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fascinating to watch oil and gas flail about in search of a workable defense of its long-term existence. just cycling through different forms of evasion, cherry-picking and fuzzy math and seeing what sticks https://www.coloradopolitics.com/opinion/opinion-shutting-down-oil-gas-defies-economic-reality/article_d2d007d2-6445-11eb-8894-3bd0f0f34919.html
A lot of this is certainly not “irreplaceable,” but even if it were, all of these byproducts accounted for a grand total of ~1.5% of petroleum end uses in 2019. Something tells me shutting down 98.5% of production isn’t a policy outcome Haley and his members would be happy with.
This is meant to leave you with the impression that oil and gas employs more people than clean energy, when in fact the opposite is true. Cleantech jobs encompass much more than wind/solar generation, as even the study cited here shows.
You can imagine an honest, scientifically grounded version of this argument: “The transition to clean energy is happening, but it can’t happen overnight. In the meantime, we need to minimize emissions and resonsibly manage the inevitable global decline in production.”
But Haley can’t even bring himself to admit that a decline is coming, even though he surely knows it is. Instead he tries some wishy-washy denialism to muddy the waters on whether the clean energy transition is even possible, without getting too specific (because he can’t).
It’s just the same old denial and delay strategy. Big Oil is having some very candid conversations inside boardrooms right now about what the industry will look like in 15-20 years, but publicly, they’re fundamentally still stuck on this dangerous misinformation campaign.
