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.…

University of Washington atmospheric scientist David Battisti and Stanford co-author Rosamond Naylor have an article in this week’s Science magazine that is making headlines across the world.

Why? Because they contend that we are fast heading towards a global food crisis as a result of a future temperature rise projected to accompany increasing atmospheric levels of greenhouse gases.

However, the paper itself is long on rhetoric and short on supporting science, with the conclusions based largely on improper reasoning.

They assume that people will sit idly by and slowly perish as the climate changes around them, doggedly clinging to outdated and failing agricultural practices instead of adopting new crop varieties and farming techniques as the climate warrants. This is known as the “dumb farmer scenario.”

But, farmers aren’t dumb. The development and adoption of new technologies and crop varieties is the primary reason why crop yields have increased many fold over the past century.…

Ed. note: This exchange in 2019 between Robert Bradley and climate scientist/activist Andrew Dessler regards adaptation as the key climate policy. It is reposted for its relevance in today’s debate over air conditioning (see yesterday’s post). “Climate mastery” via fossil fuels, as Alex Epstein has emphasized, is the natural, most rewarding public policy. [1]

“With the very unique situation of CO2 (a global externality of positives and negatives), government mitigation is doomed to fail. Sooner or later, you will have to admit that politics failed, that fossil fuels were just too good given the alternatives of non-use, renewables, nuclear.” (Bradley to Dessler #1, August 3, 2019)

“We have not only market failure but also analytical failure (imperfect you, me, others) and government failure, which is magnified by 190 or so governments.”

Ed. note: The loss of impartial intellectual inquiry and scholarship at Harvard University continues, as indicated by an upcoming article in Harvard Environmental Law Review, Vol. 48, No. 1, 2024, “Climate Homicide: Prosecuting Big Oil For Climate Deaths.” Given this trend, the contributions of a pioneering Harvard business historian, who also broke through the ranks of a male-only faculty, are worth revisiting.

“What we have done is … to put business in its broader political and cultural setting…. We are not out to defend business, but to try to do an impartial, scholarly investigation of an important American institution.”

 – Henrietta Larson (1894–1983), Harvard business historian

For many decades, corporate histories were dominated by simplistic notions of big-is-bad and capitalist exploitation. Ida Tarbell documented many innovations and economies from John D.…