ExxonSecrets Factsheet: Fred Palmer

FACTSHEET: Fred Palmer

DETAILS

Senior Vice President, Peabody Energy
Greening Earth Society

Fred Palmer is Senior Vice President of Government Relations for Peabody Energy where he is responsible for advancing state and federal policies related to the production and use of coal. Prior to joining Peabody, Fred served as Of Counsel at Shook, Hardy, and Bacon in Washington, DC, and as General Manager, CEO, and General Counsel of the Western Fuels Association. He is a member of the Board of Directors for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and a member of the National Coal Council serving on the Executive Committee and Chairman of the Coal Policy Committee. Fred is a 2004 recipient of the Erskine Ramsay Medal Award from the Society for Mining, Metallurgy and Exploration. He has served on various professional boards with roles including Chairman of the Environmental Information Council, President of the Board of Directors of the Greening Earth Society, and Chair of the Climate Change Task Force for the National Mining Association.

Fred holds J.D. and B.A degrees from the University of Arizona.

KEY QUOTES

25 March, 2001
The Bunsen burner of The Thing, Albert Gore, is gone now...But we still feel we need to keep the debate honest. The vision of apocalyptic global warming is based on flawed theory."
Source: "Science for Hire in Debate Over Warming"

every time you turn on your car and burn fossil fuel and put CO2 in the air, you are doing the work of the lord - it is the ecological system we live in
Source: "Staking the Globe"

QUOTES

The way I put it is that there are reasonable people that have speculative fears about more and more CO2 going into the air, impacting climate. But the science to me--and I have been involved, not as a scientist but as a lawyer--the science to me suggests, in the ten years I've been involved in it, that there is no basis, no mechanism that anybody can point to or look at to say that more CO2 in the air is going to lead to catastrophic global warming or apocalyptic global warming, as opposed to some mild warming, which is nothing to be concerned about at all.
Source: PBS

So the precautionary principle might say that we should put more CO2 in the air to prevent CO2 levels from being driven down to such low levels in the future by an ice age that it extinguishes plant life.
Source: PBS

We are, by the way, a carbon-based life form living on a carbon-based planet, consuming carbon-based fuels. So the notion of decarbonizing energy is another way of saying we are going to decarbonize life, which is another way of saying we are going to reduce the amount of life on the planet.
Source: PBS

When I first heard about [Global Warming], I knew it was wrong, I just didn't know why.
Source: "Staking the Globe"

ORGANIZATIONS

Western Fuels
Source: PBS Interview

National Mining Association
Source: NMA Legal Document (2006)

Shook, Hardy and Bacon LLP
Source: Peabody Energy Bio (2006)

Peabody Energy
Source: Peabody Management Page (2006)

Greening Earth Society
Source: Greening Earth Society (2006)

SOURCES