What is it about fossil fuels and the people who produce them that brings forth such uncontrolled hatred, anger, and vengefulness in a very large segment of the population?
I’ve been trying to figure out the answer to that question for many years, but I’m no closer today than when I started. I look at the use of fossil fuels in the world, and somehow I see enormous benefits to mankind — reliable electricity, transportation of people locally and at long distances, and of freight to enable worldwide trade, comfortable heating and cooling of homes, refrigeration to preserve food, computers, and so much more, all at remarkably low cost and remarkably small environmental impact. Most uses of fossil fuels either have no good substitutes (e.g., air travel, ocean shipping, steel-making), or only substitutes that have both higher cost, plus inferior functionality and/or their own environmental problems (e.g., wind, solar, or nuclear for electricity).
With almost no exceptions (e.g., the Unabomber) everybody who has access to fossil fuels or their energy output uses them in large quantities, precisely because they provide great benefits at low cost and low environmental impact, in ways that nothing else can. Even the most virtue signaling of climate fanatics, with almost no exceptions, won’t give up air travel, or buildings made with steel and concrete, or full-time life-saving electricity at the hospital, or plenty of other things that come only from fossil fuels.
The image that I can’t get out of my mind is the spectacle of the witnesses speaking at a public hearing I attended in May 2022 on the subject of the “Scoping Plan” then proposed for New York State to banish fossil fuels from its energy system. (That Scoping Plan has since been adopted, with essentially no significant changes.). As I reported in this post on May 3, 2022, I observed about 60 people testifying at this hearing, of whom only three spoke critically about the idea of banishing fossil fuels — and those three were myself plus two representatives from local utilities (whose criticisms were understandably mild and hedged, to say the least, given the political environment that they face).
At that hearing, a large number of supporters of banning fossil fuels gave impassioned and emotional pleas to speed up the process. What had aroused these strong emotions? The witness whose testimony I remember most vividly was a thirty-ish woman who stated that her young son had severe asthma, which she blamed on the fumes emitted by her gas-powered kitchen stove. Speaking of the health problems of her son, this woman broke down in tears and deep sobs, which definitely seemed genuine, and blamed the son’s problems on the uncaring gas utility. And yet for some reason she continued to use the gas stove. Had it never occurred to her that it was completely within her agency to go out and buy an electric stove? I was hoping to get a chance to ask her that question, but she disappeared before I could track her down.
In the years that I’ve been following this subject, the efforts to impose punishments and revenge on fossil fuel producers in this country have only proliferated and become more impassioned and more intense and more angry. Here are a few markers along the way:
- In this post on January 24, 2018 I reported on lawsuits that had just been brought by certain cities in California, and by New York City, both against a group of five major oil companies, blaming them for the “nuisance” of CO2 emission, and asking for some large and unspecified amount of damages plus some equally unspecified injunctive relief. I nominated those cases for the prestigious title of “stupidest litigation in the country,” based on the proposition that I couldn’t figure out what they were really trying to accomplish. I asked, if it’s money they want, why don’t they impose a tax on fossil fuel purchases; but then I answered my own question: “Oh, wait a minute, they already have that. Well, they could double it!” Ultimately, the cases could only be understood as vengeful political acts against irrationally hated adversaries.
- The New York case from January 2018 ended up getting dismissed in the District Court, and that decision was affirmed by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, while the California case that I had discussed continues to this day to kick around the courts after a convoluted procedural history. So would this long stint in purgatory be the death of this type of effort to exact revenge on large oil companies for the sin of producing fossil fuels? The opposite. Such cases have proliferated like mushrooms in the years since. Here is a May 2023 post from a Columbia Law School blog with some extensive history of cases taking the same or very similar form. According to author Korey Silverman-Roati, “In total, at least 25 [similar] cases have been filed in California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawai’i, Maryland, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, South Carolina, and Vermont.”
- Nearly all of these cases were brought in state rather than federal courts. (The exception was the New York City case — the one that ended up getting dismissed.). The occasion for the May 2023 Columbia blog post was that the Supreme Court had just denied a certiorari petition that had been filed in several of the cases seeking to get them removed into the federal courts. With that Supreme Court action, there are now somewhere around two dozen of these cases moving forward in one state court system or another. The plan is to exact massive financial revenge against these evil oil companies.
