Greta Samwel: NATIONAL COLUMN: The fossil fuel era isn't done yet, not by a long shot

Greta Samwel, The Norman Transcript, Okla.
·4 min read

Nov. 12—The International Energy Agency has its opinion. Darren Woods has his. If you are the betting sort, wager on Woods. He just wagered $59.5 billion.

The IEA, which thinks consumption of petroleum will peak and begin to decline by 2030, says the world is at "the beginning of the end of the fossil fuel era." Woods, ExxonMobil's CEO, is spending $59.5 billion to buy Pioneer Natural Resources, whose CEO told the Financial Times that, including the natural gas and natural gas liquids with the oil, what ExxonMobil is buying in the Texas-New Mexico Permian Basin is "as big as Saudi Arabia."

Chevron, America's second-largest oil company, also recently placed a big bet. By buying Hess petroleum company for $53 billion last month, Chevron gets Hess's large North Dakota position in Bakken Formation shale and Hess's almost one-third of a major recent oil discovery — the estimated 11 billion barrels of oil equivalent crude off Guyana's coast, where production is expected to rise from today's 400,000 barrels a day to 1.2 million by 2027. Chevron CEO Mike Wirth: "We live in the real world, and have to allocate capital to meet real-world demands."

Voters are demanding less green bossiness. Sweden's government has cut fossil fuel taxes several times in the past 12 months, taxes that have fueled populism. British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, with a general election impending, has announced a five-year delay, until 2035, on banning the sale of internal-combustion cars. Germany, with the right-wing populist Alternative for Germany party gaining strength while denouncing "green fascism," has said green home-heating rules will be delayed. Last month, General Motors, bowing to obdurate consumers, announced that its target of building 400,000 electric vehicles (current average price for EVs: $53,000) by mid-2024 must wait. Ford has moved its EV production target out a year.

But before climate scolds despair, they should consider what Peter Huntsman recently told the Wall Street Journal. The CEO of Huntsman Corp., which has annual revenue of about $8 billion from turning hydrocarbons into products, says the following: In 1970, global cooling was supposedly going to disrupt agriculture and other things, the ozone was going to disappear, and acid rain was going to deforest New England. Today, the real U.S. GDP is four times larger than in 1970, but Americans' activities are emitting about the same number of metric tons of carbon dioxide, even while using much more electricity, and driving and flying many more miles. Why? Better technologies and processes; we learn and adapt.

The California Air Resources Board, a slow learner, this year announced a goal of reducing Californians' vehicle miles traveled (VMT) 25 percent by 2030 and 30 percent by 2045. The Breakthrough Institute's Jennifer Hernandez, writing in City Journal, notes that VMT rose 15 percent between 2009 and 2019. CARB's 2045 goal would require cutting VMT about 2.5 times what the pandemic lockdowns and unemployment did. The pandemic was paradise for green obsessives.

CARB wants to double by 2030 the capacity of public transit, which the public dislikes: Use of it in California has declined 32 percent since 2005, and in 2019, it accounted for just 2.2 percent of commuting trips. Undaunted, CARB proposes vast social engineering: land-use restrictions to compel high-density communities. And making roads inconvenient by multiplying bike, scooter and bus lanes. Meanwhile, Southern California officials sensitive to public preferences are spending $413 million on 16 miles of toll roads to reduce delays. Hernandez says "this minute addition to the thousands of miles of existing freeways" is actually projected by the state to "induce" more than 100 million additional VMT annually.

Because radical revisions of public preferences and behaviors are unlikely, VMT hawks and other climate warriors must hope for oil scarcity. In 1914, the Bureau of Mines said U.S. oil reserves would be exhausted by 1924. In 1939, the year a global war powered by petroleum began, the Interior Department said the world had only 13 years of reserves. The postwar boom was thirsty for oil. And in 1951, the Interior Department reported that the world had 13 years of reserves. In 1970, there were an estimated 612 billion barrels of proven reserves. By 2006, after an additional 767 billion barrels had been pumped, proven reserves were 1.2 trillion and growing. (See above: Guyana.)

Many of the people who say climate change poses an "existential" threat to life on Earth also say, "Hands off my gas stove!" To which statement do you think most of these people are most committed?