“We are investing in big, new projects…. And if you go forward into 2027, we are actually growing [oil and gas] production.” (Darren Woods, CEO, ExxonMobil)

The climate alarmists/forced energy transformationists have a real intellectual and political debate on their hands. Mugged by reality, the activists must confront the failure of “green” alternatives in meeting world demand for affordable, reliable, taxpayer-neutral, plentiful energy.

The Green Energy Crisis has upended the “energy transition” and “Net Zero” future. And bullied corporations now have Main Street and Wall Street on their side. Jamie Dimon at J. P. Morgan Chase was clear on the need for a fossil-fuel future. So are the companies (Vanguard, etc.) that are bailing on the ESG climate movement.

Consider ExxonMobil. “Exxon Knows” should replace ExxonKnew, for ExxonMobil knows that consumer demand and profits will be with the mineral energies, not dilute, intermittent, government-dependent wind and solar.…

This week, a Hall of Shame business memo turns a quarter-century old. Dated December 12, 1997, it was written from Kyoto, Japan, by Enron lobbyist John Palmisano in the afterglow of the Kyoto Protocol agreement.

Global green planners were euphoric that, somehow, someway, the world had embarked on an irreversible course of climate control (and thus industrial and land-use control). But Kyoto predictably failed, and the Paris climate accord of 2015 teeters, with COP27’s recent failure making COP28’s prospects look grim.

Palmisano’s memo cites the benefits for first-mover ‘green’ Enron. Enron, in fact, had no less than six profit centers tied to pricing carbon dioxide (CO2)–and seven if CO2 were capped and traded. The story of Enron as the darling of Left environmentalists has been well told elsewhere.…

“Learning is a process, not a destination. Bret Stephens should reconsider his reconsideration to educate his readers on the benefits of CO2 enrichment and positive weather/climate trends (including global lukewarming). And do it in such a way that instead of trying to fire him, the alarmists have to answer (not duck) the hard questions about their position.”

The intellectual case against climate alarmism and forced energy transformation has always been strong. Recent events have made this case stronger with more data contradicting climate model projections. The statistics of extreme weather events and global (luke)warming are hard to ignore. In addition, the “fat tail” of worst-case, extreme warming have been scaled back in the mainstream literature. All this is good news and an antidote for ‘climate anxiety’.

Given all this (isn’t this typical of neo-Malthusian scares?),…

“What if a company bases its ESG ‘politics’ not on climate model projections or ‘attribution science’ but on the consumer imperative of affordable, plentiful, reliable energy?”

“The give-away is that now that everyone knows that fossil fuels are winning and the saturation effect is closing the mitigation window, the Church [of Climate] goers will not check their premises. If they really had ‘climate anxiety,’ they would want to understand the case for CO2/climate optimism….” (RLB, below)

The exchange began on social media regarding the paper “ESG Isn’t Woke, It’s Capitalism,” by Robert Eccles. “There are a number of important points to debate about ESG from a company, investor, and public policy perspective,” he began.

This is best done with a goal of finding common ground. This webinar is another step Dan [Crowley] and I are taking to bring my Democratic side and his Republican side together on making sense of ESG.