- And how about another line of attack seeking to destroy these fossil fuel producers? It now comes to my attention that there is a campaign to introduce bills in state legislatures (all in blue states, to the extent I have learned so far) seeking to impose on fossil fuel producers an obligation to fund a type of “superfund” mechanism to pay the states large amounts to “mitigate” supposed climate damage. Here is the text of such a bill recently introduced in the Vermont legislature in 2024, and here is another one from my own New York from 2023. I’m given to understand that comparable bills are somewhere in the works in other states, including Massachusetts and Maryland. I have the same question that I had about the “nuisance” lawsuits: Why not just impose a tax? The only answer I can think of is that a mere tax does not give a sufficient demonstration of anger and revenge.
- And now for the most recent escalation, to yet another whole new level. Yesterday, there appeared in the left-wing magazine The New Republic an article with the headline: “The Case for Prosecuting Fossil Fuel Companies for Homicide.” I’m not making this up. Brief excerpt (from a long article): “Climate change is not a tragedy, it’s a crime.” This refrain, increasingly common among climate activists, encapsulates rising moral outrage at major fossil fuel companies like ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, and BP as more information has come to light about their knowledge and conduct regarding global warming.” You might think that this is completely unhinged, but believe me, the authors (and the “climate activists” that they refer to in the quote) are completely serious. Their anger is intense, and their goal is revenge.
And yet at the same time, all of the people engaged in these campaigns of anger and vengeance are major users themselves of the fossil fuels. If these products and their producers are so evil, wouldn’t a better strategy be to go out and produce substitutes that are better and cheaper and lack the environmental downside? Ah, but those better substitutes don’t exist. The world is investing trillions in the effort to come up with such substitutes, but so far nobody has succeeded. And by the way, nobody is going to succeed at this during my lifetime.
So far, the overall strategy of the major energy companies has been to lie as low as possible and hope that before long these people will come to their senses and this will all blow over. That may have made sense when this started. Ten years ago, I would not have believed that this insanity could possibly have gone as far as it has. However, given where we are today, I think that the time for lying low has passed.
Here’s my proposal for the next phase of this game. The fossil fuel producers, either individually or through trade associations, should pick a state, logically a relatively small one (Vermont might be a good place to start), and go to the legislature with this proposition: Ban us! Make the sale or use of fossil fuels in your state illegal, starting at some early date, like for example tomorrow. We will then withdraw. And your citizens will then find out whether they prefer life with fossil fuels, or without them.
In other words, stop being such pansies. It’s time to call their bluff.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
“What is it about fossil fuels and the people who produce them that brings forth such uncontrolled hatred, anger, and vengefulness in a very large segment of the population?“…
The answer to this question is to be found in “End Times”, by Peter Turchin. Along with an explanation of many more aspects of the English speaking world today.
There has been massive overproduction of elites. By elites are meant people whose families are in the 5% or 1%, and who have been educated under the assumption they too will become members in their own rights. But the number of elite positions has not grown as fast as their numbers, so two things happen.
One is every more freinzied competition for anything that will give one’s children a better chance at a seat at the table, and in increasing precariousness of tenure for any who do make it, or who gain entry to the queue at a high level.
The recent remarks by the NVidia CEO about how good suffering was for his workforce was a classic indicator of this. Writing of student loans is another, its an attempt to buy off the disaffected failures.
The second thing that happens is a rise in the number of rejects, that is, people with the right degrees obtained at great expense, all the right entries on the CV, but who have failed to get a seat. Not really their fault, but the source of endless discontent and frustration.
All the energies of the frustrated failures then go into protest and to attempts to overthrow a system which has not worked for them.
We then get to another key observation. We have been living through a fall in living standards for the working population. This is due to a couple of factors. One is simple seizure of more of national income by the elite – senior management, the top professionals, owners of assets. A second is large scale immigration which leads to high levels of competition for jobs and thus falling wages. A third is the pattern which senior management has been following: the export of manufacturing abroad in pursuit of higher returns.
