Testimony Before U.S. House Energy & Commerce Subcommittee on Environment, Manufacturing, and Critical Materials

Mark P. Mills testified in a hearing before the U.S. House Committee on Energy & Commerce Subcommittee on Environment, Manufacturing, and Critical Materials.

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Good afternoon. Thank you for the opportunity to testify. I’m a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute where I focus on science, technology, and energy issues. I am also a Faculty Fellow at the McCormick School of Engineering at Northwestern University where my focus is on future manufacturing technologies. And, for the record, I’m a strategic partner in a venture fund focused on energy software, and I’m also a director of an oil-field services company.

Permit me to begin by observing two indisputable facts about our future. First, economic growth is the fundamental driver of energy demand. And second, while periods of slow growth and recessions are inevitable in all societies, those periods always end. But any subsequent growth can be stifled if energy supplies are either unavailable or too expensive.

Energy supply itself is not as much a matter of finding resources as it is one of building machines, regardless of the natural resource used, whether sun, wind, water, oil, gas, coal, or uranium. Thus realities around machine-building determine costs and all the associated environmental, social, and geopolitical impacts.

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Mark P. Mills is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a partner in Cottonwood Venture Partners, an energy-tech venture fund.