A reply to critics on American oil and gas

Warning: This is very long because I’m trying to be thorough.

On December 18, I published an op-ed in the New York Times arguing that Democrats should approach the American oil and gas industry more like successful center-left coalitions in Norway, Canada, and Mexico do with their own fossil fuel industries. That is to say, broadly speaking, that Democrats should invest money and political capital in trying to reduce consumption of fossil fuels — especially by promoting technological changes that move the needle on global emissions — rather than in trying to stifle domestic production.

The argument is in part political.

Mark Carney and Claudia Sheinbaum have totally different political styles, but neither thinks it would be viable to win elections in resource-rich countries while opposing their countries’ natural resource industries.

Jared Polis, Michelle Lujan Grisham, and Josh Shapiro are the governors of the three blue states where fossil fuel extraction is most economically important, and they all support their states’ fossil fuel industries. And no one’s going to win in redder states like Ohio, Alaska, and Texas with a stance that’s to the left of Democrats in Colorado, New Mexico, and Pennsylvania. And since there’s no path to a Senate majority that doesn’t involve winning those redder states, the national party may as well stop banging its head against the wall of an impossible supply-side agenda and focus on what it can achieve.

But my argument is also substantive.

I genuinely think that a prudent approach to managing American fossil fuel resources is preferable to treating the oil and gas industry like cigarette manufacturers. Burning fossil fuels creates significant amounts of pollution, both particulates and greenhouse gases. This is a problem that needs to be addressed, but a genuinely prudent approach involves both holding the industry to a high standard in terms of things like methane leaks and electrification of the actual extraction operations, and then also pushing for the resulting cleaner fossil fuels to be treated preferentially in global markets.

Oil and gas are not like tobacco or heroin, where net-net the world would be better off if they didn’t exist. We should try to build a world in which burning all these fossil fuels isn’t essential for a prosperous global economy, but such a world does not currently exist. Given the actual state of technology, it’s a win-win-win for the American economy, for climate, and for American national security to try to get people to use American fossil fuels rather than imports from other countries.

My original article wasn’t as detailed as a Slow Boring piece would be, but the point of publishing in the Times is to reach a broad and influential audience.

And I think I succeeded in a way that clearly scared some of the major green groups, which is one reason the piece attracted a lot of pushback, including most notably a long thread from Representative Sean Casten that I know circulated widely as a quasi-official rebuttal.

So I wanted to take the opportunity here on S.B. to respond in detail (perhaps tediously so) to my critics because, while I concede that the tradeoff of writing a sweeping ideas piece in the country’s premier newspaper is that the text had to be breezy, I believe the ideas are bulletproof.

The danger of epistemic narrowing

Many critics complained that I’m not an energy policy expert and/or alleged that I must be on the take from the fossil fuel industry.

I am, obviously, funded first and foremost by the more than 20,000 subscribers to Slow Boring, not by any industry. I do derive some income (less than 5 percent in total) from paid speaking, and I did one gig last year for TC Energy, a company that has significant natural gas interests along with some in wind, solar, and nuclear. If you want to believe that corrupted my judgment, I suppose I can’t prove that it didn’t. But I can tell you that I got a slightly more lucrative gig speaking at a Bloomberg Philanthropies event, and that my former Bloomberg News column was more lucrative than public speaking, and that Michael Bloomberg is a big funder of anti-fossil fuel advocacy campaigns that I don’t really agree with.

But these accusations weren’t restricted to my own supposed conflicts of interest. When actual expert Jesse Jenkins said that he mostly agreed with my take, Jeff Hauser of the Revolving Door Project claimed that he has an unacceptable conflict of interest because he started a company to deliver clean power to data centers and other large loads.

The basic idea here is that you should only listen to narrow energy specialists, but only those who don’t work with or receive funding from major producers or consumers of energy. In other words, the only people allowed to talk on American energy policy are funded by climate NGOs.

My conscience is clear, but my plea to Democratic Party elected officials and congressional staffers would be to consider how crazy this is.