This fall in living standards for any who fail to get a seat accentuates both the intensity of competition and the cost of failure.
We then arrive at the final and perhaps most important observation. These are essentially pre-revolutionary circumstances, and the disaffected elite failures are agitating for something revolutionary. But its a characteristic of revolutionary movements that their ideology does not predict their direction either during the struggle or if there is an actual revolution. The ideology and the cause can be almost anything. In our case its climate and fossil fuels, but if it were not that it would be something else. The same kind of frenzy has become attached to gender issues, to the pro-Palestine movement, to critical race theory as exemplified by the BLM riots. These issues tend to cluster together, activism in one is correlated with activism or at least belief in the others. Not because they are related. But because all are similar vehicles for the expression of revolutionary discontent.
Its quite wrong to think of this as a socialist or communist plot, its not that at all. Its the coalescence of many individuals with similar motivations to wreck, because their circumstances are similar.
Read Turchin. Not simply for his diagnosis, but also for his very interesting accounts of how some nations have found their way through such very dangerous times without lapsing into large scale social breakdown.
Its not placation, as in moving to self declaration of gender, or heavy affirmative action, defunding the police or ceasing arms supply to Israel. These will not have any effect on the discontent. But they are conceded because the elite are rightly terrified of what underlies the movement of discontent. You wonder why almost any minority today has merely to raise its voice, and governments tremble. Its because of what lies behind it, which may have nothing to do with the nominal subject of the protests.
What might work to get a society through this in one piece? Read Turchin, and read Goldstone also, to see…!
Michel – it may not originally have been a communist or socialist plot but they’ve not missed the opportunity to jump on the bandwagon. Hi-jacking other people’s causes for their own ends is what they do…
Not so. It was a communist plot by the USSR. It was developed to ensure that Russia would have a market for its only useful export – oil and gas. It also had an antinuclear focus to ensure that Russian gas would have no competitor and that Germany would be a captive market. The program was developed by Yuri Andropov with KGB infiltration of an assortment of Green groups starting in West Germany. The program succeeded so well that Andropov was chosen to be Leonid Brezhnev’s successor as head of the USSR in 1982.
It is my opinion that no one understands your comment, including you
“There has been massive overproduction of elites. By elites are meant people whose families are in the 5% or 1%”
That is an idiotic statement.
The top 1% is always one percent of the population. They are doing especially well now because the stock market is doing exceptionally well. The bottom 50% are struggling to keep up with inflation because they have few financial assets and/or do not own homes.
We should celebrate elites EXCEPT those who feel they must tell everyone else how to lives, with rules they will never follow themselves (you must reduce YOUR carbon footprint, but I will continue using my private jet).
The goal of what’s left of capitalism is the opportunity for all people to have great success by creating a product or service many people will voluntarily buy. The elites accomplished that, or at least inherited a fortune from relatives who accomplished that.
Let’s put aside the 1% or 5% or however few or many they are and just look at a couple of ideas. University was seen as elitist, a place to recruit the top people in their field – that changed as the leftists made our society far more aspirational – university became open to all and standards plummeted. The numbers of people going through university, who consider themselves ‘elite’ for doing so, has increased dramatically and yet standards of intelligence and education have declined significantly. These are the ones that consider themselves ‘elite’ for having attended university, not the generational wealth ‘elites’.
Read Turchin and Goldstone, it will repay the effort.
Overproduction of elites has nothing to do with whether a given elite is good or bad. There are all kinds, some good, some bad, some in between, and they change through their life cycles.
The Turchin-Goldstone point is that there is a driving mechanism about their evolution and behavior. One key element is that the people occupying the elite positions in society tend to increase in number faster than the number of positions. It happens for a variety of reasons which T&G get into in detail. This is what is meant by over production of elites.
Put it crudely – the US, UK, Canada, probably Australia and NZ also, have lots of people educated to rule and be wealthy and occupy important jobs and positions, but there aren’t enough jobs and positions for them all. So what do they do? They are the natural leadership of revolutionary movements, because they have nothing to lose. If you are flipping burgers with an expensive law degree, of course you want to overturn society as you see it.
