Date: 2025-01-15 Page is: DBtxt003.php txt00026483
BIG OIL and CLIMATE CHANGE
BIG OIL REMAINS IN DENIAL
Bloomberg Opinion: Big Oil Has Found a Clever New Way to Hurt the Climate.
The industry and its Republican allies are clinging to outdated concepts
about energy security that discourage much-needed investment in alternatives.
BIG OIL REMAINS IN DENIAL
Bloomberg Opinion: Big Oil Has Found a Clever New Way to Hurt the Climate.
The industry and its Republican allies are clinging to outdated concepts
about energy security that discourage much-needed investment in alternatives.
Just drilling for more oil and gas won’t make the world more secure. Photographer: Daniel Acker/Bloomberg
Original article: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-03-25/climate-change-iea-critics-are-wrong-about-energy-security
Peter Burgess COMMENTARY
Peter Burgess
The industry and its Republican allies are clinging to outdated concepts about energy security that discourage much-needed investment in alternatives.
Written by Mark Gongloff ... Mark Gongloff is a Bloomberg Opinion editor and columnist covering climate change. He previously worked for Fortune.com, the Huffington Post and the Wall Street Journal.
March 25, 2024 at 6:30 AM EDT
Fifty years ago, the term “energy security” meant “we need oil and we need it now.” In the modern world, where energy comes in many forms, security doesn’t have to be so fuel-specific. The important thing is that people can get to work or know the kitchen lights will turn on when they flip the switch.
It will probably not shatter your perception of reality to learn the oil industry doesn’t see it that way. But its effort to maintain a half-century-old definition of energy security is undermining the world’s chances of holding climate change to merely disastrous levels.
The latest example is a fight pitting Big Oil and its friends and recipients of political donations against the International Energy Agency, the Paris-based group whose energy market analysis guides policymakers worldwide. The details of this controversy are more inside baseball than the infield-fly rule, but here are the broad strokes:
The IEA was founded in 1974 by oil-consuming countries crushed by the Arab oil embargo that never wanted gas-station lines again. Its mission was watching energy supply and demand to avoid future gas-station-line-causing disasters.
Over time, and especially when current chief Fatih Birol took over in 2015, the IEA has added clean energy to its remit, which sounds like a liberal conspiracy until you remember “energy” is right there in its name.
The IEA has recently caused steam to shoot out of oil executives’ ears by forecasting a relatively imminent peak in fossil-fuel demand and the rapid uptake of renewables.
An energy consultant and former adviser to President George W. Bush, Robert McNally, took to the Wall Street Journal op-ed pages to accuse the IEA of having caved to “zealous green censors” by no longer basing forecasts on existing global energy policies but on the promises that governments have made to curb emissions.
McNally, OPEC and other critics warn that the IEA’s new forecasts will discourage investment in oil and gas projects, leaving the world vulnerable to dangerous price spikes. McNally claims, for example, that the IEA inspired President Joe Biden to halt new liquefied natural gas terminals.
Last week, two Republican lawmakers joined McNally and OPEC in bashing the IEA in a letter accusing it of “undermining energy security” and being an “energy transition cheerleader.”
The Republican letter hilariously contrasts the IEA’s forecasts with those of “respectable energy modeling organizations” that project robust oil and gas demand growth through 2050. Its list of these unbiased modeling organizations includes BP Plc, Exxon Mobil Corp. and OPEC.
Those same oil giants spent decades denying their products were pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and warming the planet by dangerous degrees. Now that the overwhelming scientific consensus — along with the plain evidence of an increasingly hot and chaotic climate — has debunked them, their denialism has been forced to take subtler forms.
Fine, they will basically say, manmade global warming is real, but it’s your fault for loving fossil fuels too much. And what do you want to do about it anyway? Stop burning the stuff? That would be terrible because it would threaten “energy security, energy access and energy affordability,” as OPEC’s secretary-general put it recently. Exxon has expressed concern about the rising risk of “energy poverty” hurting economic development and warned meeting net-zero emissions goals would degrade the “global standard of living.”
Never mind that renewable energy is generally cheaper than fossil fuels. Oil’s professed anxiety about how the energy transition will hurt the world’s poor is galling, considering those are the people most at risk as heat rises and disasters worsen. They live in places without the governance or resilience to handle disasters, deadly heat or health crises. South Sudan closed its school system last week in advance of what could be a two-week heat wave. Droughts and famines are already fueling wars and waves of refugees.
Of course, 2023 demonstrated there are no climate havens. Maui burned, and much of the continental US choked on Canada’s record wildfires. Vermont flooded. The number of billion-dollar weather disasters hit a record in the US, adjusted for inflation. How “secure” is our energy, really, when it helps make such destruction more frequent, intense and expensive?
Climate chaos threatens even the old-school definition of energy security, Columbia University energy policy professor Jason Bordoff has written: Global disasters and conflicts upset supply chains and resources, including oil — lessons we’ve relearned recently in the pandemic and Ukraine war.
In a LinkedIn post responding to McNally, Bordoff pointed out that the IEA hasn’t called for ending fossil-fuel production and that its new models better suit a “dynamic” energy market. Their output isn’t far from those of other “respectable energy modeling organizations” such as Wood Mackenzie.
In the early days of his administration, President Donald Trump supersized the eternal quest for energy security to one of “energy dominance,” which primarily meant exporting a lot of fossil fuels. Mission accomplished, I guess. But clinging to the belief this is the only form of security available discourages investment in alternatives, which will leave us all less secure in the long run.
More From Bloomberg Opinion:
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- Spain’s Running Dry But Doesn’t Seem to Care: Rachel Sanderson
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
To contact the author of this story: Mark Gongloff at mgongloff1@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Daniel Niemi at dniemi1@bloomberg.net
Mark Gongloff is a Bloomberg Opinion editor and columnist covering climate change. He previously worked for Fortune.com, the Huffington Post and the Wall Street Journal. BloombergOpinion
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