Discourse breeds discord, which in a civil setting leads to compromise, enlightenment, and progress. This is how ideas are refined in such grand realms as science, politics, and religion.
Deliberate discord-conflict provoked by extremist manifesto-is another matter. It precludes compromise. It forecloses discourse. It can't enlighten.
So why did the World Petroleum Congress make a place on its agenda this month for the energy campaign coordinator of Greenpeace?
Sample insight
Here's a sample of the insight activist Benedict Southworth brought to the meeting in Rio de Janeiro: "Oil is not a clean and sustainable energy, and so it cannot be good for anybody." Southworth's certitude is remarkable. But certitude can't redeem absurdity. Oil not good for anybody? Preposterous.
It is reasonable to dislike oil spills and air pollution and to worry about the possibility-Southworth would call it a certainty-that carbon dioxide generated by the combustion of hydrocarbons warms the planet. Those are real concerns, al- though not ones about which WPC attendees likely would learn much of practical value from a Greenpeace activist.
But the extrapolation about oil's not being good for anyone deflates whatever authority Southworth might otherwise have claimed. Why would grown-up business people, after hearing such juvenile nonsense, consider his appeals for WPC to rename itself "Clean Energy Congress" and for "serious oil companiesellipseto make the crucial decision of distancing themselves from those which focus only on profitability"?
It's easy to be smug about wholesale objection to oil and business. Neither oil nor the profit motive will surrender to activism. Adults who know better, like those attending WPC, naturally ignore apocalyptic braying to the contrary, confident that fuel choice and business practice will survive Greenpeace utopianism.
Smugness, however, is dangerous. Greenpeace has more political effect than most leaders of the oil and gas industry want to acknowledge. And this is so not just in Europe, where the activist group receives the direct if begrudging attention of companies and governments, but also in the US, which treats activist antics as more lunacy than legitimate politics.
Because it's ignored rather than questioned, the Greenpeace message insidiously affects thinking and political outcomes. Observers who reject assertions about oil's not being good for anybody nevertheless accept forced consumption of costlier substitutes. Through unconscious compromise, they settle into the assumption that it's automatically good for an energy source not to be oil. And the assumption makes them hospitable to political mistakes about energy.
For example, the US Congress soon might specify volumes of ethanol made from domestically grown grain to be sold in gasoline. The requirement will raise costs of gasoline manufacture and distribution, reduce overall energy supply, and produce no net environmental benefit-notwithstanding false claims about ethanol's making gasoline burn "cleaner." It also will increase an already large transfer of wealth from motorists to grain producers and distillers.
Why are price-touchy fuel consumers so patient with this sacrifice to regional politics? Part of the answer must lurk in the assumption that ethanol offers benefit for the simple reason that it's not oil.
The prejudice is strong and pervasive. It exaggerates oil's disadvantages, discounts its advantages, and skews assessments of costs and benefits. And it grows out of compromise with the ridiculous assertion that oil offers no advantages at all.
To be effective, Greenpeace doesn't have to win people in significant numbers over to its most extreme positions. It just needs a smug forum in which to stake intellectual claim. Compromise by everyone else eventually orients politics to its goals.
Meek response
The oil and gas industry and its consumers suffer from this alignment with the Greenpeace agenda. Yet the industry responds meekly. It either ignores or tries to accommodate activists opposed to its very being, as though they'll go away or become reasonable. They'll do neither. And they'll prevail in politics as long as reasonable people see gain in splitting differences with unyielding extremism.
The industry should respond more aggressively than it has done before to Greenpeace propaganda, especially the worst of it, the wild claims that make professionals want to shake their heads and quietly walk away. It can start by not inviting radicals to meetings designed to foster constructive discussion about real problems.
