“When you have the facts on your side,” an old legal adage goes, “you pound the facts. But if you don’t have the facts, but have the law on your side, you pound the law,” it continues. “And if you don’t have either, you pound the table.”
Well friends, as DeSmog’s Sharon Kelly reported on Tuesday, in the face of climate facts not in their favor, and with climate advocates scoring legal wins, the fossil fuel industry is increasingly left with no other option but to pound the table. Literally.
Kelly reported that last month at a shale gas conference, it was clear that the industry is feeling the public pressure for climate action. Dominion Energy executive Donald Raikes explained to attendees that they “can't sit on the sidelines and be climate deniers... we can't stick our head in the sand… We have to be a player at the table or this policy will be set without us.”
But instead of acknowledging that “more fossil fuels” is hardly a climate policy, Raikes instead complained about those who recognize that reality. “Sophisticated” and “well-funded” environmentalists with “very good messaging” “have made [the industry] public enemy number one,” Raikes warned his gassy comrades.
The irony of an executive for a company that made over $13 billion last year warning about well-funded green groups aside, Raikes is correct that greens have good messaging. After all, when the science and facts are on your side, they’re easy enough to pound!
As for those facts, they continue to stack up against the gas industry, and Raikes seems to be having trouble dealing with that. For a while, the industry had, if not the support, then the benign neglect of the climate community. After all, natural gas was supposed to be a bridge fuel, used to kill coal and pave the way for renewables. But as Vox’s David Roberts explained in May, “those arguments for natural gas that seemed so compelling during the Obama years have fallen apart. It’s now clear that if the world is to meet the climate targets it promised in Paris, natural gas, like coal, must be deliberately and rapidly phased out.”
So the facts of the climate are no longer with the gas industry. But what about jobs? Raikes claimed that there are millions of American jobs in the industry, but as Kelly points out, those numbers are hardly credible, having come from an American Petroleum Institute-commissioned study.
Nonetheless, Raikes rallied the conference-goers, and told them about a German tradition of pounding the table to show support for a statement or speaker. He then decried the “very sophisticated, well-funded machine” they’re up against, and the need for them to “make sure that we are carrying the banner and representing the facts when it comes to natural gas.”
And with that, the natural gas industry executives in attendance started pounding the table. But at this point? We can tell them to go pound sand.
(Sand that they’re definitely not sticking their head in…)
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