Carbon Capital by Sean Field

Author:Sean Field
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: NYU Press

4

Not a Dichotomy

Climate Change and Hydrocarbons

We better hope it’s man-made, because if it’s not we’re in trouble.

—Lindsay Graham, quoting Mitt Romney, 2019

Arthur called to tell me that he would be a bit late. It was a warm, sunny day in late September and I had invited Arthur over for dinner. He and Katie, his girlfriend, arrived at our modest apartment a half hour later. I saw Arthur’s white SUV pull into the driveway of the apartment complex and went out to greet them in the sun-baked parking lot. I led them up the outdoor stairway, down the terraced corridor, and into our air-conditioned flat. They brought a bottle of wine and a chocolate meringue pie that they had picked up the day before from a small German-style bakery halfway between Houston and San Antonio. We chatted over some appetizers out on the large square ottoman. As we chatted, Arthur occasionally checked his phone before excusing himself for a few minutes to take a phone call; he said that he was working on a deal and needed to confirm a few details with the counterparty. When dinner was ready, the four of us sat down at the small, round dining table. As we took our places, Arthur excitedly showed me a picture that an employee had sent him from one of his portfolio firms that was operating somewhere in the southwestern United States. The picture was of a drilling platform with a torch-like natural gas flare atop a boom set against a rural scenic orange sunset—visual evidence of his firm’s oil exploration and production activities.

As we dug into our homemade curry, Katie asked me what I thought about climate change and calls to stop oil and gas extraction. Climate change was something that Arthur and I had talked about, and I knew that he and Katie had talked about it as well. Almost everyone I had come to know had told me that climate change and the anthropogenic impact of hydrocarbons were topics of conversation at home. Often it was the source of tension and intergenerational conflict—some said that their children and their children’s friends “hated” the oil and gas industry (Field 2023). For many, this disapproval was cause for introspection and an ethical appraisal of their work, the industry, and their place in the world (as with Tony in the Introduction). Katie seemed to be both genuinely curious about what I thought as well as slightly provocative, asking me to step into what I understood was an ongoing conversation between her and Arthur. With a moment of pause, I said that I believed in climate change and that oil and gas was contributing to it, but that the focus of my research was understanding how people within the industry themselves ethically navigate the world, including how they approached climate change. Arthur then chipped in. He said that the infrastructure and technology was just not in place for an energy transition. He believed in climate change and said that “I really hope we invent completely renewable energy,” but until then he was going to produce oil and gas.

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