Alex Epstein
In the fossil fuel industry these days, there are two topics most prominent in every-one’s minds: how to survive the current low-price environment and how to survive political efforts to shrink the industry, which are efforts that will come to a head in the 2016 U.S. elections.
These topics are related. In a low-price environment where profit margins are slim to nonexistent, an industry needs to be as free from destructive government controls as possible. And yet the industry faces the threat of unprecedented government controls. For its own sake and for the sake of billions of people’s lives it energizes, the industry needs to vigorously fight back against the anti-fossil fuel effort and do so on moral grounds.
The stakes could not be higher. 2016 is the most significant energy election of this century. In 2015, at the COP21 summit in Paris, President Barack Obama tentatively committed the U.S. to join an effort that would restrict emissions of CO2, an inevitable byproduct of fossil fuel use, by over 25 percent in the next nine years and by over 80 percent in the next 35 years. Given fossil fuels comprise 86 percent of the world’s energy use and the international coalition is also hostile to noncarbon nuclear power use (4.4 percent) and hydroelectric power use (6.8 percent), and given the two preferred sources of energy, solar and wind (combined 1.6 percent) are unreliable and dependent, and given about 3 billion people have very little access to modern energy and an estimated 1.2 billion people have zero electricity, this must be taken very seriously.
A president Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders would almost certainly commit our country to dismantling the fossil fuel industry. The Republican candidates have barely talked about energy at all, but they are at least open to liberating fossil fuel, nuclear and hydroelectric energy.
So what should the industry do? The conventional wisdom is the industry should not fight anti-fossil fuel efforts so much as slow them down by making the moral case the industry is a necessary evil that, unfortunately, we won’t be able to replace with a green energy industry for many decades.
But to do so is both immoral and impractical. As I explain in “The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels,” the fossil fuel industry is not a necessary evil; it is a life-enhancing good, and it needs to make that case loud and clear this election season.
The “necessary evil” view of fossil fuels concedes the basic premise of the anti-fossil fuel movement: any benefits of fossil fuel use are far outweighed by their long-term destruction of the planet via resource depletion, pollution and, above all, global warming. But this premise, which is often couched in scientific and mathematical garb — 97 percent of climate scientists agree, the 2-degree threshold, the carbon bubble, etc. — is both old and wrong. In fact, if we look at the big picture of fossil fuels and human life, we see over time they are making this planet a much better place to live and can continue to do so.
This election season, the fossil fuel industry should make the moral, humanitarian case for fossil fuels to the public, to its employees and to politicians.
How to do so? There are three basic steps industry leaders can take to move the needle:
1. Speak up. Tell the media and the world: “What our industry does is not a necessary evil. It is a life-enhancing good, and we should be free to do more of it and not forced to do less of it.”
2. Educate your employees. At a time when the existence of your industry is at stake, your employees need to know why what they’re doing is so important and explain it to others. Give them the time, resources and training to become champions.
3. Demand energy freedom from politicians. For all the industry’s sup-posed political influence, the topic of energy freedom has barely come up in the Republican debates or rhetoric. This is the most important energy election this century. It needs to be an issue, and you have every right to demand it be an issue for politicians you support.
The 2016 election presents us with a once-in-a-lifetime energy opportunity and energy danger. There is no middle ground. There can be no more standing down. It’s time to stand up.
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