So I’ve been quiet for a wee while. Call it 10 months of quiet?
Part of it is that little has changed in the industries I work in:
Oil & Gas
Every commodity has its ups and downs, but oil & gas has swirled around its latest downturn since June 2014. It’s the same old story: Ask a dozen talking heads why this happened and you’ll get a dozen different answers (bonus points if the speaker gives contradictory views of OPEC in the same hypothesis). Despite that, there are reasons to be hopeful, including rig counts increasing most weeks. While some of that is because exploration had stalled for long enough that eventually you can’t go anywhere but up, more rigs equals more new drilling, and new production—whether it should be or not—is the accepted indicator of oil & gas health in the U.S.
Despite these hopeful signs, as of early 2017, the industry is still largely on hold. Normally this happens in January each year because companies are still waiting for approved annual budgets to proceed with anything. In lean times, annual budgets can sometimes be held back until February or March. However, this year, everyone is waiting to see what President Trump will do. Whether individuals may have a favorable or negative view of Donald Trump, the oil & gas companies overall believe his policies will be favorable to the industry. How many regulations will be scaled back and how consistent he’ll be has yet to be seen, but in every meeting, every phone call, and every email, the same hold line comes up: “Let’s see what President Trump will do.”
Water
I’ll make this one short: People still don’t care about water.
There’s a belief that we will care about water someday soon, but it’s the same belief accompanied with the same inaction year after year. Even environmentalists don’t care that much about water. It still takes a backseat to solar power and wind power.
I met with a guy this week who talked about his company’s testing water standards 15-20 years ago. At the end of their filtration, they’d have some of the water off to the side, and place a catfish in there. If you killed that bottom feeder, then you knew you messed up. While standards have gotten more objective than seeing if you can keep from killing a bacteria loving vacuum-fish, they aren’t universal. Every industry needs regulation; the goal is to have good regulation—promoting safety for people and the environment while allowing businesses to pursue success—but it’s easy to get the pendulum swinging in the wrong direction.
Since I mentioned wind power and solar energy:
- There are still (inaccurate) stories about too many birds getting diced by wind power turbines. What I don’t hear is that the wind power design you’re most likely to see are some of the least efficient. Making lighter blades, using lighter material—none of this changes the limitations of the design. Most of the better designs—that appear more static, but are better at generating energy off each vibration—don’t make it to market, but that’s any industry: the best design rarely gets the market share (or even a viable business).
- Solar still has issues with sourcing the right metals. This metal needs to be A) affordable; and B) have consistent high conductivity. The issue is that it’s still hard to find both. If the metal is affordable, it’s often not in the U.S., but making sure you get what you paid for is harder when you’re thousands of miles away. Then, if the metal is of the right quality, it’s harder to get affordably and consistently. Thus any innovation of the solar power industry is still limited by basic sourcing issues.
Okay, so things are kind of stuck, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned is that anger does little to build anything meaningful. As Sam Rayburn said, “Any jackass can kick down a barn, but it takes a good carpenter to build one.” Whatever the future of water and oil & gas hold, I want to be a part of building it well.
Let’s get pushing.
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Colin McKay Miller is the VP of Marketing for the SpiroFlo Holdings group of companies:
–SpiroFlo for residential hot water savings (delivered 35% faster with up to a 5% volume savings on every hot water outlet in the home), industrial water purification (biofilm removal), and reduced water pumping costs.
–Vortex Tools for extending the life of oil and gas wells (recovering up to 10 times more NGLs, reducing flowback startup times, replacing VRUs, eliminating paraffin and freezing in winter, etc.).
–Ecotech for cost-effective non-thermal drying (for coal, biosolids, sugar beets, dairy waste, etc.) and safe movement of materials (including potash and soda ash).
Al Gore: An Inconvenient Barrier to Environmentalism
Posted in Buzzwords, Green Commentary, SpiroFlo, tagged Al Gore, Al Jazeera, An Inconvenient Sequel, An Inconvenient Truth, Bono, Current Events, Current TV, Ed Begley Jr., environmentalism, green, Green Commentary, Green Savings, green technology, Leonardo DiCaprio, SpiroFlo on August 8, 2017| 1 Comment »
SpiroFlo discusses “An Inconvenient Sequel” and how resistance to Al Gore correlates to resistance to environmental efforts.
*I’ll apologize in advance for the agonizing over-use of “inconvenient” in this article (lay-up title included).
