Editorial: Big oil confronts climate change – not a minute too soon

All of the above

Fletcher praised Biden’s decision to return America to the Paris Climate Agreement, but she also joined many Republicans in criticizing his temporary ban on new oil and gas leases on federal lands. She was thinking about jobs. The oil and gas business makes up roughly 10 percent of the Houston GDP, Houston-based economist Jesse Thompson of the Dallas branch of the Federal Reserve told the editorial board. If indirect spending is included, that share jumps to roughly 30 percent, he said.

That’s a lot of workers. Fletcher told this editorial board her message to her colleagues in Washington, and to the White House, is that Texas supports an all-of-the-above strategy when it comes to America’s mix of fossil fuels and renewables such as wind and solar.

“We believe in science and believe in climate change,” Fletcher said, adding that she supports federal incentives for low-carbon technologies and sensible regulation that rewards best practices. “But oil and gas are going to be part of the mix for a long time to come.”

True, oil and gas aren’t going away overnight. But here’s what Fletcher and other oil industry boosters leave out: The industry is going to shrink. The growing energy demand from developing nations won’t be enough to fully counteract a global shift away from fossil fuels and toward renewables.

Last year, Shell produced a series of three scenarios for the future use of oil and other sources of energy. In all of them — including what it called the business-as-usual case — the amount of oil consumed worldwide in both absolute terms and as a share of all energy use falls in coming years.

That’ll mean fewer jobs as we know them in oil and gas, no matter how weak or aggressive the U.S. climate policy is. In that light, it might sound like good sense for supporters of the industry to cling to every last oil and gas job. But that short-term approach will tie their hands in the long run.

‘More stable wages’

For years, the Obama administration kept saying the green economy will spin off hundreds of thousands of new jobs to replace those lost as the world consumes less oil. The problem with that scenario, for Houston anyway, is that if those new jobs are located elsewhere, they won’t do much to stave off a mighty economic reckoning here.

We believe, however, that the same companies that call Houston home, the ones with famous names and tens of thousands of highly skilled energy workers — from scientists to materials engineers to oil patch roughnecks — could help lead the push into new products, new technology and ultimately new energy sources. When Exxon announced it was creating its low carbon subsidiary, it amounted to a recognition that as the world changed, so too was Exxon’s willingness to slide more of its chips over to the green economy. Shell, which has 8,000 workers in the Houston area, is moving more aggressively still: the Chronicle’s Paul Takahashi reported Friday it will divest itself of oil and gas assets to the tune of $4 billion a year over 10 years.

Thompson, the Federal Reserve economist, said that’s likely to continue. There are thousands of workers in Texas who could easily transfer their skills to a greener economy. “The same people who are drilling for oil could be building off-shore wind farms,” he said. “Will it be a one-to-one transfer? Probably not,” he said. “But there is still really good reason to believe the industry will be able to innovate its way through this transition.”

A lot depends on what forms the new energy investments take. If Big Oil leads the way in developing hydrogen fuel sources, for instance, then the highly skilled scientists already working in the area will be very welcome, he said.

Even lower wages in other areas could have a positive trade-off: “They might have to accept somewhat lower wages,” Thompson said, “but they will be more stable wages.”

Confronting the crisis

The real excitement behind Exxon’s announcement is that it signals American oil giants are moving to confront the climate crisis. Quickly enough? Not nearly. But it marks a fundamental shift in mindset.

John Hofmeister, the former president of Shell Oil, Royal Dutch Shell’s U.S. subsidiary headquartered in Houston, told us the industry’s embrace of greener fuels is accelerating: “The European majors are well ahead of their American counterparts on energy transition, but there is a desire on the part of the American companies to catch-up.”

That’s great news, and not just for the planet. The very companies that anchor the Houston economy now are the ones that have the deep pockets, highly skilled workers and increasingly, the customer-driven incentives to reinvent the way the world uses energy. It’s in everyone’s interest — including their own — to fully embrace that future.

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