Energy Execs Change Their Tune on the Environment

It’s not just a radical fringe of Americans who worry about the environment – and energy executives finally seem to have noticed. A couple years ago at the massive energy confab held in Houston every year, the people who pull oil and gas out of the ground were largely dismissive of the public’s concerns about hydraulic fracturing (fracking), said Jason Bordoff, director of the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University. But this year, industry officials are more willing to talk about problems with the technique for getting petroleum from shale formations, and to discuss how they intend to fix them.“There is a better appreciation for the need to take seriously the need to protect the public and reassure the public this shale boom can be done safely,” Mr. Bordoff said.

As U.S. shale development has taken off, a rush to drill new oil and gas wells across the country has turned millions of people into the petroleum industry’s neighbors. Their concerns range from heavy truck traffic and falling property values to possibly polluted drinking water and climate change.

The very notion of global warming used to make a lot of energy executives bristle, but anti-environment rhetoric was dialed way back this year at the conference put on by consulting firm IHS CERA.

Andrew MacKenzie, chief executive of mining and drilling giant BHP Billiton and a geologist, said his training makes it clear to him that climate change is real and has to be addressed. The telltale signs of a warming climate, he said, are baked right into the layers of earth his company digs up and drills through every day.

“You can’t argue with a rock,” he said.

But when it comes to renewable energy, there are still a lot of skeptics. “The world and certainly Europe are starting to realize that renewables are more a problem than a solution,” said Paolo Scaroni, the chief executive of Italian oil giant Eni SpA. Others pointed to problems in Germany, Spain and Italy, which embraced wind and solar power with fat government subsidies and now face rising power costs and decreased competitiveness.

“Using solar panels in Germany is like growing pineapples in Alaska,” said Joe Kaeser, the chief executive of Siemens AG, the global conglomerate.

Fonte: wsj.com