Episode 1 of BBC’s Big Oil vs The World is a polished, emotional, lawyer-like brief for one side of a multi-sided, complex issue. But in the final analysis, the BBC case is long on agenda and feelings and short on facts, balance, and proper context. The documentary is slick propaganda that accuses oil companies of producing slick propaganda.

With its documentary Big Oil vs The World, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) has added its voice to the chorus accusing the petroleum industry in general, and ExxonMobil in particular, of misleading the public and slowing the global response to climate change. The three-part documentary (Denial, Doubt, and Delay) was produced in cooperation with PBS, which ran its version on Frontline under the title The Power of Big Oil in April and May of this year.…

“The global cooling scare was real from some leading climate scientists and leading environmentalists. And it was promoted in the mainstream media heavily as is well documented. So was the ‘Population Bomb’ (from food shortages) and ‘Peak Oil’/’Peak Gas’.”

In response to a LinkedIn post on the global cooling scare of the 1970s, one comment was:

It’s a myth that the climate science community was predicting global cooling and an imminent ice age in the 1970s. The media was all over a few proponents of cooling the way they’ve been all over the rare climate science contrarians, so their voices were overamplified, the way the voices of the science denier scientists have been overamplified in the media. 

To which I replied:

Stephen Schneider was a leading climate scientist who sounded the cooling scare.

“Totally forgotten in this transformation [to mandatory open access] was a simple removal of the regulatory covenant to allow a real free market and genuine entrepreneurial discovery process…. Instead, we were told the ISO/RTO model worked: the planners knew how to price for volume and for reliability with Texas as the national model.”

Classical liberal theory explains market coordination and governmental discoordination, even “planned chaos.” The same intellectual tradition notes the propensity of government intervention to expand from its own shortcomings. Electricity is no exception. The rise and fall of the Texas grid is a case study–just the opposite of what some claiming to be classical liberal thought (see yesterday’s post).

The history of electricity in the U.S. is supportive of an undesigned order, beginning with inventor Thomas Edison and his business protégé Samuel Insull in the 1880s.…

“We need the countries that have spare production capacity to tell the world they will be ready to bring more oil to the market. Saudi Arabia has proven that they are a responsible exporter. And I would be hopeful that they will once again show their constructive role in these difficult days.” (Fatih Birol, below)

The head of the International Energy Agency (IEA) has joined with the head of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) in urging global oil producers to produce more crude oil immediately to avoid more pain at the pump and elsewhere. Fatih Birol–previously anti-oil–has issued an energy crisis “red alert” not unlike a similar plea by Secretary Jennifer Granholm earlier this year.

She said:

We are on a war footing—an emergency—and we have to responsibly increase short-term [oil and gas] supply where we can right now to stabilize the market and to minimize harm to American families….