Official urges energy advocacy

An official with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce urged Longview business owners Thursday to be vocal in their support of a wide-spread energy policy.

 

“We need to be more outspoken,” Matthew Koch told members of the Longview Chamber of Commerce during their Business Advocacy Lunch. “I think it’s important to talk about and let people know what this could mean to them.”

 

Koch, who is not related to the family-owned pipeline and energy dynasty Koch Industries, serves as vice president of oil sands and Arctic issues for the U.S. chamber’s Institute for 21st Century Energy.

 

Internal and external factors challenge the policy Koch envisions.

 

Economic growth in China and India create more competition for energy resources than America faced in the 20th century, he said. China is building a coal-fired power plant a week, he said.

 

“We are going to have about an 11 percent increase in energy demand,” he said, adding the country should develop petroleum, natural gas and nuclear resources. “The ways we do it, are maybe going to determine how we remain competitive globally.”

 

Meanwhile, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is proposing rules Koch said stymie American power companies trying to find raw fuel and build the plants to exploit it.

 

“Its policies, right now, are making stuff virtually impossible to use new ways of finding it,” Koch said of the agency.

 

Koch cited a study published earlier this week that predicted America is on track to outpace Saudi Arabia in oil production by 2020. The country already exported more coal last year than in the previous four years, he said.

 

“We may be getting closer and closer to reality, in the next 10, 20, 30 years, where we are energy self-sufficient,” Koch said. “We’re getting much closer to that reality. Developing oil and gas and coal doesn’t come at the expense of the development of renewable energies.”

 

Koch also decried grass-roots opposition to energy projects that often pop up. He did not remark on the ongoing attempts to frustrate the Keystone XL Pipeline’s trek across Texas other than to decry “green tape.” That reference was aimed more at President Barack Obama, who has held up the pipeline’s route from Canada to the Texas Gulf Coast by concerns of its safety crossing the international border. He also praised the $7 billion private investment the pipeline builder, TransCanada, says the project represents.

 

“It’s an unfortunate example, again, of how politics got in the way of what could be a great investment,” he said.

 

Koch spoke more generally about the type of opposition such projects encounter from local residents. Perennial clashes between the energy industry and residents have produced acronyms Koch noted, including CAVE, BANANA or NIMBY.

 

Those stand for the fictitious, Citizens Against Virtually Everything, and the phrases, Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anybody, and Not In My Back Yard.

 

“We believe in an all-of-the-above energy policy,” he said.

 

To achieve that, he said, supporters should advocate increased oil and gas production, recognize the niche nuclear energy can fill, promote the use of natural gas as a vehicle fuel and “exert authority to get past, NIMBY.”