A new descriptive enters the lexicon of words used to describe the energy business. Who cares how we got to the modern age? All we know is that we don’t want to stay. According to PowerShift ’09, a non-profit youth organization supporting drastic climate legislation, “Students and youth across the country will be following closely as the House Energy and Commerce Committee holds the first hearings on the American Clean Energy and Security (ACES) Act this week.” The press release quotes Jessy Tolkan, Executive Director of the Energy Action Coalition, as saying, “Young people understand the US response to climate change will determine our future.” If climate were an isolated entity, this would be true. The fact is no amount of US legislation will affect the overall rate of carbon emissions. Growing economies, like those of China and India, will continue to use what many environmental groups are now referring to as “dirty” energy. While this primarily refers to coal, oil and natural gas (including CBM) are inferred. The juxtaposition of “clean” versus “dirty” is a semantic form of brainwashing. More importantly, do young people really understand what kind of effect an irrational response to climate change will have on our future? The plethora of activists and environmental groups would have us believe that most oil and gas executives’ cheer every time a baby seal is clubbed or a village is plowed over by bright yellow dozers making way for the next crime scene where Mother Earth is raped against her will. This simply isn’t true, but you know this. The recent political push to mandate the move away from fossil fuels is the irrational result of mass hysteria. Making believe that life as we know it will completely disappear within one or two decades if we don’t “alter our self-destructive course” is not a viable solution. What it breeds is misinformation and the progressive delusion that the world will be great if “they just do what we say.” Renewable energy is a viable concept, but it can’t take place overnight. In the US, we have optimized our use of resources within the last 150 to garnish the highest levels of energy from the various elements we extract. Newer economies want a chance to do the same. To legislate limitations on what can be produced is to tether one of last bastions of heavy industry we have. While this appeases our sense of well being in the short-term, it will put us behind the technology leaders of tomorrow. For a “greener” future to have optimum benefit, it will need to be conducted through a long process of transition. Renewable energy is not juxtaposed from that produced with fossil fuels. The oil companies of today will be the energy companies of tomorrow, adopting those technologies that become more profitable as markets change with time – not with legislation. Besides, doesn’t StatoilHydro own wind farms?