Earth Day: A message for the fossil fuel industry in Texas

I am a climate activist. I know and have worked with some of the world’s top climate scientists. I sold my public relations firm a few years ago to dedicate myself to solving the climate crisis because these scientists taught me that if we don’t rapidly stop – and even reverse – human-caused climate change, we may not get to solve much else.

It may surprise you, then, that I have come to Texas – the home state of the fossil fuel industry – for Earthx2024 to acknowledge that the oil and gas industry has done some truly great things.

Starting with the Industrial Revolution, the fossil fuel industry has helped create the greatest prosperity humanity has ever known. It is truly amazing how we can fly all over the world, light and heat our homes, drive almost anywhere and power our industries. I believe we should recognize and thank the fossil fuel industry for advancing human prosperity.

But now we know that we have to change. In a hurry. Unless we achieve a rapid clean energy transition, the fossil fuel industry’s products will destabilize our climate; flood all the coastal cities of the world; collapse insurance markets; make food unaffordable; send waves of climate refugees to our shores; increase wildfires, smoke, heat waves and droughts, plus make hurricanes stronger.

This isn’t science fiction. This is science – science that your oil company scientists told you about in the 1970s, the same scientists your entire industry relies on. It is also pretty simple science. Carbon dioxide and methane from oil, coal and gas trap heat on Earth that used to go back to space. The more we emit, the hotter and stormier it will get. To protect the very prosperity the industry did so much to create, we must rapidly transition to a clean, carbon-free energy economy.

It may also surprise you to hear that I believe the fossil fuel industry could join us in making the right choice to preserve a livable climate and civilization. It won’t be easy, given today’s hyper-polarized media and politics. But I believe it might be done.

At the dawn of World War II, the U.S. government paid firms to rapidly switch to war production. The taxpayers paid corporations a lot of money, with a guaranteed profit margin. This is how we switched to making tanks, bombers, jeeps, fighter planes and artillery. We did it with lightning speed to win the war.

We can do this again, and we truly need a brisk World War II-style mobilization to decarbonize the economy.

Intensifying climate chaos is now everyone’s enemy. We have much – but not all – of the technology we need to defeat it. We need to drill for geothermal energy. We need to turn atmospheric CO2 into carbon neutral liquid fuels, even jet fuel, at scale. We need to make green hydrogen fuels, without planet-heating methane. Although some of my colleagues disagree, we need to take some carbon out of the atmosphere, turning it into stable rock under the ground.

Here’s my message to the gas and oil industry:

Your scientists and engineers who helped create prosperity can now set loose the technologies that can help bring more people safely into prosperity for generations to come. Help us improve batteries and other forms of renewable energy storage. Help us increase energy efficiency. There is so much to do. OK, you may not make the “above average returns” Exxon CEO Darren Woods insists on. But are you really going to put that above a livable earth?

You have another big problem looming. There are now pieces of your products — microplastics — in every human heart, placenta and brain. They are in the rain. They are in every sea creature. I imagine your scientists know these plastics leak toxic chemicals that can even change our hormonal system, contributing to cancer and other diseases. This sounds like a pretty risky business model to me. So why don’t we join together to get the government to invest big time in a Manhattan Project to create safe, biodegradable alternatives to petrochemical plastics?

I know you are caught in a bad system. For example, the equity valuations of the oil and gas companies are significantly linked not only to the size of your fuel reserves but the rate at which they are replenished. Under this system, you feel forced to drill to the ends of the Earth to keep your stock price up and keep your jobs. A few Wall Street analysts maintain this absurd, economically suicidal method of valuation.

Science is clear that we can’t burn all the known reserves and maintain a livable climate. Looking for more is dangerous folly — and these will likely become stranded assets. So how about we collaborate on remedies in legislation and financial markets to this madness? Let’s go talk to Wall Street bankers Jamie Dimon and Larry Fink together.

Meanwhile, there are now significant lawsuits against the oil and gas companies. Eventually, these may make the tobacco settlements of the 1990s look small. After all, the impact of suppressing the truth, funding disinformation and buying politicians to delay climate action will dwarf the harms of the tobacco industry.

Of course, this makes me mad. But our children are more important than our anger. We all love our country, we all love our children and we all love Creation and the natural world. But we are all in deep trouble if the oil and gas industry doesn’t change.

I worked with Nelson Mandela. It was the biggest privilege of my working life. He brought South Africans together, Black and white. Believe me, the defenders of apartheid and the resistance movement hated each other. They had even bombed and killed each other. Yet they found a way forward.

For the sake of freedom, prosperity, national and global security, human health, our children, the survival of our civilization and our astonishingly beautiful planet, our common home, might we do the same?

David Fenton is a long-time environmental activist who founded Fenton, a social change firm, in 1982. He is the author of “The Activist’s Media Handbook: Lessons from 50 Years as a Progressive Agitator.” This essay is his lunch address for EarthX Congress of Conferences.

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