For the oil and gas industry, whatever room for compromise might once have existed in the politics of climate change has vanished. President Barack Obama demolished it.
With his proposal for a “$10/bbl fee on oil paid by oil companies,” the president sides with environmental extremists in conflict not only with Americans who bring oil products to market but also with those who use them.
To fund a “21st Century clean transportation system,” he wants to expropriate one third of the recent value of crude oil from an industry in the throes of a market slump.
His proposal would ravage prospects of 100,000 oil industry workers who have lost their jobs and of thousands still employed but justifiably worried.
It would squelch the recovery of US oil production that will happen when the market regains balance.
And it would fleece consumers. They, not oil companies, ultimately would pay the fee.
Obama launches this assault on national welfare in response to climatological jeopardy evident more in the propaganda of environmental activists than in a temperature record at growing odds with alarming model predictions.
His probably ill-fated lurch offers one benefit. It illuminates the cost of aggressive climate precaution. The 25¢/gal by which it would hike the US gasoline price wouldn’t amount to even a small down payment on the sacrifice Americans must make if they’re to have any hope of influencing global average temperature.
When enough consumers recognize the mistreatment ahead they’ll begin asking questions too long ignored: How serious a threat does climate change really represent? For how much observed warming are people really responsible? Can overhaul of the energy economy really make a meaningful difference?
Oil companies have new reason to demand answers to these questions, to expose the political debate on climate for the sham that it has been, and to resist the stampede Obama wants to start.
Their interests, and the interests of their consumers, depend on rescue of the issue from the distortions of zealotry.
(From the subscription area of www.ogj.com, posted Feb. 5, 2016; author’s e-mail: [email protected])