Something has happened to our societies and economies over the last 60 or so years. T&G make a real contribution to understanding what it is, its role in present discontents, and what some plausible outcomes of it are.
Read them. Start with End Times. It has a lot of the answers to the question Menton raises, at a rather deeper level than the question about why they hate oil producers. The question they are trying to answer is something like this: They would be hating something else if it wasn’t oil. So don’t ask why oil, instead ask why the hate. This is the fundamental question.
Even if you don’t agree with T&Gs explanation, in formulating your disagreement and alternative point of view you will deepen your thinking about the issue. They are sufficiently rigorous that disagreement with them will force you to be rigorous in return.
You seem to mean ‘elite’ as the most financially successful persons rather than power elite. Financial elite do not have power (except in the demented minds of Marxists).
It’s evidently mental illness; we just can’t say what kind yet. My instinct says that – based on my experience of interacting with these fanatics. “Fanatics”, is just what they appear to me. We give them our best, most compelling, empirical evidence. They don’t simply ignore it; they’re actually offended that we think about the issues but didn’t come to their conclusion. Perhaps they suffer from fear instead? Possibly, there is a lot of fear-oriented propaganda directed against fossil fuels.
Fear
1) Fear is a survival response.
2) Although fear is first experienced in our mind, it triggers a strong physical reaction in our body. As soon as we recognize fear, our amygdala (a small organ in the middle of our brain) alerts the nervous system, which then sets our body’s fear response into motion. Stress hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline are released. Our blood pressure and heart rate increase. We breath faster. Blood flows change — blood actually flows away from our heart and into your limbs, making it easier for us to throw punches, or run for our life. Our body is preparing for fight-or-flight.
3) As our amygdala senses fear, our cerebral cortex (the reasoning and judgment part of bour brain) is impaired — making it hard to make good decisions or think clearly. We see the results of this in: shouting, screaming, throwing our hands up, wanting to punch something. We want to act – not to think.
4) We cannot override fear. For example, even when we know there’s no threat we can’t rationalize that the apparent threat isn’t real.
Where is my join the discussion peace? Still looking for spam you must be joking.
Each has their own motivation, though most can be grouped into three categories.
Money
Lawyers welcome sizable fees that come with drawn out lawsuits.
Environmental groups welcome increased donations and take a piece of the settlement
Politicians up tax revenues indirectly via higher prices at the pump, which they caused.
Relevance
People like their crusades. That 15-minutes of fame can be addictive.
Many are trying to secure a seat at the cool kids table so they can hang with the swells.
(Recall that the cool kids really weren’t that cool.)
Stupidity
Most are just plain stupid. And they are easy prey for glib people in the “Money” category.
Francis,
I have advocated for a long time the same strategy as you. Just give the dissenters what they crave.
Tell the loudest denigrators of fossil fuel, we as providers of the thing you hate so much will meet your desire and stop supplying you.
I would estimate it would take just days before the same headline creating Climate Control zealots who claim they want to ban FF would be in the press demanding their right to have FF.
Private individuals would supply what’s needed, the “black market”. No serious demand goes unmet if there is money available. The elites might be slightly inconvenienced. The least compensated employed would walk to work.
Stop worrying about why, they are mentally retarded, that is why. We, real Human Beings, have to strip these enemies of the Human Race of all access to the use and benefits from modern energy production. Place them on reservations, seal all access/exits, and leave them to live their lives in poverty, starvation and disease. That is what they are trying to force on us.
Allowing asylum inmates access to the internet seems to have been a mistake.
You and AlGore and Lurch Kerry prove that every day, sweety.
I wish the technology existed to remove all Looney leftys from all sources of fossil fuels.
Looking for a rational explanation for rage. You won’t find one, rage is irrational.
But that is the point, those who intentionally stir up outrage have a very rational reason to do so.
If you hold a minority position in a democratically inclined governing system, feigned outrage over grievances is one of the many ways to sway the majority.
Usually, the majority is only swayed for a short time by these grievance spectacles. All that is needed is for the circus to last long enough to institute changes that cannot be easily reversed. Then they move on.
