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Global issues dominate Aspen forums

Billionaires, politicians, leaders of industry debate energy policy, climate change, mass migration
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ASPEN, Colo. - With their sparkling skies, verdant landscapes, and dressed-down atmosphere, mountain resorts of the West have no trouble getting people with big credentials to stop by to share thoughts about how to save the planet.

Aspen does this especially well. Among its 300 speakers, the Ideas Festival in June drew the likes of Bill Gates, David Brooks and Judith Bader Ginsberg. An environmental forum in July was smaller but just as robust in its own way, with the backing of the National Geographic Society.

But the Aspen Renewable Energy (ARE) Days conference held in August surely had the most concentrated list of household names. The podium had billionaire titans of industry and commerce, one of Hollywood's brightest stars, governors and more. The unwritten premise of the session was that we must more swiftly transition away from fossil fuels - action now stalled in Congress.

Repeatedly, these bright lights were asked to share insights about how to move the United States past its impasse about energy policy. Their answers were rich, but not revelatory. The take-home for me was that even the really smart people haven't figured this out.

Ted Turner and T. Boone Pickens were the billionaires. They shared the stage twice, sharing jokes and sometimes viewpoints. A measure of their wealth is that in one story they told, the two were together in a hotel room somewhere, and for some reason they were talking about business acquisitions. The corporations mentioned were household names, big corporations. Yet they talked like most of us talk about buying shirts and pants.

Out at the Pitkin County Airport, Turner's jet was easily identified: it has a bison's head on its rudder. Turner has 55,000 bison, some of which end up on platters at his restaurant chain, Ted's Montana Grill. He's also the nation's largest landowner, with 2 million acres, including large ranches in both Montana and New Mexico. On his land in New Mexico, Turner is partnering to create a one-mile-square solar farm, equivalent in output to a tiny coal-fired plant.

His great wealth - and interests - are also revealed in his philanthropy. He founded and endowed the UN Foundation with $1 billion, with a portion of its mission being to reduce greenhouse gases through energy transitions. While in the audience, he sat in the front row, attentively listening to presentations about wind energy and the idea of nuclear energy as a "renewable energy of the West."

On stage, Turner was blunt, both funny and grim. Asked at one point by Thomas Friedman, the New York Times columnist, how he had come to embrace the challenge of global warming, Turner talked about his early investigations of power plants. "You have to be a not-very-smart person not to get it," he said.

Friedman, aggrieved by the failure of the U.S. Senate this year to pass climate-change legislation, kept wanting to know what had gone wrong. The utilities, coal and oil industries "shut us down, and I don't like it worth a damn," Turner replied. He especially targeted the coal sector with "confusing the issue" with bogus claims about clean coal.

His solution? Talk to your representatives and senators in Congress, he said.

Among fossil fuels, Turner and most mainstream environmental groups make an exception for natural gas, because it has only 58 per cent of the carbon dioxide when burned as compared to coal. That fits in with the agenda of Pickens, who wants to convert 18-wheel trucks to burn natural gas.

Pickens is hard to pin down. A stalwart Republican, a Texas twang betraying his residency, he paid $2 million to a group that painted John Kerry, the Democratic senator who ran for president in 2004, as having made exaggerated and untruthful claims about his record in the Vietnam War. And, while he seems to accept global warming as a legitimate threat, he speaks mostly about curbing imports of oil from what he describes as "our enemies." He's sure that some of the $750 billion paid for oil from foreign countries goes to bankrolling the Taliban.

Pickens said he's impatient - and has been for a long time. Every president since Nixon has talked about reducing U.S. dependence on imported oil. Instead, it has steadily increased, now up to 67 per cent (although a substantial portion is from Canada). Obama promised to do the same - but hasn't carried through.

"I think the president has to come through on this promise to get us off foreign oil in eight years," said Pickens.

Pickens sees salvation in natural gas, first in re-powering trucks. "I'm not saying everything. Just go after the 18-wheelers and we'll see where it goes from there," he said.

Two lame-ducked governors named Bill - Ritter of Colorado and Richardson of New Mexico, each down to four months in office - both claimed accomplishments worthy of national emulation.

Ritter bragged of Colorado's mixture of carrots and sticks that produced what he describes as an "energy ecosystem." Utilities were mandated to increase their use of renewables, a climate action plan was adopted and energy efficiencies were given incentives. All this made Colorado more attractive to wind turbine manufacturers, solar companies and other businesses.

Over fierce objections of the natural gas industry, Colorado also adopted regulations governing the impacts of extraction on wildlife and water. This, in turn, has allowed Colorado's largest utilities to replace older, less-efficient coal-fired generators with plants that burn natural gas. Utilities have also been ordered to meet progressively higher renewable energy portfolio standards.

But Ritter also sees the need for electrical prices to better reflect external costs. He cited the pollution of lakes from mercury emitted by power plants, which has caused health officials to warn against eating fish from the lakes. "We're not charging people for the true cost of burning coal," he said.

Richardson, in a bit of one-upmanship, claimed that New Mexico has done most of what Colorado has done - and perhaps a bit more. He too has fought coal plants, but New Mexico has also moved toward directly limiting carbon emissions.

A former energy secretary in the 1990s, Richardson also said that renewable energy must get the same subsidies long enjoyed by oil, natural gas and nuclear sectors.

He also called for a tax structure that encourages creation of manufacturing and workforce training associated with the new energy economy. "I don't believe in tax the rich," he said.

But ultimately, Richardson said that he also does not have the answers on how to more rapidly speed the conversion from fossil fuels. "We need to find another way," he said.

For James Cameron, fresh off his success with Avatar , the answer lies in visceral reactions. He called for use of emotion in pushing the conversation about how to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases. People in 2050 will look back and wonder, "What the hell were you thinking," he said.

Later that night, a film called Climate Refugees was shown. Created in part with funding from Aspen residents, the film has a world-wide scope. The scenes were from already poverty-stricken parts of the world, where rising sea levels and other impacts of climate change may well force large-scale relocations.

The film was dreary and inconsolably long, brimming with interminable floods and deserts, then young innocent faces, meant to reflect the future victims. But one statement by Lee F. Gunn, retired vice admiral from the U.S. Navy, resonated.

"I think there are very few truly bad people in the world. There are many desperate people. I think one of the unfortunate results of climate change will be that the many desperate people will be preyed on by the truly bad people."

Sitting in the velvety cushions of an auditorium in Aspen, having just listened to a couple of billionaires ruminate, all this seemed far away. But then the film showed projections of where the world's millions of homeless people would want to escape to. A rain of arrows pointed toward North America.

All of a sudden, all the shrill rhetoric about Arizona's efforts to seal the border with Mexico seemed utterly trite.