Fossil Fuel Political Backfire (AEI’s Teixeira explains)

In his Free Press article “How Progressives Blew It,” Ruy Teixeira of the American Enterprise Institute, explained how the anti-fossil-fuel narrative of the Left backfired.

“Telling people fossil fuels are evil and they must stop using them was a terrible idea, and voters hate it,” he began. 

Since the days of Barack Obama and an “all of the above” approach to energy production, progressives have embraced a radical approach to energy issues. They promulgated the view that climate change is not gradually advancing, but is already a crisis evident in extreme weather events. It threatens the existence of the planet without immediate, drastic action. That action must include the immediate replacement of fossil fuels by renewables, which are cheap and can be introduced right now with sufficient resources. 

Teixeira explained:

According to the progressive view, people resist rapidly eliminating fossil fuels only because of propaganda from the fossil fuel industry. Potential problems with renewables, such as their intermittency, are being solved, they argue. This means that as we use more renewables and cut out fossil fuels, political support for the transition to clean energy should rise because of the benefits to consumers, who will have cheaper energy costs, and to workers, who will have high-paying clean energy jobs.

False assumptions and snobbery have not impressed the electorate, the opposite being the case.

This is the gospel for progressives who see themselves as noble warriors against the impending apocalypse. But most voters, especially working-class voters, have not signed up for—or are even much interested in—the rapid green transition they envision.

Too much, too fast–but Teixeira falls into the every-energy-in-the-stew approach, a governmental one.

Workers far prefer a gradual “all-of-the-above” approach to transitioning the energy system over the frantic push for renewables that characterizes progressives’ Green New Deal–type thinking. In our Politics Without Winners survey, we asked respondents whether they thought the country’s energy supply should “use a mix of energy sources including oil, coal, and natural gas along with renewable energy sources,” or “phase out the use of oil, coal, and natural gas completely, relying instead on renewable energy sources such as wind and solar power only.” An overwhelming 72 percent in the survey favored the all-of-the-above approach, while just 26 percent backed the rapid renewables transition. Views were even more lopsided among working-class voters.

He continues:

The hard fact is that progressives’ hostility to fossil fuels is not widely shared by ordinary voters. In a recent result from a New York Times/Siena College poll, two-thirds of likely voters said they supported a policy of “increasing domestic production of fossil fuels such as oil and gas.”  Two-thirds!

Home-grown exportable energy, what Trump calls ‘liquid gold’, has voter standing.

A new NBC poll tested a wide range of policy proposals to see whether voters would be more or less likely to support a candidate who espoused them. The single most positive response among voters was to a proposal to expand domestic oil and natural gas production. By a very wide 67 to 15 percent margin, voters said they would be more likely to support a candidate who wanted to expand fossil fuel production.

“Voters clearly aren’t buying what progressives are selling on energy and climate,” Ruy Teixeira concludes. “Not even close. And that’s another big reason the progressive moment has come to an end.”

We are left with Kamala Harris “furiously backpedaling from all these [anti-energy] positions,” but change takes time. Energy exceptionalism led by oil, gas, and coal is getting back in the saddle, even politically correct.

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