ANG: Climate Goals Will Not Be Met on Time, Ken Hersh Says
Ken Hersh, head of the George W. Bush Presidential Center, spoke during Hart Energy’s America’s Natural Gas Conference about the current dynamics of the energy industry, climate change and world order.
Pietro D
Pitts
Hart Energy
Ken Hersh spoke with Hart Energy's Nissa Darbonne on the current dynamics of the energy industry on Sept. 27. (Source: Arnaldo Larios / Hart Energy)
HOUSTON—Climate change goals may not be realistic, according to Ken Hersh, president and CEO of the George W. Bush Presidential Center.
“It’s time to realize that our goals on climate are not going to be met on time [amid] difficult economic and physical [headwinds],” said Hersh, also the co-founder of NGP, during his keynote address at Hart Energy’s America’s Natural Gas Conference on Sept. 27.
The executive, talking about climate change, the energy transition, emissions and geopolitical events impacting the world, also said blackouts are “man-made problems” and that the “world has slept itself into a crisis.”
With regards to fossil fuels, Hersh said they “didn’t take a livable planet and make it inhospitable. Fossil fuels took an inhospitable planet and made it livable. Without fossil fuels, we’d all last just 72 hours.”
In terms of the climate crisis, Hersh argued that the U.N. was trying to solve problems it wasn’t developed to solve.
(Source: Arnaldo Larios / Hart Energy)
"It’s time to realize that our goals on climate are not going to be met on time [amid] difficult economic and physical [headwinds].” – Ken Hersh, George W. Bush Presidential Center
“We don’t need 196 countries to agree on [emissions], we need the top four. The top four emitters emit 60% of the world’s emissions,” he said. “Zambia wants electricity, do whatever you want… they don’t matter to climate. It’s the U.S. and China and secondarily India and Russia and places like South Africa where we need to focus.”
Hersh warned that the greatest risks for the global energy industry weren’t below ground.
“The greatest risks to the energy markets today are now seen above ground as governments try to force prices, [implement] windfall profit taxes on producers and taxes penalizing certain sources and inflating others, and export controls,” he said. “The last time we saw this type of intervention was in the 1970s when we had price controls, import quotas… and the result was a five-fold increase in prices and massive shortages.”
In response to a question about world order, Hersh said China and Russia were playing their games and that even those games required order. But the executive admitted he didn’t foresee a breakdown in world order.
“For world order to break down it has to be a wholescale collapse in institutions, and I don’t see that happening,” he concluded.
International Managing Editor focused on covering areas from Africa and Asia to Europe and LatAm, especially Venezuela. Pietro previously worked at Bloomberg and LatinPetroleum.com (LatinPetroleum eMagazine) in Caracas, among other publications. Pietro also previously worked for Energy Intelligence, Jefferies, Morgan Keegan in the U.S. as well as Banco Mercantil del Norte (Banorte) in Mexico City and Banco Santiago de Leon in Caracas. Pietro holds a finance degree from the University of Houston and speaks English and Spanish and has a good understanding of Portuguese.
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