Part of our mission is to educate the public about food and fuel issues, and our founder, Nick Tiller, had a great opportunity to do just that recently. He was a guest on CNBC’s mid-day show Fast Money: Halftime Report, where he explained how his background as a financial analyst and portfolio manager in the energy and food sectors led him to start a nonprofit organization.
Here’s a clip from the interview. We’ve also transcribed it below.
Nick: The oil market right now is probably as dicey as I’ve seen it in my career. The geopolitical situation that’s going on right now, not even just with the Russians and Ukraine, but when you look at Libya, it’s in chaos, when you look at Iraq, they’ve increased production lately but it’s by no means stable. Venezuela’s a mess. There’s a lot of reason to be concerned about supply disruption in the oil markets right now.
Kate Kelly: What can people do and what is your organization trying to further on the fuel side?
Nick: I founded Sustainable America as a charity that is devoted to both the food and the fuel markets, making them both more resilient. On the fuel side, what we’re trying to do is reduce oil demand. And if you reduce oil demand you take away some of that risk, some of that exposure to supply disruptions and you can actually lower the price of oil around the world if you reduce oil demand.
Kate Kelly: What are some strategies for doing that?
There are a few major ways that we can do that already. There are already alternative fuels and fuel choice is a good thing, between natural gas, advanced biofuels, methanol. You can also just look at the simplest thing, which is gasoline conservation; buying hybrids, buying cars with better gas mileage. And the thing I am most excited about is electric vehicles. I think the electric vehicle, over the coming decades, is going to be the biggest challenge to oil demand.
Read more from Nick Tiller about why he founded Sustainable America in “Why I Quit Oil”.
