Misinformed activism undermines attention to climate change

Everyone’s wrong sometimes. Most people, though, don’t make a show of it.

Greenpeace activists made a show of blocking entrance to BP’s headquarters in London on May 21. They were wrong about everything.

According to Reuters, some of them enclosed themselves in containers affixed to the building’s doors. Others

unfurled a banner declaring “Climate Emergency.”

BP’s work “threatens millions of lives and the future of the living world,” declared Paul Morozzo, one of the activists.

“The science is clear. We must stop searching for new oil and gas if we want a livable planet,” he said. “BP must clean up or clear out.”

Wrong.

BP’s work improves lives; it doesn’t threaten them. Climate change associated with its products is a long-term concern that can be managed without halting oil and gas exploration.

In fact, planetary livability requires more exploration.

Even if governments impose regulations assumed to be necessary to meet temperature targets of the 2015 Paris Climate Summit, oil and gas will continue to be needed in substantial amounts, and future discoveries will have to offset natural production declines.

But governments won’t impose all those regulations because politics won’t allow it. The latest case in point is Australia, where voters in May 18 parliamentary elections rejected the party clamoring for urgent climate response.

Continuation of the need for oil and gas and political resistance to pricey energy are clearer than the science of climate change. Assertions of clarity betray colossal unfamiliarity with the subject.

Morozzo said BP Chief Executive Officer Bob Dudley should “start switching to 100% renewables or wind down the company.”

The all-renewable target is fanciful. Energy requirements are far too large to be met wholly from renewable sources anytime soon. This is something about which science really is clear.

Practicable response to climate change will remain beyond hope while political discussion begins and ends with misinformed demands for the impossible.

Discussion will stay there until activists no longer get attention for spectacles that show they’re spectacularly wrong.

(From the subscription area of www.ogj.com, posted May 24, 2019. To comment, join the Commentary channel at www.ogj.com/oilandgascommunity.)