Le Devoir reports that a group of Quebec environmentalists wrote a letter to provoke Michael Binnion on the occasion of the Quebec Oil and Gas Conference.
I am blogging on it so consider me provoked.
They accuse my industry of wanting to poison the environment. They then say that their accusation is based on the position of the World Bank, the International Energy Agency and science.
Really? I ask. The World Bank, the IEA and even science say we are trying to poison the environment?
We are an industry of science. Our workers are predominantly engineers, geologists, geophysicists and many other scientific specialists. They are also professionals with orders and guidelines.
Our workers also live in our shared environment. In addition to scientists we are also hikers, skiers, hunters, fishers, bikers and parents. That’s right our workers also have children. We love our clean water and our clean air and we love our children too.
How does it possibly make sense that the very people with the most knowledge and the most information and the most experience wouldn’t use it in their day to day decisions? Our workers live next door to teachers, nurses, oil field workers and even environmentalists. We live with our children too.
Without energy we can’t have hospitals, schools, iPhones or even bicycles. Energy is the foundation of our society and it touches everything we do. Consumers have a lot of energy choices and can decide the balance they want in their energy diet. We are improving those choices every day and the balance of our energy diet is improving too.
I am proud of our industry. We work hard, very hard. It’s not easy to provide the affordable energy we all need with an ever reducing environmental impact. Yet we do it. We do it with amazing advances in technology.
We read the World Bank reports and the International Energy Agency too. We are scientists with direct experience who can comprehend what these reports mean. They don’t say our industry wants to poison the environment. How ridiculous is that? They say we have to continue what we are already doing. We have to continue finding better and better technologies. That is the only way we will continue to have affordable energy with smaller environmental footprints.
We agree with that. We live it every day.
P.S. They should read the part of the International Energy Agency report that says the world had entered the golden age of natural gas. Barack Obama calls it the future of green energy in America. Yet Quebec protesters block the development of the Utica natural gas project which is probably the cleanest source of natural gas in North America. They call that a good day’s work?