Miseducation by Katie Worth

Author:Katie Worth [Worth, Katie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

Selling Kids on Fossil Fuels

One early spring day I was sitting in the science department of an Arkansas middle school when a representative of the state’s oil and gas industry walked in. She was there to talk to the seventh graders.

Her name was Paige Miller, a petite blonde with a short shag-cut and big silver jewelry. She told me she ran Arkansas Energy Rocks!, an initiative of the Arkansas Independent Producers & Royalty Owners, which describes itself as “the voice of Arkansas’s oil and natural gas community.” Twenty attentive tween faces watched as she cued up a PowerPoint presentation.

Arkansas, she told the students, had the good fortune of being an energy state. She described the layer cake of earth and minerals under the students’ feet and pointed to diagrams showing which of those layers are soaked in fuel. She showed them pictures of the technology that sucks that fuel out. Twenty-five of the state’s seventy-five counties produce either oil or gas, and some 33,000 people are employed in that production. Arkansas is a landlocked state, but some Arkansans even work on offshore oil rigs, she said. They fly to the rigs on helicopters, work for two weeks, then get two weeks off.

“Does that seem like a good schedule? Half time?” she asked the students.

“Mm-hmm!” the kids chorused.

“So how much do they pay you?” asked one student.

“The average starting salary on an offshore drilling rig is $100,000 a year,” Miller said.

“Wow!” whispered another student.

“Fossil fuels have been very important to mankind,” she said, and launched into a list of ways that that is true. She showed the students a pie chart of the nation’s energy sources. Fossil fuels made up the majority of the pie. Each renewable energy source comprised a slim slice. But using fossil fuels comes at a cost, she told the students. “The problem with fossil fuels is carbon emissions,” she said, without elaborating on the nature of that problem. “But somebody’s going to have a problem with all of these energy sources,” she said. “Geothermal power works well but it’s expensive. Wind power a lot of people don’t like because they say it kills birds. A lot of people don’t like hydropower because they say we shouldn’t be damming up bodies of water. With solar, if there’s a tornado, what happens to the solar fuel?”

“It goes away,” the students said.

“You’re going to find a problem with any one of these sources.”

As for the carbon problem, there’s not much the US can do about it, she said. “If the United States shut down all fossil fuel usage tomorrow—all of it—the difference it would make in terms of global warming is 0.01 percent,” she said, inaccurately. She did not define global warming, but then presented a dark scenario of what might happen if we address it. “There are actually 1.2 billion people on the continent of Africa and the country of India who live every day without electricity. Now think about that—what your life would be like without electricity. You don’t have a refrigerator in your house full of good food being cooled properly.

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