Our Take, with Doug Sheridan.
CHRIS WRIGHT HAS BECOME THE FACE AND VOICE FOR ENERGY: In search of relief, meet Chris Wright, CEO of the fracking services provider Liberty Energy Energy.
Our Take, with Doug Sheridan.
Holman Jenkins writes in the WSJ, when Congress launched its first Obama-era climate subsidies, it funded a study by the Nobel-winning climate economist William Nordhaus, who concluded that alternative energy handouts are a “poor tool” for fighting emissions, with negligible effect even before accounting for the inevitable “international spillovers”.
Another widely heralded paper by Princeton economists showed subsidizing green energy globally at best would have a “minuscule” effect on emissions. Even Biden officials will say as much off the record (but on the record we're doing great things).
Of course, we heard little about these findings from the media. Yet look at the WaPo's recent contortions to let readers know the admin’s proclaimed US “climate goals” are meaningless when the US simultaneously exports large amounts of hydrocarbons and imports emissions-intensive manufactured goods.
Or take the NYT editors. They say about Biden’s EV policy, “Cars and other forms of transportation are, together, the largest single source of carbon emissions generated by the United States, pollution that is driving climate change and that helped to make 2023 the hottest year in recorded history.”
Notice how this conflates US car emissions with total transportation emissions, then US emissions with global emissions, to hide that the president’s policy would only reduce emissions by 0.2%, and then only if we ignore those pesky international spillover.
In search of relief, meet Chris Wright, CEO of the fracking services provider Liberty Energy Energy. He’s suing over an impertinent SEC rule on corporate climate disclosure, but his real goal is to seek progress against a “ridiculously naive” climate and energy debate, dominated by the cant phrases that prevail in the media.
“Clean energy,” as Americans increasingly understand, is a phrase for the extremely dirty industrial business of delivering a consumer a car with no emissions at the tailpipe or electricity manufactured without the help of a fossil-fuel power plant. “Energy transition” describes a nonexistent, mythic phenomenon found nowhere. “Decarbonization" is a placeholder for sending gas-fired US and German heavy industry to China to run on coal.
If you believe no cost is too great to avoid this outcome, please stop breathing. Otherwise, you’ve already accepted that some things are worse than CO2 emissions.
Our Take: No American CEO, in any industry, has been more forcefully on point concerning the inaccuracies and dangers of the anti-oil and gas movement that took hold of our leaders' collective ability to reason in the wake of the Paris Agreement than Wright. We'll be interested to see what he has to say to members of Congress later this week.