Texas. So what could be motivating him to spend millions on this public initiative? Perhaps it is pretty much just like Pickens says; he wants to wean America off foreign oil and onto new, sustainable energy sources and he sees the need for a national commitment to this future which goes beyond what even he can do all by himself and his Pickens Plan is the best way that he can come up with to start this process today, not in 5 or 10 years.
Al Gore, despite being on the corporate board of both google and Apple, writing a bestselling book which was later made into a movie and winning the Nobel Prize, is on the other hand is seen as more of a "man of the people" who is promoting totally green solutions such as solar and wind without any ties to the bad old days of fossil fuels or financial gain to himself. Does Al Gore have a financial interest in this process though, or is he just running his We Campaign out of his deep moral convictions as is often the way the media paints him? The answer may surprise many of you.
Al Gore (along with Colin Powell) recently became partners in the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. This is the same firm that financed the startup of google. Now they are interested in greentech and funding the startups of companies who are developing new energy technologies. Obviously then, having the United States move into a green energy economy would have tremendous financial benefits for KPCB, the companies they fund and for Al Gore personally. I think that it is safe to say that Mr. Gore stands to see a huge financial profit from the success of his campaign just as much if not more than T. Boone Pickens does.
What about the differences in the types of energy that the two campaigns promote? Most people think that Al Gore is all about totally green energy while Pickens advocates the use of natural gas (a fossil fuel) as a bridge to a totally green future. Would it surprise you to learn that Al Gore is also (at least by proxy) a big supporter of natural gas as a "green" fuel? It certainly did me.
I recently read a story on KPCB in the October 5th edition of the New York Times, Weekend Magazine that clued me in on this marriage between Al Gore and natural gas. It seems that KPBR has heavily funded a firm called Bloom Energy which the Times calls, "one of Kleiner Perkins’s biggest green-tech bets". Bloom Energy has developed a solid oxide fuel cell which uses natural gas as its primary fuel source. They see this fuel cell being installed in people's basements to provide 100% of the power for the home and, according to a story in ecogeek "Bloom Energy is looking to install 100 Kilowatt power units in everyone's houses. These will be flex-fuel, but likely running mostly on natural gas. They will also probably produce heat, and cooling, as well as power, making the devices roughly 85% efficient (thus generating two times less greenhouse gas emissions than a power plant per unit of power used.)".
Obviously, if this is the case, Al Gore is just as dependent as Pickens is on natural gas as a bridge to our energy future and both stand to make financial profits if we choose to adopt their respective plans. I don't see anything wrong with this though because that is part of our free market system and anyone who wants to invest in these same technologies or even the same companies can certainly find an avenue to do so and thereby share in the profits.The final analysis is that both T. Boone Pickens and Al Gore are accomplishing great things in their efforts to lead America toward a new energy future and both seem to be directing us into very similar pathways with natural gas being an important bridge fuel. I think that the media needs to get their facts straight and stop bashing either of these men without bashing both equally if bashing is what they need to do to in order to sell commercials.
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