Alan Murray from the Commonwealth Club, a public affairs forum, recently played host to an interesting pair: Carl Pope, Executive Director of the Sierra Club, and Dave O’Reilly, chairman and CEO of Chevron Corporation. Have a listen as they discuss the future of energy in the field of transportation. Carl Pope presented an especially insightful thought on the potential for change in the energy industry:

25 years ago, if we talked about the phones we’d be having, there’s nothing involved in this system that uses a piece of equipment designed more than 10 years ago. In our energy system, we routinely accept the fact that we drive cars built on chassis built in the 1970’s, we use light bulbs that, actually, Thomas Edison would be able to recognize, and ship them from power plants in some cases built when Calvin Coolidge was president of the United States. We need to turn capital stocks in the energy sector over much much faster. That will actually be good economic news. The rapid change in the telecommunications industry was good for the economy. A similar transformation will be good in the energy economy.