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Managing Problems, Assessing Risks
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20300 |
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Section : |
SPECIAL SECTION
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| Issue
Date : |
7 / 1992 |
3,538 Words |
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An Interview With Thomas Kean
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Thomas Kean is president of Drew University and chairman of the National Environmental Education and Training Foundation. As governor of New Jersey from 1982 to 1990, he had direct experience of handling the environmental problems of a state on a day-to-day basis. Here he speaks with Michael Marshall, executive editor of The World & I.
The World &I: The United States is the major user in the world of nonrenewable fuel sources, the fossil fuels. I believe the United States is responsible for about 40 percent of the world's oil consumption annually. Do you think that the United States should have an energy policy?
Kean: The United States is going to pay a terrible price for not having an energy policy, and it's going to pay that terrible price in the near term, not the long term. I think we're about four or five years away from feeling the effects of not having an energy policy.
W&I: What, then, should be the key features of a viable U.S. energy policy?
Kean: First of all, the encouragement to develop those resources in this country that can be developed without short-or long-term damage to the environment. There is no incentive in this country anymore to discover or produce oil or gas. If you look at the major oil companies in this country, you see they have not only stopped drilling, but they are dismantling the rigs and moving them to Europe or to the North Sea. There's a reason for that. Those countries have incentives, which means that it can be profitable to drill and produce energy in those areas, whereas it is not profitable in this country.
We are importing more and more of our energy as a result. Once these rigs are dismantled and taken away, it would be years before we could reconstruct them. That is a long-range danger to the United States.
W&I: So should a main pillar of an energy policy be encouragement to develop new sources of fossil fuels rather than developing alternative fuel sources, such as solar energy or more hydroelectric power?
Kean: I think you have to do both. My hope is that we can develop cheap and usable solar energy on a large scale, but we haven't done it yet and nobody's sure of any timetable for doing it.
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