Apologies to all, I had thought to be back to The Smokey Wire sooner. I spent some time with the Public Lands Foundation in Cheyenne Wyoming, meeting many BLM folks and others dealing with access issues to public lands in Wyoming. Then the next week, I was off to the Salamander Resort in Middleburg, Virginia, with The Breakthrough Institute, to experience how the other 1% lives and mix with admitted coastal wonky elites...here’s the agenda of that session. I’ll post some of the videos once they are up. The next week I was back West to Rapid City, South Dakota with field trips to Wall, South Dakota to see efforts dealing with dispersed recreation and the restoration of black-footed ferret with the Rocky Mountaineers retirees’ group. I hope to upload presentations on the latter so that you all can enjoy a virtual field trip.
What the three trips had in common was some amazing young people working on the problems of the day. From getting minerals from seawater and enhanced rock weathering at TBI to restoring ferrets at the Wall Ranger District, to research at the Rapid City Forest and Grassland Research Laboratory, to regulating pore space for CO2 sequestration at the BLM. Perhaps these are stories that are too much “in the weeds”, so to speak, for media to pick up on, but they’re out there.
So that’s one commonality that I observed on these trips. The other was the omnipresence of gasoline and diesel-powered vehicles (and trains, in the case of Cheyenne and Rapid City). Even in urbanized places in Northern Virginia and the District, I noticed many vehicles, and in fact, ended up in the DC morning rush hour from Middleburg one morning. Even with excellent public transportation, as there is in NoVa, there are many, many, cars and trucks. And of course recreationists coming from the Midwest to recreate in South Dakota and Wyoming.. cars and RV’s. This seems obvious.
And yet, when I look at my news outlets, such as Center for Western Priorities, or others, there are frequent articles on the badness of oil and gas production when it is done domestically. In fact, there was a major environmental group push against the Biden Admin for the Willow Project. Who knows what random goodies will be thrown by the Admin (perhaps some MOG treats?) in attempts to placate these groups?
But what is that really about? Do these groups think that outsourcing to say, Iran and Venezuela is environmentally more desirable? Not to think like an economist, but reducing supply does tend to raise prices, and we care about poor or even middle-class people not being able to get to work or not affording food because of high gas prices. And we are shipping lots of military stuff abroad which runs on.. fossil fuels.
Some of us remember the oil embargo of 1973..this from an interview with Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of RI:
“One in five gas stations in the country had no fuel to sell whatsoever,” Colgan said. “By January 1974, oil prices worldwide had quadrupled, and that led to a whole bunch of economic and political consequences” that are still present today.
When asked what it was like living through the oil crisis, Whitehouse shared that there were odd and even days to get gas, decided based on the last number of each person’s license plate. For example, if your license plate ended with a seven and it was an odd day, you could get gas, but if it ended with a six and was an odd day, you could not.
Whitehouse outlined the dilemma faced by oil companies at this time: “Do you keep your prices level because you have an obligation to your country and your customers, or do you follow the international cartel and take advantage of its price gouging?”
“Of course, they chose the latter,” Whitehouse said, explaining that oil companies chose to take advantage of their customers, rather than make gas affordable.
So O&G companies have not always acted well. Perhaps that’s a reason for hate. OTOH some of us also remember the financial crisis and banks being too big to fail and all that. And yet.. we don’t see daily in the press the need for better regulation of them. In fact, our friends in the financial industry do things like naming the CEO of Aramco to their board of directors.
The Biden Admin is all on domestic production of strategic minerals.. but not O&G. Or maybe DOE kind of is, but DOI is not. It’s all puzzling to me.
Meanwhile there are people working every day, human beings, citizens of our country, whom I don’t think deserve this scapegoating. Union jobs, paying a family wage, diverse folks working that bring us what we are using every day. So what is all this really about, and how do we “un-hate” ourselves out of it?
In fact, many of the folks most against fossil production use more than the average person, as in this article on Robert Bryce’s Substack.
Of course, Bloomberg can spend his vast fortune however he wants. According to Forbes, he’s the 11th-richest person on the planet, with assets worth $96.3 billion. (Bloomberg.com doesn’t include Michael Bloomberg in its rankings of the world’s richest people.) And the former mayor of New York City does not live modestly. As I noted in these pages in March, Bloomberg owns about a dozen houses. He’s also one of the biggest users of private jets. As I explained:
According to ClimateJets.org, Bloomberg, or people connected to him, used five aircraft which emitted about 3,197 tons of CO2 in 2022. That number puts Bloomberg in the top 10 of all private jet owners in terms of emissions. For comparison, the average American is responsible for about 16 tons of CO2 emissions per year. In other words, Bloomberg’s fleet of jets is emitting about 200 times more CO2 per year than what’s emitted by the average American.
Recall in announcing his $500 million grant to Beyond Carbon, Bloomberg claimed he wants to move “beyond fossil fuels” and replace them with renewable energy. Last year, Bloomberg, or people connected to him, flew on his private jets to New York, New Jersey, Florida, Bahamas, United Kingdom, Netherlands, Bermuda, Switzerland, France, Costa Rica, Brazil, Israel, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates. All that flying required burning about 328,000 gallons of jet fuel. For comparison, that’s about 670 times more than the volume of gasoline consumed by an average American motorist in a year.
Also, recall that in 2021, Bloomberg said, “We’re in a race to save Earth from climate change.” It’s unclear to whom Bloomberg referred when he used the royal “we.”But given his predilection for far-flung houses and private jets, it seems that the media mogul and near-centibillionaire is a lot like the rest of us when it comes to using hydrocarbons.
How can we both use something- in fact it’s vital to our economy- and say at the same time, that the (domestic only?) folks that produce it are bad and need to be shut down? Or is it simply that it’s easier to shut down things here than other countries (the policy equivalent of logging the flat ground).
Aside from obvious potential class issues related to workers. I wonder what that does to people internally to live with that contradiction if they really believe what they say about production. To me, it’s a bit as if the Deuteronomic food laws said “you can eat shrimp, but only if the Canaanites produce it for you .” I find it all very puzzling.
I haven’t seen this discussed anywhere, and I am curious about what TSW readers think.