George Mitchell and the limits to thinking
One of the great paradoxes of the fracking revolution is that its “father,” the late George P. Mitchell, was a fan of sustainable development. This might not quite rank with cotton manufacturer Friedrich Engels supporting Karl Marx, but it comes pretty close. That’s because if sustainability has one key tenet, it is that the fossil fuel industry must be killed to save the planet. Instead, fracking has revitalized it.
Mitchell symbolizes an understandable public confusion: that capitalism is somehow synonymous with the weird, anti-market ideas that capitalists often embrace. Businessmen tend not to be great fans of competition and will often seek government favours. One of the great current examples is Elon Musk, the entrepreneur who has received billions from U.S. governments wishing to promote the climate agenda and/or the great space boondoggle.
Great capitalists often have strange views that have little or nothing to do with their business success. Henry Ford was profoundly anti-Semitic. Bill Gates, the richest man in the world, has fallen victim to the notion that corporations should be solving the world’s problems directly rather than indirectly, via “corporate social responsibility.” Ted Turner is among those promoting sustainability and population control while leaving a massive personal carbon footprint. In a world when climate skepticism is claimed to be a product of fossil fuel industry misinformation, billionaires such as Michael Bloomberg and Tom Steyer receive only praise for supporting alarmism. But few businessmen held views as paradoxical as Mitchell, who died a couple of years ago.
Mitchell allied himself with the outer fringe of catastrophists and depletionists — in particular the authors of The Limits to Growth. That book claimed, in 1972, to have studied the future “with the aid of a giant computer” and projected unarguable resource exhaustion, ecological “overshoot” and civilizational collapse (Funny how current official climate models are used to predict something similar).
According to Limits, it would all be over before the end of the twentieth century unless mankind engineered a “totally new form of human society” and imposed a “sustainable … global equilibrium.” That required the sacrifice of “certain human freedoms” and rigid control of population and investment.
Mitchell embraced these views and supported conferences to promote them, even as he was part of the — relatively — free market process that ultimately made Limits’ projections as wrong as they were politically repugnant. He did it by pioneering fracking, which involves pumping high pressure liquids into horizontally drilled wells and thus releasing vast amounts of petroleum that was previously considered uneconomic. The technology is responsible for reversing the decline of oil and gas produc-
The man who invented the fracking boom was paradoxically a big backer
of sustainable development
tion in North America, and for the sharp drop in global petroleum prices. The cheap gas bonanza has revitalized the U.S. manufacturing sector and led to a projected boom in liquefied natural gas trade. It has pulled the already tattered rug from under renewables such as solar and wind, and caused turmoil in Russia and throughout OPEC.
Fracking has been fiercely opposed by anti-development NGOs, who have thrown every form of junk science at it, from claims that it leads to flaming faucets, to hysteria that it may cause dangerous earthquakes. Craven politicians have banned it, or put moratoria on it, rather than confront social-mediated mobs.
The irony is that the man who perfected fracking embraced many of the same alarmist notions and simplistic top-down “solutions” as those violently opposed to his innovations.
Mitchell was the embodiment of the American Dream. The son of a poor Greek immigrant, he not merely created a successful petroleum enterprise but also built a model community in Texas, helped revitalize Galveston, and was a generous contributor to university research, as well as signing Bill Gates’ Giving Pledge.
Some claim that Mitchell, like Musk, could never have done it without U.S. government geological mapping and R&D credits (Indeed, President Obama — the most anti-petroleum president ever — has claimed credit for the fracking revolution). Certainly governments are unavoidable in the business sphere, and perpetually seek to associate themselves with business success, but whether their impact is a net benefit is another matter entirely. History would suggest otherwise.
Mitchell’s son, Todd, admitted the “Mitchell Paradox,” based on the fact that his father supported population control but had ten children, and was a champion of sustainability although he never invested in renewables.
Dennis Meadows, lead author of The Limits to Growth, has continued to peddle the same old catastrophism, simply kicking the doomsday can down the road. Two years before Mitchell died, Meadows gave a speech in Ottawa in which he claimed it was “too late for sustainable development.” During the question period, somebody was impolite enough to point out that Meadows had suggested a decade earlier that Canadian natural gas production had peaked. Meadows squirmed. Ironically, the man who had made him wrong — yet again — was George Mitchell.
Level heads have suggested that the shale gas revolution offers a “bridge” to a more sustainable future, but this argument tends to be angrily refuted by environmental radicals, who would prefer to blow up such a bridge.
Mitchell is particularly fascinating because his belief in anti-market sustainability was refuted by his own mind, and yet he seemed to fail to grasp that minds, as the great economist Julian Simon noted, are the “ultimate resource.” As with so many great capitalist entrepreneurs, we should remember what George Mitchell did, not what he thought.