When “An Inconvenient Truth” came out in 2006, it had buzz. I heard about it in environmental circles (with the hope that it would get more people involved with green thinking) and it was well received by from critics and moviegoers alike. This time around, however, the overall impact seems, well, less:
Obviously, only being a couple of weeks into its theater-wide release means it’s too early to tell how well “An Inconvenient Sequel” will do long-term, but as of this writing, it’s nearing only $1.1 million at the box office. It is unlikely that it will surpass the $23.8 million the first one earned.
But more than anything, I blame the backlash on Al Gore.
Frankly, there’s no shortage of clueless celebrities to grill for the hypocrisy of calling for a greener approach to living while lavishly ignoring that advice for themselves:
This isn’t to say all green advocate celebrities are automatically fake. People consider Ed Begley Jr. a nut for all the environmental innovations (and life limitations) he’ll take on himself, but he walks the walk when it comes to green living. But Al Gore? Al Gore’s been easy to criticize for a long time. I believe his interest in environmental issues comes from a genuine place (starting in the mid-1970s) and he had a level of interest in promoting those values throughout his political career. However, many people believe that Gore’s interest in green issues only took off when he lost the 2000 Presidential election. That may be true, but I don’t fault anyone for pursuing a different existing passion once their current career doorway slams shut.
I also don’t think it’s completely fair to criticize Gore for making money off “An Inconvenient Truth.” Few knew that it’d be the popular, financial success it was. The pro-environmental landscape wasn’t nearly as set in 2006, and, if anything, “An Inconvenient Truth” helped cement it. The key thing is that the majority of Al Gore’s wealth came from, A) his membership on the Apple Board; and B) the sale of his Current TV network. While the former may seem like a prized position, it’s the latter move that hollowed out Gore’s environmentalist character.
While I commented on this at the start of 2013, here’s the basics:
Criticism of Gore, even from Current TV staff, was extensive, as it was seen as wrong to sell a network with a greener slant to a large oil player. However, others noted that Current TV was always subsidized, now it’d just be subsidized by the government of Qatar while paying off the guy at the top. Gore spent some of his earnings on, you guessed it, Apple stock, and was largely able to escape mainstream scathing in public interviews.
Fast-forward a decade and it seems “An Inconvenient Sequel” will flop at the box office. At least part of the problem is that “An Inconvenient Sequel” doesn’t do a great job of explaining the predictions that “An Inconvenient Truth” got wrong. (Catastrophically rising sea levels, the arctic melting, and polar bears going extinct were the most commonly cited examples.) While the rebuttal should simply be, “That was 2006; we’ve learned a lot since then and we can’t exactly go back and put in updated footnotes on a movie,” climate change proponents put themselves in a corner by asserting that the science is settled on global warming. Thus, any acknowledgement that past assertions were wrong shreds that hardline stance (but that’s a whole ‘nother blog).
This time around, people aren’t even watching “An Inconvenient Sequel” to criticize it (if the low user ratings to low box office numbers ratio is to be believed—a week ago, the Metacritic user rating was a dire 3.6 out of 10 [up to 5.8 since then]). Instead, it’s Al Gore that’s got the target on his back. The arguments aren’t even new: I’ve seen this story again—Al Gore’s home consumes 34 times more energy than the average American!—but the same story made the rounds in 2007 (it was only 21 times more energy then). While Snopes views the claim as a mixed bag, it notes, “the basic gist of the claim — that the Gores’ Nashville residence consumed a larger proportion of energy than the average American home — was true.” I first heard that story a decade back when “An Inconvenient Truth” was still popular. You know why I didn’t see it often from 2008 to 2016? Because “An Inconvenient Sequel” didn’t release until 2017. Now that Al Gore is back in the spotlight, his criticism is back there, too.
It’s simple: You devalue the spokesman and you devalue the message, and frankly, Al Gore is an easy enough target that he’s doing damage to environmentalism messaging by proxy. While it may be inconvenient to Al Gore, for green messaging to get stronger, the easy criticism targets need to be set aside.
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Colin McKay Miller is the VP of Marketing for the SpiroFlo Holdings group of companies:
–SpiroFlo for residential hot water savings (delivered 35% faster with up to a 5% volume savings on every hot water outlet in the home), industrial water purification (biofilm removal), and reduced water pumping costs.
–Vortex Tools for extending the life of oil and gas wells (recovering up to 10 times more NGLs, reducing flowback startup times, replacing VRUs, eliminating paraffin and freezing in winter, etc.).
–Ecotech for cost-effective non-thermal drying (for coal, biosolids, sugar beets, dairy waste, etc.) and safe movement of materials (including potash and soda ash).
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