This is sometimes called the “long march through the institutions”. The radicals stir up enough shills to completely wreck something, like the Ivy Leagues, then move onto something else.
The perpetually outraged shills go on shrieking, not noticing that they are no longer useful idiots. The sheer passion of the emotional fugue sustains itself. Truth, logic and proportion lie sloppy dead, as the song goes. (“White Rabbit”, Jefferson Airplane)
This demagoguery has been used so often that it no longer needs an obvious spokesman or party affiliation. Perfect for the hyper-partisan conspirators who use it. All they need is to whisper in the ears of the so-called media and it is out on the airwaves in moments. Rush Limbaugh used to assemble sound bite collages of dozens of “news outlets” all using the same wording to push the same propaganda. “Barack Obama swept into the CIA offices and was greeted like a rock star” is the one I remember, there are thousands of others.
The rage you saw in that poor duped gas-stove user is just a tiny example. Those who use propaganda to tear down western civilization will laugh when they hear of it. And use it again. When they succeed, they will know that the joke was on them as they cower in their hovels. Wondering where their next meal is coming from, since there are no more truckers or farmers.
They are clearly delusional and probably mentally ill. My question is this:
Why don’t they move somewhere and show us how it’s done without fossil fuels? Why do WE have to tear everything down?
They have no idea what comes AFTER their glorious revolution, but they’re deluded enough to think that life will be the same without fossil fuels.
And they’re communists, so there’s that.
I think that for many of the “followers”, they want to eliminate what they’ve been sold is “evil” but they, for some reason, think that their own lives won’t change much.
Sort of a version of “Not In My Backyard”.
Where is the evidence that the segment of the population that actively supports anti fossil fuel policies is “very large?”
Loudness of rhetoric should not be mistaken for plurality of supporters. I would suggest that the “silent majority” are not silent because they don’t want to oppose these policies. One reason why they are silent may be because too many are as yet ignorant of the scale of the fraud they are being subjected to. Another is because they, and those who are willing to speak up on their behalf, are being gagged.
The solution to the first problem is education: to the second, is criminal justice.
Yes, but how to educate the silent majority? They need to realize what catastrophists are doing to their family budget.
Had it never occurred to her that it was completely within her agency to go out and buy an electric stove?
No, it hadn’t. She needs someone in authority to make her do that. And that’s not joking or being sarcastic – we have major portions of at least two generations conditioned to blind obedience to authority to where they can’t think for or initiate action for themselves.
I won’t link it, but look up “Sunshine Bob” on Youtube – posted 17 years ago (although to make a different point) and still relevant.
In other words, stop being such pansies.
You know it won’t happen.
The wide divide between speech and action that is evident in the campaigners against fossil fuels reminds me of the similar observation about those who speak reverently about celibacy. Hypocrisy seems to be seen as more of a feature than a flaw in those who want to tell the rest of the world how to live.
It’s psychiatric. They need something to hate. If it were not fossil fuels it would be something else.
There is the same pathological hatred for nuclear energy – which could substantially reduce CO2 emission when producing electricity – and plastics, and an obsessive recycling compulsion for no other purpose than the ritual.
There is no point looking for a reasonable, rational explanation when those two are absent.
Jonathan Swift commented that you cannot reason a man out of something he has not reasoned himself into.
Where is the reason in demanding more farmland be ‘rewilded’ to provide more natural plant and animal habitat, whilst demanding the very thing that increases natural plant and animal habitat, CO2, be reduced thereby reducing plant life and destroying recent plant growth around deserts – an area the size of the USA?
The second part is right, it would indeed be something else.
The first part is wrong, its not really psychiatric. Its a rage based on resentment of the fact that society does not have enough well paying high level positions for them. And so the rage is directed at demolishing any part that is both accessible and fundamental to society functioning. The rage moves around apparently randomly, now its climate, now its transphobia, now its Islamophobia, now its racism, colonialism, the misdeeds of slave traders (only Western ones, notice) of 200 years ago. Its anything that can work as a target for righteous indignation, and justify to some degree policies which would wreck the functioning of society if adopted.
