It's time for oil and gas companies to pick sides in the controversy over climate change. Debate, such as it is, will intensify soon.
Former Vice-Pres. Al Gore is behaving like the presidential candidate everyone expects him to be in the 2004 election. He says he won't decide until next year whether to run. But he's making speeches critical of the administration of George W. Bush, who barely beat him in 2000. He's regretting his past dependency on consultants and polls, winning off-year headlines by confessing that, given the chance to try again, he'd "just let it rip." And he recently bought a house in his home state of Tennessee, which he lost in 2000.
A bludgeon
If Gore does run, he'll use global warming as a bludgeon against an incumbent widely depicted as vulnerable on the issue. Bush had the audacity to speak the simple truth about the Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change: The US won't ratify it. The Senate had asserted the same thing by resolution during the administration of former President Bill Clinton. But Bush has taken the heat-from European governments craving any new excuse to raise taxes and to export the habit and from Democrats complaining that he stymied Kyoto as a favor to his friends in the oil and gas business.
In fact, the oil and gas business is divided on the issue. The most outspoken companies have been Royal Dutch/Shell and BP PLC, which support Kyoto or precautions like it, and ExxonMobil Corp., which thinks hasty, Kyoto-like remedies are unnecessary. For its stance, ExxonMobil has been demonized in Europe and chastised by activist minorities among its shareholders. Recently, Kyoto supporters hinted that Bush rejected Kyoto because ExxonMobil made him do it.
Other companies need to sound off on global warming. The industry should give this issue the serious debate that politics has denied it. Politics has turned global warming into a righteousness contest between true believers and heretical doubters. It's thus broadly and incorrectly assumed that science has determined that human activity is warming the planet and threatening catastrophe and that the need for human response is urgent.
The assumption is wrong. Science has determined that greenhouse gases are accumulating in the atmosphere, that most of the accumulation probably relates to human activity, that surface measurements indicate a warming trend while airborne measurements do not, that causes other than human activity account for much of whatever warming may be under way, and that global average temperature doesn't correlate well with concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
Around the question of what, if anything, should be done about all this there is much room for honest discourse. It's not happening. Proposed remedies respond to the worst possible case with no regard to the likelihood of its coming about. Doubts about the need for precaution are dismissed as unholy. Costs of precaution are ignored, along with the uncertainty that defines the science of this issue. And the frantic urge simply to do something overwhelms the high probability that, no matter what they do, people can't alter global temperature much.
Whatever governments do about global warming, oil and gas companies will continue selling oil and gas. A world subject to Kyoto-like costs has less economic growth and slower-growing energy markets than the other kind. But it will still need increasing amounts of both oil and gas.
Confidence in debate
What oil and gas companies have most at stake with global warming is the confidence that political issues involving complex scientific questions-the kind characteristic of their business-can receive reasonable debate. Global warming did not. Beginning with infamous hearings held by then-Sen. Gore of Tennessee, discussion has been simplistic, prejudicial, and intolerant of dissent.
If more oil and gas companies than have so far done so speak their minds forcefully on global warming, they'll at least show that Bush was neither pandering to a unified industry nor bowing to a single company when he rejected Kyoto. The demonstration might help raise the quality of future debates on other subjects. An intramural discussion would in any case be useful warm-up. The inventor of global warming as a political cause looks headed again for the campaign trail. And he's promising to let it rip.