This extended snippet is from the Heated Newsletter:
For readers who are new to this newsletter, I think it’s important to note that I am not a climate activist. I’m a journalist who went went to college for journalism and have only held journalism jobs. I’ve worked at news outlets with both liberal and conservative leanings, and my beat has been climate change since 2013. My primary goal is to help people understand one of the most politically, economically, and ecologically complex issues we face as a society.
So I’m not afraid to say it: The fossil fuel industry has done a lot of great things for civilization. Industrialization and rising economic prosperity would have been impossible without oil, gas, and coal. Fossil fuels have been primarily responsible for propelling our cars, powering our businesses, and keeping the lights on in our homes—all things I personally am grateful for. And globally, the fossil fuel industry employs nearly 32 million people. (Interestingly, the clean energy sector employs even more than that, but I digress).
At the same time, however, the fossil fuel industry has created a lot of awful things that threaten the very prosperity it helped create. The toxic air and water pollution that comes from drilling, mining, transporting, burning, and refining coal, oil and gas are fueling rises in death and sickness across the world, including cancer, autism and Alzheimers. And fossil fuels are chiefly responsible for climate change, a humanitarian crisis which is fueling extreme weather, sea level rise, disease spread, and food insecurity across the world—not to mention ecosystem and ocean current collapse. Currently, fossil fuels are responsible for 75 percent of current anthropogenic CO2 emissions.
For some people, this alone is enough to “vilify” the fossil fuel industry. But perhaps surprisingly, it’s not enough for me. As a journalist, I understand that all energy production has negative—even sometimes catastrophic—environmental and human health effects. As long as industries are willing to be held accountable for those effects, and work in good faith to address them, I don’t think it’s fair to call them “evil.”
But here’s the thing: If an industry doesn’t acknowledge the massive harm of its products; then publicly denies those harms for decades while acknowledging them internally; then makes false promises to fix those harms once forced to acknowledge them; and then spends billions to delay time-sensitive solutions through advertising, lobbying, campaign spending, and public school educational material—then yeah. I think it’s fair to say an industry has entered villain territory.
The fossil fuel industry has done all these things and more.