Credit: Getty Images
If you’re looking for a heartening development on the eve of Earth Day 2024, here’s one: A new federal rule will require the oil and gas industry to pay a little more for the damage it’s been doing to the planet.
Let the disinformation begin. Oh, what’s that? It already has?
Of course it has. More than a half century after the first Earth Day on April 22, 1970, with abundant evidence of the harm that burning fossil fuels is doing to the environment, we are still arguing about whether keeping the only habitable planet we know of fit for human life is such an urgent issue after all.
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And so, with a presidential election coming around again, one of the key issues shaping up is over whether to continue the momentum toward a clean energy future, or to “unleash” the oil and gas industry and let it drill and pollute even more.
You know, that long-suffering industry that’s been averaging, according to the International Energy Agency, around $3.5 trillion a year in revenue of late. The same poor industry that has spent billions over the years in the U.S. alone to lobby and campaign against regulations it doesn’t like, to tamp down science and to keep the public from knowing the extent of the damage its products have been causing.
That not only left us with the sort of unhealthy, unsightly environment that spurred global awareness and action in 1970, which was bad enough, but has brought us to what we face now: the existential danger to our species — and many others in an intricately interconnected ecosystem – that comes from planet-wide warming and the resulting havoc of climate change.
And yet many of our politicians blithely reduce this long-mounting crisis to absurd, misleading, or downright false sound bites intended to minimize the danger in the public’s mind — like “They’re coming for your gas stove” or “They’re going to destroy American energy independence.”
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That latter meme has been getting plenty of mileage of late in one form or another. Supporters of Donald Trump are claiming that just a few years ago America was a “net exporter” of energy, but that it lost that status under President Joe Biden. That’s a half-truth at best. The country been exporting more energy than it imported since 2019, and those exports are still growing under Mr. Biden, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. The oil and gas industry is doing fine.
The Earth? Not so much.
While overall demand for oil and gas is expected to peak by the end of this decade as clean energy policy changes in the U.S. and countries around the world take hold, global warming is expected to rise more than the 1.5° C increase scientists have said is a critical benchmark, according to the IEA. The best we might achieve under current policies, the IEA says, is 1.7° C. But further demand reductions could keep the increase to 1.5° C.
The question is whether there is political will to do so — and the money to develop and deploy clean energy technology.
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In that light, the Biden administration’s latest moves are noteworthy. Earlier this month, it raised royalty rates for extracting oil, gas and coal on federal land by more than one-third. That increase — the first in a century — is estimated to cost the industry $1.8 billion over the next eight years. Companies will have to post higher bonds to ensure they clean up sites they lease. And, on Friday, the administration announced it would ban drilling in more than 13 million ecologically sensitive acres on Alaska’s North Slope.
It’s a start. The government could certainly do more to cut the billions in subsidies of all sorts to fossil fuel interests — subsidies that have long held prices artificially low and served as a disincentive to shift away from polluting energy. And politicians who defend fossil fuels in the name of American jobs and energy independence ought to recognize the value of this country being a leader in clean energy, not a net importer of foreign technology.
And since so much of this comes down to political will, whatever else you may do for Earth Day, one simple resolution would go a long way toward helping the planet: to not be snookered and swayed by the sound bites of fossil fuel interests that have delayed progress for so long. An informed populace would make for a happy Earth Day indeed – and many more to come.
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Editorial: Earth, our only home
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21.04.2024
Credit: Getty Images
If you’re looking for a heartening development on the eve of Earth Day 2024, here’s one: A new federal rule will require the oil and gas industry to pay a little more for the damage it’s been doing to the planet.
Let the disinformation begin. Oh, what’s that? It already has?
Of course it has. More than a half century after the first Earth Day on April 22, 1970, with abundant evidence of the harm that burning fossil fuels is doing to the environment, we are still arguing about whether keeping the only habitable planet we know of fit for human life is such an urgent issue after all.
Advertisement
Article continues below this ad
And so, with a presidential election coming around again, one of the key issues shaping up is over whether to continue the momentum toward a clean energy future, or to “unleash” the oil and gas industry and let it drill and pollute even more.
You know, that long-suffering industry that’s been averaging, according to the International Energy Agency, around $3.5 trillion a year in revenue of late. The same poor industry that has spent billions over the years in........
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