Everyone
knows Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg. Few recognize the name of George P.
Mitchell (1919-2013). However, in
a tribute after his death, The Economist
said, “few businesspeople have done as much to change the world as George P. Mitchell.”
The easiest label is that he was “the father of fracking.” Fracking is news. In
fact, Mitchell worked for over 20 years to bring the idea to fruition. Working
in the oil and gas industry, he earned billions of dollars building a Fortune
500 company. He also funded research into sustainablility.
I, too, was ignorant of
Mitchell’s works until I was given this book by the author. Jurgen Schmandt
worked for Mitchell’s Houston Advanced Research Center. Schmandt also served as
the director of the Mitchell Center for Sustainable development. This book
delivers an insider’s view of the creation and development of an idea both more
powerful and having more potential than the oil industry.
The concept of sustainability
is not deeply rooted. Like science and constitutional government, hints of sustainability
can be found in ancient texts, but the seed really was planted in 1713, as the
Age of Reason blossomed into the Enlightenment. Schmandt credits Hans Carl von Carlowitz with the invention
of the word “nachhaltende” in German, i.e., sustainable in English.
He coined the phrases “nachhaltende Nutzung gebe” (sustainable yield)
and “nachhaltende Entwicklung” (sustainable development). Carlowitz was a mining administrator.
Mines are shored with timbers. No hardwood, no mines. And hardwood grows
slowly. Carlowitz wrote a book, Sylvicultura
Oeconomica.
For 150 years, although forestry
and fisheries knew the terms, most of the world was not awakened to the
concepts until the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Schmandt nicely segues from
two chapters on the history of sustainability into a third on the Club of
Rome. Mitchell supported the Club of Rome and its Limits to Growth thesis with his checkbook. At the same time, as this book lays out
in careful detail, Mitchell sought a business model that would make
sustainability profitable. He was partially successful.
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| Report by the US Energy Information Agency |
George
Mitchell, who died on July 26th, was a one-man refutation of the declinist
hypothesis. From the 1970s America’s energy industry reconciled itself to
apparently inevitable decline. Analysts produced charts to show that its oil
and gas were running out. The big oil firms globalised in order to survive. But
Mr Mitchell was convinced that immense reserves trapped in shale rock deep
beneath the surface could be freed. He spent decades perfecting techniques for
unlocking them: injecting high-pressure fluids into the ground to fracture the
rock and create pathways for the trapped oil and gas (fracking) and drilling
down and then sideways to increase each well’s yield (horizontal drilling). The result was
a revolution.-- The Economist, August 3, 2013 here.
The Woodlands community
outside Houston did not mature according to the plans Mitchell envisioned, but
it is nonetheless an island of sustainable calm in the permanent sea squall
that is Houston. That perpetual
storm is a consequence of two colliding economic fronts: the success of the
urban metroplex and the need for developers to offload their true costs as
externalities for other people to bear.
Schmandt’s presentation is dispassionate and analytical, an engineer’s
report, not a jeremiad.
And, just as scientific literacy and liberal democracy are
far from ubiquitous, so, too has sustainability proved to be a difficult
problem. Despite his obvious efficacy with oil and gas, George P. Mitchell
never created a business model for sustainability. We have no sustainability
industry, but, rather, a myriad of local and personal efforts, most of
them marginally successful.
Mitchell himself was a man of
two passions. One of his children called this “the Mitchell paradox” and that is
title of Chapter 10. It was the
author’s choice: Chapter 10 could have been Chapter 1. Define the man, then
show him to us. Rather, Schmandt first introduces
us to his employer, friend, and mentor. Then he provides the conceptual
wrapper.
Mitchell was not a Luddite.
He parted from his ecologist colleagues when he insisted that economic growth and
even expansive development may well be appropriate, especially if the billions of people in the less developed regions are to enjoy the prosperity of the Western democracies. That does not change the fact that
Earth is an island.
Today’s news is dominated by
the US Presidential election campaigns and the military campaigns in Syria and
Iraq. But underneath them, continuing, and consistent, never to be completely
forgotten and often to be a burr in our running shoes, are the problems of
sustainable growth.
And, it is one thing to have
some few privileged people working in science (as in 1713), but another that (in 2013)
millions of people on every continent can recognize the periodic table.
Similarly, the quest for sustainability crosses geographical, political, and
economic boundaries, encompassing millions of people who can recognize the word, and have both an interest and (most important) an investment in its meaning.
This book is about the man
who made that happen.
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