I think [Chevron] is trying to give its employees a reason to come to work every day,” [Danielle] Fugere said. “I’m sure it’s not easy to work at an oil and gas company when those companies are contributing potentially to the downfall of civilization.” (Emily Atkin, below)

Emily Atkin, formerly at The New Republic, has a blog site, Heated, “a newsletter for people who are pissed off about the climate crisis.” How pleasant!

One of her posts caught my eye: a hit piece on Chevron and, indirectly, Alex Epstein, the author of The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels.

In Chevron pushes “the moral case for fossil fuels”, she states:

Earlier this week, a tipster sent me a picture of a pamphlet. They said it was given to them by a friend who works at Chevron.…

“It’s never been remotely plausible that [Exxon] did not understand the science.” – Naomi Oreskes (Harvard University), Scientific American, 2015.

“We didn’t reach those conclusions, nor did we try to bury it like they suggest…. [Critics] pull some documents that we made available publicly in the archives and portray them as some kind of bombshell whistle-blower exposé because of the loaded language and the selective use of materials.” – Allan Jeffers (ExxonMobil) Scientific American, 2015.

The conclusion that the physical science of climate change was “settled” or “proven” in favor of crisis is a major history-of-thought fallacy. Naomi Oreskes, Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University (quoted above), must make peace with the quotations below from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), as well as many others, to show that ‘settled science’ on the human influence on climate unambiguously pointed toward alarm.…

[Editor Note: Advertising for the premier energy conference CERAWeek 2020 (March 9–13) is in full swing. Several years ago, Daniel Yergin was urged to invite Alex Epstein to present the moral case for fossil fuels. Today, with fossil fuels on the ascent, and a distracted industry engaged in greenwashing, it is past time to feature the world’s leading energy philosopher. My post from four years ago on this subject is updated below.]

“If good and evil are measured by the standard of human well-being and human progress, we must conclude that the fossil fuel industry is not a necessary evil to be restricted but a superior good to be liberated.”

“We don’t need green energy–we need humanitarian energy.”

– Alex Epstein, “At CERAWeek Fossil Fuel Leaders Should Make A Moral Case For Their Industry,” Forbes.com.,

The battle against dense, mineral energies is stymied because of a simple concept that the climate alarmists (including the mainstream media) do not want to comprehend: energy density.

Consumers want the best energies, while an intellectual/political elite scheme for and mandate inferior substitutes. And the crusade is further complicated because carbon dioxide (CO2) is the green greenhouse gas, hardly the satanic gas the anti-industrial Left wants to ban.

As energy density drives the world’s daily work, how are the climate crusaders responding? One major complaint concerns the frontal push of China to coal-fired generation.

Jennifer Layke of the World Resources Institute deals with the elephant in the room as follows:

As the world turns attention to the UN climate meetings this week, news from China has captured global headlines: From January 2018 to June 2019, the country added 43 gigawatts (GW) of net new coal power capacity to its existing 1,000 GW coal fleet, while the rest of the world collectively reduced coal capacity by 8 GW.