I recall Udall's cogent, smart, and somewhat snarky comments on pricing energy in conversation with Jim Rogers of Duke Energy at the Aspen Environment Forum back in 2009, where we were both speaking.
Here is Chris's tribute, in part. You can go here to read the full version:
Randy Udall: An energy hero’s journey by Chris Nelder
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| Randy Udall by Dan Bihn |
Randy Udall had a unique talent for expressing complex realities and befuddling data in a simple, tangible way that anyone could understand; for being able to step back from the immediate issues of the day and put them in a larger, clarifying perspective.
So when I learned last
week that he had died on a solo backpacking trip in the Wyoming wilderness, it
was a crushing loss. Randy was one of my heroes: a wonderful man who was a
hugely important and helpful friend, mentor, sounding board, and teacher to me
over the past several years. He was a gifted writer and a compelling speaker.
It’s hard to believe we’ll have no more of his words.
He certainly contributed much to mine. It was Randy who,
preferring to be credited anonymously as “a perspicacious friend,” said this in my article on “energy independence“ in
February 2012: “The masses (and the cheerleaders) love this story because it is
one of Abundance and Manifest Destiny in this Exceptional Country of ours.”
That phrase expressed beautifully what the shale mania is really all about. A
student of human nature, Randy had an unerring ability to detect the emotional
underpinnings of our rhetoric about energy and our destiny, and bring it back
to earth.
He never doubted that
the engines of human activity were redlining, and that we had entered a period
of extreme, even existential challenges where “the politics of energy has to
surrender to the physics of energy.” He had no doubt that peak oil was a real and
a serious issue we would have to confront in the very near future, as the
decline of a handful of mature giant oil fields eventually overwhelmed new
additions from the thousands of new wells being drilled every year. And he put
his shoulder to the wheel in response, co-founding the U.S. chapter of the
Association for the Study of Peak Oil (ASPO), and co-hosting its first
conferences.
Over the past several years, I was lucky to exchange emails
every few days with Randy and some other fellow energy geeks. (Some of them
wrote this touching tribute.) In
a kind of ongoing workshop, we passed around data and charts and observations,
working through arcane details, trying to detect the reality of our energy
situation amidst a growing crescendo of industry propaganda.
Read the complete tribute here.
More about Chris Nelder.
