It is another day ending in “y” in the Beltway, and with it we have another “climate crisis” attack on the oil and gas companies — the very ones that produce efficient energy for the great mass of Americans and, indeed, the world.
The latest example of this game of pin the climate blame on the energy producers is a new “Joint Staff Report” from the Democratic minority members of the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability and the majority members of the Senate Committee on the Budget.
The two committees, respectively, are supposed “to ensure the efficiency, effectiveness, and accountability of the federal government and all its agencies,” and “to develop a concurrent resolution on the budget to serve as the framework for congressional action on spending, revenue, and debt-limit legislation.” What does any of that have to do with the fossil energy producers and, purportedly, “Big Oil’s Campaign of Climate Denial, Disinformation, and Doublespeak”? Who knows? And it matters not: attacking the energy producers is a guaranteed winner among numerous left-wing constituencies, including many journalists and ideological pressure groups.
First on the list of accusations: Two news enterprises reported that as recently as the fall of 2015, “Big Oil companies … knew that burning fossil fuels was a major contributor to climate change” but “internally did not dispute the findings but tried to dismiss them as ‘hyperbolic’ and ‘journalistic malpractice.’” This purported perfidy depends crucially on whether the actual evidence supports the common assertion that a climate “crisis” is upon us. The evidence for that stance is vastly weaker than commonly asserted. And so in the view of the authors of the joint staff report, a skeptical view of the “climate crisis”/“major contributor to climate change” argument — the kind of ordinary disagreement that is a natural manifestation of a system of free speech — is an example of “deception, disinformation, and doublespeak.” Wow.
The joint staff report is asserting that the fossil fuel producers “knew” things years ago that were not known then, are not known now, and are the subject of sharp disagreement in the scientific literature — a state of affairs virtually certain to remain with us for a very long time because the determinants of shifts in climate phenomena are massively complex. Again: Precisely who is engaged in “deception, disinformation, and doublespeak?”
And about that purported knowledge on the part of U.S. fossil energy producers “that burning fossil fuels was a major contributor to climate change.” In 2022, U.S. greenhouse gas emissions from the combustion of fossil fuels were about 4.7 billion metric tons, or about 8.7% of the global total of 53.8 bmt. Assume that all those U.S. GHG emissions were to be eliminated, and apply the Environmental Protection Agency climate model: Even under extreme assumptions, the temperature effect in 2100 would be about 0.119°C, an impact that would be barely detectable.
And so the “major contributor” rhetoric is little more than propaganda. Precisely who is engaged in “deception, disinformation, and doublespeak?”
And on and on it goes. The fossil energy producers have “perpetuat[ed] doublespeak about the [effect] of natural gas” in terms of GHG emissions, the Democrats claim. Doublespeak? Since 1990, U.S. GHG emissions have declined by 3%, largely because of the substitution of natural gas in place of coal and other fuels. Meanwhile, in the rest of the world, GHG emissions have increased by 61.7%. So mindless is this attack on the fossil energy producers that the politicians behind it have lost sight of their own GHG “climate” objectives.
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And the most amusing of all is the accusation that fossil energy producers have engaged in lobbying “either directly or through their trade associations against pro-climate legislation and regulations that they publicly claimed to support.” The politicians seem to have forgotten that the First Amendment continues to protect “the right of the people peaceably to assemble” into associations, whether focused on “trade” or other endeavors, “and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.” Individuals and groups — and businesses — do not forfeit the latter right merely by exercising the former. How unusual is it for an organization to support a given policy goal publicly but to believe that a specific proposal is perverse?
Pay no attention to such political propaganda as the joint staff report. It is a classic example of traditional Beltway dishonesty, misdirection, and disdain for the wealth and massive human benefits yielded by private enterprise generally and the fossil energy industry in particular. More fundamentally, it is an attack on the freedom and independence from political coercion that private property and market economic activity — capitalism — create. It is fundamentally totalitarian, and should be given the contempt that it deserves.
Benjamin Zycher is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
