If Only Red Adair Were Still Alive

By Peter Smith

The recent oil rig platform fire and pending environmental disaster of this past week brought one man's name to mind. A twentieth century hero who was a nation's John Wayne we all called "Red".

Red Adair was once described as a man who probably did more than any other person single-handedly to preserve the environment. But in disappointment to the liberal mind this hero didn't do it by making speeches or spewing out autographed junk mail for some far left cause. He did it by hands on genius. Born poor, served his country with honor and became a successful Texan businessman; Paul N "Red" Adair never met an oil fire he couldn't tame.

If ever there lived a man who would know how to cap this latest oil blow it would have been Red.

Thomas Lifson adds:

Red Adair is one of my heroes. When he died six years ago, I wrote a tribute to a man the cultural elite largely disdained. Recall the handwringing and predictions of doom after Saddam Hussein torched Kuwait's oil fields. As I wrote then:

The sorts of people who inhabit newsrooms, faculty lounges, and movie studios these days don't think very often about the physical travails required to drill produce, and fix oil wells. The entire enterprise is...well, smelly and icky in their view. It's much more fun and admirable,to them, to fantasize about oil conservation (unless it means grounding Robert Kennedy Jr's private jets), windmills (unless they spoil the view from Martha's Vineyard), or solar power (just don't think about the toxic substances involved in the production of solar cells).

Red Adair committed another sin, in the eyes of the intellectual elite: he made a lot of money as an entrepreneur in the oil industry. The scent of wealth created by oil is one of the most distasteful odors possible, for the sensitive noses of our cultural masters.

Red Adair's greatest glory came following the Gulf War. Saddam Hussein followed-through on his threat to ignite the oil fields of Kuwait. The anti-war forces and many environmentalists predicted global doom from the smoke shutting out the sun's rays, from the oil flowing into the Persian Gulf, and from the economic chaos caused by disruption of world oil supplies.

Where greenies and weenies bemoaned catastrophe, Red Adair saw a job which needed to be done. Fast. He met with President George H.W. Bush to advise on the logistical issues in getting firefighting equipment to the Gulf quickly, and set to work with his team to extinguish the fires in the highest-producing fields of Kuwait. The experts had predicted it would require three to five years to completely extinguish the Kuwait oil field fires. Red got it done in nine months.

Red Adair won't get his due from the cultural elites, even upon his death. But he should be a considerable hero to the rest of us.