“World Should be Optim­istic About Our Fossil Fuel Future” (Bradley op-ed in Houston Chronicle)

From MasterResource

By Roger Donway

Ed. Note: Robert L. Bradley Jr’s opinion-page editorial, reprinted below, appeared in the Houston Chronicle last Sunday, April 12, 2026. Tomorrow’s post will explain the significance of Bradley’s op-ed given the Chronicle’s long-standing bias against fossil fuels.

CER­AWeek was in town last month, joined by cli­mate act­iv­ists who showed up to protest. The real­ity, however, is that cli­mate act­iv­ism is in retreat.

The so-called “energy trans­ition” is potholed by an unpre­ced­en­ted num­ber of solar bank­ruptcies, elec­tric-vehicle retreats, and cor­por­ate pull­backs from wind, hydro­gen, and car­boncap­ture projects.

A roadmap to phase out fossil fuels was defeated at the last United Nations con­fer­ence on cli­mate change, in line with a recent pre­dic­tion by the Inter­na­tional Energy Agency that oil demand will increase for dec­ades. Texas, for its part, pro­duced a record two bil­lion bar­rels last year.

The U.S. Envir­on­mental Pro­tec­tion Agency even recently reversed its earlier decision that car­bon diox­ide and other man­made green­house gases are a danger to health and human wel­fare.

Plenty of Demo­crats are also rethink­ing their cli­mate policies. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul is mov­ing to weaken the state’s cli­mate reg­u­la­tions. Even the rad­ical Sun­rise Move­ment seems to have pivoted to pro-Palestinian act­iv­ism over cli­mate con­cerns.

Yes, atmo­spheric con­cen­tra­tions of car­bon diox­ide and other warm­ing gases are rising. But this is hardly the “exist­en­tial threat of our time,” as Pres­id­ent Joe Biden once put it.

Rather, this is an oppor­tun­ity for optim­ism.

Ignore the rhet­oric about “dis­in­form­a­tion” or “den­iers.” The case for cooler heads starts with a lit­any of other fals­i­fied exag­ger­a­tions pro­pounded by self-pro­claimed defend­ers of the sci­entific con­sensus. In 1968, Stan­ford pro­fessor Paul Ehr­lich’s “The Pop­u­la­tion Bomb” pre­dicted immin­ent riots in U.S. streets from food short­ages. Four years later, The Club of Rome’s “The Lim­its to Growth,” writ­ten by MIT-cre­den­tialed authors, pre­dicted near-term resource crises, includ­ing peak oil and peak gas. In the same dec­ade, global cool­ing fears were touted in books and art­icles.

Those fears never came to fruition, and cli­mate change is fol­low­ing a sim­ilar path.

John Hold­ren, Pres­id­ent Obama’s two-term sci­ence advisor, once warned that as many as a bil­lion people could die by 2020 from cli­mate change. That clearly hasn’t happened.

The real­ity is that the cli­mate changes over time. Since the end of the Little Ice Age in the mid-19th cen­tury, global tem­per­at­ures have increased about two degrees. Some of this increase is nat­ural. Human­ity and nature are find­ing ways to adjust to this change. In our era of con­di­tioned air and other mod­ern con­veni­ences, the tech­no­logy for adapt­a­tion is unpre­ced­en­ted.

What about those weather extremes, such as hur­ricanes, floods and droughts, that human­ity can’t so eas­ily accom­mod­ate? A recent report by the U.S. Depart­ment of Energy found no long-term increases in extreme storms, hur­ricanes, tor­nadoes, floods, or droughts.

Mean­while, fossil fuels are still ascend­ant, partly from a back­lash against “green” energy by those most dir­ectly affected. Many are push­ing back against a top-down energy trans­ition. More than 1,100 wind, solar, and bat­tery projects have been delayed or defeated at the grass­roots level, reflect­ing the prob­lems of inter­mit­tent, fra­gile, land-intens­ive, trans­mis­sion­in­tens­ive, gov­ern­ment-depend­ent renew­able energy.

Energy phys­ics explains the back­lash by con­sumers and com­munit­ies. Earth’s Sun, work­ing over the ages, cre­ated a stock of embed­ded, con­cen­trated energy that is far super­ior to the daily flow of solar rays. Solar in its most effi­cient form is oil, gas, and coal.

Pro­gress­ives may bristle at rhet­oric call­ing cli­mate alarm “a hoax” and the Green New Deal “a scam,” but the world keeps turn­ing, and con­sumer-voters are sens­it­ive to green-energy infla­tion.

Con­sumer-chosen, tax­pay­er-neut­ral energy is the oppor­tun­ity cost of the Green New Deal. Global luke­warming is more the real­ity than a run­away green­house-gas effect. Adapt­a­tion, with the aid of fossil fuels, is the policy pre­scrip­tion. Such middle ground can allow cooler heads to pre­vail in a future filled with optim­ism.

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Robert L. Brad­ley Jr., is CEO of the Insti­tute for Energy Research, which he foun­ded in Hou­s­ton in 1989 and is now centered in Wash­ing­ton, D.C.