Why Environmentalists Love Plummeting Oil Prices.
NEW YORK — Deepwater drilling rigs are sitting idle. Fracking plans are being scaled back. Enormous new projects to squeeze oil out of the oilsands of Canada are being shelved.
Maybe low oil prices aren’t so bad for the environment after all.
The global price of oil has plummeted 31 per cent in just five months, a steep and surprising drop after a four-year period of prices near or above $100 a barrel.
Not long ago a drop of that magnitude would have hit the environmental community like a gut-punch. The lower the price of fossil fuels, the argument went, the less incentive there would be to develop and use cleaner alternatives like batteries or advanced biofuels.
But at around $75 a barrel, the price is high enough to keep investments flowing into alternatives, while giving energy companies less reason to pursue expensive and risky oil fields that also pose the greatest threat to the environment.
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