It should be clear now if it wasn't before that the oil and gas industry does not represent uniform opposition to policies addressing climate change.
Even Big Oil, that monolith of popular villainy, is divided on important questions about the issue.
Popular mythology, contrived by environmental propagandists and reinforced by gullible media, won't acknowledge that serious adults and the companies they work for can disagree over serious questions about climate change. In the mythological view, oil companies all see response to climate change as a threat to profits and therefore resist it in defiance of clear and urgent reasons to act.
In fact, companies vary in their corporate opinions about the extent and nature of the threat of climate change, about causes and the need to respond, about costs, and about what responses—if any are in order—would be best. Disagreement has been demonstrated anew by the withdrawal of two major oil and gas companies from a group called the US Climate Action Program (USCAP), formed to create a framework for policy-making.
BP and ConocoPhillips support action on climate change but became disaffected when USCAP supported cap-and-trade legislation threatening to penalize refiners and raise fuel costs.
Why it took them this long to see problems with membership in a coalition that includes the antioil likes of the Environmental Defense Fund and Natural Resources Defense Council is anyone's guess. But right choices are right choices, whenever they occur.
Erosion of the scientific case for urgent action, spun out of the scandal-ridden Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, must have influenced their decisions.
As IPCC lapses come to light, alarm over climate change increasingly seems driven by the political usurpation of science. Now the lone remaining oil company in UNCAP is Shell, whose executives have been heard to describe climate-change science as "settled."
That banality comes from the chapter of popular mythology entitled, "Oil Companies All Think Alike on Climate Change."
As credibility of the IPCC, the supposed science settler, melts away, it's a proposition worth reconsideration of the type BP and ConocoPhillips gave UNCAP membership.
(Online Feb. 19, 2010; author's e-mail: [email protected])
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