The Log | School News
Leadership Forum 2004 CEOs, Environmentalists,
Academics, and Government Regulators Deliver Lively, Sometimes
Contentious, Debate About the Future of Energy
by Lisa M. Dellwo
“No one wants coal or oil or gas. Everyone
wants light, heat, mobility, and clean water.”
With these words, Joseph Stanislaw launched the
third annual Leadership Forum sponsored by the Nicholas School
on March 8-9 at Duke University. Creating a Sustainable Energy
Future brought together 31 environmental leaders, corporate
executives, government regulators and academics to participate
in a series of panels on the future of hydrocarbon-based energy.
It is an unusual conference that puts CEOs of
coal and natural gas companies on a panel with the president
of Environmental Defense, and an executive from British Petroleum
on stage with the director of the Natural Resources Defense
Council’s Climate Center. And organizers did not expect participants
to emerge from the Forum with a consensus on how to address
problems raised by the dwindling supplies and the environmental
and health impacts of burning coal, natural gas, and oil.
What they hoped for—and achieved— was dialogue,
frequently lively and sometimes contentious.
“For too long, environmentalists and energy
companies have been adversaries in any discussion about our
consumption of energy,” said Simon Rich,
retired chairman and CEO of Louis Dreyfus Natural Gas and
chair of the Nicholas School’s Board of Visitors. Rich organized
the Forum along with Master of Environmental Management students
Lena Hansen, Mandy Schmitt, Allison Ridder, and Kristin Grenfell.
The urgency of the topic was reflected in the
sold-out registration. More than 300 attendees came from as
far away as California and England and from backgrounds as
diverse as the panelists’. Representatives of traditional
power companies rubbed shoulders with people who work with
solar, wind, and other renewables. Financial services companies
sent representatives, as well as state governments and conservation
groups.
The keynote address by Stanislaw, president
of Cambridge Energy Research Associates, laid the groundwork
for a series of five panels the following day. Stanislaw began
with some familiar statistics: The United States has 5 percent
of the world’s population and uses 25 percent of the world’s
resources, producing a quarter of the world’s greenhouse gas
emissions. In 1975, China used almost no oil, and today it
is the world’s second-largest consumer of oil, with only an
upward trajectory in the future. With the world’s poorer citizens
aspiring to lifestyles, automobiles, and homes such as we
enjoy in the United States, “it is predetermined that the
world will use more fossil fuel,” Stanislaw said.
Solving the impending energy crisis demands a
transition that will take a long time, according to Stanislaw,
urging the audience to focus on efficient use of hydrocarbons
as well as technologies to replace them.
Technology was a recurring theme during the next
day’s panels, beginning with ChevronTexaco vice president
Rhonda Zygocki describing advances that allow her company
to drill ever more deeply under the ocean floor for oil. Zygocki
argued that this extension of traditional energy delivery
should be developed side by side with newer technologies that
break away from the use of fossil fuels. Addressing the environmental
and health impacts of his industry, William Cavanaugh, CEO
of Progress Energy, described measures used to ensure cleaner-
burning coal plants.
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photos: 1) Joseph Stanislaw, Cambridge Energy
Reseach Associates; 2) Susan Tomasky, American Electric Power;
3) John Manzoni, British Petroleum; 4) Thomas Capps, Dominion
Resources; 5) Larry Burns, General Motors; 6) Paul Portney,
Resources for the Future; 7) Kathleen McGinty, Pennsylvania
Department of Environmental Protection; 8) David Hawkins,
Natural Resources Defense Council
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