Oil And Fracking, Our Misunderstood Friends
Trump's new Energy guy, a fracking CEO, is soaking in it!
We all knew that the second Trump administration would be a disastrous setback for the fight against climate change, given his pledge to leave the Paris climate agreement again and roll back as much of Joe Biden’s climate accomplishments as he possibly can. (Keep in mind, however, that the energy transition is going to keep moving forward anyway, because clean energy is just plain cheaper and more efficient.)
And as is typical of Trump, he may be a fucking idiot when it comes to policy, but he has a knack for appointing people who know how to get terrible things done, at least when they’re not too busy lining their own pockets.
For yet another example, see this jaw-dropping New York Times article (gift link) about Chris Wright, Trump’s pick to be secretary of Energy. Wright is the founder and CEO of “Liberty Energy,” a fracking services company that has its sludgy fingers in a lot of filthy pies. The main thing most reports about him point out is that he made a stunt video in which he and several employees each drank about a shot glass’s worth of fracking fluid, or at least a fresh-blended mix that included several of its components. Know what he didn’t do? Have the shit pumped into petroleum deposits near wells he relied on for his home drinking water for years.
Wright says he accepts the reality of climate change, but of course he doesn’t really. He simply shunts the question off to the side, insisting against all the evidence that the climate effects of burning fossil fuels are still a long way off, so in the meantime we should keep using them, because fossil fuels bring prosperity to everyone, and why do you radicals want to deny poor people in developing countries the benefits of modern life, you monsters? Never mind that, as the Times points out, poor nations are already suffering the effects of extreme weather, drought, heat waves, and sea level rise, with death tolls already in the tens of thousands.
Get in the kitchen and make me a Truth Sandwich
Let’s Truth Sandwich this dumb thing we’re about to quote, OK? Wind, solar, and storage are in fact becoming more affordable, and capable of bringing energy to more people, more quickly, in more places, than fossil fuels, making it possible for developing nations to leapfrog past the obsolete technology of coal, gas, and oil. But Wright falsely insists that it’s fossil fuels or nothing, because he is lying:
“It’s just, I think, naïve or evil, or some combination of the two, to believe they should never have washing machines, they should never have access to electricity, they should never have modern medicine,” Mr. Wright said on the “Mission Zero” podcast last year. “We don’t want that to happen. And we simply don’t have meaningful substitutes for oil, gas and coal today.”
That’s flat out bullshit, or, as Jody Freeman of Harvard Law School’s Environmental and Energy Law program puts it more decorously for the Times, it’s “not an intellectually serious argument. […] It’s about creating a permission structure for not pursuing a more responsible energy policy.”
If you only remember one thing from the Times article (go read the whole thing with the gift link, you!) it should be these information-rich paragraphs, which are perhaps criminally placed about halfway into the story:
The World Bank has found that solar mini grids could provide basic electricity to 380 million people in Africa by 2030 who do not currently have access to power. A Rockefeller Foundation study in 2021 found that investing in distributed renewable energy like rooftop solar panels, small-scale wind turbines and home battery storage systems could create 25 million jobs by the end of the decade in Asia and Africa. That is about 30 times the number of jobs that would be created by investments in oil, gas or coal in that period, the study found.
Daniel M. Kammen, a professor of energy at the University of California, Berkeley, who has worked on energy access throughout Africa and Asia, said coal was responsible for hundreds of thousands of premature deaths around the world annually.
Oh, yes, there’s a lot more, like the fact that building great big fossil fuel plants in poor nations primarily benefits the fossil fuel companies, and often the corrupt governments that invite them in, rather than ordinary people. Solar minigrids, rooftop solar, and small wind generators with battery backup are more localized than huge power plants, without the need for thousands of miles of transmission lines or pipelines, both of which have their own environmental consequences.
In Nigeria alone, oil pipelines are frequently breached by poor people — and by criminal gangs — resulting in frequent spills, fires, and explosions whose death tolls range from the single digits to the hundreds, to say nothing of the vast environmental damage to the Niger River Delta. As of 2020, Nigeria experienced more than 45,000 pipeline breaches in less than two decades. Just some of the benefits of prosperity that Welch somehow forgot to mention.
Oh, and as for all the abundant electricity that Welch says inevitably comes with fossil fuel development? Nigeria’s economy has largely been based on oil exports since the early 1960s, but a recent report in the Georgetown Journal of International Affairs found that Nigeria’s energy grid is so shoddy that fewer than a third of rural residents have access to electricity. Even in cities, the grid is prone to shortages and failures from its rickety infrastructure, a major constraint to economic development. (The Georgetown study calls for greater investments in off-grid electricity like minigrids using wind, solar, and storage.)
It’s a good Times article! So of course it steps on its own dick.
Like most of its climate reporting, the Times profile of Wright offers plenty of context to make clear that he’s lying, although the article also suffers from the same sort of careful equivocation that so much of its journalism does, starting with the headline, which proclaims Wright “says fossil fuels are virtuous.” That’s followed by a subhed that only gingerly hints at the bullshit to be found in the article itself, noting that Wright “says oil, gas and coal are key to solving global poverty. Some call that misleading.” (Yes, we know that at big papers like the Times, the headlines are added by editors, who probably should also have fracking wells installed near their home water supplies.)
No, it’s not merely misleading, it’s oil industry propaganda, as the article explains in quite a bit of detail, noting that “oil is a friend to the poors” is one one the oldest dodges in the oil misinformation playbook, as the story demonstrates with examples going back decades.
“Its déjà vu all over again,” said Robert J. Brulle, a sociologist at Brown University who studies fossil fuel misinformation campaigns. “They’re drawing on old tropes that have been around for 20, 30 years.”
Why hello, it is once again time for us to remind you that if you haven’t read Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway’s Merchants of Doubt, you need to. It’s the definitive work on how pro-industry rightwing hacks have distorted science in the name of profits ever since the early 20th Century, with the aim of preventing regulation of some of our most toxic products like lead, cigarettes, ozone-depleting refrigerants, and fossil fuels.
Take the win.
We’ll close with another reminder that while Wright and other Trump cronies are poised to engage in constant fuckery aimed at promoting fossil fuels, they are NOT going to be able to halt the energy transition, which has already gained incredible momentum. Here, enjoy last night’s Chris Hayes segment with current Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, who points out that thanks largely to Joe Biden, we’re building out America’s clean energy supply chains and industries, and even Republicans know it. Will Trump reverse it? He’ll try getting rid of it, or he may simply decide to take the other Republican tack and just show up at factory openings to cut a red ribbon and take credit.
Feel-good takeaway: Near the end, Hayes asks Granholm how optimistic she is that the clean energy transition will survive Trump, on a scale of one to ten. She noted that because there are so many jobs being created, especially in red states, she’s very optimistic that despite GOP rhetoric, progress toward clean energy is “inexorable […] That is not going to turn back.” The program ran out of time, but as Hayes handed off to Alex Wagner for her show, she said that Granholm’s optimism sounded like a good solid “six and a half, maybe seven.” Now off-camera but on mic, Granholm added, “Yeah, I would say even an eight.”
So there’s your reason to stay in the fight, kids.
[NYT (gift link) / Guardian / Georgetown Journal of International Affairs / Photo: Julia Kilpatrick, Pembina Institute, Creative Commons License 2.0]
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WHAT THE FUCK DOES COAL HAVE TO DO WITH OWNING A WASHING MACHINE?
“It’s just, I think, naïve or evil, or some combination of the two, to believe they should never have washing machines, they should never have access to electricity, they should never have modern medicine,”
I think it's lying to claim anyone has said that nobody should have those things.