Ed. Note: With the failing climate narrative, it’s time to play offense in energy/environmental debates. Chris Wright of Denver-based Liberty Energy Inc., previously profiled at MasterResource, drawing upon his company’s 99-page 2022 sustainability report, “Bettering Human Lives,” offers a compelling argument. [1]
“Let’s all check our desires to be fashionable or hip when we talk about energy. Energy is so critical to human well-being that we must speak honestly, candidly, and frequently to combat the increasingly damaging plague of energy ignorance that has taken over our country and much of the western world.”
Chris Wright is a member of the New School of moral-high-ground fossil-fuel executives. So is Adam Anderson, CEO of Innovex Downhole Solutions, who exposed North Face/VF Corporation’s anti-petroleum stance. Another notable is Vivek Ramaswamy, Executive Chairman, Strive Asset Management, who exhorts more oil and gas production from the companies he invests in “to both create significant shareholder value and contribute to human flourishing.”
At times, Chevron and ExxonMobil have shot back at the purveyors of green energy poverty. (And ExxonMobil has hurt itself and the whole industry with its appeasement strategy.)
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Back to Chris Wright. In just 300 words, the head of Liberty Energy shared some “macro comments” at the conclusion of his year-end analyst call. In the tradition of Alex Epstein, he stated:
Recent Russian drone and missile strikes have damaged or destroyed over a third of Ukraine’s power stations and numerous fuel depots. The targeting is obvious: imperil a countries’ energy system and you imperil everything else making life much, much harder for Ukrainians. The world is rightfully outraged at this cruel strategy. Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, called these attacks “war crimes”.
Yet, imperiling our own energy system through the political process remains a front burner priority for many politicians and activists. Surely this is only possible because most people still don’t appreciate that increasing road blocks to hydrocarbon development and infrastructure are highly destructive with no offsetting benefits.
For example, restricting hydrocarbons and heavily subsidizing intermittent, weather dependent “renewables” have severely compromised our electricity grids from California to Texas to New England. New England is warning of blackouts this winter due to potential gas shortages even though the mother-of-all shale gas reservoirs is next door.
But access to this gas is blocked because New York State prevented expansion of the gas pipeline, harming tens of millions of Americans. New England has generated MILLIONS of Megawatt-Hours of electricity this year burning oil because sufficient natural gas was either unavailable or unaffordable.
Copious bio-fuel subsidies and a growing regulatory burden have led to the shut-down or conversion of multiple American refineries, contributing to skyrocketing diesel prices and US Distillate inventories now being at their lowest October level in FIFTY years! I could go on, but you get the point.
Let’s all check our desires to be fashionable or hip when we talk about energy. Energy is so critical to human well-being that we must speak honestly, candidly, and frequently to combat the increasingly damaging plague of energy ignorance that has taken over our country and much of the western world.
Into the new year, Wright’s insights stand tall in the energy debate. Correct fundamentals trump magical thinking and “greenwishing.” And watch: maybe DeSmog will include him in their enemy 1,000, but they will not dare debate him. For he is arguing from the moral high ground.
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[1] See Rupert Darwall, “An Oil Company Shows Wall Street How to Do ESG (RealClear Energy: September 20, 2022) notes:
The report is a 99-page answer to the question that the 532 signatories of The Investor Agenda’s climate crisis statement presume to have answered without a scintilla of analysis: Would the world be better off without fossil fuels?
ExxonMobil’s “appeasement” is nothing compared to the craven, spineless groveling of Shell and BP.
For all ExxonMobil’s trouble, here’s what they get from NPR:
“Exxon climate predictions were accurate decades ago. Still it sowed doubt”
January 12, 2023
Heard on All Things Considered
by Jeff Brady
“Decades of research by scientists at Exxon accurately predicted how much global warming would occur from burning fossil fuels, according to a new study in the journal Science.
The findings clash with an enormously successful campaign that Exxon spearheaded and funded for more than 30 years that cast doubt on human-driven climate change and the science underpinning it. That narrative helped delay federal and international action on climate change, even as the impacts of climate change worsened…”
https://www.npr.org/2023/01/12/1148376084/exxon-climate-predictions-were-accurate-decades-ago-still-it-sowed-doubt