Embarrassment as an art form

To say that the news flood so far this month has been a target-rich environment for whiners like me would be an understatement. The news flood this month has been a veritable horn of plenty, with said plenty being of the conflicting signals variety.

Perhaps the most obvious example would be President Biden’s confident statement that “there will be no more drilling” a day or so after he urged U.S. oil companies to, well, drill more. But it’s far from the only one.

Take this Guardian report: Oil and gas firms planning ‘frightening’ fossil fuels growth, report finds. Published Wednesday, the report decries investment plans by the oil industry that are, shockingly, plans for more drilling for oil and gas.

According to the authors of the cited report, these plans are incompatible with the IEA’s vision of net zero by 2050. According to the IEA itself, OPEC+’s decision to reduce oil production by a million barrels daily is “not helpful”.

Anyone would be confused by this messaging but it has become more or less standard procedure these days. First, you condemn the oil industry for producing oil, then you condemn them for not producing enough oil. I feel an oncoming headache just writing about it.

But there’s more, as there always is. A Bloomberg columnist this week proposed a new, anti-OPEC group of oil buyers that will punish OPEC+, and especially Saudi Arabia and Russia for curbing oil production.

I sketched the main problems with that brilliant idea in a feature due to be published later today on Oilprice but I can’t not mention it here as well. The group, which the author dubs the “Organization for Clean and Affordable Transportation” would “manage” global oil prices within “an affordable but adequately profitable range”.

In order to be able to “manage” prices in this way, the OCAT (not the best acronym as acronyms go) would need to first punish OPEC+ with things like fines, import tariffs, and, yes, sanctions. Because this won’t prompt a response, of course.

The author, by the way, is “a former chairman of the Sierra Club and the coauthor, with Michael R. Bloomberg, of “Climate of Hope,”” which really tells us all we need to know about the OCAT idea.

I find it really fascinating how resilient the idea of buyers telling sellers what price to set for their product —which is vital for everyone involved — has turned out to be despite all the reality checks it has had to endured since Mario Draghi first suggested it this spring. I guess that’s because it’s such a sexy idea one tends to ignore the unintended consequences.

Another thing I find fascinating is how nobody involved in this mixed messaging that, on the one hand, insists we need to stop using oil and, on the other, insists with equal conviction we need more affordable oil otherwise the world economy will crash, does not seem to feel the slightest embarrassment. The people generating these messages seem to have elevated embarrassment to an art form and are now incapable of feeling any.

Europe is, as usual, a great case in point. European officials have been bragging about how they have reduced the EU’s dependence on Russian gas from 40% to 8%, conveniently overlooking the fact a lot of that “reduction” was not exactly voluntary. And yet we now learn another embarrassing fact: the EU may not be importing so much Russian pipeline gas but it is certainly importing a lot of Russian liquefied gas.

In any decent universe, this would be highly embarrassing but the one we happen to inhabit right now left decency in its rear-view mirror a couple of hundred transition-and-sanctions statements ago.

In this universe, it’s perfectly non-embarrassing to import Russian LNG, just as it is perfectly non-embarrassing to stock up on Russian coal and oil, and diesel before the sanctions you devised against those same coal, oil, and diesel kick in. In this universe, that sort of thing passes for rational behaviour.

So does the EU’s Josep Borrell’s tour in the Middle East, and more specifically the UAE, where he said this week that “Your security is our security,” and also that “We need to reduce our consumption of gas" and that "We need other suppliers and we need to continue fighting against climate change at the moment.”

If the above statements sound a little bit incoherent, that’s okay — incoherence is the new black in political discourse. Saying mutually exclusive things in two consecutive statements is perfectly acceptable as long as both sound sufficiently dramatic, which would divert listeners’ attention from petty details such as meaning.

Here’s a couple of more statements from Borrell that made me feel embarrassed so I’m spreading the joy: “I think our energy partnership makes more sense than ever. You are supplier, we are consumer, but hydrocarbon will not be the energy forever. We need to look for new sources," he said, only to add:

"You have sun. You are investing a lot in new renewables. It is also an important partnership,” which made me suspect some form of substance abuse but I may be wrong.

Anyway, speaking of drama, this week the UN’s secretary-general took the cake. The imagery in his latest speeches — and tweets — is fit for a Stephen King novel, if he co-authors it with Edmund Spenser from beyond the grave. “The Stand” meets “The Faerie Queene” in the bestseller of the decade.

Yet while Antonio Guterres took the cake, I can’t ignore the runner-up, which this week was climate activist Mike Hudema, who blessed us with a list of six things to do right now to solve our climate problem.

Here they are, with my humble and completely unproductive comments:

1) End the use of fossil fuels (This one’s easy. Just stop pumping)

2) Build massive amounts of solar & wind (Impossible without fossil fuels but who cares)

3) Electrify everything (Impossible without 2), which is impossible without fossil fuels. This is fun!)

4) Conserve (Well, we’ll have to, in light of 2) and 3) being impossible without fossil fuels.)

5) Find solutions for the last hard stuff (planes, cement) (That’s too vague, which is disappointing but sure, let’s find those solutions. While conserving, of course.)

6) Stop cutting down trees (We should totally do that, by way of culling the planet’s human population as the simplest solution)

I don’t know about you, but I think Mr. Hudema would make a great replacement for the IEA’s Fatih Birol or even the UN’s Guterres.

Because I don’t want to end on a depressing note, let me share a personal story, which is both informative and entertaining.

My daughter came into my “office” today while I was browsing news and she happened to see a picture of an oil pump. With the insatiable curiosity of 11-year-olds, she immediately asked how it worked.

Always happy to oblige, I found a YouTube video explaining the way nodding donkeys operate. We were both fascinated. Then she asked to watch another video, which just showed a lot of nodding donkeys, well, nodding.

“It’s great!” she said. “I know it’s bad but it looks so great!” The process of separating the oil from the gas and the water was apparently, equally great. I’ve definitely passed on the right genes even if they never manifested in me.

“Well, it pollutes, yes, but there are strict rules for not harming the environment and we’ve done a lot to make sure ICEs bur more cleanly,” I told her and then I reminded her the world runs on oil and gas, which she already knows even if she’s not happy about it at this impressionable age. I’m not taking any chances. There are way too many children on their way to brilliant embarrassment artists already.