Category: Environment

Ramping up fossil fuel production and shredding pollution rules, as the Trump administration did for four years, largely defies economic and scientific logic in an era of costly climate disasters. But Larry Kudlow, who was director of the National Economic Council for part of that time, may have indicated Wednesday that the administration saw its policies on fossil fuels through another lens: culture.

During an interview with Fox Business star Maria Bartiromo, Kudlow dismissed President Joe Biden as an ideologue whose approach to climate change threatens to “wreck the whole energy sector.”

“It turns out President Biden may be the most left-wing president we’ve ever seen,” Kudlow said. “His actions on spending and taxing and regulating, on immigration and fossil fuels and other cultural issues… he may be the most left-wing.”

It was only a split second, possibly even an unintentional slip of the tongue. But the idea of defining fossil fuels as a “cultural issue” gets at something that typically goes unacknowledged in policy debates over how to deal with the industry most responsible for destabilizing the planet’s ecosystems. For conservatives, fossil fuel fights are just another front in the U.S. culture war that’s been waged for decades over issues like same-sex marriage and abortion.

On the other hand, the economic logic of pumping and burning more oil, gas and coal is difficult to square.

Already, the planet has warmed 1.2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial averages, yielding biblically terrifying and astronomically expensive results in the form of deadly floods and fires, prolonged droughts and ravenous locust swarms. Last year, the United States alone suffered a record-breaking 22 warming-fueled disasters that each topped $1 billion in damages.

And that only accounts for fossil fuels’ effect on global temperatures. Tiny particles from fossil fuels that pollute the air kill as many as 4.5 million people worldwide each year, and result in global economic costs totaling roughly $8 billion per day, a study published last year by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air found.

Then there’s the reality that fossil fuel producers rely heavily on debt and generous government subsidies to turn profits. About 50% of new oil drilling in the U.S. would be unprofitable without subsidies, according to a 2017 study in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Energy.

Over the past decade, cheap loans from Wall Street investors boosted the popularity of hydraulic fracturing, the drilling technique known as fracking ― thereby flooding the market with supply and reducing the price of oil and gas. The sector’s success was its own undoing: Between 2012 and 2017, the 30 largest shale producers lost more than $50 billion, according to a Wall Street Journal estimate. From 2015 to 2016, an eyebrow-raising 91% of all corporate debt defaults in the United States were in the oil and gas sector, the financial research firm Moody’s  calculated in 2019.

Now that policymakers are starting to heed scientists’ calls to rapidly transition the global economy away from fossil fuels, even the mightiest companies are showing signs of financial atrophy. Exxon Mobil Corp., the Western world’s largest oil explorer, lost its place in the Dow Jones Industrial Average stock index last August as its debt, and its obstinate refusal to plan for a low-carbon future, repelled investors. This week, the company reported its first annual loss in at least 40 years.

If the adoption of renewable power and electric vehicles proves as swift as leaders in the U.S., Europe and East Asia now say they want it to be, new drilling projects ― which can take decades to pay off ― could become what financial experts call “stranded assets,” virtually worthless money pits that will never make a profit but may instead be costly to clean up.

What, then, explains the political power of fossil fuels? Hefty political donations and the long-term need for some supply of the fuels, albeit paired with some kind of technology to capture emissions, only tell part of the story. The industry, especially in the U.S., also serves as an avatar for a certain kind of cultural worldview, one that resonates with tough-guy masculinity and patriarchal families.

In 2011, a study in the peer-reviewed journal Global Environmental Change found that white males were overrepresented among people who denied the reality of climate change. Researchers attributed the phenomenon to a desire to “protect their cultural identity.”

“Perhaps white males see less risk in the world because they create, manage, control, and benefit from so much of it,” the study’s authors wrote. “Perhaps women and nonwhite men see the world as more dangerous because in many ways they are more vulnerable, because they benefit less from many of its technologies and institutions, and because they have less power and control.”

In 2014, researchers in Sweden found that climate denial was “intertwined with a masculinity of industrial modernity that is on decline.” Those who defended the industries destabilizing the planet were trying “to save an industrial society” that men like them had built and dominated, argued the researchers, whose work appeared in Norma: International Journal for Masculinity Studies.

In 2018, Virginia Tech political scientist Cara Daggett gave the concept a name: petro-masculinity.

