The remarks of these lobbyists suggested that many of them live on a different planet, where climate change is not an urgent challenge but rather is the obsession of ideological malcontents.
The meeting, held annually, is sponsored by the United States Energy Association, whose chieftains are not the CEOs of America’s oil, coal, and gas companies. Rather, they are the heads of the Washington-based trade associations that lobby against regulation of greenhouse gases and toxic pollution. They mostly are former corporate lawyers or Capital Hill functionaries who worked their way up and now receive enormous-for-DC salaries to serve at the beck and call of actual energy executives.
I think most of us are grateful to the men and women of America’s energy companies for providing the power that fuels so much of our lives. The question is, now that the evidence of human-made global warming is overwhelming, what do these companies want to do about it? Will they continue to deny the dangers of climate change and vilify those who seek to slow it? Or can they instead change course and devote more of their skills and resources to innovations for cleaner energy, innovations that could make their companies, not to mention the Earth, more sustainable in the long term?
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