Behind the Mask
It didn’t take long for the opposition to respond to the arm-in-arm announcements and press conferences pledging action on global warming. The first glimpse of the view from the entrenched interests came last week, with the remarks of John Hofmeister, the President of Shell Oil. Hofmeister is on a 50-city road show with a purported purpose of speaking about energy security issues, but his real goal is to promote Shell’s view of the world in the face of jelling global consensus about our relationship to fossil fuels. Hofmeister believes that “there’s plenty of energy to be had,” and that “the obstacles to getting it are man-made.” By energy, he is, of course, referring to oil and natural gas, even though he includes the de rigeur list of alternative energy options. In this new age of heightened awareness about climate change, the oil companies have all been magically transformed into energy companies. The man-made obstacles he refers to are none other than those pesky laws which prevent companies from drilling or mining in pristine wilderness areas. Hofmeister states further that “energy is the sustaining enabler of our lifestyle and our economic prosperity.” I would expect the head of a company operating in an industry currently experiencing record profits to defend his market, but the hubris is striking. The message seems to be “all this talk by politicians and business leaders is nice, but don’t get the notion that you can live without us.”
Maybe I’ve spent too much time deriding the automakers when I should have been focusing on the oil companies. After all, during a period in which oil consumption flattened, SUV sales fell, and Ford reported unprecedented losses, ExxonMobil just announced record-breaking profits. The oil companies thrive on the uncertainty created by our collective inaction, and, as such, are the most formidable threat to unity on global warming. Savvy oil executives like Hofmeister beat the bushes to spread the rosy gospel of endless supply and the need to maintain our way of life, knowing full well that pollyanna messages drown out sophisticated discussions about creating a less energy dependent culture. As their financial performance suggests, these companies are better run and more redoubtable than the bumbling automakers. While they will express support for “pie in the sky” alternative technologies, their mission in the short run is to keep the discussion focused on expanding supply and continue to lure Americans away from any changes in behavior with cheap, plentiful gas.
A long term commitment to reducing energy consumption is the key to negating the influence of the oil companies. According to Thomas Friedman, such a commitment will also foster instability in the despotic regimes that sit on much of the world’s oil supply. Friedman asserts that the drop in oil prices in the late 1980s contributed to the fall of the Soviet Union as much as any foreign policy. With the precipitous decline in revenues, the Soviets were left without sufficient funds to prop up their dysfunctional economy. Friedman thinks the parallels to Iran are meaningful:
[In 2005,] Iran’s government earned $44.6 billion from oil and spent $25 billion on subsidies — for housing, jobs, food and 34-cents-a-gallon gasoline — to buy off interest groups. Iran’s current populist president has further increased the goods and services being subsidized.
His plea sounds familiar:
[T]he best tool we have for curbing Iran’s influence is not containment or engagement, but getting the price of oil down in the long term with conservation and an alternative-energy strategy. Let’s exploit Iran’s oil addiction by ending ours.
The likely stonewalling by the oil companies is all the more galling in the face of the most disheartening news on global warming yet. The United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released the summary results of its latest study on climate change. In addition to reconfirming the existence of man-made global warming, the study theorizes that even an immediate massive decline in global carbon emissions would not reverse the warming trend. Current efforts to reduce carbon emissions may slow the warming and allow for the possibility, centuries from now, that our damage to atmosphere can be corrected. How’s that for a sucker punch?
I can just picture an oil company executive reading the report and penning a whole new PR campaign: “There’s nothing we can do, so why stop now?”
Comments
The IPCC is not the ultimate authority on what global warming means and what to do about it. Here for example, is one critique:
http://www.cato.org/homepage_item.php?id=473
However, I know that some climate scientists are skeptical of reports from Cato and CEI (Competitive Enterprise Institute) as little more than propaganda from think tanks that they would describe as corporate lackeys.
Therefore, I present a guy and his colleagues who seem to have no axe to grind except a sincere desire to get at the truth:
http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/prometheus/archives/climate_change/index.html
Scroll down a bit to read the January 26th post about ExxonMobil for a very different take on global warming from an oil company executive!
The guys who write for this blog are smart, they know global warming is real, but they also recognize the dangers involved in trying to do too much too fast to "correct" the problem. And they also don't like the way too many exaggerate what the IPCC says about global warming.
Posted by: Jeff Singer | February 5, 2007 9:43 AM