My latest at RealClearMarkets.com.
It’s fashionable to slam fossil fuels these days. But the oil and gas industry just had a last laugh of sorts.
At the end of 2020, the CEO of the Texas-based oil services company Innovex Downhole Solutions wanted to buy his employees a Christmas present. So he tried to buy 400 jackets with the Innovex logo from outdoor apparel maker North Face.
North Face refused the order, saying selling jackets to Innovex was “not consistent with its brand standards” because Innovex is an oil and gas company.
North Face is probably on safe legal grounds. In 2018, the Supreme Court ruled in Masterpiece Cake Shop vs. Colorado Civil Rights Commission that the Commission violated the cake maker’s religious liberty by forcing him to decorate a cake for the marriage of a gay couple. And belief-based climate alarmism is probably as good a religion as any other.
But North Face, and the radical climate movement it has longed supported, is now taking a hit in the public relations department.
The Colorado Oil and Gas Association just awarded North Face its first-ever “Extraordinary Customer Award” in recognitions of North Face’s abundant use of oil and gas.
Virtually every North Face product is made with nylon, polyester and polyurethane, all of which are produced from oil and natural gas. It’s probably overkill to mention the fleet of private jets owned by North Face’s parent corporation, VF Corp.
COGA will now use the North Face’s embarrassment to launch a pro-oil campaign called “Fueling Our Lives.”
“I think too often we think of oil and natural gas as just as fuels — something to put in our cars or heat or cool our homes,” said COGA chief Dan Haley. “And, as we’ve seen in recent weeks across the country that is hugely important part of what our industry – supplying affordable and efficient clean-burning natural gas to heat our homes and help power our grid – but we often forget just how many other things we have and enjoy in the 21st Century that are made possible because of oil and natural gas” he added.
This effort is not a moment too soon.
During the recent confirmation hearing for Biden Secretary of Interior nominee Deb Haaland, Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) pressed Haaland on the reality of oil.
Cassidy noted that even if the US decreases production of oil and gas, global demand would be the same. To which Haaland responded, “We’re hoping that…uh… when we create these… uh… clean energy opportunities… that perhaps that will change.”
Cassidy then pointed out, that, “Eighty percent of a barrel oil does not go for propulsion. Rather it goes for the plastics and chemicals that are essential to modernity, for example the products that go into a wind turbine, the carpet we are both looking at… would you agree that its quite likely that even in the rosiest scenarios there will continue to be demand for oil and gas?”
“Yes,” Haaland responded.
Yet despite her acknowledgement of our dependence on oil and gas, Haaland was a co-sponsor of the anti-fossil fuel Green New Deal and has pledged to implement the Biden policy of ending oil and gas exploration and drilling on federal lands.
Climate activists apparently don’t really realize that every part of our world is entirely dependent on fossil fuels and that there are no substitutes on the horizon that will lessen that dependence.
While it’s easy to poke fun at mindless anti-fossil fuel campaigns like “Keep It In The Ground,” they will be no laughing matter if actually implemented.
Steve Milloy publishes JunkScience.com, served on the Trump EPA transition team and is the author of “Scare Pollution: Why and How to Fix the EPA” (Bench Press, 2016).