Recent events validate a claim once dismissed as hopelessly pessimistic: You can't please environmentalists. Unless you accept the whole extremist agenda, you're the enemy. There's no room for compromise.
The oil and gas industry should know that by now. Companies have been trying to gain the initiative, to implement cleanup and precautionary programs in advance of regulation. But the regulations keep coming, adding costs and crimping operations for reasons that often have little to do with the environment and much to do with the urge of some people to tell others how to behave.
PUBLIC BASHINGS
Public bashings continue as well. When companies advertised used-oil recycling services recently, the Sierra Club bashed them for burning some of the collected waste. Yet burning is a minor tradeoff against the 5 million bbl of old oil estimated to be improperly discarded each year. The Sierra Club, it seems, just can't pass up a chance to bash oil companies. What are its priorities, anyway?
Sensitive oil company types will cringe at the question. They don't like to bash environmentalists. Sometimes, however, environmentalists deserve it.
U.S. President George Bush might harbor thoughts like these after this month's Earth Summit in Brazil. He has been bashed for not leading the proceedings-meaning he wouldn't sign the worst of the often absurd proposals set before him. It was, the bashers say, a disaster for Bush, the environmental president who wouldn't fall in step with the save-the-planet crowd.
Yet, to people who doubt the planet so urgently needs to be saved, Bush looked sufficiently leader-like. He stood up to over-hyped and often selectively represented world opinion, rejecting agreements he couldn't keep and refusing to make his country endure unwarranted hardship.
So now he's the environmentalists' pet villain. And the portrayal should worry oil companies. This is the president who signed clean air legislation that will shut down many U.S. refineries and raise costs for the sake of, in most areas, marginal air quality gains. This is the president who deferred leasing of most of the Outer Continental Shelf. This is the president who soon will sign energy policy legislation extending federal land lockups. This is the president who, while not outwardly antagonistic toward the business, nevertheless has been the man in charge as his nation exports much of its domestic producing industry.
Environmentalists' villain? What do these people want?
"I say with the strongest possible passion that we must change," said Earth Summit organizer Maurice Strong as the conference ended. "Our present economic system is not sustainable...."
A SUSTAINABLE SYSTEM
Wrong. The present economic system is sustainable because it will change, it will adapt, it will reconcile human progress with natural values-if obstructionists like Strong will just get out of the way. Strong and his planet savers want managed economies, the environmental consequences of which are painfully clear in the old Soviet Union and eastern Europe. The doomsayers won't acknowledge the potential of free people to pursue prosperity and solve environmental problems at the same time.
Radicalism is no excuse for environmental backsliding, of course. Governments, companies, and individuals must act responsibly and can do so without subscribing to environmentalist panic. But they also must stand up to self-righteous scorn to answer whiny critics and dumb ideas. The planet abounds with such pests these days, more so since the Earth Summit. It's time to bash back.
Copyright 1992 Oil & Gas Journal. All Rights Reserved.
