The World Petroleum Conference in Calgary last month gave voice to a climate-change approach called the precautionary principle. It's a new label for an old argument favoring costly remedy for theoretical disease. For the oil and gas industry to adopt the approach is not at all cautious.
The approach is not cautious because it leads automatically to high taxation of the industry's products. All proposals for reducing human emissions of heat-trapping gases amount to taxing fossil energy heavily enough to force people to use different, more-costly fuels. Before any business consents to such manipulation of its customers, it should be certain that benefits warrant the cost.
The oil business can't be that certain about climate change prescriptions. Too many of its leaders use the precautionary principle as a reason to ignore scientific questions about the human role in climate change. They thus become complicit in the tendency of governments to tax people as heavily as politics will allow. This is no way to treat customers.
Growing doubt
Oil and gas companies that assert a certain-enough link between CO2 emissions and evidence of overall warming haven't paid attention to recent findings. In fact, doubt about the link grows.
Too few industry leaders seem to have noticed that nearly 2 years ago, James E. Hansen, the Goddard Institute chief who raised initial warming alarms, changed course significantly. Writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Hansen declared, "...Uncertainties in climate forcings have supplanted global climate sensitivity as the predominant issue."
The initial stance off which Hansen thus swerved represents the intellectual foundation of the Kyoto Protocol, which calls for industrialized countries to slash their emissions of carbon dioxide. But the Kyoto Protocol has taken on a life of its own. Politicians, with regrettable support from some oil and gas companies, ignore new knowledge, especially when it throws doubt on Kyoto prescriptions.
Yet still the doubt grows. Science does not only recognize that climate mechanics are too complex to support the simplistic gas-temperature linkage that underlies Kyoto and the precautionary principle. It also now suggests that the causal effect works in the reverse of popular assumption.
Researchers writing in the journals Science and Nature last year reported that historical evidence affirms that global average temperatures and CO2 concentrations do vary together. But the gas changes appear to have occurred after the temperature changes and therefore cannot have been their cause. A possible explanation: during naturally occuring warming cycles, the ability of oceans to hold CO2 diminishes. So what causes the natural temperature flux? Many influences are coming into view, solar activity chief among them.
While human emissions of greenhouse gases might have some influence on average global temperature, the effect looks smaller as knowledge grows about climate phenomena. The likelihood thus shrinks that humans can affect temperature appreciably by taxing themselves away from hydrocarbon fuels.
The oil and gas industry must acknowledge growing complexity and new doubt and avoid the simple-mindedness that propels Kyoto politics. The threat that its customers might be taxed heavily for unsound reason is orders of magnitude greater than the threat that use of its products will overheat Planet Earth.
The precautionary principle seduces oil and gas companies toward hypocrisies exemplified recently by US Vice-Pres. Al Gore. The Democratic Party's probable candidate for the presidency and leading cheerleader of the Kyoto Protocol has written in praise of high gasoline prices as a means of hastening the transition to nonfossil energy. Yet he now angrily complains about a gasoline price spurt and wants to investigate oil companies.
Hidden poison
Gore can't have it both ways with energy consumers. Neither can oil and gas companies. Industry leaders must ground their politics in the interests of their customers. And they must protest any suggestion that price increases are justifiable when they originate in politics but not in markets. Just such a suggestion is the precautionary principle's hidden poison.
The industry must be careful with its caution. Parts of it are in danger of responding to the wrong threat.
