Energy fuels everyday life | Mike Wirth

Great to be here.

It's actually a bit nicer. I like it.

The first memory I have of that is actually when I was a young child and, growing up in Colorado, we had a winter storm that took the power lines down, and we were without electricity for several days. And all of a sudden, my life changed. School was closed. I had to stay at home all day. When the sun went down, we went to bed. We didn't stay up because the television didn't work. The food in the refrigerator all went bad pretty quickly. It was cold outside, and so we had to burn firewood. We were huddled up with blankets around the fire for heat in the early morning and in the evening and actually through the day. And I realized, pretty quickly, that everything that made my life comfortable was gone. And it wasn't that much fun. You know, the first day might have been an adventure, but after that, it was not great. And so that was, I think, the first time when I realized: wait a minute, what happens when you don't have energy? I don't have the life that I enjoy.

You know, the other time you see it is when there's a hurricane. And you can go back to Katrina and Rita, or one of these big hurricanes. When you have a large, populated area that is without power for just a few days, society starts to break down. I mean, people are scared, they're hungry, they're angry. And so, reliable energy underpins the kind of stability and the lifestyle that we really do take for granted. When I think about my morning: This morning, the alarm clock went off. I grabbed my cell phone, which had been charging overnight. The shaving cream that I used to shave has got products that come out of petroleum. Hot coffee, a hot shower, getting here. Checking my email on my device—I mean, literally, each step of my morning was made possible by energy that is always available. It's always on. And it's worked its way into every aspect of our lives in ways that we don't even see and realize. Light, heat, space cooling, mobility, mechanized agriculture—the things that enable all of us to live the life that we do are impossible without reliable and affordable energy.