Former Wall Street employee says environment and renewable energy motivate him to get into politics

Doug Lee is a Republican candidate for the New York State Assembly District 16 in Nassau County and he will try to unseat Democratic incumbent Michelle Schimel in November on a platform that backs natural gas drilling and questions the viability of renewable energy development in the Empire State.

Lee, 63, has spent the last three decades working for financial services firms, 11 years of which were on Wall Street. Gas drilling and other environmental issues were topics he didn't know much about until he got involved with farmers who lived and worked in the Catskills region in New York.

"I have a farmhouse up in the Catskills and I've been going up there during the weekends which is how I got involved with organizing with the farmers upstate," Lee told China Daily.

Through conversations with those farmers, Lee began to see how unsustainable New York State's pursuit of renewable energy was for the economy and how natural gas drilling might be the solution.

"Since I have a house up there, I was somewhat concerned about what the potential impact for drilling was, so I studied it. Based on the research, I decided that it was actually cleaner than other forms of energy, but there were a lot of political factors involved that would suppress gas development," he said.

The current political trend is to support renewable energy, Lee said, which is "ideal from a conceptual standpoint because it would theoretically be clean." However, Lee noted that many renewable energy sources today can also cause pollution, particularly the creation and installation of solar panels, a fast-growing industry in the US.

Lee believes the amount of money the government is putting into renewable energy is not proportional to the benefits that it would provide for the environment.

"The energy policies that we have, simply do not make economic sense," said Lee. "Right now, the legislature has dedicated $1 billion to renewable energy development which is a big problem because what that means is that it's going to significantly add to taxes, which would make it more of a burden on small businesses and on everybody. That actually causes New York State to be extremely non-competitive. We have a lot of people leaving New York State; we have no industry in most of the state."

Lee was born in Guangdong province and moved to Hong Kong as a child, living there until he came to the US to attend college. After getting a bachelor's degree in biology and a master's in accounting, both from St. John's University in New York, Lee ventured into the financial sector to work on computer security for big firms like accounting firm KPMG, where he worked prior to his current position at another large financial institution, which Lee said he did not want to disclose the name of.

Though he never used his biology degree in his line of work, once he became interested in natural gas production and how harmful alternative renewable energy sources were to the environment, Lee said his science background came back to the forefront of his pursuits.

"I can comfortably retire and mind my own business, and just go fishing, staying by the stream. But when I'm fishing by the stream, I realize that everybody is vulnerable. The atmosphere is changing," he said.

"There's no regulation in regards to solar panel recycling. There's no recycling going on in the US, and there's no regulation on what to do with the toxic byproducts," he said.

"We cannot just keep accumulating the toxic byproducts in the US. Right now, it's accumulated and buried in the ground or they're in containers. At some point, it's going to be a big problem. In Asia, I know they are not contained, they're just dumped."

People spend a lot of time talking about climate change, "but no one is talking about real pollution", he said, the kind of pollution countries like China and India are experiencing and "getting worse every day" to the point that parts of countries may no longer be livable if the pollution continues at the current rate.

"On natural gas development alone, that would not push me to potentially give up my Wall Street job, but global pollution, however, is a cause that I am willing to give up a lot to fight. This is a very emotional issue for me," he said.

"I'm approaching retirement. I would like to stay on Wall Street for a few more years, but the future of humanity is a lot more important than one person."

amyhe@chinadailyusa.com