I’m no apologist for “Big Oil”, or indeed “Big” anything. Large corporate entities are not to my taste, as they tend to foster the worst of human nature, visible even through the smokescreen of those responsible for their PR. I know that there are good people working for these organisations, especially at the sharp end, but I have little time for many in the management structure. Personally, I find this to be at least as true for spiritual organisations as for ones as worldly as the oil supermajors.
However, I find the campaigns against these companies rather baffling. As Germany has discovered during the current invasion of Ukraine by Russia, stopping the use of fossil fuels abruptly is not practically possible. Likewise, the disruptive campaigns urging us all to do so are quite simply stupid.
The apparently reasonably widespread public support for these campaigns appears to be founded in a belief that oil companies are ‘making’ people use their products. This looks like another case of supply supposedly causing demand, but it doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. Our cities, our societies, our world are all based on the use of fossil fuels. The current alternative to our using fossil fuels supplied by big private companies is not that we stop using fossil fuels. It is that we keep using such fuels, only from less transparent sources, less inclined to even pay PR lip service to corporate social responsibility, places like Russia.
Blockading fuel depots, disinvesting from oil companies etc., is blaming oil and gas companies for our personal and societal reliance on fossil fuels. But it would be far easier to argue that we are all individually responsible for our choice to use fossil fuels. Oil and gas are not like tobacco – legal but addictive and harmful. Oil and gas drive the machines which provide the labour previously done by horses and human slaves. They are the feedstocks of the chemical industry which essentially makes everything which civilisation relies upon. There is a balance to be struck, but oil companies are not pantomime villains, and green campaigners are neither heroes nor sources of truth. They each have their agendas.
For some campaigning organisations their stated agenda is the destruction of capitalism, a system which they believe to be the cause of the so-called “climate emergency”. The rampant pollution in China and other non-capitalist nations, and the lack of willingness among such nations to take part in resolving the “climate emergency” appears to be unproblematic.
Whilst I am no more a cheerleader for Capitalism than I am for big business, a comparison of Yale University’s Environmental Performance Index (EPI) and the Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom shows that the most capitalist countries actually had the highest EPI scores, whilst the least capitalist had by far the lowest. Germany, before its reunification, provides a useful case study. In 1989, the non-capitalist (East) German Democratic Republic emitted more than three times the CO2 per unit of GDP and 10 times the sulphur dioxide per square mile than capitalist West Germany.
I know quite a few people involved in “Extinction Rebellion” etc. They are either well-meaning, retired old lefties, or the sort of disappointed graduates I wrote about in my last article. What they tend to have in common is scientific illiteracy, coupled with a belief that someone other than themselves is responsible for the state of the world. The younger ones might have an argument, but the ‘boomers’ do not.
To my mind, a case in point here is the petty vandalism of “Tyre Extinguishers”, and offshoot of XR who go around letting down 4×4 tyres (even electric ones, because ”you can’t electrify your way out of the climate crisis”, according to them). I used to own a Land Rover myself, back when I had a job that involved a lot of offroad driving. It was no Chelsea tractor. It was used as an actual tractor far more frequently than as a school bus. Nevertheless, when I drove through the local middle-class ghetto, I used to get a lot of negative feedback. 4x4s are no more responsible for climate change than oil companies. They may (according to the Guardian) on average produce 14% more CO2 than the average small car, but there are an awful lot more of those small cars, and not all SUVs are being used for things those other cars could do.
So yes, those people who drive SUVs who never go offroad are wasting some fuel, but so is everyone. You waste a lot more fuel every time you drive somewhere you could walk or cycle than you save by not doing it in an SUV. I didn’t learn to drive until I was 32, so I know it is possible to live without a car. However, feeling smugly superior to SUV drivers because we bought a Toyota Pious instead is scarcely different to my mind from looking down on cash- or time- poor people who eat junk food. Ostentatiously rejecting the industries which make modern life happen whilst continuing to use their products is often viewed as hypocritical.
Those few people who can genuinely do without the products of the oil industry can usually only do so because of their wealth, in many cases inherited wealth accumulated by their ancestors involved in businesses which would have pretty questionable morality today. Even the Telegraph has noticed the rise of the “Old Econian”. The foot soldiers of XR and the like might be life’s losers, but many of its generals went to private school.
Read Sean's first post about ‘Supply Does Not Create Demand‘