A classic is the demand to ‘defund the police’.
Its not a centralized conspiracy, its individuals acting similarly because they have similar experiences and interests.
Its sort of rational. It is really true they are over educated for jobs and roles that don’t exist in sufficient numbers to accommodate them all. If everything is thrown up in the air, they might well end up better off. Or some of them may. Lenin after all did a lot better than he would have if he had remained a schoolmaster in the rural wilderness. Or it felt to him like he was doing better. It was certainly a lot more exciting.
So no, this is not illness. Its much worse and more dangerous than that.
Well, it is psychological I think.
Psychiatric is a stronger malady, but the violent ones can be categorized as that.
I have proposed similar, but I like yours much better.
Funny part of all those litigations is I can find none, not one, that invokes an injunction against the oil companies.
Lacking the injunction, there are very few possibilities.
Maybe I missed others.
And as an added thought, point out that the very clothes worn, food, electronics, etc., etc., etc., would have to be given up to be oil free.
In following the trials and tribulations of what is happening in New York City with their Net Zero transition follies, watching this happen from Beta Blocker World Headquarters here in the middle of nowhere in southeastern Washington State, I have become deeply concerned that my favorite source of expensive gourmet cookies might be driven out of business as a consequence of the ever-rising costs for electicity in the city.
These hummers from the Levain Bakery now cost five dollars a cookie. But they hit the spot with my relatives when I send them as birthday and holiday gifts. I even order some for myself once in awhile, twice a year or so. It takes me a month to eat them, half a cookie at a time.
If the cost of energy or other kinds of absurd Net Zero regulations drive the Levain Bakery out of NYC, I’m sure cities like Boise or Spokane out here in the wild west would be glad to have them relocate there.
There is absolutely no mystery here, the creation of the fraud of human induced catastrophic climate change due to the use of fossil fuels (CO2) was from the very start was political, it was never about science that was simply window dressing, a diversion from their real aim of destroying the west in favor o a global socialist state.
Story Tip:
https://www.theepochtimes.com/world/some-e-bikes-to-be-banned-from-go-trains-due-to-fire-hazard-5607547
Some E-Bikes to Be Banned From GO Trains Due to Fire Hazard!
Simple answer to the headline: A large number of the population has to be below average intelligence for there to be an average intelligence. Those people without much reasoning power are also gullible and targets of those who have something to gain from promoting all the BS.
I went on a Am. Assoc.of Petroleum Geologists field trip in the 1970’s which included a stop at Teapot Dome. We were mostly interested in the outcrops, but the leader recounted the story of the oil companies in 1921 bribing officials for the oil rights to the area and concluded “the oil business earned a black eye in public opinion from which it never recovered”. Some of it is our fault for stupid scandals like that, but we always have been and always will be the bad guys.
The left has always hated anyone who has been successful.
Until they start giving millions to leftist causes.
Why the hate of oil companies? Don’t know but it is nothing new – it appears to go back to at least the 1920s – remember the stories, apparently going back to the 1920s, of them suppressing the 100 mpg carburetor – they bought the patents and are keeping it off the market. Of course this is an obvious lie because 1) laws of nature 2) patents require full disclosure and EXPIRE after a few years.
Governments CANNOT just raise the oil taxes because they obviously be the cause of skyrocketing prices, so to they have to milk the cash cow another way – lawsuits worked against the tobacco companies, so why not here?
As to cutting off oil to a state. Why can’t one of the majors, on the day they get served with a suit, reply that the suit is now moot because we are no longer selling our, allegedly deadly, product in your state. See how many other companies get sued and follow the example. I’ll bet the suit gets dismissed within 5 days as people riot for access to fuel, heat and electricity.
They hate human life.
The inaugural issue of The Ecologist magazine referred to humans as ‘parasites’.
Pamphlets by Objectivists like George Reisman quote environmentalists with similar claims, some of them US government employees decades ago.
Marxism is commonly their underlying ideology, it is anti-human and hypocritical (it supports contradictions – ‘ dialectic logic’ – and lying for the cause).
Marxism was the most murderous ideology of the 20th century.
What is the psychology of people who push lies?