What’s Wrong with Touting America’s Fossil Fuel Extraction Success?

The debate about climate change in the Presidential and Vice-Presidential debates is over: altogether, discussion about climate change and how to address climate change was weak. Weak, that it, unless otherwise dismissed off-handedly, as in the case of J. D. Vance’s throwaway statement about atmospheric carbon’s role in global warming, which he agreed to “for the sake of argument,” but only after calling it “weird science.”

Weird.

Although more talk of climate change took place during the vice-presidential debate, America’s top ranking for fossil fuel production was a bragging point on both sides. [Image from NPR, Matt Rourke/AP credit]
But one interesting note from the campaigning by Harris and Walz is their pointing to America’s fossil fuel energy production, and bragging points are certainly due given that America is now the largest fossil fuels producer in the known galaxy.

But these guys are the climate change guys, right?

Well, right. The Biden-Harris administration signed several important climate-change bills—the Infrastructure Act of 2021 and the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022—that represent to date the biggest budgets and most ambitious goals to combat climate change and reduce carbon emissions. You’d hardly know this, though, if your only source of information is from the 2024 Presidential campaign. What you hear more clearly—even gleefully!—expressed is the United States of America’s success in fossil fuel production. We’re Number One, Baby!

This is going to make anyone who understands the climate crisis nervous, but there’s a need to understand the campaign’s perspective, which is, at its rawest, to win. It may be regrettable that our politics comes down to such basic stratagem, but with Trump, still stubbornly holding dear to his lies and odd opinions against the energy transition and about other facets of the problems of global warming—windmills kill whales and/or cause cancer; sharks follow electric boats, waiting to see how the passengers choose to die… well, you know the list—we need to keep him and his ilk out of office.

So, it’s “drill, baby, drill,” in point of fact up and down the campaign trail, which means, of course, the focus on the so-called “swing” states, where, presumably those bodies politic are nervous about fracking bans and delaying  new natural gas export facilities and other right-wing bogeymen.

Nonetheless, the perspective of those focused on climate progress needs to be that climate progress is a multi-decades process and that we remain far closer to the start of this work then we wish. We have to accept that fossil fuels will continue to be an important source of power as we power toward the clean energy transition. Yes, we have to work as hard as possible to speed the transition, right along with other carbon reduction choices in farming and industry. We can’t wait to do the work necessary, such as building out a higher capacity and interoperable electrical transmission grid or turning all vehicles to EV, to get do work. We can’t shut the taps of Big Oil immediately, and this should be obvious to all, although there are those brethren of ours who believe exactly this. Such believers either don’t realize the tens and hundreds of millions of people at mortal risk if fossil fuels were to disappear today or they don’t care or believe that such sacrifice is for the greater good in the long run, and another word for such believe is fanaticism.

Is this Big Oil’s wet dream? Climate progress requires us to acknowledge that today, reliance on fossil fuels is a fact, but that doesn’t mean Big Oil should prevail over time. If Big Oil insists on staying the course, they’ll join the other losers from industries that failed to acknowledge changing markets. [Image courtesy of AI]
But we do have plenty of very good reasons to worry about just when fossil fuels reach peak use—or, more relevantly, decline precipitously in use—since we know that we need to act as quickly as possible to reduce carbon so that global warming doesn’t get worse. We all know global warming is already bad, and those pictures of Helene’s devastation is only the latest of far too many statistically absurd bad weather phenomena that in aggregate point conclusively that we’ve been mucking up the environment. We are making progress in reducing carbon emissions in some places, but even the best performance is modest while the populations of the biggest countries forecast ever-rising emissions.

Of course, the problem of vaunting our fossil fuel production is that Big Oil sees this as business as usual, while we want them to understand the window for fossil fuels is closing. Unfortunately, we are well justified in thinking that the more investment Big Oil makes, the more likely there’s more resistance to surrendering the fossil fuels business. Since the resistance is already a clear and present danger in the various forms of climate change denial and climate progress delays, political lobbying and dark money, and outright public lies and misdirection, we can confidently assume the worst as we look ahead, and the worst is Big Oil continuing to assert itself as the dominant power source for far longer than we can tolerate. Even today, it is necessary to call out Big Oil as an existential threat, but getting politicians into office who are more likely to take climate progress action is our more immediate goal.

Meanwhile we need to keep the FTC and Justice Department strong. We need to anticipate Big Oil’s continuing resistance. Big Oil is in possession of the facts (and from the historical record, apparently among the first to determine the global warming consequences of carbon emissions), and as an industry Big Oil should be transitioning to other business models not based on fossil fuel exploration, production, and sales. We’ve seen plenty of established industries fail to change in the face of reality—newspapers and music studios are two famous examples—so it is likely enough that Big Oil too will lose money if they keep things business as usual, throwing their hundreds of billions of funds and assets down the oil well.

Like, sorry, but boo-hoo, if as an industry they don’t choose to pivot to what the world needs. All the more reason to divest of oil investments, by the way, if you are lucky enough to have investments, and many of us are, at least to some small extent most likely in the forms of managed pension funds or IRAs.

Big Oil’s future collapse is going to be ugly. It doesn’t have to be, if Big Oil choses to sensibly manage its huge resources beyond the current comfort zone of huge profits, stock buybacks, and hefty dividends, not that I expect any speedy transition to business success in the post-fossil fuel world.

So let us all accept the present US success of Big Oil and the advantages for our economy today, but let’s also be sure to put in place leaders who understand reality as it is and not as is hoped for, and make sure we move full steam ahead toward the clean energy transition. Patience and steady work is what is called for, so we’ll forego panic induced by campaign necessities, and keep our eyes on the prize, which is to get Big Oil’s foot off of our and the world’s neck.

Don’t panic. Vote.

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