They claim to be science-based, but anti-fossil fuel campaigners are, at heart, ignorant and unserious. To understand how, just witness the recent spectacle put on by The North Face, the clothing company known for its puffy jackets.
Perhaps inspired by the Summer of Wokeness, the outfitter decided it would make a statement on the issue of climate change. With yet another tiresome act of vain virtue-signaling, The North Face snubbed one of its existing corporate customers, refusing for the first time to produce jackets bearing the company logo. The reason? Because this West Texas company is in the business of petroleum production.
Ah, but wait a minute — what are North Face jackets made of?
Surely, if you haven’t guessed it already, you will not be surprised when you hear that they (like two-thirds of all clothing sold today) are made from petroleum products. Thus, the geniuses in management at The North Face are effectively boycotting their own suppliers.
Brilliant.
It is not worth arguing whether the world has a lower-carbon or carbon-neutral future ahead of it. It certainly does, even without any central planning effort. The United States, without any grand plan or signed treaty, has seen its carbon emissions decline dramatically over the last 15 years. Fracking, by allowing natural gas to replace coal on a large scale, has already reduced U.S. greenhouse emissions more than all of the environmental activism in the history of man combined. And not only is carbon-free natural gas a proven concept, but renewable energy requires its assistance, given that wind and solar are by nature intermittent and gas can be turned up or down with great flexibility.
More to the point, nuclear fusion is believed to be just years, not decades away. And other forms of carbon-free, next-generation nuclear power may help hasten the transition of electrical generation away from fossil fuels.
As for transportation, the other main source of emissions, the trend is slow but unmistakable. First commercial and then passenger vehicles are sure to continue electrifying as time passes.
If a low-carbon future is a fait accompli, the only real question is how much damage environmentalists will do to the economy before it happens with useless, purely symbolic gestures. Efforts to shut down fracking, for example, will not slow global warming even one iota, but they certainly will result in great inconvenience and expense for those who cannot afford it.
By restricting the free flow of energy sources that currently exist and power the life of the nation, the radicals would harm everyone — especially the poor, who depend upon cheap energy to keep up their standard of living — in exchange for undetectably small, meaningless reductions to world carbon dioxide levels that will have no effect on world temperatures at all.
Their zealotry, depending on how much economic damage it does, might even impede the technological progress toward lower-carbon sources of energy.
Today, the nation continues to depend on fossil fuels. There is no shame in that, nor in continuing to produce them and export them proudly. It also has side-benefits, American natural gas exports, for example, will weaken the grave threat that Russia poses to Europe. But there are also millions of jobs involved here, which should not be snuffed out prematurely in a fit of alarmist zealotry among conceited central planners.
As credible as the scientific evidence is for anthropogenic climate change, there is no evidence for alarmists’ claims that the future of Earth will be irretrievably lost 10 years from now if people keep driving or flying or fracking or eating meat or drilling for oil.
What’s more, carbon-based fuel products — especially natural gas, but also petroleum, which is used to manufacture everything from aspirin to lipstick to shampoo to asphalt to rugs to North Face jackets — will continue to have a place in society even as the nation’s greenhouse gas footprint naturally shrinks.
So, keep on drilling.