“The concept of petro-masculinity suggests that fossil fuels mean more than profit,” Daggett wrote in the international studies journal Millennium. “Fossil fuels also contribute to making identities, which poses risks for post-carbon energy politics.”

Reflecting on this growing body of social research, the climate writer Emily Atkin asked in a recent edition of her Heated newsletter: “Do you ever wonder what the planet might look like if men didn’t control the world?”

“I’m not talking about all cisgender men, or the entirety of the male gender,” she wrote. “Really, I’m just talking about people who believe that because they have penises, they are required to act in a traditionally, almost performatively masculine way ― like ‘being strong’ and ‘never showing weakness’ and ’ not ordering sauvignon blanc.”

Now that the Trump administration’s four-year assault on environmental protection and conservation has crested, the work of restoration must begin. As professionals in the field of conservation, we watched with dread and dismay as the laws, policies, science, and stewardship of waters, air, wildlife, and public lands were systematically dismantled.

While the damage is profound, the Biden-Harris administration can reverse these harms, restart fundamental environmental policies and programs, and restore the federal commitment to environmental protection and lands and waters stewardship. What is needed is a tactical plan for restoration.

Ten months before the November 2020 election, we convened a team of diverse environmental leaders with government, nonprofit, private sector, and academic experience. They were from both coasts and the heartland, the north-west and the south-east, rural America and large cities. Meeting virtually as The Restoration Project, they worked over several months to create a carefully researched and prioritized list of the top 100 important actions to be taken to restore the nation’s environment. The plan was delivered to the Biden-Harris transition team in November, and we are releasing it today to the public here.

Some of the plan’s top priorities have already been met, including rejoining the Paris Climate agreement (#1), issuing executive orders on meeting climate change goals (#2), and halting the Keystone XL pipeline (#25). Other restorative actions will take longer, especially where the Trump administration locked in changes with new federal regulations.

For instance, final regulations were issued by the Environmental Protection Agency that weakened fuel economy standards for cars and trucks from 54 mpg to 40 mpg by 2025, which may exacerbate the climate crisis. The EPA also finalized the so-called “transparency rule” that would restrict the agency from considering scientific studies that do not reveal raw data, including confidential or personal identifying information. The result is that studies including such personal information can no longer be used to evaluate toxic substances that endanger public safety. The team prioritized these reversals among its top 10, and recommended either they be repealed by Congress or a new rule be promulgated, a process that will take several years.

Some of the “harms” are already being challenged in the courts, such as drastic reductions of both Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears national monuments. In other cases, the courts have ruled the Trump action as illegal, as in the replacement of the Clean Power Plan with one that did not protect air quality. The Biden-Harris administration can restore the boundaries of the two national monuments and issue a new, stronger plan for clean air.

The Trump administration rolled back a series of protections for the nation’s wildlife, mostly through policy directives within the interior department. The plan calls for the new interior secretary to restore protections for migratory birds that could be killed by industrial development, eliminate the practice of shooting female grizzly bears in their dens in Alaska, and prevent the shooting of polar bears by private companies exploring for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

The plan also calls for a restoration of protection for special places that we all thought were legally protected from development and impact, including road building and logging in the Tongass National Forest of Alaska, drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and oil and gas development adjacent to Chaco Culture National Historical Park.

The detailed approaches required for restoration and outlined in the report – executive orders, policy changes, and prudent use of the Congressional Review Act– may seem mundane, but this is what we must do to restore what has been lost, threatened, and harmed. Some of the actions will be easily completed in the first 100 days of the administration and others will take years to reverse, requiring patience and persistence. We recommend that the administration track and report to the American people progress on the accomplishments detailed in the plan.

The Restoration Project was written for the government as a tactical plan for progress. But it is also a call to action for a broader conservation movement that includes those working to restore civil rights, rural economies, public health, scientific integrity, and environmental justice. The new administration should be supported in its progress, applauded for its successes – and held accountable when action is forestalled or lacking.

• Jonathan B Jarvis served 40 years with the National Park Service and was its 18th director. Dr Gary Machlis served as science advisor to the director of the National Park Service and is a professor of environmental sustainability at Clemson University. They are the co-authors of The Future of Conservation in America: A Chart for Rough Water (University of Chicago Press).