Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
THANKS TO
S
TUDENTS FOR A
J
UST AND
S
TABLE
F
UTURE OF
Worcester Polytechnic Institute for
making this occasion possible, and for inviting me to speak to you today. To the students: Your
courage and persistence are admirable. You are our hope for the future.
Thanks also to President Berkey and the rest of the WPI administration for making this space
available and for their willingness to listen to students' concerns.
The reason for this “alternative” commencement speech is that some students were upset to
learn that their college had invited Rex Tillerson, the CEO of ExxonMobil, to bestow a message of
blessing upon their graduation. As Linnea Palmer Paton put it in a letter to WPI President Berkey,
“[W]e, as conscientious members of the WPI community and proud members of the Class of 2011,
will not give [the Exxon CEO] the honor of imparting. . .his well-wishes . . . for our futures . . .when
he is largely responsible for undermining them.”
I think Linnea got it exactly right. ExxonMobil is inviting you to take your place in a fossil-
fueled 21st century. But I would argue that Exxon's vision of the future is actually just a forward
projection from our collective rearview mirror. Despite its hi-tech gadgetry, the oil industry is a relic
of the days of the
Beverly Hillbillies
. This fossil-fueled sitcom of a world that we all find ourselves
trapped within may on the surface appear to be characterized by smiley-faced happy motoring, but
at its core it is monstrous and grotesque. It is a zombie energy economy.
Of course, we all use petroleum and natural gas in countless ways and on a daily basis. These
are amazing substances: they are energy-dense and chemically useful, and they yield enormous eco-
nomic benefit. America started out with vast reserves of oil and gas, and they helped make our na-
tion the richest and most powerful country in the world.
But oil and gas are finite resources, so it was clear from the start that, as we extracted and burned
them, we were in effect stealing from the future. In the early days, the quantities of these fuels avail-
able seemed so enormous that depletion posed only a theoretical limit to consumption. We knew
we would eventually empty the tanks of Earth's hydrocarbon reserves, but that was a problem for
our great-great-grandkids to worry about. Yet US oil production started declining in 1970, despite
huge discoveries in Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico. Other countries are also seeing falling rates of
discovery and extraction, and world conventional crude oil production has flatlined for the past six
